Even in Britain, the general strike of 1926 left a simmering legacy of bitterness. In Germany, the shell of Weimar legality contained a profound conflict. In Weimar Germany, as in the Austrian Republic and the Second Republic in Spain, the forces which had hitherto monopolized the levers of political, social, and economic power lost control of the political system. Left and liberal forces would try to use this power to introduce sweeping social reforms. However, the threatened establishment forces still retained enormous social power, in the form of their domination of the systems of mass communication, and economic power, in the form of their ownership of land, industry, and the banks. They would use that power, with increasing ruthlessness in the context of economic contraction, to block the forces of reform. In the case of Germany, the destabilizing potential of this underlying conflict was exacerbated by the nature of the Weimar constitution. Because the extreme form of proportional representation gave even the tiniest groups representation in the Reichstag, a strong president had emergency law-making powers.
Although the Weimar regime survived its early difficulties between 1919 and 1923—the left-wing insurrections, Hitler’s abortive ‘Beer Hall Putsch’ of November 1923, and inflation— social conflict remained latent within the prosperity of the mid-1920s. The Republic acquired a certain spurious respectability in the eyes of the right with the election of Field-Marshal Hin-denburg as President in 1925. However, deep-seated resentments deriving from the unexpected defeat in i9i8 and its consequences saw a growth in support for radical nationalist and racist groups. Hitler and the German National Socialist Workers Party appealed to a wide swathe of German society by making the Jews scapegoats for all economic and social problems while offering grandiose dreams of world domination, glory and Lebensraum (living space) in the east. The readiness of certain sectors of German society to listen to Hitler’s skilfully projected message was increased by the Wall Street crash of October 1929 and its consequences.
By dint of war debts and subsequent credits, most of Europe was in hock to the United States. During the Great War, while the belligerents had been converting their productive capacity into weapons of destruction, other states from Spain to the United States had been expanding their industrial capacity to fill the gap. North America, Argentina, Australia, and New Zealand had been doing the same in agriculture. The burden of war debt precluded the investment which might have produced the economic growth that in turn might have absorbed some of the post-war crisis of overproduction. The United States refused to cancel debts and simultaneously maintained high tariffs to keep out foreign imports. After the Wall Street crash in October i929, the process accelerated. Credit to Europe was curtailed, the German banking system collapsed, and with it much of German industry. Unemployment reached 25 per cent in Germany and the United States. World industrial production was reduced by 30 per cent and world trade by 60 per cent. Governments throughout Europe responded with draconian public spending cuts which increased the scale of depression. In Britain, cuts in unemployment benefit were rendered even more urgent by the need for rearmament in a context in which the defence of Ireland, India, the Middle East, the Far East, and most of Africa was beyond the nation’s economic capabilities.
In the late summer of 1930, the Weimar coalition government collapsed because its SDP members refused to cut unemployment payments in order to balance the budget. Elections were called for September and held in an atmosphere of economic crisis and nationalist fervour against the western powers who were held responsible by the radical right for the enslavement of the German people. Hitler’s NSDAP gained 107 seats in the Reichstag and was second only to the SPD. As the government under Heinrich Bruning grew more unpopular, the NSDAP’s support grew with the covert approval of President Hindenburg. In the elections of July 1932, the Nazis gained 230 seats. After blocking effective government, with the help of the communist KPD, Hitler finally managed to browbeat Hindenburg into making him Chancellor on 30 January 1933. Within less than a year, he was able to establish a brutal and far-reaching dictatorship, for which he secured the support of the military establishment by promises of rearmament and an aggressive foreign policy. He decreed emergency powers to curtail basic constitutional freedoms for his left-wing opponents and Jews, who were also subjected to daily terror by his brown-shirted storm troopers, the SA (Sturmabteilungen).
A stage-managed election at the beginning of March 1933 gave the Nazi-conservative coalition a majority which secured the Enabling Act, giving Hitler the right to rule by decree. He annihilated the socialist and communist parties, imprisoning most of their leadership cadres in concentration camps. In November 1933, a further election gave him an 88 per cent majority. To clinch the support of the army, he crushed his own militia, the SA, in the so-called ‘night of the long knives’ on 30 June 1934. When Hindenburg died on 2 August 1934, Hitler simply combined the powers of the Reich President and those of the Chancellor into the absolute power of the Fuhrer. Thereafter, he presided over the ever-more frenetic efforts of his subordinates as they jostled to realize his plans for the extermination of racial enemies and for world domination. Workers were regimented into the German Labour Front, the young into the Hitler Youth. A terrifying panoply of security services was controlled by the sinister Heinrich Himmler, the head of the Schutzstaffel or SS.
World History
