Hitler’s “election”
[NOTE: I thought it might be time to revisit the topic of how Hitler came to power. I know a lot of you are history buffs and are well aware of his path to dictatorship, but I keep seeing references – especially in other places – to the idea that the German people elected Hitler (usually said by the left with some supposed parallel to Trump, of course). The truth about Hitler is actually far more chilling: only about a third supported the Nazis but through series of fortunate (for him – unfortunate for the human race) events and machinations, Hitler became chancellor. Once there, he knew how to become dictator. I described some of the process in this post, written in 2006. I’m going to reproduce the relevant parts here, with some slight changes and additions.]
Several bloggers have pointed out a parallel [between the election of Hamas in Gaza and] the rise of the Nazis in pre-WWII Germany, saying “Hitler was democratically elected.” I beg to differ, at least slightly.
Yes, Hitler was selected by a Democratic process. But he did not come to power by winning the popular vote. He won neither a majority (difficult to do in a Parliamentary election, anyway), nor a plurality. In fact, he lost, and the Nazi Party’s fortunes were sinking.
That story is told here. An excerpt:
Between 1931 and 1933, vicious power struggles would break out between rival political parties. The power brokers in these struggles were Hindenburg and Schleicher. The problem during this period was that no party even came close to achieving the majority required to elect its leader Chancellor. Coalitions were either impossible to build, or were so transient that they dissolved as quickly as they formed. Ambitious leaders from every party began maneuvering for power, striking deals, double-crossing each other, and trying to find the most advantageous alliances. Hitler himself would ally the Nazis to the Nationalist Party. “The chess game for power begins,” Joseph Goebbels wrote in his diary. “The chief thing is that we remain strong and make no compromises.”
They had their sights on the prize from the start, and were confident that they could be the most ruthless of all. Hindenburg, who was around 84 at the time and not a well man (he died in 1934), was not up to the task of successfully opposing them. Although he was more popular with the people, he simply did not understand the depth of the calculating evil of the Nazis. Despite being against them, he ended up reluctantly playing a big part in their rise [emphasis mine]:
In 1932, hoping to establish a clear government by majority rule, Hindenburg held two presidential elections. Hitler, among others, ran against him. A vote for Hindenburg was a vote to continue the German Republic, while a vote for Hitler was a vote against it. The Nazi party made the most clever use of propaganda, as well as the most extensive use of violence. Bloody street battles erupted between Communists and Nazis thugs, and many political figures were murdered.
In the first election, held on March 13, 1932, Hitler received 30 percent of the vote, losing badly to Hindenburg’s 49.6 percent. But because Hindenburg had just missed an absolute majority, a run-off election was scheduled a month later. On April 10, 1932, Hitler increased his share of the vote to 37 percent, but Hindenburg again won, this time with a decisive 53 percent. A clear majority of the voters had thus declared their preference for a democratic republic.
However, the balance of power in the Reichstag was still unstable, lacking a majority party or coalition to rule the government. All too frequently, Hindenburg had to evoke the dictatorial powers available to him under Article 48 of the constitution to break up the political stalemate. In an attempt to resolve this crisis, he called for more elections. On July 31, 1932, the Nazis won 230 out of 608 seats in the Reichstag, making them its largest party. Still, they did not command the majority needed to elect Hitler Chancellor.
In another election on November 6, 1932, the Nazis lost 34 seats in the Reichstag, reducing their total to 196. And for the first time it looked as if the Nazi threat would fade. This was for several reasons. First, the Nazis’ violence and rhetoric had hardened opposition against Hitler, and it was becoming obvious that he would never achieve power democratically. Even worse, the Nazi party was running very low on money, and it could no longer afford to operate its expensive propaganda machine. Furthermore, the party was beginning to splinter and rebel under the stress of so many elections. Hitler discovered that Gregor Strasser, one of the Nazis’ highest officials, had been disloyal, attempting to negotiate power for himself behind Hitler’s back. The shock was so great that Hitler threatened to shoot himself.
But at the lowest ebb of the Nazis’ fortunes, the backroom deal presented itself as the solution to all their problems. Deal-making, intrigues and double-crosses had been going on for years now …
Hitler’s unexpected savior was Franz von Papen, one of the former Chancellors, a remarkably incompetent man who owed his political career to a personal friendship with Hindenburg. He had been thrown out of power by the much more capable Schleicher, who personally replaced him. To get even, Papen approached Hitler and offered to become “co-chancellors,” if only Hitler would join him in a coalition to overthrow Schleicher. Hitler responded that only he could be the head of government, while Papen’s supporters could be given important cabinet positions. The two reached a tentative agreement to pursue such an alliance, even though secretly they were planning to double-cross each other.
Meanwhile Schleicher was failing spectacularly in his attempts to form a coalition government, so Hindenburg forced his resignation. But by now, Hindenburg was exhausted by all the intrigue and crisis, and the prospect of civil war had moved the steely field marshal to tears. As much as he hated to do so, he seemed resigned to offering Hitler a high government position. Many people were urging him to do so: the industrialists who were financing Hitler, the military whose connections Hitler had cultivated, even Hindenburg’s son, whom some historians believe the Nazis had blackmailed. The last straw came when an unfounded rumor swept through Berlin that Schleicher was about to attempt a military coup, arrest Hindenburg, and establish a military dictatorship. Alarmed, Hindenburg wasted no time offering Hitler the Chancellorship, thinking it was a last resort to save the Republic.
On January 30, 1933, Hitler was sworn in as Chancellor.
You want to reach back in time and scream “No, no no!!” to Hindenburg. But alas, you cannot.
The Enabling Act followed not long after and solidified Hitler’s power; I’ve written about that here.
Imagine if the Nazis – like today’s Dems – had social media to start rumors and create propaganda.
And, yes, I made that comparison. The Dems want absolute power and will do anything to achieve it and retain it. Even jail political opponents.
This isn’t fair! Joy Reid was absolutely demolished by “Moms for Liberty” co-founder Tiffany Justice!! Video
https://commoncts.blogspot.com/2024/01/this-isnt-fair-joy-reid-was-absolutely.html
Very well laid out Neo. ( I am a History Major, BA/MA). I read Rise and Fall of the Third Reich while a Senior in HS, sitting in my car at a McD’s.
Isn’t it interesting that as Hitler was made Chancellor in the US Roosevelt was starting his first term. Hitler’s nemesis.
On the whole agreed, though I feel it is worth noting a few things. Firstly, the Weimar Republic was a parliamentary system, and so it is relatively rare for a single party to get an absolute majority or even a commanding plurality. So the results the Nazi Party got are chilling and quite persuasive.
Secondly: I would bluntly argue that the conventional story of Hitler’s rise to power is incomplete or at least skewed because people tend to believe the Weimar Republic was much healthier than it was prior to Hitler’s takeover, with most focus being on the rising street violence and political sway of both the Nazis and Communists. That is certainly true but I think it ignores an at least as pressing problem: the silent coup by what could be called a “German Deep State” including Hindenburg.
I would argue that by 1932 the Weimar Republic is basically either dead or almost certainly terminally injured, with an uneasy alliance of Hindenburg, Papen, and Schleicher conspiring to seize power in Prussia and essentially abolish the SPD leaning government in order to help pave the way for…. Something. Probably an absolutist imperial restoration of the Hohenzollern or some kind of “Republican” Nationalist military dictatorship, with the KPD and NSDAP indifferently going along for the ride because they hate the SPD and other Weimar parties more than they hate the old imperialists or each other.
And this succeeds beyond most dreams.
https://dhruvushev.medium.com/the-forgotten-coup-that-helped-hitler-consolidate-power-735a52bef533
After which it basically becomes a protracted and ugly struggle for maneuvering within and power amongst the conspirators on what kind of dictatorship they are going to have and who will head it, which helps Hitler get into power by exploiting divides between them.
This also dovetails with an issue I have with the popular narrative of this.
I think the conventional narrative about Hindenburg gives him ENTIRELY too little blame and “credit” for destroying German freedom. It is certainly true he was unwell and on death’s door. It is also true he was massively popular and not personally well disposed to the Nazis. However, portraying him as merely a sick old man and former war hero I think ignores what he fundamentally was and had been: a fanatical and authoritarian military leader who had helped pioneer and masthead one of the first more or less undeniable totalitarian dictatorships in modern history during WWI, and also one of the “grave diggers” of the Republic in interest Germany through his political machinations and conspiring with other unsavory creatures.
This is a man who held power on a similar scale to Hitler himself at the height of his power and who exercised some of the powers he would later arrogate to himself, and who unquestionably was responsible for the murder of millions (and indeed the way he was quickly rehabilitated after WWI I think points to a deeper sickness and pathology in German political and military culture that was never firmly dealt with, especially since he was the dude trusted by the Weimar Coalition, and unsurprisingly went on to backstab them). Now to be fair he might not have been QUITE as awful or deeply evil as Hitler (then again, who is? Not many) and it is an open question how much day to day power he exercised over the WWI regime in comparison to his titular lieutenants like Ludendorff (who is a particularly terrifying figure and arguably something of a John the Baptist for Hitler) and Hoffmann, but he almost certainly exercised greater authority than either Hirohito or Tojo did over Imperial Japan in WWII.
The Republican parties put him in a position of trust where he essentially held the Republic by the throat. It was a position he manifestly did not deserve, nor just because of his physical infirmities and his growing senility but also because of his temperamental and political ones. And unsurprisingly when he first saw the chance he cut the Republic’s throat in order to try and pave the way for the rise of a new nationalist dictatorship.
He didn’t WANT it to be headed by the Nazis or Hitler, but as history showed it was a result he was prepared to accept. Moreover that maneuver sent Germany into a spiral of further instability by gutting the Republican coalitions, erecting an unpopular rogue minority government with overt authoritarian leanings, and helping to destabilize the economy further while giving the totalitarians outside the government the time to expand. Oh and also triggering a conflict for power among Hindenburg’s co-conspirators.
