When democracy has died in Weimar

#116

My Dear Friend of Democracy,

I was in the German city of Weimar this weekend.

It was once the capital of the German federal state of Thuringia (now it is Erfurt), and I want to tell you what happened here in Weimar a hundred years ago.

As said, Weimar was the state capital of Thuringia in the first German democracy, the so-called Weimar Republic, which emerged only a few years earlier.

Before the state elections for the third legislative period, four bourgeois parties joined forces to form the so-called Thüringer Ordnungsbund, short TOB (Thuringian Order League). The aim was to replace the left-wing government, which had lost support due to the extreme economic crisis and hyperinflation.

However, the February 10, 1924 election did not bring the hoped-for absolute majority for the TOB. It received 35 of the 72 seats.

This was the beginning of the rise of Hitler's party, NSDAP, in Thuringia.

NSPAP parliamentary group leader in the state parliament, Artur Dinter, promised to support the minority government of Richard Leutheußer of the national liberal DVP if "the government consists only of German-blooded, non-Marxist men".

The government followed the request of its "tolerating partner".

In the following state elections, the bourgeois alliance again failed to gain an absolute majority. This time, however, the extremists in the six-member NSDAP faction were no longer satisfied with toleration.

Adolf Hitler himself travelled to Weimar for the coalition negotiations, where he pushed through the appointment of Wilhelm Frick, who had been convicted of an attempted coup, as Minister of the Interior and Education.

That was the first time that one of Hitler's National Socialists had been appointed to a ministerial position. It was in 1930.

Frick immediately got to work. The administration, police and education system were "cleansed" of politically undesirable people. Frick issued the decree "Against Negro culture for German nationality", ordered nationalist "school prayers", appointed the cultural racist Paul Schulze-Naumburg to head the former Bauhaus Weimar (which had already been expelled to Dessau in 1925) and the racial scientist Hans F. K. Günther to the State University of Jena.

The later Reich Minister of the Interior used his ministerial post as a test run for the seizure of power in Berlin, and in Thuringia, it became clear for the first time what could be expected in the event of a nationalist takeover of power in Germany.

Due to increasingly violent verbal attacks by extremists, the government coalition collapsed in April 1931.

Not least because of increasing social and economic upheaval caused by the global economic crisis that began in late 1929, the NSDAP received 42.5 per cent of the vote in the following state election on July 31, 1932 (in parallel elections in the Reich, the figure was 37.2 per cent). At the same time, the bourgeois parties had almost completely disappeared.

On August 26, 1932, under the former NSDAP faction leader Fritz Sauckel, the government began its business. The parliamentary system was immediately undermined, the opposition was harassed, and the state parliament was largely paralyzed by permanent disruptions.

In the state parliament session on February 14, 1933, the NSDAP proposed adjournment "indefinitely." Thus, this session became the last.

Democracy in Thuringia was abolished.

✊ Some parallels to today are obvious, aren't they? The rise of the extreme right. Toleration by parts of the middle of society. Things like that. It's scary. But history doesn't have to repeat itself. It's up to us.

See you in Europe,

Johannes