Text of a post by Jürgen Hubert on the Steve Jackson Games Forums.

It started with WWI. Strong press censorship and the fact that little, if any, of the war was fought on German soil gave the civilian population the impression that Germany was slowly winning the war, or at least not loosing it. The surrender took most people completely by surprise.

And then the military, despite being responsible for the war, refused to sign the surrender treaty by themselves. Instead, they sent some democratic politicians to sign the Treaty of Versailles, with all its non-negotiable punitive compensations, and from that point on the democratic parties and democracy in Versailles were seen as having "sold out" to the foreign victors.

All this (and a small number of protests by unions in the final war years) lead to the so-called "Dolchstosslegende" - the myth that the German armies were undefeated on the field of battle, but instead were "stabbed in the back" by democratic, socialist, and communist forces at home...

Moral Lesson Number One: Always be leery of leaders - either military or political - who seek to shift blame for their own failures on either domestic or foreign enemies.

Then it came to create the new democracy. The constitution was widely hailed as the "most democratic constitution in the world", and with good reason - for example, women gained universal voting rights one year before that happened in the USA. And there was no limit placed on the parties who could get entry to parliament - each 60,000 votes directly translated into a single seat.

Of course, this lead to a splintering of the electorate - more and more radical parties gained entry to the Reichstag, and coalition governments of three or more parties were the norm. Near the end of the Republic, the NSDAP and the Communist party together had enough seats to block any new bills - which meant that the Republic was effectively governed by emergency measures by whichever government had been appointed by the President recently. Not stable, and not very democratic.

Moral Lesson Number Two: Ideals are nice when founding a new nation - but it is important that the new system works as well.

Then there was hyper-inflation, which came from the fact that Germany was unable to fulfill its reparation obligations - so the government turned to the printing press to create new money (I still have a 100,000 Reichsmark note somewhere...). And when the government finally claimed to be unable to pay its bills, France occupied the Rhineland, Germany's most heavily industrialized region, and furthermore weakening Germany's ability to pay. This also showed the democratic government as being weak and ineffectual, and gave the nationalist forces yet another cause to rally around (apart from the Treaty of Versailles).

Then there was the extreme conservativism of many judges. Right-wing extremists killed many of their political opponents, but few of them were ever persecuted, and many got nothing more than a slap on the wrist, if that. I mean, Hitler stayed in prison for less than a year for treason - leading an armed rebellion (the infamous Beer Hall Putch of 1923).

The Great Depression was the final nail in the coffin of the Weimar Republic. Most Germans now firmly believed that democracy didn't work, and few objected when Hitler was appointed Chancellor in 1933, despite the occasional personal misgivings...

Of course, these are only reasons for what happened - not excuses. There cannot be any valid excuses for what happened next.

 

All in all, the history of the Weimar Republic is a fascinating and sobering tale of all the things that can go wrong with a democracy. All too often we take democracy for granted, but reading about these times reminds us why we shouldn't.