Many voters, maybe a majority, believed that Hindenburg was a vote for a continued Democratic Republic. But not only was he not, but many of his “friends” on the Nationalist, Authoritarian Right knew it. So I do think that after the Spring of 1932 the Republic is basically dead of multiple stab wounds from multiple parties, and the main question ks who would inherit.
Wonder if a parliamentary system is more susceptible to such machinations than a tri-partite system–which I think describes ours.
Did some research into affairs in 1933. Was reminded that, whatever happened, it was the usual offices, the usual badges, the usual letterhead, the usual forms of address of all the departments of the previous more or less legitimate government.
The first deaths at Dachau–opened in 1933–were investigated by an office which might have been some version of bureau of prisons. Double check the guards’ stories.
Perhaps the early success of the ratchet was that the work was done by the usual folks, a step at a time. And maybe even they didn’t know, at the lower levels, initially…
Also this is before I get into the fact that Steve Kangas in general is a dishonest scumsucker on the left, and a lot of this feels frankly like Special Pleading (as if backroom deals aren’t a normal part of parliamentary procedure in parliamentary systems?) and also blatantly misrepresenting what Hindenburg represented to many (perhaps not most, but MANY) of his voters, as well as his level of engagement. And also how shocking it was that Hitler and the NSDAP obtained and retained that level of power when competing against Literally Hindenburg.
Frankly Hitler came to power in probably as much a democratic procedure as the Weimar Republic in the state it was could hope to have, however corrupt, authoritarian, and incestuous that process was. He certainly has a better claim to being democratically elected than the likes of either Papen for most of his term or Schleicher at all do, and I think this is something Kangas is willfully overlooking or downplaying.
Kangas’s left wing bias also shows I think by assuming that the Republic was doomed from the start and that Germany had “no democratic tradition” (which is dubious AT BEST if one studies the HRE and Medieval Germany, as well as the utterly imperfect and compromised but still existent legislative politics of the Second Empire) and also by giving too much credit to the German Social Democrats (while overlooking their authoritarian tendencies and the need to rule by decree). It is telling that the high point of the Republic happened under Stressemann, who was not a Social Democrat.
The fact that the Republic lasted as long as it did, was largely destroyed by people claiming to defend it (looking at you Hindenburg), and outlasted much older and more stable parliamentary traditions like those of Italy I think speaks to its resilience and how it almost worked.
Later I might give a more in-depth analysis and fisking of Kangas’s reiteration of the story, which again while largely true I think is undercut by his staggering biases and intellectual dishonesty (which I’ve encountered before) and also by “conveniently” not pulling some things together (such as the direct connections between the renegade military and Hindenburg) or keeping some others apart (such as how the SPD helped create or at least entrench the precedents for authoritarian rule, such as Ebert and Noske and others using emergency powers to a disturbing degree, banning domestic gun ownership on pain of summary execution, and using Enabling Acts).
@ Turtler – indulging in a little alt-history to ask your opinion:
I’ve read some analyses of the era that suggest the problems that ended the Weimar Republic and gave us Hindenburg and then Hitler could have been avoided by keeping a modified monarchy, with one of Kaiser Bill’s sons on the throne as titular head of government, but reined in (heh) by a stronger parliament and democratic process.
The power struggles would have occurred but at a lower level, and even though the Hohenzollerns were as anti-Semitic as the general populace of the day, they would not have been aiming at eradication of the Jews.
Lots of pros and cons in all different directions, but you may have gamed this out sometime and I’ve always wondered it that would have tempered the aftermath of Germany’s defeat and sent the world in another direction, at least for awhile.
We might still have had a WWII, but not a Holocaust, and possibly the Russian situation might also have changed.
Can of worms, I’m sure!
@AesopFan
Thank you kindly.
It probably would be better than what they got historically, the big issue I see is the question of who. As for one of Kaiser Bill’s sons on the throne as opposed to giving us Hindenburg, Papen, Schleicher, and Hitler, I think a big issue is “let’s remember who gave us these people in the first place.” A lot of the “credit” for that can be laid at the foot of Wilhelm and to a lesser extent his offspring.
The creation of the Weimar Republic in a lot of ways is odd because the concept of doing away with the monarchy was simultaneously unpopular and not very appreciated by any of the major German figures (including people like Ebert and Stresemann, the former of whom was it) but incredibly popular among the rank and file due to how the Hohenzollern and their involvement in the war and support for Ludendorff and Hindenburg’s wartime dictatorship undermined them, especially since there really wasn’t any particularly good pick of successors from Wilhelm II’s children.
The fact that most of them were absolutists in sentiment and were willing to court the Nazis doesn’t help. They were certainly better than Hitler or his ilk were on multiple levels, but not by as much as many people think. Ironically the best ones I can think of would have been “Adi” or Joachim (the latter of whom was openly depressive and probably mentally disturbed and went on to unalive himself after the war), with Eitel Friedrich being a runner up (in spite of being a scammer). That gives you some idea of the tensions involved, especially since a continued German Empire would probably make allowing Wilhelm II to return (even if not reign) would be a point of pride (and I think points to the deeper issues).
On the whole most of the German royal families were probably not good fits for the post-Compiegne world. Ironically some of the better examples that come to mind were the Bavarian Wittelsbach (where Rupprecht -in spite of being a rather gifted but tough piece of work in WWI – proved remarkably adroit and even humane in seeking democratic sanction for a restoration and making himself liked on the world stage) and the Wettins of Saxony. The Habsburgs probably also would’ve been better at least in terms of ruling over Austria and/or Hungary, given the nature of their heirs, but they had also heavily discredited themselves in the war (and had a bit of proto-globalist in them given Otto).
Probably the best chance for it was in Late October or Early November 1918, when Germany was clearly beaten but had not signed a peace yet, and Prince Maximillian of Baden (one of the rare mixtures of being RELATIVELY constitutionalist but in the upper echelons of the Imperial Family) was serving as Chancellor, but he was short-circuited by Wilhelm II’s stubbornness and the fact that war weary sailors at Kiel mutinied after the Admiralty ordered them out to sea to die in an “honorable battle” against the Western Allied navies, before this got fanned by mixtures of those fed up with the dictatorship, radical socialists, and communists. He was probably the best chance for a Constitutional German Monarchy.
But that runs into the issue of a few things, starting with how so much of the German military and bureaucratic leadership refused to admit they were beaten (and this was shared by much of the public) and began poisoning the well towards that effect, how there were vast numbers of troops out East who were second rate but still reasonably fresh and intact (and would go on to cause all problems) and how none or virtually none of Wilhelm II’s heirs promised to be much good. That coupled with how a lot of the terms for peace were harsher than most Germans expected and how the Imperial dictatorship had begun the hyperinflation policy that would utterly destroy the early Weimar Economy back in 1914, and I think it’d be hard.
The big issue with a throne and especially one under the Hohenzollern is that it’s an invitation to “mischief” for people like Hindenburg, Papen, Schleicher, Groner, and so on and for the heirs themselves (especially people like Crown Prince Wilhelm himself*, August Wilhelm, and Oskar). The German “Deep State” in the military and bureaucracy never really reconciled themselves to the Republic to begin with and they would likely be even closer to power in this scenario than they were. So we’re likely to see some kind of Crowned Autogolpa against the Constitution and possibly civil war.
It’s probably telling when one of the better outcomes I can see is some sort of Quasi-Fascist Royal Dictatorship like what would happen in Romania under Carol II (ironically a Hohenzollern himself, albeit from a cast off branch), though HOPEFULLY with less corruption.
It still would be somewhat unlikely to get as bad as the Nazis, but that’s a bigger if than we might like.
Agreed there.
I’m leerier. While a reform to the Constitution and giving power to the Reichstag would have reined a lot in, the German military was already used to terror tactics and even genocide and Wilhelm II had publicly defended this and commended von Trotha for it. It might not have been targeted against the Jews (but then again given some of the personalities involved that’s more iffy) it is another question.
Possible but less likely. Ironically having a continuation of the Empire might cause other questions like in what happens in the Baltics with still-remaining German troops there that were supported (however cautiously) by the Republic. But I doubt this would be too decisive in what happens to Russia.
But it is indeed a can of worms.
* it is telling that in the admittedly fantasy Steampunk strategy game Iron Harvest, a really obvious standin for Crown Prince Wilhelm (down to the name) basically was positioned to serve as a “Royal Hitler” himself, after being a General in the “Great War” (based on but not quite WWI) and committing a host of war crimes (like the real CP Wilhelm did, though usually more passively) before regiciding his (fictional) father and basically taking not!Germany to prepare for war.
Now let me make clear. This is FICTION and this isn’t ACTUALLY Wilhelm III (just a fantasy world’s character that is meant to be really really really like him in a world with walking mechs). But it’s pretty telling that given the real Crown Prince’s avowed support for Hitler and Nazism I couldn’t be sure how much would be an exaggeration or not. And this was the dude next in line for the throne after Willy II, with him sharing much of his dad’s view of racism, nationalism, genocide, and issues with the Jews (though apparently to a somewhat more radical extent, though still not as badly as Hitler).
** As for Latvia and the German remnant troops in the East, this is sort of a general overview.
https://www.pygmywars.com/rcw/history/latvia/latviaintro.html
Leftists/Progs, as per usual, describe the process while not telling of events that impact the process. Kurt von Schleicher was murdered during the Night of the Long Knives.
@Richard Cook
Indeed. I imagine that he is also massively downplaying the socialist nature of the Nazi Party. He’s also reiterating the old “Evul Industrialists Funding Hitler” canard, when those were vanishingly rare as modern forensic accounting shows (not to say the likes of the Krupps were saints loayl to the Republic, they largely weren’t, but they were funding the more reactionary, imperial elements of the Right rather than the Nazis).
The 1919 Weimar constitution prescribed national list proportional representation in electing a legislature. Recall Germany had a multi-party system during the Wilhelmine period, wherein you had electoral systems varying from one state to another and common use of single-member constituencies. You were never going to see a parliamentary majority for one party under such a system. Note the situation in Britain, which had single-member constituencies and much stronger tendencies toward bipolarism in political allegiance. Multi-party coalitions were in Britain a frequent occurrance between 1905 and 1945.
