The Weimar Republic was the first practical attempt in history to give Germany a democratic form of government. But it had a hard time from the start: it lacked popular support, unity and support from the executive power. Mass unemployment, war damage and reparations from the First World War weighed heavily on the young democracy.

Many voters and members of the democratic bourgeois parties were not aware of the danger posed by National Socialism. They saw him only as a radical side effect of a time of crisis. In the exaggerated national consciousness, in the conviction that Germany had suffered injustice after the First World War, in the hope of overcoming the Versailles peace treaty and in the aversion to the new and unfamiliar parliamentary-democratic system of the republic established in 1918/19, many were conservative Citizens agree with the anti-democratic extremists.

The ideological counter position, but also party political competition, were the driving forces in the struggle of the labor movement against Hitler's NSDAP before it came to power. However, many forces of the labor movement were bound to each other in the struggle. The KPD disparaged the Social Democrats as "social fascists" and did not shy away from occasionally allying with the NSDAP against the SPD and other parties. The SPD, on the other hand, wanted absolutely nothing to do with the Moscow-based communists. The NSDAP as a common opponent was the beneficiary. The KPD's hostility to the parliamentary-democratic system inevitably included the Social Democrats. These, in turn, were prevented from effective resistance actions (such as a general strike) due to their strict legality course, even in the face of violations of the constitution by the government, such as the "Papenstreich" against the Prussian government on July 20, 1932. The leadership of the SPD was not prepared to leave the ground of what was allowed under the constitution or even to give the appearance of it until it was too late because the enemies of the constitution had destroyed law and order.

Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Benz
Professor at the Technical University of Berlin and head of the Center for Research on Anti-Semitism. Chairman of the Society for Exile Research. Co-editor of the Journal of History