Why the Weimar Republic collapsed and how Hitler was able to take and consolidate power.

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Steph Fenton

Why the Weimar Republic collapsed and how Hitler was able to take and consolidate power.

Some historians believe that the Weimar Republic, born in the aftermath of the First World War, was destined to failure from it very outset. It was blamed for Germanys defeat and for the harsh treaty of Versailles, ‘no one in their right mind would claim that the terms of the treaty of Versailles did not play a major role in the collapse of the Weimar Republic’ (Geary). The Paris peace conference was held between the 12th of January 1919 and 20th of January 1920. Leaders from 32 states (75% of the world’s population) attended. Five treaties emerged from the conference, one of which being the Versailles created to deal with Germany. The harsh terms included territorial and military restrictions. Germany was forced to reluctantly sign the treaty. In the bitter atmosphere in Germany after the defeat a simple explanation for it quickly spread. It claimed that the German army had been stabbed in the back by unpatriotic and weak politicians. That if the army had fought until the end, they could have won the war. That they were not defeated on the battlefield but by pacifists and socialists who had undermined the war effort. These so called ‘November criminals’ that had stabbed them in the back were associated with the new democratic regime and this severely weakened the Weimar republics chance of survival.

 One of the terms of the treaty was that Germany should pay compensation for the damage done during the conflict. In April 1921 the reparations were set at £6, 600 million to be paid in annual instalments. This outraged the German people and politicians such as Adolf Hitler claimed that if they gained power they would stop paying the reparations.

At the end of the war , the communists hoped to seize power, as the Bolsheviks had done in Russia a year earlier. During the November revolution, soviets sprang up all over Germany. An independent socialist republic was set up in Bavaria and in January 1919 the spartacists attempted a revolution in Berlin. The provisional government had to use the army and the Freikorps to regain control. There was street fighting in Berlin and the spartacist leaders, Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, were murdered. In Bavaria there was also a civil war.

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In 1920 in the Kapp Putsch members of the Freikorps attempted to seize power. The putsch was badly organised and soon brought to an end by a general strike in Berlin. Ominously ,however,the army refused to come to the aid  of the government and few of those responsible for the putsch were punished.

 By 1923 the German government found that it was unable to continue paying the reparations required by the Treaty of Versailles. French and Belgian governments responded to this by sending their troops into the Ruhr, the main centre of Germany’s coal, iron and steel production. The German ...

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