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Note that by 1932, a constitutionalist coalition was not viable. The totalitarian parties (Nazis and Communists) had won an absolute majority in the legislature.
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Germany’s experience with monarchist sentiment was the same as you’ve seen nearly everywhere in the period since 1875. Once the monarchy was disestablished, there wasn’t a vigorous constituency for restoration. The one political party with a monarchist platform was the National People’s Party, whose support bounced around a set point of 14% of the electorate.
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The constituent assembly at Weimar one can argue retrospectively made a number of errors.
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One was in not recasting Germany’s system of regional government. A set of 26 contiguous states derived from historical subdivisions and with a range of populations between 250,000 and 6 million would have been an improvement over the messy political geography of Wilhelmine Germany. Each could have been given the option of restoring the local monarch (or, in the case of Thuringia, a board of monarchs).
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Another was in making use of proportional representation. Single member constituencies and ranked-choice contests would likely have generated a set of seven multi-regional political parties (communist, social democratic, Catholic, social-liberal, whig-liberal, conservative, and volkisch) with seats only a scatter of seats won by totalitarian outfits and regional parties.
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Another was in not making presidential ministries the default, with parliamentary ministries an option.
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Another was in not giving the federal ministry the option of instituting a continuation of the previous year’s budget given contumacious behavior by the legislature.
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Another was in not mandating the retirement of public employees (from the president on down) at age 76.
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It might have been helpful to have retained a formal nobility with certain residual courtesies and advantages. Having as a head of state a regent chosen by an electoral college for an irregular term rather than an elected president might also have reduced the antagonism of the old order to the new constitution.
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However, it’s a reasonable counter-factual that what really crippled the constitutional was bad policy decisions, specifically bad monetary. You had one catastrophe in 1922-23 and then you had another in 1930-32. These catastrophes were the second and third blow to the legitimacy of the German establishment (the first being the loss of the war and attendant humiliation and deprivation).
I’m up on my WWII history.
Also see how easily the Germans were sucked into antisemitism
Turtler:
Totally agree.
if you’ve michael burleighs sacred spaces, you see the devastating effect the great war had on almost every participant, sans perhaps australia and the US,it opens with the unveiling of the Cenotaph the monument to the British War dead,
in Germany the catastrophe was even greater,not only the Government but much of the institutions collapsed in the wake of the onslaught, Nazism and Marxism was only two of the currents that were rampaging through society,
the Clemenceau and LLoyd George pressures of war debt didn’t help things, in fact it aggravated the fiscal crisis that Havenstein provoked in 1923-4, thats the backdrop to the Munich putch, that Hitler orchestrated the Dawes plan did stabilize the situation somewhat until 1931 when the collapse of the Credit Anstalt bank which shattered the consensus of dirigiste economics that had held court since the 1880s under Wagner and Moller
the Industrialists like Thyssen Krupp et al feared a Communist revolution, as much as the anomie of the Weimar years, Stalin certainly wanted the former, so he pressed the Social Fascists slur of the 2nd international against the Social Democrats, some might say after the former cataclysm the SD’s could not have prevailed under any circumstances, Jan Valtin’s the Night left behind, demonstrated the direct action push in the docks of Hamburg, and elsewhere,
of course the Catholic Center was dead man walking under Bruning, the hunger chancellor
perhaps an unearned honor like Herbert Hoover,
Yes Hindenberg knew what he was doing somewhat like what Yeltsin did, not to engage in Godwinism, picking Putin not to equate the two, also similar aspects of turmoil occurred 60 years apart,
@miguel cervantes
Frankly part of the problem was that not enough German institutions collapsed. The military, bureaucracy, and on a more banal note the central banking systems did not, and they proved to be almighty BLIGHTS On the world. Whether it was the military and bureaucracy conducting illegal rearmament, detente with the Soviets (see: von Seeckt’s alliance) and murdering whistleblowers (and even supporting Rudiger von der Goeltz’s armies as they conducted their own politics and wars in the Baltic and even overthrew the Latvian government they claimed was their employer) while planning absolutist putsch attempts, or the more banal issue of the government’s financial institutions playing into the hyperinflationary issues.
So you had the worst of both worlds in some ways since you had too much institutional damage and social trauma for things to remain as is, but you didn’t have enough to destroy the elements that were most irking to the allies or contributing to republican dysfunction.
Agreed though honestly even blaming Havenstein or the Allies is too much. The Imperial government turned on the printing presses in 1914 and pushed Gold out of the day to day economy and this wouldn’t stop until the mid 1920s with the Weimar government continuing and doubling it down.
Agreed.
Agreed.
Likely, though I do think in contrast at least Yeltsin could claim he was standing bitterly against the established totalitarian ideologies by fighting the likes of the Neo-Nazis and Neo-Bolsheviks in the legislature (The Peoples’ Cube did an excellent job there).
Frankly part of the problem was that not enough German institutions collapsed.
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The country would not have benefited from institutional collapse. It would have benefited from better political architecture and better policy decisions.
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Whether it was the military and bureaucracy conducting illegal rearmament
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This is a nonsense formulation. Treaties are delineations of power relationships. When the power relationships change and parties cannot coerce other parties, the treaties are null.
well belief in the Church and the Family that should have produced some insulation against both Nazi and Bolshevik influence, the bureaucracy is a behemoth of it’s own, of course the future Wehrmacht trained on Soviet soil with the full cooperation of Stalin even into the early Hitler period, the Armies of the Great Entente were utterly smashed in the Blood Lands for the Turks in the Levant
notably against Allenby’s forces, one of the great set piece battles, the threeconsecutive battles over Gaza, Dr Zhivago in a minor footnote, and Solzhenitsyns Red Wheel showed the big story in gruesome detail specially the first two volumes the third has not been largely published here,
Koba might have been playing the long game on that score, recalling that Trotsky built the Red Army and dispatched him rather readily
even though sacrificing the cream of his officer corps, in the purges, even know he knew there were no such coup plotters as h gnored evidence of German ambitions in those same bloodlands
@Art Deco
Agreed. This is something else I think Kangas ignores, and is probably bluntly dishonest about. He’s comparing Weimar Germany’s elections to a void. The reality is that he should be comparing them to themselves, and Hitler’s results were amazing, among the most impressive if not the most impressive for any single party. His issue was he did not have coalition partners.
Moreover, Kangas “conveniently ignores” how during the rerun 1932 election where Hitler lost votes, who picked them up. Literally every single major party that could be considered constitutionalist or republican ALSO lost vote share in that election, with the VERY DUBIOUS exception of the DNVP (which was on the reactionary right and while it did have a constitutionalist wing was headed up by Hugenberg, who was clearly angling for an authoritarian restoration. Think something of a German Imperialist right-wing Bezos and you have some idea). The others were the Communists literally taking orders from Moscow.
This I think clearly shows that no matter who we deem “won” the November 1932 elections, the Republic lost. Much like we can and should conclude regarding Hindenburg v. Hitler’s election. Moreover, the fact that Hitler’s vote share declined but did not collapse and hung in shows his political longevity.
Though re: the Wilhelmine Period, it’s worth noting that while there was a multiparty legislative system, there were caveats large enough to rank as dreadnoughts in the tonnage department. For one, there was a decidedly authoritarian “everything else” in terms of the Imperial Cabinet, bureaucracy, and military, which while often having to get funded from the legislature (and even then the Emperor had undue influence) had only partial legislative oversight. In due time it is possible the Reichstag might have been able to use the power of the purse to wrestle power away, but that is much less likely.
Wilhelm II outright claimed to be an enemy of democracy and much of the German public accepted this as a useful vanguard against the “excesses” of “too much democracy”, and indeed by 1916 you even have avowed, messianic propaganda with the Imperial Dictatorship and its foreign allies advertising this war as a crusade against capitalist democracy (oh also Eastern Slavs).
Agreed, though I also think part of the damage came not just from the rising totalitarian power shares but also the weakness within. Hindenburg and Papen and Schleicher’s usurpations made a mockery of the concept of constitutional government in a way similar to how Biden and co have behaved but far far far worse, and that enabled a totalitarian populist rising.
This I think is overstating the matter. For starters, while explicitly monarchist sentiment was a distinct minority, it was still a Sizable minority. Moreover, implicit or ambiguous monarchist sentiment was even more popular, both among parties (for instance you had a sizable number of monarchists in parties like Zentrum and the DNVP and the Bavarian Center and Right Wing), but you had even greater power in the “Deep State” among notables in the army and bureaucracy. Hindenburg was explicit in his loyalty to the Hohenzollern and voted in both in spite of and because of that because he claimed he would be the defender of the Republican Constitution.
(He of course was lying about that. Or at best was insincere and not committed to his answer even if we go with the more generous – but in my opinion less likely – interpretation that he had not already begun formulating plans).
The big issue is that the Imperial Family had made themselves obnoxious during the war and to a lesser extent before it and there was fierce divides between constitutionalists and those that wanted to return to a more authoritarian system.
Agreed on the whole. I do think parliamentary governments MIGHT have worked (and indeed they saw sizable success) but they were weak. Moreover, the powers of both President and Chancellor needed to be much more defined and limited, precisely to avoid the kind of abusive rule gaming almost every Weimar Chancellor and President did. And I’m not limiting my condemnation on this front to those I regard as post-Republican “Republican” leadership like Papen, Schleicher, Hindenburg, Hitler, etc. The ability of the Chancellor to rule by dictate (literally becoming a partial dictator) is well established and happened a bunch of times even outside states of emergency.
Possible though I’m leery. The “Old Order” already got a huge amount of concessions from the Republic, especially an autonomous military and bureaucracy (the main reason the retirement age for public servants would’ve been important). They used it for all kinds of mischief, often helped (wittingly or unfittingly) by the Republican parties in things such as spreading Stab In The Back propaganda during the early Republican period and running the Blood Libel Workshop for the War Guilt Section of the Foreign Ministry.
