THE GERMAN RIGHT, 1918–1930

The failure of the Weimar Republic and the rise of National Socialism
remains one of the most challenging problems of twentieth century
European history. The German Right, 1918 1930 sheds new light on this
problem by examining the role that the non Nazi Right played in the
destabilization of Weimar democracy in the period before the emergence
of the Nazi Party as a mass party of middle class protest. Larry Eugene
Jones identifies a critical divide within the German Right between those
prepared to work within the framework of Germany’s new republican
government and those irrevocably committed to its overthrow. This split
was greatly exacerbated by the course of German economic development
in the 1920s, leaving the various organizations that comprised the
German Right defenceless against the challenge of National Socialism.
At no point was the disunity of the non Nazi Right in the face of Nazism
more apparent than in the September 1930 Reichstag elections.

   is Professor Emeritus in the Department of

History at Canisius College in Buffalo, New York, where he has taught
since 1968. His previous publications include the award winning German
Liberalism and the Dissolution of the Weimar Party System, 1918 1933
(1988) and Hitler versus Hindenburg: The 1932 Presidential Elections and
the End of the Weimar Republic (2015).
 THE G ERMAN RIGHT,
1918–1930
Political Parties, Organized Interests, and
Patriotic Associations in the Struggle against
Weimar Democracy

LARRY EUGENE JONES

Canisius College, New York
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Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781108494076
DOI: 10.1017/9781108643450
© Larry Eugene Jones 2020
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First published 2020
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A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Names: Jones, Larry Eugene, author.
Title: The German right, 1918 1930 : political parties, organized interests, and patriotic
associations in the struggle against Weimar Democracy / Larry Eugene Jones,
Canisius College, New York.
Description: Cambridge, United Kingdom ; New York : Cambridge University Press, 2020. |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019038331 (print) | LCCN 2019038332 (ebook) | ISBN 9781108494076
(hardback) | ISBN 9781108713863 (paperback) | ISBN 9781108643450 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Germany Politics and government 1918 1933. | Conservatism Germany
History 20th century. | Political parties Germany History 20th century. | Deutschnationale
Volkspartei History. | Nationalism Germany History 20th century. | Pangermanism
GermanyHistory 20th century.
Classification: LCC DD240 .J588 2020 (print) | LCC DD240 (ebook) | DDC 943.085 dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019038331
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019038332
ISBN 978 1 108 49407 6 Hardback
Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy
of URLs for external or third party internet websites referred to in this publication
and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain,
accurate or appropriate.
Dedicated to the memory of my mother
Lila Maurine Berg Jones
(1909–1996)
 CONTENTS

List of Figures page ix

Acknowledgments x
List of Abbreviations xvi
Introduction: Setting the Context 1
1 Revolution and Realignment 16
2 Infrastructure of the German Right 48
3 Forging a Conservative Synthesis 77
4 Growth and Consolidation 114
5 The Radical Right 144
6 1923 – A Missed Opportunity? 176
7 From Triumph to Schism 207
8 Stabilization from the Right? 241
9 Paladins of the Right 270
10 A Resurgent Nationalism 299
11 The Road Back to Power 331
12 The Burden of Responsibility 363
13 From Defeat to Crisis 394
14 Reverberations and Realignment 432
15 The Chimera of Right-Wing Unity 461
16 Schism and Fragmentation 493

vii
viii 

17 The Brüning Gambit 524

18 The September Earthquake 555
Epilogue: The Price of Disunity 589

Select Bibliography 598

Index 610
 FIGURES

1. Photograph of Oskar Hergt, DNVP party chairman from 1918 to 1924 and vice
chancellor and Reich minister of justice in 1927 28. 33
2. Otto v. Kursell, antisemitic handout for the 1919 elections to the Weimar National
Assembly. 37
3. Unknown graphic designer, “Deutsche Frauen, wach auf!,” DNVP campaign
placard for the 1919 elections to the Weimar National Assembly. 39
4. Photograph of Karl Helfferich, DNVP Reichstag deputy from 1920 to 1924 and the
party’s most prominent critic of German reparations policy. 133
5. Photograph of Adolf Hitler at a rally of right wing forces at the Deutscher Tag in
Nuremburg, 1 September 1923. 192
6. Unknown graphic designer, “Frei von Versailles!,” DNVP campaign placard for the
May 1924 Reichstag elections. 223
7. Photograph of Count Kuno von Westarp, DNVP Reichstag deputy from 1920 to
1930, chairman of the DNVP Reichstag delegation from 1925 to 1929, and DNVP
national party chairman from 1926 to 1928. 337
8. Paul Jürgens, “So sprach er zum Mittelstand,” Business Party campaign placard for
the May 1928 Reichstag elections. 396
9. KWO, “Wählt Volksrechts Partei!,” People’s Justice Party campaign placard for the
May 1928 Reichstag elections. 398
10. Herbert Rothgaengel, “Mehr Macht dem Reichspräsidenten!,” DNVP campaign
placard for the May 1928 Reichstag elections. 406
11. Photograph of Alfred Hugenberg, DNVP Reichstag deputy from 1920 to 1933 and
DNVP national party chairman from 1928 to 1933. 415
12. Unknown graphic designer, “Noch 60 Jahre in Ketten gefesselt,”placard in support
of the referendem against the Young Plan, 1 October 1929. 487
13. Herbert Rothgaengel, “Bis zum 60 Jahre soll dieses Kind Tribute zahlen!,” placard
in support of the referendum against the Young Plan, 1 October 1929. 488
14. Henry Boothby, “Konservative Volkspartei, Liste 16,” KVP campaign placard for
the September 1930 Reichstag elections. 558
15. H. P. Schnorr, “Soll es so kommen?,” CSVD campaign placard for the September
1930 Reichstag elections. 562
16. Unknown graphic designer, “Her zu uns! Kämpft mit für Freiheit und Brot,”
NSDAP campaign placard for the September 1930 Reichstag elections. 582

ix
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book has its origins in the 1960s, a time when the United States found
itself in the midst of a crisis that severely tested the strength and resilience of
its democratic institutions. As a young graduate student at the University of
Wisconsin-Madison, I was quickly swept up in the wave of student protest that
was engulfing American campuses throughout the country and became an
embittered opponent of the Viet Nam War. This coincided with my introduc-
tion to Marxism, first under the tutelage of Richard DeGeorge at the Univer-
sity of Kansas and then under that of Harvey Goldberg and William
Appleman Williams at Wisconsin. Even though I never thought of myself as
a Marxist in anything more than a vague, undefined sense of the word, my
encounter with Marxism was very much at the center of my approach to the
study of history in general and continues to inform my inquiry into the failure
of Weimar Germany and the rise of Nazism.
Recent developments in American political life notwithstanding, my subse-
quent studies on modern German history quickly convinced me that the political
cultures of the two countries were so dissimilar that something analogous to the
Nazi seizure of power in Germany was inconceivable here in America. At the
very least, American democratic institutions were much more firmly rooted in
American political culture than those of the Weimar Republic and had consist-
ently proven themselves more resilient to the pressures of economic crisis than
their Weimar counterpart. Moreover, the feudal relics that had played such an
instrumental role in bringing about the collapse of Weimar democracy were
totally absent from the American political experience, particularly after the
defeat of the South in the American Civil War. Yet even as it became clear that
the German model had lost much of its relevance for understanding the Ameri-
can political experience, the failure of Weimar democracy and the triumph of
Nazism remained very much at the heart of my scholarly agenda for the half-
century or so that I have been a professional historian.
Why Weimar failed was very much at the center of my study of German
liberalism that appeared with the University of North Carolina Press in 1988. By
then, however, I had come to realize that the failure of German liberalism was
only part of the story and had already begun to collect material on right-wing
political organizations in the Weimar Republic for a parallel study of the German
x
  xi

Right. Hopes that this might lead to a follow-up publication in fairly short order –
a draft manuscript was already under way as early as 1990 – were, however, put
on hold with the fall of the Berlin wall and the unrestricted access this suddenly
afforded historians like myself to the troves of material in the Deutsches Zen-
tralarchiv and other East German archives. The fact that I was now able to access
not only the records of a plethora of right-wing parties, interest groups, and
patriotic associations that had been previously unavailable to historians in the
west but also the private papers of a select group of right-wing politicians meant
that much of what I had already written would have to be redone. Similarly, my
success in gaining access to materials on the politics of Germany’s Catholic
aristocracy through the auspices of the Vereinigte Westfälische Adelsarchive in
Münster added a new dimension to my study on the German Right that would
require a further revision of my timetable for publication.
It is difficult for the author of a book that has been as long in gestation as
this to remember, let alone thank, all of those without whose help and counsel
its publication would never have been possible. I was particularly fortunate to
spend two years each studying with two of the most influential scholars of
their time, first from 1963 to 1966 as a Fulbright scholar with Karl Dietrich
Bracher at the University of Bonn and then from 1975 to 1977 as a Humboldt
fellow with Hans Mommsen at the University of the Ruhr in Bochum.
Bracher’s Die Auflösung der Weimarer Republik was the first German-
language book in my library, and Hans went on to become one of my closest
professional friends. Both had a decisive impact on the way I came to read the
political history of the Weimar Republic, and I remain profoundly grateful for
their inspiration, support, and generosity. That I had the opportunity to study
with Bracher and Mommsen at a formative stage in my career was a stroke of
enormous good fortune that I probably never fully appreciated at the time but
that with the benefit of historical hindsight becomes clearer and clearer every
day of my professional career. I am also deeply indebted to Theodore
Hamerow, my dissertation advisor at Wisconsin, for his counsel and encour-
agement during the early years of my career. Likewise, I remain deeply
indebted to Georg Iggers for his friendship and constant curiosity about my
work. Similarly, both Gerald Feldman and Henry A. Turner, Jr., were particu-
larly supportive of my work in the early stages of my career, even to the point
of sharing materials in their possession that helped me fill important gaps in
the narrative I was trying to put together. I am particularly grateful to Profes-
sor Feldman for having invited me to take part from 1978 to 1983 in the
international project on “Inflation und Wiederaufbau in Deutschland und
Europa 1914–1924” that was funded by a grant from the Volkswagen-Stiftung.
My involvement in this project was instrumental in helping me understand the
impact of the runaway inflation of the early 1920s and the measures that were
taken to stabilize the currency in 1923–24 on Germany’s political development
and the swing to the Right that took place in various stages after 1924.
xii 

