The answer to this question hinges on what exactly constituted "before 1919." There were a number of Weimar-era groups, largely on the German right, whose rhetoric was based on a rejection of Versailles and the Republic. But their actual platforms advocated a Germany that was quite different than the Hohenzollern-led Kaiserreich. Rejection of the Republic and Versailles did not necessarily entail a reestablishment of the 1914 form of government.

This odd form of politics- restorationist in rhetoric but not in practice- is clearly seen in Weimar's various monarchists. These two related answers of mine on the DNVP party and the Reichswehr. The long and the short of it is that one should not take the declarations of monarchism by German conservatives at face value. To be a monarchist in Weimar Germany was not really about restoring the Hohenzollerns. It was rather a set of ideas that rejected the Republic and its basic legitimacy. These conservatives contended that the November Revolution was fundamentally a coup by various anti-German forces (Jews, communists, socialists, etc.) and their enablers who became the Weimar political establishment like Ebert. Monarchism was much more involved with delegitimatizing the Republic and its institutions than creating a new Kaiserreich. The Hohenzollerns often gnashed their teeth in exile that for all the various declarations of support for monarchy among the German right, there was very little in the way of concrete measures to bring back the monarchy. Weimar's monarchists invested more time and ink in bringing back the old imperial flag than they did the imperial house. And it needs to be stressed that Paul von Hindenburg soon filled in the role of "monarch" for most of Germany's monarchists when he was elected as President.

The Reichswehr's officers did long for a rejection of Versailles and rearmament. But what the military's leadership did during Weimar was to plan for a new type of military that incorporated the lessons of the war. The Reichswehr, provided much of the backbone for the German Wehrmacht of the Second World War. Although Versailles restricted its size, the planners of the Reichswehr created a highly efficient small army. The instability of the Republic in the 1920s meant that many Weimar leaders actually turned a blind eye to this contravention of the spirit of the Versailles Treaty as having a strong professional army could disband any insurrectionists on either the left or right. The danger of course was that as an established institution within the state, the Reichswehr could through its weight behind anti-democratic forces.

The Reichswehr's plan for expansion and rearmament centered around ensuring that the 100000 man army was fully trained and that Germany exploited any loopholes or lax enforcement of the Versailles Treaty. Given its small size, the interwar Reichswehr could afford to be highly selective in its recruits. Although the Versailles Treaty limited the number of officers, the Truppenamt (a shadow general staff) ensured that the ranks had a massive number of NCOs, which the Treaty did not prohibit. It operated under the aegis of Hans von Seeckt for most of the Weimar period. Von Seeckt instituted a training regime which incorporated many of the lessons of the last war. For example, the Reichswehr built many of its infantry formations around portable machine gun troops, the same type that found success in the late war Stoßtruppen. Officers and NCOs in the Reichswehr often thought and trained for the duties and responsibilities one or two grades above them, so that when expansion came, the German army would not lack for trained officers.

The Reichswehr also used a variety of means to evade the strictures of the Versailles Treaty. They fostered and maintained a Security Police of about 70000 men, often recruited from the paramilitary Freikorps. In order to develop experience with equipment forbidden by Versailles (namely aircraft and tanks), Reichswehr officers forged a clandestine relationship with the USSR. The state airline Lufthansa also possessed something of a shadow organization for officers experienced with flying and cultivate air-mindedness. Finally, German military advisers were active in China aiding the Nationalist government in the 1920s to gain direct experience with military operations and put theory into practice.

So the Reichswehr was trying to evade Versailles with a mind to overthrowing its limitations. But its vision of the future was for an independent German army. There was little to no thought given to supreme command of the expanded army, much of the effort was devoted to making potential expansion an end onto itself. Both of these factors- too much thinking on expanding the armed forces and relatively little thought as to where the military would fit in a post-Republic government- made the Reichswehr quite vulnerable to Hitler. The new German Chancellor expanded the Germany army far beyond anything von Seeckt or the his successors in the Truppenamt had ever conceived. The late-Weimar Reichswehr had envisioned a twenty-one division post-Versailles peacetime army by 1938. Hitler envisioned a much grander army; his meetings with the military chiefs in 1933 called for the twenty-one division benchmark by 1935 and exceeding it afterwards. German rearmament proceeded after 1933 at a breakneck pace and the newly rechristened Wehrmacht struggled to meet the demands for ever-larger planned armed forces. The carefully-planned officer scheme of Reichswehr could not match this expansion. One of the problems for the peacetime Wehrmacht was there simply were not enough officers to man these new formations and the training establishment could not keep up with demand.

By the same token, Weimar's Rechswehr had promoted ambiguous executive authority. There was very little thought given to the issue of who exactly would be in charge of an expanded, post-Versailles military. The Defense Minister was nominally the chief of the armed forces, but this was an cabinet-level appointment by the President and the Minister could not be an active member of the armed forces. The Weimar-era Reichswehr had promoted a command culture in which the Defense Minister served the interests of the uniformed military chiefs. Hitler broke with law by having von Hindenburg appoint the active-duty officer Werner von Blomberg as Defense (soon to be renamed War) Minister. Von Blomberg pushed Hitler's rearmament schemes, but the general's servile attitude to Hitler also underscored how politically outmaneuvered the military was during the Third Reich. The War Minister was a cabinet appointment and could be cashiered by the civilians, which Hitler did in 1938 with considerable help from Himmler and Göring. The Blomberg-Fritsch affair led to the supreme command of the military falling on the Führer's shoulders and the newly-created OKW, which Hitler was able to staff with officers even more servile than von Blomberg.

The military though took both the swift expansion and the neutering of its supreme command in relative stride though. It was only after the war turned south and defeat that the military's officers began to embellish their resistance to Hitler's assumption of supreme power over the military. This demonstrates how for all of its monarchist sentiments and hatred of the Republic, the Reichswehr really wanted a new form of politics rather than a redux of the Kaiserreich.

Sources

Citino, Robert Michael. The German Way of War: From the Thirty Years' War to the Third Reich. Lawrence, Kan: University Press of Kansas, 2005.

Corum, James S. The Roots of Blitzkrieg: Hans Von Seeckt and German Military Reform. Lawrence, Kan: University Press of Kansas, 1992.

McElligott, Anthony. Rethinking the Weimar Republic: Authority and Authoritarianism 1916-1936. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2011.

Murray, Williamson, and Allan Reed Millett. A War to Be Won: Fighting the Second World War. Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2000.