I think my presentation went pretty well. I spoke about the failure of the Weimar Republic, and whether today in the United States we can learn anything from studying why it did not succeed.

I would like to upload my text (which I have in a Word file) onto the blog, but when I looked at the instructions on how to do that, they seemed to involve about a dozen steps, none of which I really understood and none of which I had the patience to learn about. So…..

The German Weimar Republic was the government set up after World War I and the signing of the Treaty of Versailles in 1919 ending the war, and placing significant burdens on the losing German Empire, including reparations, military limitations and territorial losses. A constitutional convention was held in the city of Weimar, resulting in the formation of a liberal republic that governed Germany until it was replaced in 1933 by Hitler’s Third Reich.

My presentation, which I think went well, was primarily based on a book titled “When Germany Put the Clock Back” by American journalist Edgar Mowrer and originally published shortly after Hitler obtained control of the country.

Germany had no democratic traditions, and Mowrer said the Germans, always aggressive in foreign affairs, were always docile in internal matters, leaving governing to their better classes, and that the idea of a western style democracy was brand new to them. They, for the most part, did not understand how it was suppose to work, making it easier for the opponents of the Republic to undermine it.

In addition, most elements of the population were against the new governing structure, including the old noble class, the military, the Catholic Church, and nationalist right wing groups, such as the brand new National Democratic Socialist Workers’ Party, otherwise known as the Nazis.

There was tremendous bitterness about the terms of the Versailles Treaty. There was a country which had been destroyed, and there was unbelievably high inflation coupled with unemployment. There were those who believed in Aryan superiority and could not except defeat, and there were those, including many Jews, who found a liberal democracy just what they wanted, and who succeeded in changing the books Germans read, the films and plays they watched, the art they produced, and the sexual practices they were accustomed to. All this fed opposition to the Republic.

Things settled down for about five years after 1924 when the Versailles terms were adjusted, but the global depression, which began in 1929 hit Germany hard and turned many of those who had voted with the Social Democrats ten years earlier into ardent supporters of the Nazis, who gained 38% of the vote for the German parliament in 1933 (as opposed to 2% of the vote which they won only a few years earlier).

Of course, the Nazis always based much of their program on “the Jewish problem”. The Jews just didn’t fit into the Nazi way of thinking. The Nazis believed that humanity’s unchangeable pattern was to have ethnic or national groups compete with each other for power. A cosmopolitan group like the Jews, who believed in tolerance within the communities in which they lived and who all seemed to have international connections, just did not fit in the German/Nazi worldview.

The Weimar government was led by a president, General von Hindenburg, a military hero and a man not identified with any of Germany’s 40 political parties, and by a Chancellor, the last of whom was Baron von Papen. The Chancellor ran the non-military side of the German government and reported to the President, who was also in control of the German military. In 1932, von Papen and von Hindenburg decided that Germany had become too unstable and fired all of the country’s ministers (something arguably not permitted by the constitution), replacing them with a more conservative, right wing group. In early 1933, von Hindenburg appointed Adolph Hitler as Chancellor. Von Hindenburg was not a Nazi, and not a fan of Hitler, but was afraid of him and believed that he would be easier to control in the government (in a high position, but one where he answered directly to von Hindenburg) than if he remained outside the government agitating.

The deposed cabinet ministers left without putting up a fight prior to Hitler’s appointment. They thought they were helping save the country from further instability, and had not contemplated Hitler as Chancellor. They were even more surprised when Hitler was able to put through the Parliament (the Reichstag) legislation known as the Enabling Act, which basically gave the Chancellor the power to adopt and enforce new laws without parliamentary approval and without the approval of the President. Von Hindenburg died less than a year after he appointed Hitler Chancellor. He was not replaced. Hitler was now all powerful.

This is the briefest of outlines. If you want my entire presentation, just let me know and I will send it to you.

The question is: can it happen here? No one thought it could happen in Germany until it was too late. And when it did happen, it happened very, very fast. And it happened because not enough people fought against it, and because the Enabling Act gave unlimited power to an individual who had much less power the day before its passage.

The United States in 2025 is not Germany in 1919. But even so……anything can happen anywhere, which means that “yes, it can happen here.”