Over the years my work has benefited from conversations and collaborative
undertakings with a wide range of historians that have helped shape this book.
In the fall of 1998 I had the privilege of participating in a conference in
Toronto organized by James Retallack on Saxony that helped me grasp the
importance of regional history and just how significant regional differences
were in understanding the politics of the German Right. The following spring
I attended the second of two symposia in Bad Homburg that Heinz Reif
organized on the theme of “Elitenwandel in der gesellschaftlichen Moderni-
sierung: Adel und Bürgertum im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert” that complemented
and contextualized my own work on the politics of the Rhenish-Westphalian
aristocracy. Then in the spring of 2004 I had the privilege of co-organizing a
conference on Kuno Graf von Westarp, in my mind the most important of the
conservative politicians in the Weimar Republic, at the ancestral estate of
Westarp’s grandson Hans Freiherr Hiller von Gaertringen. The conference
provided important new perspectives on Westarp’s political leadership that
were subsequently incorporated into the book at hand. During a break from
my study of the German Right to complete a book on the 1932 presidential
elections that Cambridge University Press published in 2015, I edited a
collection of essays on the German Right in the Weimar Republic that
appeared with Berghahn Books in 2014. I remain deeply indebted to the
scholars who contributed articles to this volume for the way in which this
helped me flesh out my knowledge of right-wing politics in Weimar Germany.
Then in May 2015 I had the good fortune to participate in a workshop at
Harvard University organized by Daniel Ziblatt to solicit comments and
criticism of the manuscript he was preparing for Oxford University Press on
Conservative Parties and the Birth of Democracy. This was a particularly
valuable experience for me in that it helped clarify arguments in my own
work and situate it in a broader theoretical context.
Of my own contemporaries, none has played a more important role in
highlighting the complexity and nuances of right-wing politics in Germany
from 1890 to 1933 than Geoff Eley. Although there remain significant differ-
ences in the way we each approach the history of the German Right –
particularly in the latter stages of the Weimar Republic – I still find Geoff’s
criticism of my work thoughtful, carefully nuanced, and provocative. I am also
indebted to Wolfram Pyta for his cooperation in co-editing the results of the
Westarp conference in 2006 and for his continued interest in my work.
Recently I have worked closely with Hermann Beck first in organizing sessions
for the annual meetings of the German Studies Association but more recently
in co-editing a collection of essays on the Nazi seizure of power for Berghahn
Books. Hermann is a knowledgeable and discerning student of the German
Right, and I greatly value his counsel. Of my more established colleagues, I am
particularly grateful to Shelley Baranowski, Winfried Becker, Joseph Ben-
dersky, Wolfgang Hardtwig, Peter Hayes, Konrad Jarausch, Stefan Malinowski,
  xiii

William Patch, Karsten Ruppert, Charles Sidman, and Bernd Weisbrod for the
exchange of ideas that we have had over the years, while a cohort of younger
scholars including Alex Burkhardt, Andy Daum, Daniela Gasteiger, Björn
Hofmeister, Barry A. Jackisch, Rainer Orth, Michael O’Sullivan, André Pos-
tert, Mark Ruff, Edward Snyder, Kevin Spicer, and Benjamin Ziemann and
their willingness to share the results of their research with me have reassured
me that the future of Weimar political history lies in good hands. This list is
not exhaustive, and I apologize to anyone whose name I might have omitted.
I am also grateful to numerous colleagues in the profession who have helped
me gain access to the materials upon which this book is based. No one has
been more helpful in this regard than my long-time friend Hans-Dieter
Kreikamp, who worked as an archivist at the German Federal Archives (or
Bundesarchiv) in Koblenz and Berlin and who unfailingly responded to my
requests for copies of materials I needed for my work. Without his help and
support I would never have been able to complete this study. I am also grateful
to Hans-Dieter and his wife Tania for their gracious hospitality on the
occasion of my visits to Berlin. I also owe an enormous debt of gratitude to
Friedrich Freiherr Hiller von Gaertringen, who granted me access to the
papers of his grandfather Kuno Graf von Westarp at the very beginning of
my career and remained a valuable source of information and counsel until his
death in 1999. Karl Mayer, a professional archivist and local historian who
worked closely with Friedrich and his brother Hans to ensure their accessibil-
ity to future generations of historians, performed an invaluable service by
organizing approximately two-thirds of the collection. An indispensable
source on the history of the German Right, the Westarp papers remain in
family possession, where Verena Gräfin von Zeppelin-Aschhausen, their cur-
rent custodian, is committed to making the collection available to research
scholars like myself. And lastly, I would like to extend a special word of
gratitude to Horst Conrad, Werner Friese, and the staff of the Westfälisches
Archivamt in Münster, who by affording me access to the archives of the
Westphalian aristocracy helped me achieve what would prove to be a major
breakthrough in my research on the politics of the German Right.
The completion of this work would not have been possible without the
generous help and support of a large number of archives, libraries, and
research institutes. Here I would like to express my gratitude to the staff of
the Bundesarchiv in Berlin-Lichterfelde and Koblenz, the Bundesarchiv-Mili-
tärabteilung in Freiburg im Breisgau, and the Politisches Archiv des Auswärti-
gen Amts in Berlin for providing access to materials in their possession. I am
particularly grateful to the Bildarchiv of the Bundesarchiv for permission to
use the images of right-wing politicians and right-wing campaign material that
are to be found throughout the book. Important material on the history of the
German Right was also to be found in state, regional, and municipal archives,
in particular in the Bayerisches Hauptstaatsarchiv in Munich, the
xiv 

Brandenburgisches Hauptlandesarchiv in Potdam, the Landesarchiv Berlin,

the Landesarchiv Nordrheinland-Westfalen in Münster, the Landesarchiv
Baden-Württemberg, the Hauptstaatsarchiv Stuttgart, the Niedersächsisches
Staatsarchiv in Osnabrück, the Sächsisches Hauptstaatsarchiv in Dresden, and
the Staatsarchiv Hamburg as well as in the municipal archives of Braun-
schweig, Dresden, Mönchen-Gladbach, Paderborn, Stuttgart, and Wuppertal.
Corporate archives also proved to be a valuable source of information on the
German Right. In this respect I am particularly grateful to the Historisches
Archiv Friedrich Krupp GmbH in Essen for access to the papers of Gustav
Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach, to the Rheinisch-Westfälisches Wirtschafts-
archiv zu Köln for access to the papers of the Gutehoffnungshütte’s Paul
Reusch, to the Siemens Historical Institute in Berlin (and its predecessor, the
Werner von Siemens Institut für die Geschichte des Hauses Siemens in
Munich) for access to the papers of Carl Friedrich von Siemens, to the
ThyssenKrupp Konzernarchiv, Außenstelle Hoesch-Archiv, in Dortmund for
access to the papers of Fritz Springorum, and to the Unternehmensarchiv
Bayer A.G. in Leverkusen for access to the papers of Carl Duisberg. And lastly,
I would like to thank private research institutes that made their holdings
available for this project, namely the Archiv für Christlich-Demokratische
Politik an der Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung in Sankt-Augustin the Forschungs-
stelle für Zeitgeschichte in Hamburg, the Institut für Zeitgeschichte in
Munich, and the Kommission für Zeitgeschichte in Bonn. I remain profoundly
grateful to all of those who have helped me assemble the material upon which
this book is based and for the service they provide all historians.
None of the research upon which this book is based would have been
possible without the generous financial support I have received from a variety
of sources over the course of my career. I am particularly grateful to my home
institution Canisius College for the sabbaticals and numerous small research
grants that I have received from the college since arriving in Buffalo in the fall
of 1968. These made it possible for me to return to Germany for extended
periods of research on an almost yearly basis. In addition to the fellowships
I received from the Fulbright Program and the Alexander von Humboldt-
Stiftung at the beginning of my career, I have held major grants from the
American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment of the
Humanities, the National Humanities Center, the German Marshall Fund,
and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars as well as smallers
grants-in-aid from the American Philosophical Society and the Deutscher
Akademischer Austauschdienst. Were it not for the generosity of these organ-
izations and their donors, this book could never have been completed.
No less important was the encouragement and patient support I have
received from Cambridge University Press. I remain deeply indebted first
and foremost to Lewis Bateman, who first contacted me when he was at
Princeton University Press, solicited and oversaw the publication of my first
book on the history of German liberalism during the Weimar Republic, and
  xv

then demonstrated enormous patience as he waited for the completion of my

manuscript on the German Right. When it became apparent that things were not
moving as quickly as we had hoped, it was Lew who suggested that I take a break
from this project to write a book on the 1932 presidential elections. That was
without a question one of the best pieces of editorial advice I have ever received.
Following Lew’s retirement in 2016, this project was handed over first to Michael
Watson and then to Liz Friend-Smith, who shepherded it through the approval
process before placing it in the capable hands of Ian McIver, Ishwarya Mathavan,
and particularly my copy-editor Barbara Wilson for guiding me through the
production process. All of this was done with a professionalism and a respect for
the author’s instincts and predilections that made publication much less onerous
than it has been for many of my colleagues in the profession.
I would be remiss if I did not also express my gratitude to those of my colleagues
at Canisius who have been supportive of my work during my long tenure at the
college. I think in particular of the old guard of Tom Banchich, Dave Costello,
Walt Sharrow, Ed Neville, and Jim Valone who made Canisius a welcome and
comforing place to teach, and of the younger cohort of Richard Bailey, René de la
Pedraja, Dave Devereux, Bruce Dierenfield, Julie Gibert, and Steve Maddox. What
we all share in common is a deep and abiding commitment to the humanities and
to excellence in teaching and scholarship. The bridge between these two groups is
Nancy Rosenbloom, my colleague, wife, and the mother of our two sons, Matthew
and Daniel Rosenbloom-Jones. All three have endured my fascination with
German history with a mixture of amusement, patience, and good humor, but it
is Nancy who has had to put up with my moments of distraction, my annoying
work habits and late nights at the computer, and everything else that has gone into
the completion of this book. Never did Nancy doubt the value of what I was doing,
either as a work of historical scholarship or as a part of who I am. And for that she
has my deepest thanks and love.
The person to whom I owe the greatest debt of gratitutde is the person to
whose memory this book is dedicated, my mother Lila Maurine Berg Jones.
My brother Ron and I grew up poor in a small farm town in south central
Kansas in what was at the time the heart of the dust bowl. My mother, who
had abandoned her dreams of becoming a concert pianist with the onset of the
Great Depression and became a school teacher by default, valued education
above all else and was committed to making certain that Ron and I received
the best education possible. No sacrifice was too great in order to make this
part of her dream come true. In retrospect, I doubt if I ever really told my
mother how greatly I appreciated all that she had done for the two of us and
that it was only through her love and sacrifice that I was able to achieve my
own dreams as a scholar and teacher. May this book be a fitting tribute to her
memory and sacrifice.
Buffalo, New York
 ABBREVIATIONS

