Germany If I Have To Say It Weimar Time

In late 1918, with the German army on the brink of collapse, workers and Socialists spearheaded revolt on the homefront in the November Revolution. On November 9, 1918, Social Democratic leader Philipp Scheidemann declared a republic in Berlin, with Friedrich Ebert as its first president. The young republic, named after the National Assembly in Weimar that drafted its constitution, was guided by its Social Democrat, German Democratic Party, and Catholic Center parliamentary majority. Marshal Ferdinand Foch, the Allied Commander-in-chief, and Matthias Erzberger, Germany’s representative, signed an armistice in a railroad car outside of Compiègne, France, on November 11. Following this, the Treaty of Versailles called for staggering reparation payments, reduced the German army to 100,000 men, and ascribed full blame for the war to Germany. An Allied blockade literally starved the newborn republic into accepting the treaty.

By 1922-23, hyperinflation from war debts was so severe that the American Dawes Plan reduced the demand for war reparations in order to prevent total economic collapse in Germany. A period of remarkable cultural and scientific artistic flourishing ensued. It was during the abortive 1923 Beer Hall Putsch uprising in Munich that Adolf Hitler, then a frustrated artist and decorated Austrian corporal, was arrested. He received the minimum sentence of five years, but served only 10 months. During his imprisonment Hitler wrote Mein Kampf (My Struggle), attacking Communists and Jews and stressing the importance of Lebensraum (“living space”). Hilter believed that his party, the National Socialist German Workers Party (Nationalsozialistische deutsche Arbeiterspartei; NSDAP, also known as the Nazis), should seize power by constitutional means. Though the Nazis had nearly quadrupled its membership to 108,000 by 1929, it was still a fringe party, receiving only 2.6% of the vote. The same year, the Great Depression struck, leaving 25% of the population unemployed; membership in the party exploded to over a million. The SA (Sturmabteilung), its paramilitary arm, grew to match the German army by 1930. Hitler failed in a 1932 presidential bid against the aging Franco-Prussian war hero Paul von Hindenburg, but parliamentary elections made the Nazis the largest party in the Reichstag. After intense political maneuvering, Hindenburg reluctantly appointed Hitler chancellor of a coalition government on January 30, 1933.