Peter Matthews 12WK
What Problems Faced The New German Republic
From 1918 - 23? How Did It Survive?
The Weimar Republic was declared on 9th November 1918, although its first elections were on the 19th January of 1919 out of the defeat of the First World War and lasted until Hitler abused Article 48 of the Weimar constitution in 1933 to turn Germany into a totalitarian state. The republic faced unpopularity right from the beginning. In June 1919, the German delegates were forced to sign the humiliating treaty of Versailles in which Germany was forced to accept full responsibility for the First World War (Article 231) and to pay £6.6 billion in reparations. There was also the ‘Dolchstosstheorie’, the stab in the back theory in which it was the Politicians that brought the Germans out of the war when they were so close to victory. All of these problems provided the basis for some of the other problems which the faced the new republic.
Right from the beginning of the republic until the very end, Germany faced constant threats from both the extreme left and right-wing militants to take power. In March of 1919, there was a Berlin ‘spartarcist’ (KPD) uprising in which 1200 workers were killed. In the same month, Bavaria was proclaimed a soviet republic. However each both of these incidents were tackled by using the right-wing Freikorps (ex-army police) and the army. The right wing was hostile to the left and had no reservations about putting down any left-wing uprisings. However, the right wing did make its own attempts to overthrow the government. On 12th March 1920, 12,000 Freikorps soldiers led by Dr Wolfgang Kapp marched into Berlin and took over the Reichstag (Parliament) building. The government could not use the army to break up the revolt. ‘ Troops do not fire on troops; when Reichswehr fires on Reichswehr all comradeship within the officer corps has vanished’. The right wing army refused to fire on the right wing Freikorps. The Government did however use a different tactic. Before fleeing the Reichstag building, it told the citizens of Berlin to go on strike in protest to Kapp’s government. ‘Workers, party comrades! The military putsch has started…The strongest counter measures are required. No factory must work while the military dictatorship of Ludendorff and Co rules! Therefore down tools! Come out on strike!’ Civil servants, banks and many other industries went on strike which brought the entire city to a standstill. Vital services were not functioning leaving the capital ungovernable. The Kapp government fled after four days and Ebert’s government returned. In reaction to this putsch, the left organized 50,000 communists to resist the pro-putsch army in the Rhur, the largest working-class revolt in the period 1918 –23. As in the Berlin spartarcist uprisings, the government used the army and the friekorps to crush the resistance. Over 1000 soldiers and 250 policemen were killed. There were a other left wing revolts such as the disturbances in Saxony and Thuringia in April 1920 and the Two-day risings in Hamburg but in each case, the government used the right wing to suppress the left. The only other major right wing uprising was Hitler’s Munich putsch in November 1923 in which an army of 2000 Nazi soldiers was met by armed police and Bavarian soldiers. 14 Nazis were killed. The only other tactic that was used by both the left and the right was the assassinations of government officials. In total 376 government officials were assassinated. 354 by the