Organizations
ADGB Allgemeiner Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund/General German Trade
Union Federation
ADI Arbeitsausschuß deutschnationaler Industrieller/Coordinating
Committee of German National Industrialists
ADV Alldeutscher Verband/Pan German League
AKD Arbeitsgemeinschaft Katholischer Deutscher/Coalition of Catholic
Germans
BBB Bayerischer Bauernbund/Bavarian Peasants’ League
BBMB Bayerischer Bauern und Mittelstandsbund/Bavarian Peasant and Middle
Class League
BDI Bund der Industriellen/League of Industrialists
BER Bund zur Erneuerung des Reiches/ League for the Regeneration of
the Reich
BdL Agrarian League/Bund der Landwirte
BLB Bayerischer Landbund/Bavarian Rural League
BrLB Brandenburgischer Landbund/Brandenburg Rural League
BMP Bayerische Mittelpartei/Bavarian Middle Party
BVP Bayerische Volkspartei/Bavarian People’s Party
CDI Centralverband Deutscher Industrieller/Central Association of German
Industrialists
CNBLP Christlicher nationale Bauern und Landvolkpartei/Christian National
Peasants and Farmer’s Party
CSRV Christlich soziale Reichsvereinigung/Christian Social Reich Union
CSVD Christlich Sozialer Volksdienst/Christian Social People’s Service
CVD Christlicher Volksdienst/Christian People’s Service
CVP Christliche Volkspartei/Christian People’s Party
DAAP Deutsche Arbeiter und Angestelltenpartei/German Workers and
Employees’ Party
DAG Deutsche Adelgenossenschaft/German Nobles’ Society
DAP Deutsche Arbeitspartei/German Worker’s Party

xvi
    xvii

DBP Deutsche Bauernpartei/German Peasants’ Party

DDGB Deutsch demokratischer Gewerkschaftsbund/German Democratic Trade
Union Federation
DDP Deutsche Demokratische Partei/German Democratic Party
DGB Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund/German Trade Union Federation
DHK Deutscher Herrenklub/German Gentlemen’s Club
DHR Deutscher Hochschulring/German University Ring
DHV Deutschnationaler Handlungsghilfen Verband/German National Union
of Commercial Employees
DIHT Deutscher Industrie und Handelstag/German Chamber of Commerce
and Industry
DIV Deutsche Industriellen Vereinigung/German Industrialists’ Association
DKP Deutsche Konservative Partei/German Conservative Party
DLB Deutscher Landbund/German Rural League
DLV Deutscher Landarbeiterverein/German Farm Workers’ Union
DNAB Deutschnationaler Arbeiterbund/German National Workers’ League
DNJ Deutschnationaler Jugendbund/German National Youth League
DNVP Deutschnationale Volkspartei/German National People’s Party
DRKB Deutsche Reischskriegerbund Kyffhäuser/German Reich Warriors’
Kyffhäuser League
DSTB Deutschvölkischer Schutz und Trutzbund/German Racist Protection
and Defense League
DStP Deutsche Staatspartei/German State Party
DvAG Deutschvölkische Arbeitsgemeinschaft/German Racist Coalition
DVFP Deutschvölkische Freiheitspartei/German Racist Freedom Party
DVLP Deutsche Vaterlandspartei/German Fatherland Party
DVP Deutsche Volkspartei/German People’s Party
EWB Einwohnerwehren Bayerns/Bavarian Civil Defense Leagues
Gaä Gemeinsamer Ausschuß/Joint Committee
GCG Gesamtverband der christlichen Gewerkschaften Deutschlands/United
Federation of Christian Trade Unions
GdA Gewerkschaftsbund der Angestellten/Federation of Employee Unions
Gedag Gesamtverband deutscher Angestelltengewerkschaften/United Federation
of German Employee Unions
GKE Genossenschaft katholischer Edelleute in Bayern/Association of Catholic
Nobles in Bavaria
HAPAG Hamburg Amerikanische Packetfahrt Actien Gesellschaft/Hamburg
America Line
KPD Kommunistiche Partei Deutschlands/German Communist Party
KVP Konservative Volkspartei/Conservative People’s Party
NDB Nationalverband Deutscher Berufsverbände/National Federation of
German Professional Unions
xviii   

NLV Nationalliberale Vereinigung der Deutschen Volkspartei/Nationalliberale

Vereinigung der Deutschen Volkspartei
NSDAP Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpareti/National Socialist
German’s Worker Party
NSDFP Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Freiheitspartei/National Socialist German
Freedom Party
NSFP Nationalsozialistische Freiheitspartei/National Socialist Freedom Party
Orgesch Organisation Orgesch/Organization Orgesch
RDI Reichsverband der Deutschen Industrie/National Federation of German
Industry
RFKP Reichs und Freikonservative Partei/Imperial and Free Conservative Party
RLB Reichs Landbund/National Rural League
RLHV Reichsverband landwirtschaftlicher Hausfrauenvereine/National
Federation of Agricultural Housewives’ Associations
RPL Reichspropagandaleitung der NSDAP/Reich Propaganda Leadership of
the NSDAP
RvA Reichsbund vaterländischer Arbeitervereine/National Alliance of
Patriotic Workers’ Clubs
SLB Sächischer Landbund/Saxon Rural League
SPD Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands/Social Democratic Party of
Germany
TLB Thüringer Landbund/Thüringian Rural League
VDA Vereinigung der Deutschen Arbeitgeberverbände/Federation of German
Employer Associations
VdBD Vereinigung der christlichen Bauernvereine Deutschlands/Association of
Christian Peasant Unions of Germany
VDESI Verein Deutscher Eisen und Stahlindustrieller/Association of German
Iron and Steel Industrialists
VKE Verein katholischer Edelleute Deutschlands/Association of Catholic
Nobles of Germany
VKF Vereinigung Konservativer Frauen/Association of Conservative Women
VKV Volkskonservative Vereinigung/People’s Conservative Association
VNR Volksnationale Reichsvereinigung/People’s National Reich Association
VRP Reichspartei für Volksrecht und Aufwertung/Reich Party for People’s
Justice and Revaluation
VSB Völkisch Sozialer Block/Racist Social Bloc
VVVB Vereinigte Vaterländische Verbände Bayerns/United Patriotic Leagues of
Bavaria
VVVD Vereinigte Vaterländische Verbände Deutschlands/United Patriotic
Leagues of Germany
WBB Westfälischer Bauernbund/Westphalian Peasants’ Union
WBP Württembergische Bürgerpartei/Württemberg Burgher Party
    xix

WBWB Württembergischer Bauern und Weingärterbund/Württemberg Peasants

and Winegrowers’ League
WP Wirtschaftspartei or Reichspartei des Deutschen Mittelstandes/Business
Party or Reich Party of the German Middle Class
ZAG Zentralarbeitsgemeinschaft der industriellen und gewerblichen
Arbeitgeber und Arbeitnehmerverbände/Central Association of
Industrial and Commercial Employer and Employee Associations
ZdL Zentralverband der Landarbeiter/Central Association of Farm Laborers

Archives
ACDP Sankt Augustin Archiv für Christlich Demokratische Politik, Sankt
Augustin
BA Berlin Bundesarchiv Berlin Lichterfelde, Berlin
BA Bildarchiv Bundesarchiv, Bildarchiv, On Line
BA Koblez Bundesarchiv Koblenz, Koblenz
BA MA Freiburg Bundesarchiv Militärarchiv, Freiburg im Breisgau
Bayer AG Unternehmensarchiv Bayer AG, Leverkusen
BHStA Munich Bayerische Hauptstaatsarchiv, Munich
BLHA Potsdam Brandenburgischer Landeshauptstaatsarchiv, Potsdam
DHV Archiv Hamburg Archiv des Deutschen Handels und
Industrieangestellten Verband, Hamburg
FZH Hamburg Forschungsstelle für Zeitgeschichte in Hamburg,
Hamburg
GLA Karlsruhe Landesarchiv Baden Württemberg, Generallandesarchiv
Karlsruhe, Karlruhe
GStA Berlin Dahlem Geheimes Staatsarchiv Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin
HA Krupp Historisches Archiv, Friedrich Krupp GmbH, Essen
IfZ Munich Institut für Zeitgeschichte, Munich
KfZ Bonn Kommission für Zeitgeschichte, Bonn
LA Berlin Landesarchiv Berlin, Berlin
LaNRW Münster Landesarchiv Nordrhein Westfallen, Münster
NSStA Osnabrück Niedersächsisches Landesarchiv/Staatsarchiv Osnabrück,
Osnabrück
PA AA Berlin Politisches Archiv des Auswärtigen Amts, Berlin
RWWA Cologne Rheinisch Westfälisches Wirtschaftsarchiv zu Köln,
Cologne
SHI Berlin Siemens Historical Institute, Berlin
SHStA Dresden Sächsisches Hauptstaatsarchiv, Dresden
StA Braunschweig Stadtarchiv Braunschweig, Braunschweig
StA Hamburg Staatsarchiv Hamburg, Hamburg
StA Köln Stadtarchiv Köln, Cologne
StA Mönchen Gladbach Stadtarchiv Mönchen Gladbach, Mönchen Gladbach
xx   