I’d say those were key ones that rocked the foundations of the German Republic, particularly in the “Nuh Uh I don’t have to” in the immediate post war years (where they let the imperial dictatorship’s hyperinflationary policies from 1914 continue on into the post-war period and refused to pay up like the French had in the 1870s, which devastated the economy and delayed consolidation and recovery). Though I’d also argue the perversely anarchistic and authoritarian features of the Weimar Constitution had a comparable role, especially the use of tricks and dictatorial decrees by the Chancellor that remained even during the heyday of the SPD and DVP at the apparent apogee of the Republic.
The failure to address putschists and the atrocities of the wartime dictatorship also did not help, because while doing so too much would have been at least as destabilizing as what happened allowing the likes of Hindenburg to enter public life again while claiming they essentially did nothing wrong proved catastrophic and also set the precedent that this kind of behavior was acceptable for a government to do. And a lot of people (Hitler included) took note.
@Art Deco
This is a nice canard, but it runs counter to the structure and personnel of said institutions. This is particularly the case in the military and bureaucracy, which were allowed to go deeply unreformed, deeply unrepentant, and utterly corrupt and set in their ways. The fiscal regime could arguably be fixed by changing policy decisions and political architecture (and indeed it did as the concessions in 1924-26 did). But if you wanted to purge the bureaucracy and especially the army you probably needed to be prepared to shoot it out as they would be expected to defend themselves and their creed if you went in guns blazing, or even to a gradual attempt to sunset their membership out and try another putsch attempt.
One of the untold stories of the Weimar Republic was the way even the “Constitutionalist Parties” helped fed into the problem, whether implicitly or offhandedly (such as giving succor about how they hadn’t “really” been defeated on the war front) or explicitly.
Also frankly given the problems many of these institutions caused much like the Dark Valley in Japan I do think that – while destabilizing and deeply unpleasant – flat out destroying some of these state organs and shooting the people in them would’ve been less destabilizing. Certainly seizing the banking authorities’ printing presses by force would’ve lessened the financial crisis of the early post-war period.
No, it’s not. Especially when you realize that much of the military’s armament was illegal not just in the eyes of the Allies under Versailles and its kin, but ALSO under German domestic law.
Please study things like the “Black Reichswehr” and its domestic hit squads.
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-349-16941-2_19
This is before I get into the issues of how extensively Seeckt took liberties with his supposed limitations under German law.
This is word salad at best, and moreover discusses practical effects of treaties rather than their legal effects. Israel’s nuclear program is illegal (however wise) and Iran’s is likewise, that doesn’t mean the treaties are “null” it does however mean they are imperfectly enforced (though they can become null later if that expands too much).
In any case my central issue was not merely that the rearmament was illegal under Versailles and its kin (though that is damning enough) but the other violations of both Versailles and German domestic law that the Ebert-Groener Pact ultimately sanctioned.
Which again featured things such as a German “Mercenary” Army consisting mostly of veterans from WWI that never went home (or volunteers recruited from Germany) and ostensibly answering to German military authorities in East Prussia staging a coup in Latvia against the internationally recognized government on false pretenses.
to be fair, this was a new thing, to them there really was no parliamentary democracy under bismark, and it went down hill from there, Germany was riven with sectional tension Bavaria Prussia et al, in a way post Meiji Japan was not
Social Democracy, specially in the early post war period was a flawed vehicle, maybe the Catholic Center like the Christian Democrats who have the majority faction until recently, might have prevailed, as did the Christian Social Union, but not in the Gale force of a Depression, Merkel really made a potato pancake of Helmut Kohls work,
the apparat Von seekt and company did know the ropes and could work around any oversight that the Weimar regime would attempt if they wanted to,
This has been a very interesting discussion to consider. It’s adding to the depth of the picture where my knowledge of interwar German politics is concerned.
Circling back to the matter of elections, the Austrian corporal, etc., however, I feel as if there’s a certain coldness to one aspect. I feel as if a lot of the discussions about Weimar and its checkered electoral history seem to view German voters as a mere mass phenomenon, somewhat undifferentiated except by party and class.
Assuming that our motives for discussing Weimar-era Germany are connected to its role as a sort of case study in the collapse of republics, similar to classical Athens, Roman Republic, etc., I have the impression that we could be drawing more lessons from it with application to our own domestic situation than the usual parameters of historical analysis of the Weimar Republic might permit, provided that we could perhaps point the discussion toward consideration of German voters in a more individualized context. What do you think? Is the utility of Weimar as a political subject necessarily limited by (and to) the context of its origins in WWI and its nature as partially the object (acted upon) of larger economic forces, taking these as mass phenomena?
I guess I’m looking for some kind of useful way to understand individual actors in Weimar, not just at the level of political intriguers or industrialists. I think I’m trying to get to this because that’s how I want to see our American politics as much as possible. Everyman, the average Joe, still having something to contribute to events. I suppose what I’m trying to say is that I have never gotten this feeling from studying Weimar Germany and I wonder if it’s just not possible, or if it’s there but overlooked.
Philip Sells:
As I understand it – and I’m certainly no expert on the history of Germany, but I have some knowledge at least – the parallels aren’t strong between their elections and ours. Just for starters, our two-party system is VERY different from their parliamentary system with many many parties and the need to form coalition governments – and sometimes the failure to form them, and then the calling of new elections. Also, we are older as a nation and our system of government is older than theirs was then.
Note also this: “All too frequently, Hindenburg had to evoke the dictatorial powers available to him under Article 48 of the constitution to break up the political stalemate.” We have a different Constitution. The Article referred to in that quoted sentence is this one:
That was done through the Enabling Act, after the Reichstag Fire.
That doesn’t mean something similar couldn’t happen here through some sort of executive order, if conditions were right. But in Weimar Germany it was relatively easy to do without even violating the Constitution.
@ Turtler – thank you for the very detailed reply to my hypothetical; you filled in a lot of the gaps in my knowledge of the situation.
And thanks to you and everyone else for the weekend history symposium.
@ Neo > “That doesn’t mean something similar couldn’t happen here through some sort of executive order, if conditions were right. But in Weimar Germany it was relatively easy to do without even violating the Constitution.”
One more thing to the credit of our Constitution writers: clearly they foresaw the danger of allowing the Executive to legitimately override the rest of the government.
At least executive orders can be countered legislatively or judicially, or reversed by the next president.
Not that Biden Inc. is paying much attention to the first & second of those obstacles.
Let’s hope we get a chance to implement the third.
This is a nice canard
==
It’s not a canard at all.
==
German constitutionalism co-existed with the military and the civil service passably from 1851 to 1918. Neither the military nor the civil service wrecked the constitutional order in Germany after 1928. The electorate, the President, the succession of ministries during the period running from 1930-33 all did that.
==
Military manpower after 1918 was a modest fraction of what it was prior to 1914. Quite a bit of leeway to retire problematic officers.
No, it’s not.
==
Yes it is. There is no law between nations. There are conventions and that’s all.
We will never understand it because the information that was truthful has been changed and so made a new reality in which details are different but the outcome is the same..
see Willi Munzenberg the trials…
[we believe the wrong history]
you dont even know who he is, and a dozen others
so its kind of like watching fish out of water trying to breath
munzenberg was garrotted outside france with the knotted garrot coiled and left on his head as he slouched by a tree… since that, its been changed.
So, anything you discuss, would be like discussing a false history
you all failed to upgrade it when i pointed it out
and your still trying to figure out things from a history that is not valid, so GARBAGE IN GARBAGE OUT
but it certainly does feel good to mentally masturbate, doesnt it?
the validity is not a necessary component to any of it…
As infighting between communists and socialists and the indifference of liberals and conservatives helped Hitler into the Reichstag, it was clear that good magazines and popular films were not enough. Münzenberg fled Germany under a false passport when the Nazis came to power, and spent the rest of his life in France. His finest moment would come in exile, in the campaign his organizations waged against the Reichstag trial of 1933. The Bulgarian Communist Georgi Dimitrov was put on trial under the new Third Reich for allegedly setting fire to the German parliament. The counterevidence that this was nothing but a setup was assembled by Münzenberg in the Brown Book, widely and clandestinely distributed in Germany. This was widely credited with Dimitrov’s acquittal and the humiliation of his accuser, Hermann Goering; holding a free trial was not a mistake the Nazis would make again.
now whatever happend to freda utley who Ronald Reagan spoke so highly at her funeral, and you don know her either…
imagine US history with things like the trail of tears and john brown, and the unions carvved out..
would US history make sense any more?
well… to the people who dont know whats cut out, yeah, it SEEMS to make sense as they make up stuff to fill in the blanks and the best made up stuff ends up becoming real to all of them!!!
wacko funny people if you think you get anywhere with that…
you cant understand even what neo is surmizing because its leaving out the Munzenberg Trust and the work he did in the USA to help us love hitler stalin and mao enough to make all three men of the year in TIME
none will comment on this
its gone already
last…
you have to also know who was sleeping with whom..
and who changed their names and so on too!
the magyar? you never read the Magyar Struggle that outlines what hitler would do in his struggle?
they hid the best parts
and you have no idea they are missing
because like validity, big empty spaces in knowlege never cause alarm
Otto Katz is another, and an associate of willi
also known as André Simone amongst other aliases, was a Czech agent. He was one of the most influential agents of the Soviet Union under Stalin in Western intellectual and artistic circles during the 1930s and 1940s. He was hanged after he was convicted in the Slánský trial.
a lot of what propelled them into the top place was the responses to the soviets… that is, the soviets bit by bit taught them what hteir mistakes were… like an open honest trial that let it be taken by willi… redefined in the brown book, we beleive the wrong info (same with the democrats and the hayes tilden election!!! and what we forgot was congressional testimony!!!)
anyone know about OTTO? you cant understand weimar and that period and how things happened without these people!!!
Babette Gross???
Margarete Buber-Neumann???
note the scene in the recent movie on stalin, and the orgies?
want to guess who was part of those, and not just duranty?
