Chapter 2: A Black Weekend
“By 1930, production in almost every country, bar Soviet Russia, had collapsed. Falling by some 40% in the worst cases like Germany and America. With factories from the Ruhr steel mills to the Detroit car plants shuttered, entire armies of unemployed workers flooded the streets of major cities. 8 million men and women in America, another 2.5 million in Britain, and 5 million more in Germany.
These loitering gangs of workless and wageless youths walked the lengths of their cities, and for each street corner they turned, it seemed they were joined by another score of people who had just been put out of work as the depression spread like a plague across the West. With no possible way to pay rent or afford housing; grim-looking shanty towns popped up like ghosts out of the grave on the outskirts of towns, encampments of suitcases and scrap metal with maybe a single blanket between a whole family used for the roof. It’s no surprise living under these conditions that the natural progression of the crisis would lead from hopelessness to violence and revolt.
There were food riots that broke out in America, especially in the central and south-west, Britain saw a massive miner's strike, and Berlin was quickly racing towards a city-wide civil war in its streets as militias clad in brown shirts and flying red banners clashed with police.
The
'Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei' (NSDAP)–or 'Nazis'–fed like vultures on the mass hysteria of the German population, playing up their frustrations with the government to net themselves massive gains in the Reichstag and accelerating the party from fringe right-wing groups to one of the largest single political parties in Germany. Of course, it was not only the government the Nazis went after, but they also attacked the Entente powers, the Communists, the Socialists, the Gypsies
[1], and most of all, the Jews. Violence in Berlin became a daily norm. So it is no surprise that as the depression effects began to explode in coups across the globe, from Portugal to Brazil, Argentina, Peru, and Spain, the same fate would befall Germany.”
- Lords of Finance, by Liaquat Ahamed [2]
“In the course of history, it is hard to argue the actions of one person can be so influential; most often, multiple factors are at play when anything happens in history. However, there is a case to be made, that at the heart of the origins of the German Constitutional Crisis was one man, Heinrich Brüning.
Brüning is somewhat seen as the German equivalent to Herbert Hoover in America. He was a conservative with a staunch aversion to any policies he saw as ‘socialist’ in nature, which, while in a time of economic prosperity like only a year or two before would have been admirable and even preferable during a global depression, it was decidedly not. Initially, Brüning’s policies found some support given his financial and economic acumen. But it quickly melted away as the measures he instituted seemed to only accelerate the effects of the depression. Brüning’s policies were so unsuccessful that the
Reichstag repealed them after a month. In response to this, Brüning attempted to have his policies pushed into action by way of ‘Notverordnung’, or emergency decree. This power, however, was vested only in the President himself, and after witnessing Brüning’s repeated failures decided to have him removed from the position of chancellor.
Brünings cabinet didn’t even last a year yet it completely eroded faith in the government, and the economic downturn he caused only increased the radicalism and popularity of parties like the Nazis and DNVP. He left the
Reichstag as a government practically at war with itself, many right-wing parties called for Jarres to dissolve the government and hold new elections. However, rightly fearing the rising popularity of the Nazis in reaction to Brüning's actions, Jarres refused and instead appointed the new Chancellor, Otto Wels a part of the SPD. At the time the SPD was still the largest party and yet had to nonetheless rule by a coalition in the
Reichstag. Wels’ cabinet encompassed many of the SPD’s previous allies like the DDP, DVP, and Centre parties. However notably excluded the second-largest party in the
Reichstag, the DNVP. The DNVP had undergone a very radical shift under its new chairman Alfred Hugenburg, a hardline defender of the Nazis. He had refused to support Brüning's cabinet, and Brüning's removal and public disgrace led him to believe that new elections would hail in the return of his party to prominence. He was especially displeased when Jarres refused to acquiesce and instead appointed a socialist to the chancellorship. Hugenburg expressed his discontent in a speech to the
Reichstag only days after Wels’ appointment and stated his demands that the new elections be called or the DNVP would walk out on the government. Both Wels and Jarres attempted to negotiate with Hugenburg, but the DNVP refused to hear them out, finally not wanting to lose face by an entire party walking out on the Reichstag; Jarres caved and had the government dissolved and new elections called.
It is disputed whether Hugenburg would have actually walked out had the new elections not been called. He could’ve still just as easily used the staunchness of Wels and Jarres as justification to initiate the crisis regardless. But the calling of new elections certainly made it easier for what came next.”
- The Years of Anarchy: Germany from 1929-1932, David Schmidt
“Those autocrats in sheep's clothes who have for ten years ruled the Republic of Weimar, have pressed their boots on the neck of the German
Volk for ten years too long! Today Germany will be reborn and take its rightful place among the great nations in the world!”
- Excerpt from Alfred Hugenberg’s speech to the Reichstag, September 21st, 1930
“On the morning of the 21st of September, 1930, the citizens of Berlin awoke to the sound of gunshots in the streets. Hours earlier, Alfred Hugenburg of the DNVP had called his party along with the armed paramilitary of
‘Der Stahlhelm’ and other groups of the nationalistic ‘Pan-German League’ to a rally, where he proclaimed to the gathered parties the results of the German federal elections that had been held a day prior. He announced the League had swept the elections but that the President was planning to suppress the results and remove them from the Reichstag. Thus, he called upon the League to pass a vote of impeachment against the President and take forcible hold of the German government. The German Constitutional Crisis had begun.