StA Paderborn Stadtarchiv Paderborn, Paderborn

TKA Dortmund ThyssenKrupp Konzenarchiv, Außenstelle Hoesch,
Dortmund
VWA Münster Vereinigte Westfälische Adelsarchive, Münster
 u

Introduction
Setting the Context

Germany’s defeat in World War I, the collapse of the Hohenzollern monarchy,

and the founding of the Weimar Republic marked the beginning of a dramatic
new phase in the history of the German Right. The question that faced the
leaders of Germany’s conservative establishment as they reacted to the trau-
matic events of 1918–19 was whether they would be able to adapt to the
revolutionary changes that had taken place in the structure of German polit-
ical life or whether they would retreat to the entrenched positions they had
held in the last years of the Second Empire. The possibilities that faced
Germany’s conservative leadership were open, and it was by no means
certain – and certainly not in 1918–19 – which of these two paths would be
taken. Yet despite promising signs from within Germany’s conservative estab-
lishment that something new might emerge from the ruins of the old order,
the leaders of the German Right would consistently opt for policies over the
course of the next decade that denied rather than affirmed the possibility of a
democratic future. The reasons for this are indeed complex and resist reduc-
tion to a common denominator such as the weight of historical tradition, the
force of German nationalism, the fear of Bolshevism, or the anti-liberal
animus of Germany’s conservative elites. All of these factors – and others as
well – were involved, though in differing degrees at different points in time. As
this would suggest, the responses to the question posed above even within the
German Right were extremely varied, just as the players who were involved in
crafting those responses were diverse and represented divergent, if not contra-
dictory, interests. By no means, however, was the way in which all of this was
eventually resolved somehow fixed or pre-determined. In other words, it was
the specific actions of specific individuals or groups of individuals at specific
points in time that shaped the course of events that ultimately determined the
fate of Germany’s experiment in democracy.1

1
Larry Eugene Jones, “Why Hitler Came to Power: In Defense of a New History of
Politics,” in Geschichtswissenschaft vor 2000. Perspektiven der Historiographiegeschichte,
Geschichtstheorie, Sozial und Kulturgeschichte. Festschrift für Georg G. Iggers zum 65.
Geburtstag, ed. Konrad H. Jarausch, Jörn Rüsen and Hans Schleier (Hagen, 1991), 256 76.
In a similar vein, though from a different conceputal perspective, see Geoff Eley, Nazism as


   , –

The consequences of what happened on the German Right were indeed

enormous. Recent scholarship has suggested that an essential precondition for
the smooth transition from authoritarian to democratic government was the
existence of a strong, resilient party on the Right that was committed to
pursuing its objectives within the framework of the new democratic system.
A case in point, as Daniel Ziblatt argues in his recent book on Conservative
Parties and the Birth of Democracy, is the Conservative Party in Great Britain,
a party that adapted itself to the exigencies of democratic politics and that by
the end of the nineteenth century had evolved into a bulwark of British
democracy. The absence of such a party, Ziblatt goes on to argue, severely
undermined efforts to establish a viable democratic order and greatly
enhanced the likelihood of a return to authoritarian rule in one form or
another, often in a form that was more authoritarian and more brutal in its
opposition to the forces of democratic change than the one it had replaced.
The perfect counterpoint is the case of Germany before 1933, where forces on
the Right never succeeded in achieving the degree of political cohesiveness that
would have enabled them to assume the mantle of their British counterpart.2
The disunity of the German Right was very much a defining feature of the
German party system and the way it evolved in the Weimar Republic. The
purpose of this study is to examine why a party like the Conservative Party in
Great Britain never succeeded in establishing itself as a durable political force
in pre-Nazi Germany. Political parties constituted a particularly important
feature of Weimar’s political landscape. They were, after all, indispensable
vehicles for the mediation of social, economic, and political power between the
individual, his social class, and the state. At the same time, political parties
objectified the basic values of the different “social-cultural milieu” that consti-
tuted Germany’s political culture. In this respect, political parties not only
represented the material interests of specific sectors of German society but also
helped articulate the subjective images of the world – or what Max Weber
called Weltbilder – by which the different segments of the German population
came to understand their role in Germany’s political system. As Weber wrote
in the introduction to his comparative study on the economic ethic of world
religions: “Not ideas but material and ideal interests directly govern men’s
conduct. Yet very frequently the ‘world images’ that have been created by
‘ideas’ have, like switchmen, determined the tracks along which action has
been pushed by the dynamic of interest.”3

Fascism: Violence, Ideology, and the Ground of Consent in Germany, 1930 1945 (London
and New York, 2013), 13 22.
2
Daniel Ziblatt, Conservative Parties and the Birth of Democracy (Cambridge, 2017), 1 21.
3
Max Weber, “The Social Psychology of the World Religions,” in From Max Weber: Essays
in Sociology, ed. Hans Gerth and C. Wright Mills (Oxford, 1948), 268.
  

In his classic formulation of this argument, the German sociologist

M. Rainer Lepsius attributed the remarkable stability of the German party
system from the founding of the Second Empire in 1871 to the outbreak of the
Great Depression at the end of the 1920s to the fact that during this period
Germany’s political parties functioned as the political “action committees” of
four relatively homogeneous, yet structurally complex, political subcultures, or
what Lepsius chose to call “social-moral milieus.”4 The strength of Lepsius’s
approach is that it employs both social and cultural criteria to understand the
relationship between Germany’s political parties and the different subcultures
they represented. This is particularly useful in the case of the German Center
Party (Deutsche Zentrumspartei), which had served as the political represen-
tative of Germany’s sociologically diverse Catholic population since its
founding in 1871. Germany’s Protestant population, on the other hand, was
split into two distinct subcultures, one feudal, rural, and conservative and the
other bourgeois, urban, and liberal. The German working class, with its
plethora of political, economic, and cultural organizations, constituted the
fourth and final subculture upon which the German party system rested.5
According to Lepsius, the net effect of this situation was to create a political
culture in which the various German parties were concerned more with
defending the material and cultural assets of the specific subcultures with
which they were identified than with effecting their integration into a national
political culture.6 While this state of affairs may have inhibited the emergence
of a homogeneous political culture similar to those that developed in France,
Great Britain, or the United States, it nevertheless produced a remarkably high
degree of politicization on the part of the Wilhelmine electorate. By the
outbreak of World War I, Germany had developed an electoral system in
which voters took their right to vote seriously and, in the case of an over-
whelming majority of all German voters, exercised that right as a politically
meaningful act by which they affirmed their loyalties to the respective subcul-
ture to which they belonged. Even if electoral outcomes had little effect upon
the personnel or policies of those in control of the existing political system, the
cleavages between Germany’s different subcultures endowed the right to vote
with a significance that was more than purely symbolic. This was no less true
of conservatives from east of the Elbe River than it was of Catholics or

4
M. Rainer Lepsius, “Parteiensystem und Sozialstruktur: zum Problem der Demokratisie
rung der deutschen Gesellschaft,” in Wirtschaft, Geschichte und Wirtschaftsgeschichte.
Festschrift zum 65. Geburtstag von Friedrich Lütge, ed. Wilhelm Abel, Knut Borchardt,
Hermann Kellerbenz, and Wolfgang Zorn (Stuttgart, 1956), 382. See also Wolfram Pyta,
Dorfgemeinschaft und Parteipolitik 1918 1933. Die Verschränkung von Milieu und Par
teien in den protestantischen Landgebieten Deutschlands in der Weimarer Republik
(Düsseldorf, 1996).
5
Lepsius, “Parteiensystem und Sozialstruktur,” 383 92.
6
Ibid., 383.
   , –

workers. Even though German conservatives may have had profound reserva-
tions about the legitimacy of representative institutions, they nevertheless
came to use the ballot not only to defend their vested class interests against
the incursion of commercial and industrial capitalism but also to affirm the
specific cultural and religious values that were inseparably intertwined with
the Prussian way of life.7
Much of the following study focuses on the history of the German
National People’s Party (Deutschnationale Volkspartei or DNVP), a party
that was firmly anchored in Germany’s predominantly Protestant national-
conservative milieu and that served as its primary political representative
from the time of its founding in late 1918 through the end of the Weimar
Republic. Though still mostly rural, this milieu was no longer as homogeneous
as it had been at the beginning of the nineteenth century and had undergone
considerable diversification in the preceding half-century. This study is
not a conventional party history of the DNVP but seeks to examine the
party’s development from 1918 to 1930 against the background of what was
happening to the larger milieu of which it was a part. In this respect, this
project draws not just upon the theoretical insights of Lepsius but upon the
more historically rooted applications of the milieu thesis in the works of Karl
Rohe, Frank Bösch, and Helga Matthiesen, the last two of which deal specific-
ally with the national-conservative milieu that is the primary focus of this
project.8 A specific goal of this undertaking is to situate the DNVP in the
milieu with which it was identified even as that milieu was undergoing a series
of dramatic changes in the wake of economic and political modernization. To
do this, it will be necessary to place the development of the DNVP in the
broader context of its relationships with the various interest groups that
constituted the material base of Germany’s national-conservative milieu with
specific attention devoted to the tensions this produced at various levels of the
party organization. This, in turn, will entail a careful study of the aspirations of
organized economic interests and how they sought to promote those interests
not just within the DNVP but within the German party system as a whole. It
will also focus on how the Stahlhelm, the Pan-German League (Alldeutscher

7
Stanley Suval, Electoral Politics in Wilhelmine Germany (Chapel Hill, NC, 1985), 55 63,
97 106. See also Gerhard A. Ritter, “The Social Bases of the German Political Parties,
1867 1920,” in Elections, Parties, and Political Traditions: Social Foundations of German
Parties and Party Systems, 1867 1987, ed. Karl Rohe (Oxford, 1990), 27 52.
8
For a reassessment of the Lepsius thesis, see Karl Rohe, “German Elections and Party
Systems in Historical and Regional Perspective: An Introduction,” in Elections, Parties,
and Political Traditions, ed. Rohe, 1 26, as well as the more specialized applications of the
milieu thesis by Frank Bösch, Das konservative Milieu. Vereinskultur und lokale Samm
lungspolitik in ost und westdeutschen Regionen (1900 1960) (Göttingen, 2002), and Helge
Matthiesen, Greifswald in Vorpommern. Konservative Milieu im Kaiserreich, in Demokra
tie und Diktatur 1900 1930 (Düsseldorf, 2000), esp. 75 301.
  

