The Real Parallels Are With Weimar

What Happens When Elites Hate Democracy

President Hindenburg delivering a radio address, 1932. 

If you say the word Hindenburg to an American, the reaction is likely to be a blank stare, or possibly the thought that a dirigible of that name burned and crashed in Lakehurst, New Jersey, on May 6, 1937. But behind the zeppelin there stands an actual person: Paul von Hindenburg, a German field marshal who was a hero of World War I and later served as the second and last president of the Weimar Republic (he served as president of Germany from 1925 to his death in 1934). 

When Americans think of military leaders who have later careers as presidents, they may think of Washington, or Grant, or Eisenhower. Hindenburg was not like them; he did not believe in the form of government he was presiding over. 

As historian Mary Fulbrook puts it: "... Hindenburg was not in principle committed to upholding and strengthening the democratic system: on the contrary, he made little secret of his intention to replace it with a more authoritarian political system as soon as was practicable." (Mary Fulbrook, The Divided Nation: A History of Germany 1918-1990, 1992, p. 45.) 

Hindenburg was not alone in his dislike of the Weimar form of government. A whole bunch of German elites basically wanted democracy dead. This did not always come in the form of active support for the Nazi party, but industrialists, for instance, "certainly made little effort to sustain the democratic political system and indeed attacked its structure and fabric sufficiently to render it weak in the face of the final onslaught. The agrarian elites who had such a favourable reception with Hindenburg must also bear a burden of guilt, as must those army officers who worked to undermine democracy and install an authoritarian alternative." (P. 64.) 

If all of this sounds to you like the earlier rise of Mussolini in Italy, you wouldn't be wrong. (For more on Italy, see Jim Crow Was a Failed State, So Why Do We Want to Go Back?)

Even the churches got into the act: "Both the Catholic and the Protestant churches propagated essentially conservative, monarchist and anti-democratic sympathies; they were moreover highly critical of the moral decadence, as they saw it, of a society in which birth control was for the first time becoming widespread." (P. 41.) 

It was in this very opportune context that the Nazis cleaned up their definitely fringey act and started appealing to a more mainstream audience. A key was messaging. As Fulbrook puts it, "... Nazi 'ideology' was a somewhat rag-bag collection of largely negative views combined with a utopian vision of a grandiose future coloured by nostalgic appeals to aspects of a mythical past." (P. 52.)

As history has shown, such a formula can have considerable success, and not just in Germany.

After Hitler came to power, the parade of prefiguration continued. For instance: "... some civil servants who harboured misgivings about the Nazi regime justified their decision to stay as 'preventing something worse.' Yet the overall record of civil servants in the Third Reich remains one of compromise, rather than serious subversion of the regime." (P. 69.) 

Hitler did eventually become Chancellor of Germany in 1933 and immediately began to consolidate a totalitarian regime. If you were to ask an ordinarily knowledgeable American when democracy died in Germany, the reply would probably be it was when Hitler became Chancellor, or possibly when the Reichstag burned down a few weeks later.

In fact, parliamentary democracy in Germany died nearly three years before Hitler became Chancellor. Fulbrook again:

"The Grand Coalition of 1928-30, including the SPD [social democrats], led by Chancellor Hermann Muller, was the last genuinely parliamentary government of Weimar Germany. Plans had already been made for its replacement by a more authoritarian alternative - essentially presidential rule through a Chancellor and cabinet lacking majority support in parliament - several weeks before its actual collapse." (PP. 53-54.) 

The proximate cause of the government's collapse was the question of how to pay the rapidly rising bill for unemployment benefits as the depression threw more and more people out of work. The parties in the coalition were unable to agree.

"Foundering on this issue, the last cabinet of the Weimar Republic to rely on parliamentary support was replaced by a presidential cabinet under Chancellor Bruning, which, lacking majority support in parliament, was to rule by presidential decree." (P. 54.)

A brief observation on the role of chance in history. Weimar's first president, the social democrat Friedrich Ebert, was only 54 when he died from appendicitis and septic shock in 1925. If he had lived, the course of German and world history might well have been very different. 

Hindenburg Disaster, Lakehurst, N.J., 1937.

One final note. The fiery crash of the zeppelin Hindenburg is, in my opinion, a valid metaphor for the collapse of the Weimar Republic under President Hindenburg. It's true that one was slow and complicated, and the other was over in less than a minute. But the result was the same - disaster.

President photo: Bundesarchiv, Bild 102-13227 / CC-BY-SA 3.0.

Zeppelin photo: Sam Shere.

See also Fascism, What Can Pierre Laval Tell Us About Donald Trump?