He frequented fashionable cafés such as the Arco and the Continental, where he rubbed shoulders with the young intelligentsia who spoke only of social or artistic revolution. Helped by a regularly paid allowance by his father, Otto frequented the avant-garde (Franz Kafka, Max Brod, Franz Werfel) and led a life of pleasure in 1922 while adhering to the German Communist Party.
oh… and yes…
the continental was much famous before John Wick
in fact, movies are dotted with references the same way that renaissance paintings are dotted with all kinds of pagain thins, symbolism, messages, etc
enjoy
The Brown Book of the Reichstag Fire and Hitler Terror (German: Braunbuch über Reichstagsbrand und Hitlerterror) is a book published in Paris, France in August 1933. It was written by an anti-fascist group which included German communist Willi Munzenberg, as well as Hans Siemsen and Gustav Regler.
It put forth the theory that Nazis were behind the Reichstag fire of February 27, 1933. According to Spanish novelist Anthonio Munoz Molina
Wiki contradicts itself if you know where to look
oh, and the left believes the lies
so when you see all the LGBTQ stuff,,
watch Caberet and realize its a cross dressing nightclub
and then this
The book claimed that Ernst Röhm’s assistant Georg Bell [de], who was murdered in early 1933 in Austria, had been his pimp and had procured Reichstag arsonist Marinus van der Lubbe for Röhm. The book claimed that a clique of homosexual stormtroopers led by Heines set the Reichstag fire; van der Lubbe remained behind and agreed to accept the sole blame because of his desperation for affection; Bell was killed to cover it up. There was no evidence for these claims, and in fact Heines was several hundred kilometers away at the time.
Nevertheless, the matter was so politically explosive that it was aired at van der Lubbe’s trial in Leipzig. Wackerfuss states that Reichstag conspiracy appealed to antifascists because of their preexisting belief that “the heart of the Nazis’ militant nationalist politics lay in the sinister schemes of decadent homosexual criminals”.
in trying to make history happen, they copy details as if they were The Boys From Brazil.
funny stuff.
@Art Deco
“No, You are!” Is not a convincing argument. Indeed, it is not an argument at all. Unsupported assertions are among the last resort of the defeated, and you cannot actually contest my points that German rearmament was illegal not merely by the terms of Versailles but also by the terms of German domestic law and often by the terms of international treaties such as those governing poison gas development and use.
You unwisely picked a fight on this issue while blathering about how treaties are merely power dynamics and how if they cannot be enforced they were null like a post-modern nihilist in contravention of a couple thousand years of Western law, and now you are trying to salvage some kind of “win” over me without actually being able to make a point on this issue.
You write “passably” but who gets to determine what constitutes a “passing” grade?
The reality is that the military and civil service could co-habitate “passably” with “German Constitutionalism” because what passed for “German Constitutionalism” was INTENTIONALLY punched full of holes in order to accommodate the overweening power of an autocratic crown and an overweening Military and Bureaucracy answering primarily to the King of Prussia and his Cabinet rather than to any kind of legislative or even judicial organization. This is why you see a steady drumbeat of things such as the Zaberne Affair, the Voight Affair (which saw a thief steal an officer’s uniform and command soldiers to rob a town, and which is usually portrayed in the popular myth as some kind of picaresque comedy in spite of being objectively terrifying, and the legal conclusion focused narrowly on Voight’s theft and impersonation of an officer rather than on the idea that officers could not rob law abiding citizens and imprison those that complained), the von Trotha/Southwest Africa Affair (which focused on LITERAL EXTRAJUDICIAL MASS MURDER), and so on. Because “German Constitutionalism” did not contain many of the things we take for granted.
This is why you do not have to go very far in the period documents to see Germans of the time arguing their system was not a Democracy, often laudatorily, sometimes while simultaneously complaining about the latest army scandal. Wilhelm II in his usual (un)helpful fashion probably made the supremacy of the Crown and the Military-Bureaucratic State over the people more explicit than most because of his typical habit for braggadocio but he was far from the only one (as those familiar with Bismarck’s words can attest).
This reached its apogee by midway through WWI, when the Kaiser empowered a series of military chieftains to rule with despotic power, and in the case of the Hindenburg/Ludendorff/Hoffman Troika totalitarian power, with most of the pretenses of “German Constitutionalism” dropped. Admittedly it WAS a war of a grand scale and the state usually appropriates power unto itself during then (and Woodrow Wilson certainly showed how the US is not immune to misrule) but it’s not often I have to compare Tsarist Russia favorably with some other European Great Power of the time in terms of domestic liberties or harsh rule.
It also helped lead Germany to shattering defeat, which helped discredit the Empire and what passed for “German Constitutionalism” because at least Bismarck and co gave concrete positive results for their measures. And the German military and bureaucracy reacted to this with fury.
Translation: you’re in fucking denial about very basic facts of the chronology.
I have LITTLE love to say about the German Presidency, Chancellery, or ministries, or even the electorate in the Late Weimar Period. But the entire career of General and later Chancellor von Schleicher between 1928 and his murder by the Nazis handily disproves this, since it reveals the military and its connivance with a series of authoritarian ministries to help rip the guts out of the Republic’s constitution, and then to quarrel with his rival Papen (including the blatantly politicized and corrupt use of military preparation and war gaming) over power.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/1877954
If I need to start quoting examples from this source and others, I will.
You can argue to what degree those actions stand out against the backdrop of legislative and ministerial collapse or public violence, but they do not make much sense without understanding the entrenched, authoritarian culture of the German military and bureaucracy or their willingness to upend the Constitution, in much the same way that many of the actions of the Ministries or Presidents do not without that backdrop.
In particular, no story of Hitler’s rise to power can be complete without an overview of the Prussian Coup of 1932 which probably killed or at least killed the republic as any kind of free government on the national level, and the Prussian Coup does not make a whit of sense without the Reichswehr and German Civil Services’s willingness to use coercion to suppress the constitutional government in Prussia and conspiring with Papen and Hindenburg.
So CLEARLY the military and bureaucracy continued to have a destabilizing, authoritarian influence well after 1928 and was vastly important to the actions of said Ministers and Presidents you single out as being responsible for wrecking the German constitution after 1928.
Who would promptly tend to go on to keep in contact with their chums still in the service, engaging in things such as paramilitary terrorism, conspiracy, and so on. This becomes painfully obvious when one studies the careers of both the mighty in the Reichswehr’s world (such as the aforementioned von Seeckt and von Schleicher) or the relatively paltry (such as Ernst Roehm). It had its dire effects in both visible matters such as the failed Kapp-Luttwitz putsch, and the more subtle but probably more devastating effects such as Seeckt’s cooperation with the Bolsheviks and the refusal of him and his successors to defend the Republic against serious threats from the nationalist right.
The military and bureaucracy were hardly the only factors driving the collapse of the Weimar Republic, and I’d even be sympathetic to the argument they were not even the primary ones. And many of their atrocities and abuses were sanctioned either officially or tacitly by the duly elected or at least officially appointed government (Halbrook’s Gun Control in the Third Reich details for instance their role in seizing lawfully owned civilian guns under the orders of various Weimar governments for instance, in addition to summary executions even beyond said instructions).
But the idea they had no role in this after 1928 requires on you outright ignoring who their leaders were and assuming we can’t trace their actions.
Kindly talk about that in an Admiralty Court and try to push that. I’ll await the results.
International Law is far from the most sacred of cows, but it is at a minimum a convention or even myth that is commonly agreed upon and semi-regularly enforced.
In any case, I am not going to take lectures from someone who apparently has never heard of the Reichswehr’s actions during the last decade of its existence. Kindly STFU if you cannot actually engage in a conversation with competence or more than assertions.
@ArtfldgrsShadow
Where do I start with this cobble of poorly formatted and almost uncapitalized words?
Let’s start with this.
Bullshit. There were plenty of organizations and people with an incentive to change truthful facts and spin their narratives. I have spoken at length about the Reichstag Fire and how it was almost certainly committed by van der Lubbe as a half-baked plan to trigger a Communist Revolution in Germany that blinded and briefly terrified the Nazis but which they exploited.
And the truth is that even totalitarian regimes on their own turf struggle to create a “new reality” flawlessly, even when they have functionally as complete a control over the material evidence and what people can say in public as possible. There’s a REASON why we have the original photos of most things Stalin and his successors modified (such as the most famous photograph that deleted Yezhov after his purge).
That gets even worse for people and evidence they do not control, such as that in say Britain.
This allows us to go over the evidence and reconstruct the true or at least true-ER picture with far more success than you, the condescending pseudo-intellectual Gnostic Enlightened, can give us. Which is one reason why I look upon you with a mixture of bemused irony and irritation at you acting like Willi Munzenberg is some kind of arcane piece of knowledge known only to the enlightened when I have known about him for years and have spoken about him (albeit mostly as a supporting actor in the terrible dramas of the interwar period).
I have. And Munzenberg’s propagandistic bullshit has usually been studied and exposed, especially in regards to the Reichstag Fires.
Define what the “right history” is, ArtfldgrsShadow. It is certainly true we believe some things in our narrative and theory of history that are wrong, in much the same way we believe some things that are wrong. But that is a grasp of history that has flaws in it, not necessarily a completely wrong history.
Ah yes, the condescending bullshit.
Listen up, you little twerp: I have known about Muntzenberg for well over a decade. Indeed I have written about him and his activities and ultimate fate, usually in contact to Communist Propaganda and the Big Lie that “The Nazis did the Reichstag Fire.”
I just do not focus on him as much in this discussion because, while an interesting character for mostly the wrong reasons in his own right, he is mostly a supporting actor in the dramas we focused on here, especially since Communist propaganda in Germany and Central Europe was highly persuasive abroad but utterly outfoxed and outpaced by events on the ground. This is shown by things like the mass defections from the KPD rank and file to the Nazis.