Verband or ADV), and the various groups that comprised Germany’s patriotic
Right resisted efforts to use the DNVP as the vehicle for the representation of
organized economic interests and how they struggled to reassert the primacy
of the national moment in German political life over the purely economic.
With the increasing fragmentation of Germany’s bourgeois party system in the
second half of the 1920s and early 1930s, the focus of the manuscript is
broadened to include a detailed analysis of those parties that broke away from
the DNVP in an attempt to establish themselves as independent forces on the
German Right. The political fragmentation of Germany’s bourgeois Right
posed a particular challenge to the patriotic Right and its struggle to salvage
the national movement from descent into the morass of interest politics, most
notably in the 1929 crusade against the Young Plan.
The underlying question is, as Thomas Mergel defined it in a widely cited
article in the Historische Zeitschrift, how and why did the DNVP not evolve
into a German version of British Tory democracy, that is, as a state-supporting
conservative party committed to pursuing its objectives within the framework
of Germany’s republican system of government.9 Mergel’s answer to this
question, however, was too narrowly focused on the years from 1928 to
1930 to provide an altogether satisfying answer to the question he had posed.
In fact, what happened between 1928 and 1930 was not, as Mergel would have
us believe, so much a turning point, a path not taken, as the logical conse-
quence of what had already happened, of other paths not taken, in the earlier
history of the party. The purpose of this study will be to place the events of
1928 to 1930 in a broader historical perspective by identifying earlier points in
the history of the DNVP – for example, in the struggle over the party program
in April 1920, the racist crisis of 1922, the split over the Dawes Plan in 1924,
the Locarno conflict of 1925, and the DNVP’s difficulties as a member of the
fourth Marx cabinet in 1927–28 – when the DNVP missed the opportunity to
redefine itself in a way that might have contributed to the stabilization of the
Weimar system. At the same time, Mergel runs the risk of overestimating the
actual potential of the DNVP to develop into a moderate state-supporting
conservative party along the lines of the Conservative Party in Great Britian.
As Manfred Kittel reminds us in a sharp critique of Mergel’s thesis, party
leaders often found their hands tied by the strong anti-system sentiment that
existed in broad sectors of the DNVP’s popular base, a sentiment that could be
easily mobilized by those on the party’s right wing who adamantly opposed
any sort of accommodation with the hated Weimar system.10 One could argue

9
Thomas Mergel, “Das Scheitern des deutschen Tory Konservatismus. Die Umformung
der DNVP zu einer rechtsradikalen Partei 1928 1932,” Historische Zeitschrift 276 (2003):
323 68.
10
Manfred Kittel, “‘Steigbügelhalter’ Hitlers oder ‘stille Republikaner’? Die Deutschnatio
nalen in neuer politikgeschichtlicher und kulturalistischer Perspektive,” in Geschichte der
   , –

that the prospects of a development such as that envisaged by Mergel would

have become even more difficult with the economic collapse of the late 1920s.
A somewhat more skeptical assessment of the DNVP’s political prospects is
to be found in Maik Ohnezeit’s monograph on the party’s development from
its founding in the last months of 1918 to Alfred Hugenberg’s election to the
DNVP party chairmanship in October 1928.11 This work is based on extensive
research in the surviving party records and the private papers of Count Kuno
von Westarp, who served as chairman of the DNVP Reichstag delegation from
1924 to 1928 and as the party’s national chairman from 1926 to 1928. It
contains a wealth of information on the party’s organizational structure and
on the decision-making process within the party as a whole. Moreover,
Ohnezeit is particularly sensitive to the fissures within the party’s social base
and the effect these had upon the DNVP’s ability to articulate a coherent
vision and to pursue a clear and consistent course of action. Yet for all its
many virtues, Ohnezeit’s study of the DNVP is deficient in several key
respects. Most importantly, it does not situate the DNVP’s political fortunes
during the period under investigation in the general framework of German
social and economic development over the same period of time. Similarly,
Ohnezeit devotes insufficient attention to special-interest organizations like
the National Federation of German Industry (Reichsverband der deutschen
Industrie or RDI) and the National Rural League (Reichs-Landbund or RLB)
and patriotic associations like the Stahlhelm and Pan-German League (All-
deutscher Verband or ADV) and the demands they placed upon the DNVP’s
national leadership. It is important, therefore, to view the DNVP’s history in
the Weimar Republic not just in its own terms but as part of the larger
German Right to which it belonged. Third, Ohnezeit’s study is essentially a
study of the DNVP from the perspective of Berlin and does not adequately
address the enormous regional diversity that existed throughout the party
organization. A member of the DNVP in Bavaria, for example, had interests
and concerns different from those of his counterpart in Württemberg, and
both viewed party affairs through a lens that was substantially different from
that of their party colleagues in East Prussia or Mecklenburg. Here too it is
necessary to broaden the focus that Ohnezeit brings to bear upon the DNVP
and its place in the politics of the Weimar Republic.
The development of the German Right in the Weimar Republic was pro-
foundly affected by the general course of German social and economic devel-
opment. One of the major objectives of this study will be to explore the impact

Politik. Alte und neue Wege, ed. Hans Christof Kraus and Thomas Nicklas, Historische
Zeitschrift, Beiheft 44 (Munich, 2007), 201 35.
11
Maik Ohnezeit, Zwischen “schärfster Opposition” und dem “Willen zur Macht.” Die
Deutschnationale Volkspartei (DNVP) in der Weimarer Republik 1918 1928 (Düsseldorf,
2011).
  

of developments in the economy of the Weimar Republic on the DNVP and

the interest groups that constituted its material base. The Weimar economy
passed through three distinct phases, each with profound implications for the
social and economic constituencies that formed the backbone of the DNVP’s
electorate.12 Although the runaway inflation of the early 1920s helped keep
employment levels high and thus helped hold the radicalization of the German
working class in check, it wreaked havoc on the urban middle classes and
those sectors of society whose wealth was primarily in the form of paper mark
assets. The DNVP was able to capitalize upon the distress that broad sectors of
the German middle class experienced as a result of the great inflation, a factor
that no doubt helped account for its dramatic victories in the May and
December 1924 Reichstag elections. But the stabilization of the German
currency at the end of 1923 and the return to normalcy from 1925 to 1929
were accompanied by a sharp increase in unemployment, the collapse of
agricultural prices on the world market, and a revolt on the part of small
investors who felt victimized by the government’s failure to embrace a full and
equitable revaluation of the losses they had suffered during the great inflation.
This coincided with the DNVP’s entry into the government in 1925 and 1927
and the emergence of special-interest parties that articulated their appeals for
support in the language of economic self-interest. The heavy losses the DNVP
suffered in the May 1928 Reichstag elections bore dramatic testimony to the
success with which special-interest parties were able to mobilize the support of
specific sectors of the Nationalist electorate. This, in turn, set the stage for a
bitter leadership conflict that ended with the defeat of those who had been
responsible for the DNVP’s two experiments at governmental participation
and the triumph of those on the party’s extreme right wing who were irrecon-
cilably opposed to any form of collaboration with the hated Weimar system.
The third phase in the economic history of the Weimar Republic began with
the outbreak of the world economic crisis in the fall of 1929 and was marked
by the end of effective parliamentary rule and the turn to government by
presidential decree. In many respects, this represented the fulfillment of what
the more moderate elements on the German Right had been hoping for ever
since the founding of the Weimar Republic and created opportunities for the
pursuit of a conservative agenda that had not existed since the end of the
Second Empire. Moderate conservatives both within and outside the DNVP
would rally behind the banner of Reich President Paul von Hindenburg and
the experiment in government by presidential decree in the hope that this
might allow them to reposition themselves as the driving force in German
political life. All of this presented the DNVP with a series of challenges that

12
For an overview, see Harold James, “The Weimar Economy,” in Weimar Germany, ed.
Anthony McElligott (Oxford, 2009), 102 26.
   , –

would ultimately determine whether it would evolve into the state-supporting

conservative party that would play its role in the stabilization of Weimar
democracy or remain steadfast in its implacable opposition to the hated
Weimar system. Would the DNVP succeed in withstanding the forces of social
and political disintegration that the world economic crisis had unleashed
throughout the German nation? Would the moderates regain control of the
DNVP, or would they be left with no alternative but to try to establish
themselves as a viable force outside the orbit of the DNVP? Or would the
DNVP somehow manage to reestablish itself as the basis upon which the
various elements of a badly fragmented German polity reconstituted them-
selves as an effective and viable political force? These were indeed critical
questions, and the fate of the Weimar Republic would hang in the balance. No
less critical was the way in which the DNVP and the forces of the German
Right would react to the emergence of the NSDAP as a mass political move-
ment toward the end of the 1920s. Would the DNVP be able to sustain itself as
a viable political force in the face of challenge from a party that was more
radical both in its recipe for a solution to various ills that bedeviled the
German nation and in the methods by which it sought to translate that recipe
into reality? Would a badly fragmented German nation discover in national-
ism, anti-Marxism, antisemitism, or any combination thereof the ideological
basis upon which it could reconstitute itself as the decisive force in German
political life? And if so, would the NSDAP replace the DNVP as the party
political basis upon which this would take place?13
The men who would face these challenges would, for the most part, have
defined themselves as conservatives. But, as Oded Heilbronner argued in
2003 in a thought-provoking review of recent literature, the relationship
between conservatism and the conservative German Right is problematic
and defies any easy one-to-one correlation.14 In fact, many of those who rose
to leadership on the German Right both before and after World War I came
not from conservative but from liberal backgrounds.15 The study of what
conservatism meant in its German context is further complicated by the lack
of a scholarly consensus over what the term conservatism actually means.16

