connected with, and dependent on, the backing
of the Reichstag parties.
When in 1928 the Socialists at last joined a
broad coalition excluding the more extreme right
they seemed to be remedying their earlier mis-
taken policy; but it was very late in the history of
the parliamentary Republic. The coalition part-
ners, especially the Centre Party, had already
moved so far to the right that they now felt ill at
ease working with the Socialists under a Socialist
chancellor. This so-called grand coalition had the
utmost difficulty holding together for the two
years (1928–30) the government lasted, plunging
from one internal crisis to the next. The influence
of the brilliantly successful foreign minister,
Gustav Stresemann, just managed to keep the
right wing of the coalition in government. To
carry through his diplomacy of persuading the
Allies to relax their grip on Germany, he needed
a stable government behind him. But the coali-
tion did not survive his death in October 1929.
The three years from 1928 to 1930 were
critical in the decline of Weimar Germany.
Economic distress was becoming severe among
the small farmers. Then followed the Wall Street
Crash and its chain reaction in Europe. Industrial
output contracted and unemployment soared.
The Nazis were able to capitalise on the grievances
of the small farmers and then as the depression
widened and deepened they exploited the resent-
ments of the lower-middle classes, the shopkeep-
ers and white-collar workers who were facing
uncertainties and financial hardships and who
feared a Bolshevik revolution from the unem-
ployed industrial workers. On the political scene,
the conservative Nationalist Party was excluded
from power by the ‘grand coalition’ which in
1928 supported a broader-based government.
The Nationalists in that year had fallen under the
leadership of a wealthy industrialist and publisher,
Alfred Hugenberg, who hated Weimar democracy
and socialism equally. The Nationalists had not
done well in the elections of 1928. The effect
of their setback was to encourage Hugenberg
to look to the more extreme right for votes. In
the wings, the small, violent and racialist Nazi
Party stood on the threshold of achieving mass
support.
The first opportunity for the Nazis to make a
significant electoral impact in the Reichstag elec-
tions came in 1930. The economic crisis had bro-
ken up the Socialist-led grand coalition. The
partners of that coalition could not agree whether
employers or the workers should suffer from the
government’s only remedy to the crisis, the cutting
back of expenditure. Like the majority of the
Labour Party in Britain, the Social Democrats
could not remain in a government that reduced
unemployment benefits. President von Hinden-
burg now called on the leader of the Centre Party,
Heinrich Brüning, to lead a new government.
There were threats that the president would dis-
pense with the Reichstag’s approval and resort to
emergency decrees provided for in the constitution
if it rejected Brüning’s savage deflation. This hap-
pened within a few weeks and Brüning now staked
his future on dissolving the Reichstag and on a new
election. Its unexpected result and its political con-
sequences ushered in the final phase of Weimar
democracy. The vote of the Nazis increased from
some 810,000 in 1928 to nearly 6.5 million in the
September 1930 election. They increased their
representation from 12 to 107, just behind the
Socialists, who had 143, and nudged ahead of the
Communists, who had 77, to become the second-
largest party. The conservative Nationalists lost
half their support.
It would still, perhaps, have been just possible
to stabilise the political fortunes of Weimar, but
Brüning’s financial ‘cures’ killed any chance of this
happening. Confidence throughout the country in
the ability of the politicians to solve the crisis
ebbed away. Economists of the Keynesian school
of thought met with complete rejection in the
Brüning era. (The Nazis lent them a more ready
ear.) There was an alternative policy of expansion
and of credit and of state help to put the unem-
ployed to work. Financially the country was slid-
ing into a position where administrators felt that
something had to be done. In parliament, the
Social Democrats, under the great shock of the
National Socialist landslide, backed the minority
Brüning government from the benches of the
opposition as far as they could. Brüning’s prefer-
ence was for authoritarian, austere government,
and with Hindenburg’s backing he governed by
emergency presidential decrees.
1
THE FAILURE OF DEMOCRACY AND RISE OF HITLER, 1920–34 183