But if you acknowledge that maybe people have reasons to talk about people other than Muntzenburg or the characters you came up with, Trivia Night Style, you would be forced to humble yourself and consider that maybe you aren’t the Enlightened Gnostic with Secret Knowledge about the Real History while we are all brainwashed fish out of water. And apparently that’s toxic to your sense of self and ego.
PS: The fact that you’re using the Jacobin as a source does not speak well to your awareness or competence, especially given the airquotes around “duped” by communist propaganda.
Welcome to propaganda in the interwar period. Are you new here?
You mean like historians or students of history regularly do to try and understand the truth and get closer to the true history? Well BOWL ME OVER WITH A FEATHER.
You didn’t point it out here. Indeed, this is the very first comment you have on this thread, and you are Manifestly Failing To Include Anything Of Value in regards to the discussion we’ve had. Which as I’ve mentioned before included taking some ideas of the conventional history to the woodchipper. In my case over things such as the systematic whitewashing of Hindenburg as merely a senile, tired old man (which to be fair he was to a fair degree) and not the former totalitarian dictator of much of Western Eurasia and aspiring midwife to a dictatorship, and also the KPD’s willingness to walk hand in glove with their rivals the Nazis and the reactionary deep state in the German Government if it meant upending the Weimar Republic.
You have addressed NONE OF THIS and instead went on a separate tirade about Munzenberg, which is all well and good but is at best of secondary relevance in this case given how Munzenberg at least in the death throes of the Republic was less a molder or creator f events so much as someone trying to spin them.
And as was typical for the late KPD in the 1930s reality outpaced their spin.
Ok Mr. Shadow. What is the “valid history”? If you want to blather and preach to us, you had better know the source material.
The main person doing the mental masturbation here is you. I have plenty of disagreements with some, including Art Deco, but they aren’t getting as spectacularly off topic or unwarrantedly condescending as you are.
Let me get this straight you sophistic cunt:
You are QUITE LITERALLY USING COMMUNIST PROPAGANDA FROM THE JACOBIN TO TRY AND LECTURE US ABOUT THE TRUTH?!?!?
AND SPECIFICALLY A SOURCE THAT CELEBRATES MUNTZENBERG’S DREK OF “THE BROWN BOOK” BLOOD LIBEL AS SOME KIND OF HEROIC RESULT?!?
And you wonder WHY the Adults aren’t obsessing over the Jacobin’s propaganda and Munzenberg’s political lies?
The truth is that NO, Munzenberg did not get Dimitrov etc. al. acquitted. This becomes very obvious if you actually look through the trial records or at least half-accurate summaries of it (presumably part of the “not valid history” you the enlightened Gnostic know better) like Fritz Tobias’s work. The simple matter of the fact is that the prosecution was unable to produce any proof that Dimitrov or his co-defendants were tied to the fire, and while the judiciary involved was as nationalist and authoritarian as one might expect the judges involved were more interested in finding out the genuine dimensions of the threat (or lack thereof) behind the fire than giving the Nazis an excuse to grandstand, and wanted to assert their independence. So van der Lubbe confessed to the fire and claimed to have worked alone (which was almost certainly true) while Dimitrov and other KPD and Comintern goons on the dock skirmished indecisively with the prosecution and doing competitive grandstanding and conspiracy Olympics until the judge ruled that van der Lubbe was guilty but there was no evidence for the rest.
Some of Munzenberg’s lies and narrative appeared on the trial but it was assessed rather carefully (if imperfectly) and generally discarded for what it was. Unverified and unverifiable trash. that didn’t stand up to scrutiny. And the chance that the judicial staff involved in the trial were avid fans of Munzenberg’s work or shared his broader political agenda re pretty close to 0.
What about her? I confess I had forgotten about her until you mentioned it, but I have engaged with her work and failures before.
Are you actually putting any of this together into some kind of coherent point? Or are you just randomly wandering in a desperate attempt to prove your superiority to us without actually putting things together into a coherent point?
No, at least not on the whole. Though it WOULD make more sense than the incoherent drek you are putting together, reliant upon literal Communist Propaganda from the fucking Jacobin to try and give Munzenberg’s lies a second wind as some kind of thing changing legal history.
Citation needed. Especially on stuff like this. There is some truth to it (especially left wing attempts to rise up the myth of the Party Switch or to claim Fascism isn’t socialism) but you aren’t helping your cause by speaking in mystical mumbo jumbo that is intentionally vague and reliant on the Jacobin.
“Wacko funny people” who apparently know history and reason better than you. Kindly study how the “Donations of Constantine” were proven to be forgeries. That is a document and fraud that proved to be exponentially more important and transformative to history for CENTURIES than Munzenberg’s Brown Book was. But it was found out by paying close attention to the fake history it purported to tell, examining its use of the terms (and how they didn’t link up with the Latin used when it was supposedly written), and was torn apart.
Munzenberg’s Brown Book got a similar treatment barely after it was published during the Reichstag Fire Trial. As did frankly much Communist and other totalitarian propaganda.
This is utterly stupid on a grandiose level. We clearly do understand what Neo is summarizing. Indeed, I pointed out how she is uncritically relying upon Steve Kangas and his work, and I raised the alarm at how this is likely tainted to a large degree by Kangas’s leftist, anti-conservative biases. In particularly I pointed out how Kangas (and by extension neo) focused on the fact that the Nazis got a mere plurality of the vote (around a third) during their elections and lost vote share in the final relatively free elections in 1932, but how this overlooked how that vote share was MUCH STRONGER than that of most victorious single parties in Weimar Elections before, and how it had largely hung in in spite of intense street violence and agitprop from republican parties, communists, and the more reactionary authoritarian right like that represented by Papen, Hindenburg, Schleicher, etc.
I am well aware of the Munzenberg Trust, I just do not give it special emphasis in this because while an influential propaganda operation with greater long term effects than we know it was largely undercut and outmaneuvered in Germany at the time, and had MUCH LESS influence than the Jacobin Article you are using as your primary source indicates.
I have. I just have no real patience for condescending grandstanding and barely veiled insults from you. Especially when they are not put together very well.
I’m going to skip past Wells etc. al. and the Algonquin Round Table and Communist penetration of such because I am aware of those things (even if I do not claim to be an expert) and because it seems like you are just pounding the table in an ill-advised attempt to prove some kind of superiority without actually being able to be superior from making a coherent point.
That certainly helps, but it depends on what you are talking about. If you are talking about the specifics of how Communist propaganda spread? Sure.
But if you are talking about the nitty gritty such as the collapse of the Weimar Republic and how the reactionaries outmaneuvered the Weimar Republic and Communists only to get outmaneuvered by the Nazis? You really don’t as much.
Yes, I have, because I try and study this stuff.
Then prove it. Because pretty much nothing you have said is something I did not know.
This is sophist bullshit that might sound intelligent to say for five seconds but doesn’t actually mean anything. The absence of knowledge about where Kido Butai was in November and December 1941 certain did cause alarm to the Western Allies and the Soviets. And sane people CAN, SHOULD, AND IN MANY CASES WERE alarmed at the big, empty space that was detailed information coming out of the FISA Court.
Moreover, there’s a reason why in the absence of information people tend to get alarmed and start reaching for sensational conclusions. A good example of this was the redactions on Nixon’s recorded tapes, which often featured relatively tame cursing but were assumed to be far more profane and scandalous than they were (though the reality was plenty scandalous).
And don’t even get me started on Trotsky being able to be so persuasive about Stalin mostly because he knew most of his audiences didn’t know what he knew or what we now know.
Yes, yes I did you pretentious git. The interwar period is one of my areas of expertise and the decline and fal of the three Czechoslovakias is something I have studied, including the Slansky Trial. I also know a fair amount of Comintern spying operations and propaganda, as I pointed out.
And I’m an amateur historical fan and autist who studies this for free.
Stop assuming you have some kind of secret, gnostic knowledge of history that nobody – including none of us – do.
You can’t understand it FULLY, but you can get a good gist of the immediate period before collapse without touching on them. Because the Communists had so overreached and made themselves toxic to those of the public that they couldn’t recruit (which admittedly was a lot) and had almost no friends in the upper echelons of the German government or the nationalist undergrounds that did most of the work in actually killing the Weimar Republic. That isn’t the case in many other places (like Spain), but it is in Germany which as I mentioned basically consisted of a conflict between and among members of the reactionary right seeking some kind of imperial restoration or a “Republican” Military Dictatorship, and between and among members of the Third Positionist National Socialists, with the Communists being dangerous and monstrous but ultimately quite ineffective in large part because they had bought into their own propaganda and thus badly misjudged the situation (and so were left dumbfounded by the number of defections to the Nazi Party and how successfully Hitler consolidated power).
NOTHING you have written has done ANYTHING to undermine that point. You have shotgunned a bunch of names of Communist agents or people who were at least adjacent to it for little purpose than to say “LOOK WHAT I KNOW! YOU ARE ARE STUPID!” without displaying any kind of deep wisdom or knowledge in how to use them.
Muzenberg’s arguably most loyal partner in crime and one of the few to choose him over the Comintern and Comrade Stalin.
One of the German Communist leadership that managed to escape to the USSR but fell victim to knowing more about the situation than Stalin, primarily because she pointed out how the situation was changing and counting on the Nazis to take power and then screw up and give power to the KPD was probably not going to work, resulting in her getting Le Gulag and turning against both Hitler and Stalin, at least officially.
Your point? Do you even have one beyond demonstrating your staggeringly inflated ego?
I am quite aware of them. It is also where I point out that while Bolshevik sexual mores were always Libertine (and that’s being GENEROUS, somehow Stalin managed to hire three “Nonces” as the British call them back to back, Yagoda, Yezhov, and Beria), but this was around the time the Party began refining sexionage to an art form and blackmailing using it.
I’m going to skip the conspiratorial nonsense about the Continental being famous before John Wick; movies certainly are and were dotted with communist and pro-socialist messages but the Continental’s a historical motel chain going back to when Lenin was still an outlaw terrorist, and it was famous at the time. It attracted Communist Bohemians because of its luxury, not the other way around.
This is where actually knowing some period fiction would help.