13
In this respect, see Larry Eugene Jones, “Germany’s Conservative Elites and the Problem
of Political Mobilization in the Weimar Republic,” in Transformations of Populism in
Europe and the Americas: History and Recent Tendencies, ed. John Abromheit, Bridget
Maria Chesterton, Gary Marotta, and York Norman (London, 2016), 32 48.
14
Oded Heilbronner, “The German Right: Has It Changed?” German History 21 (2003):
541 61, here 542 46.
15
Geoff Eley, Reshaping the German Right: Radical Nationalism and Political Change after
Bismarck (New Haven and London, 1980), 101 15.
16
Much of what follows identifies themes originally addressed in Larry Eugene Jones and
James Retallack, “German Conservatism Reconsidered: Old Problems and New Direc
tions,” in Between Reform and Reaction: Studies in the History of German Conservatism
  

Problems of definition stem in large measure from the fact that, unlike
liberalism or socialism, conservatism did not originate as an ideology with a
fully articulated concept of human nature, the state, and society, but as a
reaction to the sudden and dramatic changes that began to transform the face
of Europe in the second half of the eighteenth century. In terms of its basic
ideological contours, conservatism rejected the liberal doctrine of natural
rights in favor of an organic theory of the state and society that affirmed the
priority of the general welfare of the whole over the private rights of the
individual. In its critique of liberal theories of the state and society, German
conservatism drew much of their inspiration from the writings of Edmund
Burke and his rejection of the universalist principles that in his mind had led
to the outbreak of the French Revolution.17 In Germany, however, this was
reinforced by two further tendencies that gave German conservatism its
characteristic form. The first of these was a literary movement known as
romanticism and the revolt against reason that had begun in France with
the writings of Jean Jacques Rousseau but found many of its most ardent
supporters in Germany. The romantics stressed the primacy of feeling and
sentiment over reason and replaced the liberal theory of society and its
emphasis upon the pursuit of private self-interest with the concept of an
organic society in which the welfare of the whole assumed priority over the
interests of any of its constituent parts.18 The second was the wave of
nationalist indignation that swept much of Germany following Napoleon’s
humiliation of Prussia in 1806–07 and that found expression in Johann
Gottlieb Fichte’s famous Addresses to the German Nation from the winter of
1807–08.19 The symbiosis of German conservatism with romanticism and
nationalism provided those who were committed to the preservation of
existing social, economic, and political hierarchies with a coherent and emo-
tionally compelling defense of tradition against the corrosive forces of the
modern world.20
It would take the better part of the next forty years and the revolutionary
upheaval of 1848–49 for those who subscribed to these principles to coalesce
into political organizations of their own. In this respect, Sigmund Neumann

from 1789 to 1945, ed. Larry Eugene Jones and James N. Retallack (Providence, RI, and
Oxford, 1993), 1 30, esp. 3 8.
17
On the German misreading of Burke, see Karl Mannheim, “Conservative Thought,” in
From Karl Mannheim, ed. and with an introduction by Kurt H. Wolff (New York, 1971),
132 222, esp. 140.
18
Ibid., 142 52. On Rousseau’s impact on German political thought, see David James,
Rousseau and German Idealism: Freedom, Dependence, and Necessity (Cambridge, 2013),
91 142.
19
Matthew Levinger, Enlightened Nationalism: The Transformation of Prussian Political
Culture, 1806 1848 (New York and Oxford, 2009), 97 99.
20
Mannheim, “Conservative Thought,” 152 60.
   , –

distinguished between two antithetical strands within nineteenth-century

German conservatism that he identified as “romantic” and “liberal” conserva-
tism and that came together in the period after 1848 to produce a higher
synthesis he labelled “realistic conservatism.” As representative figures of these
three stages in the development of German conservatism, Neumann selected
the romantic conservatives Justus Möser and Ludwig von der Marwitz, the
liberal conservatives Joseph Maria von Radowitz and Moritz August von
Bethmann-Hollweg, and the realistic conservative Otto von Bismarck.21 In a
similar vein, Klaus Epstein in his seminal study of the genesis of German
conservative thought from 1770 to 1806 not only stressed the historical
specificity of German conservatism as a defense of the ancient régime against
the universalist principles of the Enlightenment and French Revolution, but
also offered a comprehensive definition of conservatism that embraced three
distinct ideal types: status quo conservatism, reform conservatism, and reac-
tionaries.22 The definition of conservative in the German context would
become even more complicated with the emergence of “conservative revolu-
tionaries” in the last decades of the nineteenth century. The conservative
revolutionaries – epitomized by the likes of Paul de Lagarde, Julius Langbehn,
and Arthur Moeller van den Bruck – rejected the ideologies of the nineteenth
century, including conservatism itself, as moribund and sterile and evinced a
deep-seated animosity to the various manifestations of cultural and political
modernity. They espoused a particular hostility toward the materialism of the
industrial age and called for the spiritual renewal of the German nation in
apocalyptic tones that drew much of their inspiration from the writings of
Friedrich Nietzsche. They were also quick to identify the Jew as one of the
principal beneficiaries of the modern age and embraced a particularly virulent
form of antisemitism that was gaining ever wider acceptance within Ger-
many’s conservative establishment.23 Antisemitism was a well-established
and highly recognizable component of right-wing ideology both before and
after World War I.
For the most part, the conservative revolutionaries – or “young conserva-
tives” as they preferred to call themselves in the Weimar Republic – remained
on the fringes of German political life and exercised little in the way of direct
influence on the politics of Germany’s conservative elites before World War
I. While the study of their ideas is a valuable exercise in and of itself, it is more

21
Sigmund Neumann, Die Stufen des preußischen Konservativismus. Ein Beitrag zum
Staats und Gesellschaftsbild Deutschlands im 19. Jahrhundert (Berlin, 1930). See also
Hans Jürgen Puhle, “Conservatism in Modern German History,” Journal of Contempor
ary History 13 (1978): 689 720.
22
Klaus Epstein, The Genesis of German Conservatism (Princeton, NJ, 1966), 7 11.
23
See the classic study by Fritz Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study in the Rise of
the Germanic Ideology (Berkeley, CA, and Los Angeles, 1961).
  

important to place those ideas in a specific historical context and to under-

stand just how those ideas reproduced themselves in the actions of individual
men and women. Even then, it is difficult to establish with any degree of
precision the exact relationship between thought and action, particularly in the
absence of detailed biographical information that can reveal the motives
behind the action. In other words, the extent to which ideas influence the
political behavior of individual men and women is not always that easy to
discern. In the case of Weimar conservatism, however, there was a complex
and highly variegated network of clubs, associations, and affiliated publica-
tions that enabled Germany’s young conservatives to propagate their ideas
well beyond the reach of what had been previously possible. One of the
distinctive features of Weimar culture was the emergence of revolutionary
new modes of communicative discourse that greatly facilitated the exchange
and dissemination of ideas.24 Any study of the German Right in the Weimar
Republic would therefore be remiss if it did not also examine the relationship
between the network of clubs and organizations through which Germany’s
young conservative intelligentsia propagated its critique of Weimar political
life and the political parties, economic interest organizations, and patriotic
associations through which it tried to gain influence.25 In this respect, how-
ever, it would be a serious mistake to assume that Germany’s young conserva-
tive intelligentsia represented a singular voice with a singular vision of
Germany’s political future. In point of fact, there was little in the way of
ideological cohesion within the ranks of young conservatives, with some
embracing a German version of British Tory democracy and others identifying
themselves as conservative revolutionaries with nothing but disdain for any
compromise with the existing political order. Despite the appeal these ideas
held for Weimar’s conservative elites, the sheer range of viewpoints within the
ranks of Germany’s young conservative intelligentsia was indeed daunting and
defied the emergence of an ideological consensus upon which the various
elements of a badly fragmented German Right might presumably coalesce.26
The one area, however, in which the revolutionary conservatives of the late
Wilhelmine era are to be cited for their prescience is with respect to the so-
called “Jewish question.” Antisemitism in one form or another had been a
well-defined feature of German life ever since the late Middle Ages and

24
In this respect, see Thomas Mergel, Parlamentarische Kultur in der Weimarer Republik.
Politische Kommunikation, symbolische Politik und Öffentlichkeit im Reichstag
(Düsseldorf, 2002).
25
This has been persuasively argued in Geoff Eley, “The German Right from Weimar to
Hitler: Fragmentation and Coalescence,” Central European History 48 (2015): 100 13,
esp. 107 12.
26
On this point, see Klemens von Klemperer, Germany’s New Conservatism: Its History and
Dilemma in the Twentieth Century, 2nd printing with a foreword by Sigmund Neumann
(Princeton, NJ, 1968), 71 190.
   , –

assumed a new virulence after the emancipation of German Jewry in the

middle of the nineteenth century. The antisemitism of the German Right
was a hodge-podge of different threads of antisemitic thought and practice.
Some of it was rooted in inherited religious prejudice, both Lutheran and
Catholic. Some of it was of a more recent provenance and had to do with the
perception that since their emancipation in the previous century the Jews had
come to exert an influence over German social, economic, and cultural life that
was incommensurate with their meager numbers. Some of it stemmed from
the way in which the Christian-Social tradition of Adolf Stoecker at the end of
the nineteenth century had identified Jewishness with the worst excesses of an
unbridled capitalism. Some of it was certainly related to the increasingly
palpable fear of Bolshevism and social revolution that gripped Europe’s prop-
ertied classes in the wake of World War I. And some of it was rooted in an
aggressive and virulent form of racism and in a racial theory of history that
saw the Jews as the heart and soul of a vast and multi-faceted conspiracy
aimed at the subjugation, if not the destruction, of the German nation and the
last remaining reservoirs of unpolluted Aryan racial stock.27
The precise place and function of antisemitism in the development of the
German Right both before and after World War I remains a matter of
considerable disagreement among historians and students of modern German
history.28 On the one hand, historians have been quick to take note of the fact
that antisemitism appears to have become a fairly ubiquitous feature of
German political culture by the middle of the nineteenth century and that
its potency was greatly intensified by the financial crisis of the 1870s and the
onset of the great depression that would last for the next twenty years.29 On
the other hand, efforts to found new political parties that relied first and
foremost on antisemitism as a way of attracting mass political support met
with repeated failure in the period before 1914.30 The problem is compounded
by the fact that the decade of the 1890s witnessed the emergence of a plethora