The Pan-German Leagues paramilitary forces went on the warpath as they paraded through the streets of Berlin and marched up to the
Reichstag, weapons in hand. Once there, the ministers of the
‘Neue Deutsche Regierung’ assembled in the
Reichstag and held a trial in absentia with the unanimous decision to impeach President Karl Jarres. The new government then declared the acting chancellor, Alfred Hugenburg, to become the acting president and enact Article 48 of the constitution. The new government then announced the banning of ‘anti-German’ parties like the KPD and the Weimar Coalition and demanded the party headquarters be shut down. In some states, there was immediate compliance with the order, and party headquarters, especially in Pomerania, Ostprussia, and Bavaria, were shut down by the police. However, many did not comply, not least because of the limitations to Article 48 which Jarres' government and party had conveniently put in place only a short while prior.
In the democratic stronghold of the Prussian Free State, the police not only did not comply with the order by the new government, but they immediately mobilized across the state to try and get the situation under control. It was specifically because the Prussian police defied the government's new orders that Karl Jarres was not beaten to death by a nationalist mob that arrived at his residence only a mere ten minutes after police had come to his home to inform him of the coup. However many others were not as lucky, and many politicians had their doors kicked in by the nationalist paramilitaries that day. The Prussian police acted quickly to save the President and by the time the Pan-German League had been informed Jarres was nowhere to be found, the German president was in Brandenburg, an hour from Berlin.
Jarres was quick to action, one of the officers who had been escorting him out of Berlin said of the man, quote; “He was off like a shot from the moment he set foot to pavement.” Jarres, along with what ministers in his company had been rescued, sought out the nearest radio station from which they could broadcast to the German people. However, the Pan-German League had a force of paramilitaries in the city and the cabinet was forced to relocate to Magdeburg, which the German police had managed to lock down with the help of the local populace. From there, the cabinet went on air to declare the new government as illegitimate and unconstitutional, with the Minister-President of the Prussian free state, Otto Braun, alongside Jarres, bringing forward the actual results of the election, which had come in just before the crisis began. The SPD had won overwhelmingly in Prussia, and while the DNVP had won Pomerania, they had lost major battlegrounds in districts like Ostprussia to the NSDAP. The release of the electoral results from Prussia caused the New German Government's legitimacy to begin to crumble. Multiple other states began releasing their own electoral results, all of which clearly showed the DNVP and Pan-German League losing the election overwhelmingly. Even the KPD came to the side of Jarres’ government and called for a national strike against the government. With their authority up in the air, Hugenburg and the League panicked and declared martial law across the country, ordering the military to go in and clear out the revolutionaries. At the same time, Jarres was calling the German high command and ordering them to confine the troops to barracks and instead let the German police disperse the putsch. While many generals held Pan-German sympathies and were self-described nationalists, they nonetheless chose to obey the orders from Jarres rather than Hugenberg, this was largely because of the worry that supporting the failing Hugenberg regime could spark a nationwide communist revolution and lead to a civil war. With the coup by this point dissolving into street fights between the League's under-equipped militias and the well-trained Prussian police in Berlin, as well as the fears that Jarres could still mobilize the army, led to Hugenberg conceding to the results of the election and the new german government disarmed and surrendered at the gates of the
Reichstag. The belief among Hugenberg and his supporters was that there was no way the Police would be able to arrest every single person associated with the plot and that they might be granted amnesty similar to the ringleaders of the Kapp Putsch around a decade prior. They quickly learned this would not be the case, and as Hugenberg stepped out of the
Reichstag, he and his supporters were surrounded by the full force of the Prussian Police, and forcibly taken into custody.
All in all, the two-day-long Constitutional Crisis of 1930 claimed the lives of some two hundred Germans on both sides. In its wake, the leaders of the attempted coup were sentenced to life imprisonment, with the exception of Hugenberg himself who was sentenced to death for high treason. The DNVP became defunct; its members were either arrested for their part in the crisis or left to help form the ‘Conservative People’s Party’ (KVP)
[3], which would go on to officially replace the DNVP in almost all capacities. Protests and strikes, mostly by communists, persisted across Germany for another three weeks as the government tried to get itself under control, with new elections having to be called once again now that the DNVP as well as multiple other parties associated with the Pan-German League had either been dissolved or banned. The Crisis was extremely significant in the Weimar’s history, as while it would not be the last time civil discontent rose to a boiling point, nor the last time a group would attempt a putsch against the Weimar, it would be the last major revolt that had any chance of reshaping Germany. Although, in a way, it still did.”
- Republic of Weimar, by Franklin McAdoo
[1] I understand that this term may be considered offensive by some, and I apologize if that's how it is perceived. But I only intend here to show a level of historical accuracy. Sorry for the inconvenience.
[2] Here I actually took out quite a few direct quotes and altered them slightly from the very real Liaquat Ahamed's also real book; Lords of Finance. The book is mostly about financiers who caused the economic breakdown in 1929, but since this is an alternate timeline, the Weimars tumult gets a larger mention, and the content is slightly altered. This is probably going to be the largest extent of the actual economics and finance stuff in my TL since I’m not great with that.
[3] The KVP actually became a party in July of 1930 after moderate members of the DNVP broke with Hugenberg. That, of course, still happens, but they're much more prominent and don’t run out of funds by 1933.