I already addressed this. It was classic communist “Black Propaganda’ designed to claim the Nazis false flagged the Reichstag Fire burning (and thus to obfuscate and deny van der Lubbe’s history as a communist pyromaniac and all around unstable idiot terrorist and thug.). It has been HUGELY influential on the public because they do not know any better (how many people have referred to Jan 6th as a Reichstag Fire?) but had holes put in it at trial and was pretty much utterly destroyed by Fritz Tobias.
Tell me something I don’t know. SO WHY THE HELL ARE YOU USING IT AS YOUR MAIN SOURCE ALONG WITH AGITPROP FROM THE FREAKING JACOBIN?!!?
Of course they believe the lies. This isn’t surprising. Indeed it is one of the reasons people tend to be on the left.
A bunch of nonsense I have absolutely no reason to go into here because it’s at best adjacent to the subject matter and is something I discussed already, which was discussed and mostly dismissed at the trial in the time, and has been dismissed since.
Get on our level and try to be less of a douche.
Turtler:
“Artfldgr” used to be a regular commenter here years ago, but for the past few years only visits now and then. His previous reference to Munzenberg can be found here, from early 2019. As the resident blogger, I am able to do a search for a word in the comments, although readers can’t. I did some research in WordPress to see if there’s a plugin to enable a comments search for readers, but I was unable to locate one.
@neo
I thank you kindly for the link. I too vaguely remember Artfldgr from my time as a lurker on this blog, though this material sours my opinion of him greatly. Munzenberg Is quite important to be sure, but I think Artfldgr GREATLY exaggerates it. The “artificial” boundary between entertainment and propaganda was punched well before (as anyone who has compared Richard III by Shakespeare to the historical record can attest), and Munzenberg in many ways learned his trade at the knees of totalitarian socialist propagandists and “news people” before him such as Lenin, Marx, and Ludendorff (or more specifically the latter’s “morale officers”).
Also his overreliance on Jacobin and unsourced claims as well as overweening, almost gnostic arrogance that he knows more than all of us is annoying and irritating. I do not claim to be all knowing, far from it. But I try to back up my claims with sources and solid argumentation and try to extend good will to those I debate with (though it can be argued I fail from time to time).
I also note that Munzenberg was something of a Johnny come lately to communist and even Leninist propaganda in the West, as “Parvus” could attest.
I appreciate your efforts to let us search comments; that would be wonderful and I thank you for even making the effort.
Also, I wonder why “Art” is now using the “Art__shadow” moniker. Seems curious.
@ Turtler > “Also, I wonder why “Art” is now using the “Art__shadow” moniker. Seems curious.”
He went through a bad patch in his life a while back and took a break from commenting.
Although I appreciate your counterpoint with sources, Art has presented a lot of historical information in the past that I and others were not aware of, because it doesn’t hit the general history texts, whereas you are an indefatigable specialist, which does much to recommend your comments.
Bottom line: we tend to cut Art some slack because of past value received.
@AesopFan
Fair enough, and I cannot fault them for that.
Fair enough, and I can appreciate it. And indeed Muzenberg’s propaganda networks and the others in his generation influenced by the Soviets ARE Important parts of the story. I think it is relatively easy to overemphasize them (especially in the blush of first learning, since the Reds had been laying networks down for a while and Lenin and Stalin worked as newsmen), but it is also easy to dememphasize them.
But the arrogance, level of mystical woo woo, and assumption that none even know what Neo was talking about if they didn’t talk about him is aggravating. Part of assessing Munzenberg etc. al.’s importance and assessing the damage they did is fitting them into the wider picture and realizing what they Didn’t do as well as what they did, and Art went off half-cocked on that.
Moreover they seemed to be more focused in name dropping people rather than trying to inform or educate about them in order to help craft the sort of image of superiority of “You don’t know the True History, but I do. You all are ignorant.”
“What, you think I’m going to actually tell you the True Story or help cite my sources so you can research yourself (even if they are largely Wikipedia or Jacobin bits)? You naive person you.”
Turtler, I admire your facility with the details of the period, all the more so since I am plodding though Ferguson’s “Paper & Iron: Hamburg Business and German Politics in Era of Inflation, 1897-1927.”
Could it be that the fundamental debate after the German Revolution of 1918 was an accelerated version of the French experience following 1789, then 1830, then 1848, then 1871 and following? The basic division there was a struggle between republicans and monarchists of various stripes, with radical wings of the parties, political killings, frequent political gridlock, and periodic coups.
In Weimar Germany, there a three way debate between the revolutionaries (originally of the red variety but later also of the brown) and the constitutional republicans and the monarchist defenders of the Wilhelmine ancien regime. There could never be agreement among these three perspectives from the standpoint of first principles, and the inevitable result was deadlock, fragile coalitions, minority governments, and resort to rule by decree. Plus thirteen years of attempted coups, insurrections, street violence, and assassination, which left a lot of voters looking for order of some kind. Looking at the election results from 1919 to 1932, one sees a pretty stable share for the Socialist parties, though there were important differences between the SPD and KPD, and the KPD was increasing its share in 1932, suggesting the majority of socialists supporting parliamentary government was getting smaller. The rise of the NSDAP came mostly at the expense of the DNVP and BVP, though also necessarily at the expense of DVP and DDP, the bourgeois parties. So the 1932 elections showed that roughly 50% of the electorate favored a Revolutionary answer, though 3/4 of them wanted a Brown Revolution, not a Red Revolution.
Hindenburg received a small majority in 1925 based on the alliance of the bourgeois parties with the DNVP and the BVP, winning in the East but losing to the Socialist candidate in the Rhineland. He received a comparably small majority in 1932, but this time facing the revolutionaries Hitler and Thalmann, he carried the Rhineland and Bavaria (the latter with the help of BVP), while Hitler carried Prussia (more or less), indicating that Hindenburg’s opponents of 1925 now thought he was their best chance.
The question is, what caused the monarchist parties–which had particular footing in the bureaucracy, the universities, and the army– to conclude that a return to monarchy was no longer a relevant question? Was there a decisive moment?
The bourgeois parties always found the prospect of government by the Reds to be intolerable. What caused at least some of their voters to conclude that NSDAP was the best of a bad set of choices?
One has to think that when 50% of the electorate doesn’t accept the legitimacy of their constitution, time is up.
@Oblio
Apologies for the lack of attention here. I was bogged down.
Thank you kindly, I appreciate it. While I differ with Ferguson a great deal (especially around WWI) I cannot deny his accomplishments and the comparison is quite stunning.
I would say that is a logical comparison, especially since there are a lot of parallels and I’d argue that this issue had a long prologue. It tends to get underappreciated now but Germany is on a very very short list (alongside I’d argue Italy, Switzerland, and the Greater Netherlands) of countries that were the most drastically affected by the French Revolutions, especially the “Great” ones of 1789 and 1793 (Spain and Portugal were transformed almost as much but more from the Napoleonic French invasions and occupations and British predation than from the Revolutions).
This isn’t TOO surprising. France was the cultural epicenter of Western civilization at the time, and one of its political ones (indeed, French remained the language of diplomacy well into the the 19th century and since then was demoted to “merely” being one of them). France also had absorbed a good number of ethnically and politically German territories in the course of the 1500s and 1600s (especially in the famous Alsace-Lorraine). Even beyond that, many German territories were directly influenced by France or even outright clients of it like the League of the Rhine, meaning that the rocking effects in Paris and Versailles rippled out to touch them. And a bunch of German territories were either annexed by France (especially on the West Bank of the Rhine) and more were placed under the overlordship of French rulers or German clients of France.
This all had a fair amount of turmoil. For one it helped create the borders Germany would go through most of the 19th century with, with the often violent consolidation of German states on the East Bank of the Rhine and then their annexation of French occupied territory in the West. For two it also helped spread the ideas of the French revolution and their discourses Eastwards, with often shocking events. Large parts of Western Germany partially or entirely adopted the Code Napoleon and French military reforms and not all got rid of them entirely. Moreover you had a sizable flowering of what’s now modern nationalism and classical liberal or romantic ideas. This actually caused a fair number of problems, since a lot of these were implicitly pro-French (though this waned as the revolutions and wars continued; Beethoven’s scratching out of a dedication to Napoleon is a good representation) and even those that weren’t tended to implicitly challenge the Ancien Regimes of Germany, and this caused a major problem as the monarchs generally tried to reform enough to compare with or even beat the French, but not to shake the boat or their foundations. While also dealing with these pesky often-armed “hippies” willing to form various paramilitaries (Free Corps, or “Freikorps”), who often operated outside of the control of the crown, and were the cause of no small amount of fear and irritation among the old absolutists. On the whole most of these issues got swept aside in the face of the tides of war and particularly the 1813-1814 war to defeat France that fatally weakened and cast down Napoleon, but they didn’t solve everything. Which is why a generation later yet another series of revolutions swept through Germany, France, Italy, and the neighboring issues (and I’ve wargamed some of those), and in general they were very narrowly put down.
Turns out that Marx’s bloodthirsty ranting about how there would be no mercy and how they would know where to shoot wasn’t so smart when dealing with people who knew how to shoot and were at least as ruthless. So you gradually saw cracking (both accidental and by design, top down and bottom up) and changes as the Powers that Be tried (and largely succeeded) in channeling nationalism for the power of the state and its expansion across Central Europe, and made some measured concessions on social and economic matters, but rarely to the complete satisfaction of dissidents like full constitutionalists, Social Democrats (to say nothing of actual Communists), or “bourgeoise” republicans. Which slowly cooked in the background until entering a bit of a stalemate where the Social Democrats held a generally commanding popular vote lead but were kept in check by the powers of the Imperial cabinet over the army, the voting system (which on an extreme issue saw the Krupp family Patriarch have 1/3rd of all the votes in a state to himself due to income based vote counting), and intentional weaknesses in the Reichstag’s oversight. WWI papered over many of these in the flourish of patriotic fervor (helped by a clever propaganda campaign by the government that included knowingly lying about Russian intent), but then the decision to empower a series of military dictators and demanding more and more sacrifices for less and less gain ultimately caused the situation to blow up.