27
The preceding has been excerpted from Larry Eugene Jones, “Conservative Antisemitism
in the Weimar Republic: A Case Study of the German National People’s Party,” in The
German Right in the Weimar Republic: Studies in the History of German Conservatism,
Nationalism, and Antisemitism, ed. Larry Eugene Jones (New York and Oxford, 2014),
79 107, here 96.
28
In this respect, see Oded Heilbronner, “From Antisemitic Peripheries to Antisemitic
Centres: The Place of Antisemitism in Modern German History,” Journal of Contempor
ary History 35 (2000): 559 76.
29
For example, see Peter G. J. Pulzer, The Rise of Political Antisemitism in Germany and
Austria (New York, London, and Sydney, 1964), esp. 75 126. See also Klaus von See,
Freiheit und Gemeinschaft. Völkisch nationales Denken in Deutschland zwischen Franzö
sischer Revolution und Erstem Weltkrieg (Heildeberg, 2001), esp. 112 74.
30
Richard S. Levy, The Downfall of the Anti Semitic Political Parties in Imperial Germany
(New Haven, CT, and London, 1975), esp. 225 53.
  

of organizations on the moderate to the radical Right that unhesitatingly

placed antisemitism and the search for a solution to the so-called Jewish
question at the core of their existence. The most important of these was the
Pan-German League, an organization that had been founded in the early 1890s
in an effort to mobilize popular support for an imperialist agenda that would
transform Germany from a European into a world power but that by the turn
of the century had become one of the German Right’s most outspoken and
unrelenting voices in the struggle against the threat of Jewish world domin-
ation.31 But the agitation of the Pan-German League was only one aspect of a
far more radical transformation of German political life in the late nineteenth
century that marked the eclipse of National Liberal hegemony and the emer-
gence of a new and more stridently populist form of German nationalism.32 To
highlight the differences between these organizations and those that had come
into existence at an earlier stage in Germany’s political development, historians
such as Geoff Eley and James Retallack have adopted the term “New Right” to
distinguish populist and nationalist organizations like the ADV, the German
Naval League (Deutscher Flottenverein), and the Society for the Eastern
Marshes (Deutscher Ostmarkenverein) from older and more established forms
of conservative political engagement.33 To be sure, not all of the organizations
that belonged to the “New Right” embraced the ADV’s antisemitism or the
sense of urgency it attached to the quest for a solution to Germany’s “Jewish
question.” But antisemitism would become an increasingly prominent feature
of right-wing political culture as organizations as diverse as the German
Conservative Party (Deutschkonservative Partei or DKP), the Agrarian League
(Bund der Landwirte or BdL), and the German National Union of Commercial
Employees (Deutschnationaler Handlungsgehilfen-Verband or DHV) all

31
On the founding and early history of the ADV, see Rainer Hering, Konstruierte Nation.
Der Alldeutsche Verband 1890 bis 1939 (Hamburg, 2003), 110 33, as well as Björn
Hofmeister, “Between Monarch and Dictatorship: Radical Nationalism and Social Mobil
ization of the Pan German League, 1914 1939” (Ph.D. diss., Georgetown University,
2012), 25 67.
32
In this respect, see the two seminal essays by Geoff Eley, “Reshaping the Right: Radical
Nationalism and the German Navy League, 1898 1908,” Historical Journal 21 (1978):
327 54, and idem, “The Wilhelmine Right: How It Changed,” in Society and Politics in
Wilhelmine Germany, ed. Richard J. Evans (London and New York, 1978), 112 35, as
well as Eley, Reshaping the German Right, 19 98. See also Peter Walkenhorst, Nation
Volk Rasse. Radikaler Nationalismus im Deutschen Kaiserreich 1890 1914 (Göttingen,
2007), 38 79.
33
On this distinction, see Geoff Eley, “Conservatives and Radical Nationalists in Germany:
the Production of Fascist Potentials, 1912 28,” in Fascists and Conservatives: The Radical
Right and the Establishment in Twentieth Century Europe, ed. Martin Blinkhorn (London,
1990), 50 70, esp. 61 65, and James Retallack, The German Right, 1860 1920. Political
Limits of the Authoritarian Imagination (Toronto, 2006), 76 107.
   , –

incorporated antisemitic language of one sort or another into their official

programmatic statements.
Antisemitism would become a well-defined trademark of Germany’s polit-
ical culture well before the outbreak of World War I. The failure of antisemitic
parties to establish themselves as a viable force in German political life might
very well suggest that antisemitism had become such a ubiquitous feature of
German political life that antisemitic parties were unnecessary or superfluous.
This also might suggest that while antisemitism ran broadly throughout the
different sectors of German bourgeois society, it did not run all that deeply and
that it lacked the emotional intensity to transform itself into an effective and
durable political movement. Just how all of this would be sorted out in both
theory and practice would remain one of the most vexing challenges for the
DNVP and its allies on the German Right in the Weimar Republic. Germany
would experience a veritable explosion of antisemitism in the first years after
the end of World War I, an explosion fueled by the trauma of defeat and
inflation, the fear of Bolshevism, and a conspiratorial theory of history that
portrayed the Jew as the archenemy of the German people and as the architect
of all the misfortunes that had befallen Germany.34 Much of this temporarily
abated with the economic and political stabilization of the Weimar Republic in
the second half of the 1920s. But with the onset of the world economic crisis at
the end of the 1930s, antisemitism regained much its earlier virulence with
devastating consequences for the fate of Weimar democracy.
The September 1930 Reichstag elections represented a dramatic turning
point in the history of the Weimar Republic. The shift to government by
presidential decree in the spring of 1930 and the increasing reliance upon the
special emergency powers that the Weimar Constitution had invested in the
office of the Reich presidency effectively destroyed the last vestiges of parlia-
mentary government at the national level. The emergence of the NSDAP as a
mass political party in the 1930 Reichstag elections fundamentally altered the
calculus of right-wing politics in the Weimar Republic and amounted to a
decisive break with established patterns of parliamentary discourse. Not only
had the forces on the moderate Right, including those that had recently broken
away from the DNVP in the second of two major secessions on the party’s left
wing, failed to come together into some sort of united front during the
campaign, but the DNVP went down to a major defeat that saw it completely
eclipsed on the radical Right by the NSDAP. With more than six million votes
and 107 deputies in the Reichstag, the NSDAP was the second largest party in
the newly elected parliament and stood on the threshold of a bid for power
that would end with Adolf Hitler’s appointment as chancellor less than two

34
Werner Jochmann, “Die Ausbreitung des Antisemitismus,” in Deutsches Judentum in
Krieg und Revolution 1916 1923. Ein Sammelband, ed. Werner E. Mosse (Tübingen,
1971), 409 510.
  

years later. In the wake of these developments. the complex and multi-tiered
interrelationships that had developed between organized economic interests
and political parties in the first years of the Weimar Republic – in fact, these
relationships had already begun to take shape before the outbreak of World
War but were greatly accentuated by the transition to parliamentary democ-
racy in 1918–19 – completely unraveled. Any chance that the DNVP or any
other constellation of forces on the German Right might evolve into a state-
supporting conservative party capable of facilitating the transition from
authoritarian to democratic government was dealt a well-neigh fatal blow by
the verdict of September 1930. By this point, the more traditional elements on
the German Right were no longer capable of offering any sort of effective
resistance to the rise of National Socialism and the appeal it held for diverse
sectors of the German population. To the contrary, the divisions on the
German Right only played into the hands of the Nazis and greatly facilitated
their march to power. The disunity of the German Right thus constituted a
precondition for the Nazi rise to power that was every bit as important as the
schism on the socialist Left or the fragmentation of the German middle.
 1

Revolution and Realignment

World War I was a catastrophe for virtually every sector of German society
with the possible exception of workers in the war industries and the industrial-
ists and managers who profited from their control of the warime economy.
The rest of the economy – and in particular agriculture, the retail sector, and
small and middle-sized manufacturing – was decimated by acute shortages of
manpower, energy, raw materials, and capital.1 As the war entered its third
year in the fall of 1916, the sense of national euphoria and affirmation of
national unity that had greeted its outbreak two years earlier gave way to a
mixture of disillusionment, stoic resignation, and outright bitterness over the
way in which Germany’s political leadership had failed to deliver on its
promise of a quick, decisive victory.2 In the public eye, blame for the cata-
strophic series of events that had befallen Germany over the preceding decade
rested squarely on the shoulders of those conservative elites in the government
and military who were responsible for Germany’s entry into the war and the
conduct of the German military effort. This represented a dramatic intensifi-
cation of the crisis of conservative hegemony that had been simmering severe
ever since the Daily Telegraph affair in the fall of 1908 and that now found its
most sensational expression in the passage of the Reichstag’s Peace Resolution
in June 1917. Not only did the passage of the Peace Resolution represent a
direct challenge to the political prerogatives of Germany’s conservative elites,
but it brought together the three components of the political alliance – the
Social Democrats, the Center, and the left-liberal Progressive People’s Party
(Fortschrittliche Volkspartei) – that would vie for power through the remain-
der of the war and into the postwar period.3 Just how the leaders of Germany’s

1
On the social effects of World War I, see Jürgen Kocka, Klassengesellschaft im Krieg.
Deutsche Sozialgeschichte 1914 1918 (Göttingen, 1973), esp. 65 195; Gerald D. Feldman,
Army, Industry, and Labor in Germany, 1914 1918 (Princeton, NJ, 1966), 459 77; and
Roger Chickering, Imperial Germany and the Great War, 1914 1918 (Cambridge, 1998),
95 131.
2
Chickering, Imperial Germany, 132 67.
3
Klaus Epstein, “Der Interfraktionelle Ausschuß und das Problem der Parlamentarisierung
1917 1918,” Historische Zeitschrift 191 (1960) 562 84.


    

conservative parties would respond to the military defeat of 1918 and to the
revolution that would sweep away the institutions through which Germany’s
conservative elites had exercised their political hegemony for almost half a
decade remained an open question as they turned their attention to the
challenges of survival in a radically transformed new order.

