The following year was one of unparalleled political violence in Germany, culminating in the murders of such prominent politicians as the head of the Zentrum party, Erzberger, and the foreign secretary, Rathenau. The Freikorps ran wild, assassination was rife, and Germany was in crisis. The army and police were often little help, and the government could do little to curb the violence. Democracy was being buried under the corpses of it’s advocators.
Hitler’s famous “beer hall putsch” of 1922 was unimportant insofar as what it achieved, at least in reference to it’s aims – it was, according to Morris, “reduced to fiasco”. The police acted quickly, the army refused to support Hitler, and the leaders were rounded up and tried for treason. Here, though, we see further damage inflicted on an already bedraggled democratic government. Here were men being tried for high treason – for attempting to overthrow the government – and as the judges were right wing sympathisers, Hindenburg was acquitted, whilst Hitler, who felt confident enough to launch into a political speech during the trial, was charged with high treason and given a laughable sentence of five years. He served less than one year, and that was in the comfort often afforded by an expensive hotel – it gave Hitler time to write Mein Kampf and rethink the Nazi direction, but more importantly in reference to the question in hand, it showed the unwillingness of the institutions of Germany to punish the very people trying to overthrow it. So far, the Weimar government had received a vote of no confidence from both the army and the existing legal system – both left over from the reign of Wilhelm II.
Further problems were to hit Germany, before the “clear” skies of 1924-29. In 1922, Germany asked the allies for an extension on her repayments, claiming there was no possible way for her to make them in full – it was refused, and by 1923, when she failed to keep up with repayments, the French took matters into their own hands and invaded the Ruhr. Inflation was already a problem in Germany, due to both the cost of war and some very poor economical policies (when there wasn’t enough money, print some more) – these had resulted in the DM’s tripling in . The French invasion enraged the country, and the Weimar Government encouraged the workers in the Ruhr to partake in a passive resistance against the French – namely, simply to not work for them. The French were not to be so easily beaten, and so marched in their own troops, and worked the machinery on their own – Germany’s single greatest remaining industrial area was now not supplying her already crippled economy, and so inflation began to take it’s toll. By the end of 1922, the exchange rate had mushroomed from 4DM:$1 pre-war to 8000DM:$1; and by far the worst was yet to come. The French occupation continued, so by November 1923, the exchange rate peaked at 4,200,000,000DM:$1. Money was less than worthless – life savings were wiped out, companies crumbled, people were degraded to the level of eating their own pets. The effect on democracy in Germany was impossible to estimate – as Craig intelligently states, “Millions of Germans who had passively accepted transition from Empire to Republic suffered deprivations that shattered their faith in the democratic process and left them cynical and alienated”.
By 1923, several of the pillars of support on which not only democracy but also government in general need in order to function correctly, had been shattered. I have examined evidence in this essay that shows the government could not rely on its army for support, its judicial system or the rest of Europe. To add to its woes, the hyperinflation caused a huge body of people who would previously have had little reason to distrust or dislike the Weimar Republic, and who could have been swayed either way when it came to votes, to have some personal experience of when it failed them personally – in fact, this is true to such an extent that it would probably be a challenge to find somebody who had not been let down by the government. The economy had been poorly handled, and the citizens themselves could see that the government was badly supported. Then, compounding matters yet further, there was the ever-changing merry-go-round of coalitions that ruled Germany, just highlighting the inherent weakness in the government that was ruling the country. Having never really had the support of it’s army or judicial system, being opposed to by large numbers of the ruling elite and influential industrialists, and alienating and losing the confidence of an immense proportion of it’s populace, there is no way to hide the fact that democracy in Germany was very badly, if not fatally damaged – a theory backed up by the “years of recovery”, whose dependence on foreign loans led to the massive extent of ruin caused by the Wall Street Crash and subsequent termination of loans to Germany, and ultimately gave cause to such discontent that people were desperate enough to vote Adolf Hitler into power in 1933.