But this wasn’t helped by how very few factions or people in German politics were not complicit in some way with the crimes of the wartime governments (whether it was the Social Democrats rushing to vote war credits, or continuing the policies of the “War Guilt Office” in the German Foreign Ministry engaged in war crimes denial, or continuing Imperial hyperinflation). So a full reckoning was not really practical in spite of the deep flaws it left. And it was made worse by the odd symbiosis that emerged where the reactionary authoritarians dominating the bureaucracy and military and the republicans in the legislature needed each other (the republicans providing diplomatic and political legitimacy – or as Ludendorff put it cover – and economic aid, while the reactionaries provided the military muscle to put down rebels like Communists and Polish nationalists and were the brain trust behind rearmament, which was something almost all in Germany agreed with).
Largely agreed, though I’d point out that much of the Republic was dominated by uneasy alliances between the constitutionalists and the reactionaries (for lack of a better term, and I’d also note that while there was a heavy corollary between those favoring a Republic and Constitutional Rule or those favoring an imperial restoration and authoritarian rule it wasn’t 1-1; you saw a few constitutional monarchists and a few favoring an authoritarian nationalist republic), even if this made “Sudden but inevitable betrayal” into a trope.
Moreover I’d also point to the deep fissures within these camps over things such as ideology, personalities, desired policies, and so on. There’s a reason Hitler murdered a lot of imperial loyalists and right wing republicans during the Night of the Long Knives.
Largely agreed with an important caveat. It is really hard for me to understate the importance of things such as the ability of the Nazis to peel off SPD and especially KPD support for themselves (which is all the more remarkable because the KPD generally made strong political inroads during this time), and also the growing decline of republican legitimacy overall due to the Depression and particularly the Prussian Coup and the abuses of the constitution and law by what I’d call the Shadow Dictatorship. This tends not to be highlighted as much for a few reasons, starting with the desire of many leftists to pretend the Nazi support came purely from middle class or business owners (and you can see Kangas delving into this by blathering about business support for the Nazis in spite of how this was mostly mythological) while ignoring how a large working class left wing contingent is what gave the Party its mass movement heft. Secondly to I think paint the sharper contrast between the Republic and the Nazis in order to make Hitler the clearer cut villain of the story and the Third Reich a sharper break from the Republic.
And of course in most ways Hitler IS the villain of the story and the Reich WAS a sharp break from the Republic. But I’d argue it was not nearly as sharp as it is often portrayed (especially in the “Hitler killed Democracy” telling) and the villainy was not so unidirectionally Hitler’s. In many ways Hindenburg, Schleicher, Papen, and the rest exploited the Republic’s in-built flaws to take it over from within in order to try and transform it into something else (what that would be is somewhat unclear and subject to which of that circle would’ve wound up winning), and Hitler exploited their self-coups and infighting to seize power.
Turtler, thanks for your comments.
You are certainly right that the return of some kind of dictatorship was widely expected as early as 1923, though von Seeckt declined to take it and in fact later became a DVP RM. The actions against the Prussian government of Prussia in 1932 resembled those taken against the government of Saxony in 1923, if less violent, and not taken against a somewhat insurrectionist government of Bavaria in 1923. Though the Socialists complained bitterly about the different treatment meted out in Saxony and Bavaria, it is understandable that the Reichswehr had no interest in fighting the Reichswehr units loyal to the Bavarian government as the successor of the Wittelsbach monarchs. Regular Army fighting against Regular Army is a key characteristic of civil war. (Hitler was in the Bavarian Army, which swore allegiance to Bavaria’s king. I don’t know whether they also swore allegiance to the Hohenzollern Emperor. Interesting question.) The legal and constitutional issues are complex, as the Weimar constitution continued the federal organization of the German Empire, which in turn reflected the legal organization of the North German Confederation. The constituent states of Weimar continued to have representatives in each other’s capitals, a vestige of old ambassadorial roles. I staggered through Ludendorff’s memoire a few years ago–which was remarkable in many ways–and he spent political capital during the war worrying about whether the Imperial Lands of Alsace and Lorraine could be annexed to Prussia after the war, and how to put members of the House of Hohenzollern on the thrones of Baltic puppet states.
I’m still wondering what was the point at which the issue of the return of monarchy became irrelevant FOR ITS SUPPORTERS. When and why did they give up?
@Oblio
No worries.
I think Seeckt’s refusal had a fairly clear pragmatic reason. If France and Germany went to war in 1923 he would almost certainly expect Germany to lose and be subject to a more protracted occupation. The attempts to rebuild the military were not done yet and were in fact delayed by regional conflicts, premature putsch attempts (like Kapp-Luttwitz, Buchrucker, and Munich attempts) and the rise of the KPD in the East. He believed (correctly as it turned out) the war machine and political situation required some more years to play out.
I’d argue the more important distinction was their loyalty. The military may not have been ecstatic at the idea of fighting other soldiers regardless of their allegiance, but they were far more open to doing so against those with communist or at least revolutionary, anti-nationalist socialist sympathies like they did with the Bavarian Soviet Republic (where Hitler served as a Regimental Representative for the Reds and fought on opposite sides to Roehm and others before fleeing) or the Ruhr Red Army.
Moreover, Seeckt at least had an “in” in Bavaria in the form of von Lossow and his garrison’s strength within the uneasy Kahr-led coalition ruling it, and Seeckt probably was mollified by the ability to influence the Bavarian government or possibly take it down from within, as well as the fact that Kahr seemed supportive of a pan-German reactionary coup against the Republic, in sharp contrast to what the Communists and revolutionary SPD members wanted.
In contrast the KPD I’d argue got too blood thirsty and gun hungry, and while Kahr’s maneuverings (while criminal) were at least subtle enough they could be overlooked by a military inclined to overlook them and a government that wasn’t so much so, the formation of large scale paramilitaries in Saxony and the adjoining areas explicitly committed to revolutionary transformation was too much, and the government and Army were looking for an excuse. One they found when the KPD cells in Hamburg rose in armed revolt in spite of being comically unprepared and poorly armed and trained (something Halbrook touches on).
Once that happened the excuse was clear.
It also “helped” that Hitler and Ludendorff’s Munich Putsch failed miserably and encouraged Kahr to put a moratorium on plotting and crawl back to the Berlin Government in order to help protect his position (for which he was later murdered by Hitler in an act of vengeance).
I’d have to check the specifics but at a minimum they were beholden to the Hohenzollern Kaiser by dint of the Wittelsbach Monarch’s oath of fealty to the Kaiser. I haven’t looked at the Bavarian Oath for a long tiem so I’ll need to dig up.
Indeed, and it is rather jaw dropping in how complex it is. Also one reason I am leery about the characterization Germany had no democratic tradition. The HRE was one of the more democratic or at least electoral systems in the world on the superregional level for centuries.
Oh yeah, this was an issue. Actually Alsace-Lorraine was more urgent (or at least seemed to be) than one might think. It was basically under military occupation during its entire time in the Second Empire (and arguably in the Third Reich), and military rule there had proven dysfunctional and alienating. Which led to advocations for annexation. Most notably by Prussia (the leading state of Germany and home of the Emperor) but also by the Bavarian Royals, including their King and at least as importantly his heir Crown Prince (and Field Marshal) Rupprecht, who was quite skilled as a leader and gifted in war in his own right, and who put his heft into trying to get the region annexed to Bavaria, arguing on things such as their shared Catholic faith, closer culture, and Bavaria’s prestige as the second most powerful state in the Reich.
Which caused a fair bit of bickering on how powerful the Bavarians could get.
(I actually consulted on a WWI Video Game way back when about the distinct role of the Bavarian government and military on the Western Front there and considered some kind of dynamic political balance of power between Prussia and Bavaria, but that only came partially through).
As for the kingships out East, this also made sense to a fair degree. The Central Powers wanted to form puppet states out East, but were utterly leery of actually allowing the locals much power. So the idea was to make them mini autocracies under the control of the military, headed up by a noble from either Germany or Austria-Hungary. Of course WHO those people should be was a fierce subject to dispute (including between Berlina nd Vienna on whether they should be primarily Austrian or German oriented, and among the sub realms and dynasties on who exactly they’d be). In particular it was largely a rubber stamp process with the military continuing to rule outside of Finland (which gained independence under its own speed and actually fought a civil war between its local Reds and the muscular Senate who sought German help on their own terms and imposed a bunch of demands), and it all broke apart as the locals realized they were intended to be cannonfodder out West without much real say in their governments. So they generally revolted when it became clear the Western Allies had broken the German military out West and South, and the Bolsheviks invaded.
It is still an interesting microcosm of the era and what might have been, and I still study and wargame it a fair bit.
I’d probably argue it was a gradual process, with the first people bowing out after WWI and especially during the more stable eras of the Weimar Republic. but Nazi rule and especially WWII and its aftermath were basically the fatal blows to it I’d argue. Hitler rejiggered the regions of Germany to some degree and helped cement his rule, but then that got washed away and Germany got truncated even further and partitioned. Suffice it to say, not many could hope to have a restoration of the Saxon Throne under Soviet oversight, and so it gradually faded away outside of a kind of sentimental attachment and fringe agitation in Bavaria.
I’d probably say Hitler’s seizure of power and increasing telegraphing that he would not allow an Imperial or Monarchical restoration was the turning point. We know that Papen during his own Chancellorship was trying to prepare for some kind of absolutist imperial restoration; Schleicher is more of an open question (Trotsky did call him the Question Mark in Epaulets for a reason) but he seemed to be ok with either that or an authoritarian “Republic” under him. But Hitler was a closeted anti-Monarchist and opposed to hereditary government on principle and he made solid inroads to dismantle that (and in addition his petty vengeances like against von Kahr helped shatter
@Oblio
Regarding the Bavarian Army in the Empire, this might be of interest to you.
https://etd.ohiolink.edu/acprod/odb_etd/ws/send_file/send?accession=osu1260973420