The Many Faces of Wilhelmine Conservatism

Before the outbreak of World War I no less than four conservative parties had
dotted Germany’s political landscape.4 Of these, the oldest and most import-
ant was the German Conservative Party. Ever since its founding in 1876, the
DKP had functioned as the political instrument of East Elbian aristocrats
fearful that Prussia’s absorption into the new German Empire would infringe
upon their own historic rights and privileges. The party, whose parliamentary
strength had peaked in the late 1880s when it had elected no fewer than eighty
deputies to the Reichstag, had fallen upon hard times since the turn of the
century, polling only 9.2 percent of the popular vote and electing just forty-
two deputies in the 1912 Reichstag elections.5 Since 1911 leadership of the
party had rested in the hands of a special three-man committee consisting of
Ernst von Heydebrand und der Lasa, Oskar von Normann, and Karl
Stackmann. The first of these three had also served as chairman of the party’s
delegation to the Prussian Landtag since 1906, while his counterpart in the
Reichstag, Count Kuno von Westarp, had assumed his post as late as 1913. In
terms of its basic ideological orientation, the DKP was unequivocally commit-
ted not only to the preservation of the Hohenzollern monarchy and the
defense of aristocratic privilege, but also to the maintenance of Prussian
hegemony over the rest of the Reich. Above all else, the leaders of the DKP
were adamantly opposed to the democratization of the existing political
system and categorically rejected any reform of the Prussian franchise that
might undermine the powers of the crown and aristocracy. In the last years
before the outbreak of World War I, however, the leaders of the DKP came to
feel as if they and all they stood for was under siege from below.6 Whether they

4
Volker Stalmann, “Vom Honoratrioren zum Berufspolitiker: Die konservativen Par
teien,” in Regierung, Parlament und Öffentlichkeit im Zeitalter Bismarcks. Politikstil im
Wandel, ed. Lothar Gall and Dieter Langewiesche (Paderborn, 2003), 91 125.
5
For further details, see James N. Retallack, Notables of the Right: The Conservative Party
and Political Mobilization in Germany, 1876 1918 (Boston, 1988), as well as the anthology
of Retallack’s articles published under the title The German Right, 1860 1920: Political
Limits of the Authoritarian Imagination (Toronto, Buffalo, NY, and London, 2006).
6
James Retallack, “Heydebrand and Westarp: Leaving behind the Second Reich,” in James
Retallack, Germany’s Second Reich: Portraits and Pathways (Toronto, Buffalo, and
London, 2015), 202 34.
   , –

and the interests they represented would survive the transition to the age of
parliamentary democracy remained to be seen.
The DKP’s counterpart outside of Prussia was the Imperial and Free
Conservative Party (Reichs- und freikonservative Partei or RFKP), more
popularly known inside Prussia proper as the Free Conservatives.7 Like its
Prussian counterpart, the RFKP had been founded in the mid-1870s as a
consequence of the split that the unification of Germany had produced within
conservative ranks between those who supported and those who opposed
unification on the terms proffered by the Iron Chancellor Otto von Bismarck.
Whereas the leaders of the DKP feared that Prussia’s absorption into the newly
founded German Empire would lead to the loss of historic rights and privileges
for the Prussian aristocracy, the Free Conservatives were less heavily commit-
ted to the defense of Prussian privilege and more closely tied to Germany’s
emerging industrial elite than the DKP. With the appointment of Bernhard
von Bülow as chancellor in 1900, the Free Conservatives resolved their differ-
ences with the DKP and joined it, the Center, and the National Liberals in the
so-called Bülow Bloc that coalesced behind the chancellor after the
1903 Reichstag elections and that functioned as an unofficial parliamentary
coalition before falling apart in the dispute over a reform of the federal tax
system in 1908–09. Throughout all of this, the RFKP’s strength at the polls
continued to plummet from a peak of 13.6 percent of the popular vote in the
late 1870s to 3.0 percent in 1912.8
The declining electoral fortunes of the DKP and RFKP extended as well to
the two remaining conservative parties of any note, the Christian-Social Party
(Christlich-soziale Partei) and the German-Racist Party (Deutschvölkische
Partei). The Christian-Socials traced their origins to the 1870s, when Adolf
Stoecker, the court pastor of Wilhelm I, had tried to counter the appeal of a
newly reunified socialist movement by founding a party of his own, the
Christian-Social Workers’ Party (Christlich-soziale Arbeiterpartei).9 The real
target of Stoecker’s strategy, however, was not so much the German worker as
the independent middle class of small shopkeepers and artisans. In an attempt
to capitalize upon the economic distress this sector of German society had
experienced since the onset of the “great depression,” Stoecker and his associ-
ates not only called for the introduction of legislation that would protect the
independent middle class against the vicissitudes of a market economy but,

7
Matthias Alexander, Die Freikonservative Partei 1890 1918. Gemäßigter Konservatismus
in der konstitutionellen Demokratie (Düsseldorf, 2000), esp. 27 42.
8
Ibid., 268 346. See also Georg von Below, Die politische Lage im Reich und in Baden
(Heidelberg, 1910).
9
On the Christian Social movement, see Martin Spahn, “Die christlichsoziale Bewegung,”
Hochland 26 (1929): 164 82. See also Norbert Friedrich, “Die christlich soziale Fahne
empor!” Reinhard Mumm und die christlich soziale Bewegung (Stuttgart, 1997), 60 114.
    

more importantly, tried to place the blame for its economic difficulties on the
Jewish control of German financial institutions.10 The Christian-Socials,
however, experienced a great deal of difficulty establishing themselves as an
independent political entity, and at the beginning of the 1880s they entered
into a special arrangement with the German Conservative Party.11 This alli-
ance lasted until the mid-1890s, at which time Stoecker and his followers
decided to sever their ties with the DKP and refound their party amidst a new
and indeed more highly charged wave of agitation against the social and
economic influence of German Jewry. Although Franz Behrens and the gen-
eration of Christian-Socials who gained control of the party after Stoecker’s
political retirement in 1907 moderated their antisemitism in favor of a
heightened emphasis upon the social gospel of Lutheranism and what it had
to offer the German worker,12 the Christian-Social Party never elected more
than a handful of deputies in any national election and remained at best a
marginal factor in Wilhelmine political life.13
If in the last years before the outbreak of World War I the Christian-Socials
were in the process of retreating from the more extreme antisemitism of
Stoecker and his generation, this could not be said of the German-Racist
Party. This party, which had been created through the merger of the German
Social Party (Deutschsoziale Partei) and the German Reform Party (Deutsche
Reformpartei) in March 1914, was dominated by a leadership cadre that
subscribed to the most virulent brand of racial antisemitism the nineteenth
century had to offer. Whereas the antisemitism of the Christian-Socials had
been primarily religious and economic in nature, the leaders of the German-
Racist Party regarded the Jew as a racial parasite that had to be expunged from
all aspects of German life or else the German people would experience the slow
death of racial decay.14 This particular brand of antisemitism, however, was no
more attractive to the average German than that of the Christian-Socials – a

10
On Stoecker, see Werner Jochmann, “Stoecker als nationalkonservativer Politiker und
antisemitischer Agitator,” in Günter Brakelmann, Martin Greschat, and Werner Joch
mann, Protestantismus und Politik. Werk und Wirkung Adolf Stoeckers (Hamburg, 1982),
123 98, as well as Klaus Motschmann, “Ein aussichtsloser Kampf um die innere Einheit
Deutschlands Adolf Stoecker (1834 1909),” in Konservative Politiker in Deutschland.
Eine Auswahl biographischer Porträts aus zwei Jahrzehnte, ed. Hans Christoph Kraus
(Berlin, 1995), 206 33.
11
Retallack, Notables of the Right, 36 53.
12
For example, see the reports by Mumm and Behrens in Bericht über den Christlich
sozialen Parteitag am 6., 7. und 8. September 1913 in Bielefeld (Bielefeld, n.d. [1913]),
8 20.
13
Levy, Anti Semitic Parties, 245 47.
14
Stefan Breuer, Die Völkischen in Deutschland. Kaiserreich und Weimarer Republik
(Darmstadt, 2008), 68 83. See also Werner Bergmann, “Völkischer Antisemitismus im
Kaiserreich,” in Handbuch zur Völkischen Bewegung 1871 1918, ed. Uwe Puschner,
Walter Schmitz, and Justus H. Ulbricht (Munich, 1996), 449 63.
   , –

fact to which the weakness of its two forerunners in the 1912 Reichstag
elections clearly attested – with the result that the German-Racist Party too
had been effectively relegated to the margins of German political life by
the time war broke out in August 1914.15 Appearances notwithstanding,
the weakness of Germany’s antisemitic parties in the last decade before the
outbreak of World War I did not necessarily mean that German society had
become any more tolerant of Jews or that antisemitism was no longer a
relevant issue in Wilhelmine politics. To the contrary, this might very well
suggest that antisemitism had become such a pervasive and widely accepted
feature of right-wing politics in Wilhelmine Germany that single-issue parties
such as the German-Racist Party were no longer necessary or viable.16
The last decade of the Second Empire was marked by a political stalemate
that neither the champions nor the opponents of reform were able to turn to
their advantage.17 Under these circumstances, the forces on the German
Right tried to shore up their position following their defeat in the March
1912 Reichstag elections by founding the Cartel of Productive Estates
(Kartell des schaffenden Stände) as the rallying point around which the
various social and economic groups that supported their political agenda
could unite. Among the organizations that came together in August 1913 to
form the Cartel of Productive Estates were the Agrarian League, the Central
Association of German Industrialists (Centralverband Deutscher Industriel-
ler or CDI), the Association of German Peasant Unions (Vereinigung
der christlichen Bauernvereine Deutschlands or VdB), and the Imperial
German Middle-Class League (Reichsdeutscher Mittelstandsverband).18 But
the cartel, whose program amounted to a virtual declaration of war against
the Social Democrats and their allies in the struggle for a democratic reform
of German political life, failed to win the support of prominent conservative
parliamentarians like Heydebrand and Westarp and remained little more
than an empty specter devoid of lasting influence upon Germany’s political
development.19

15
Levy, Anti Semitic Parties, 251 53. See also Uwe Lohalm, Völkischer Radikalismus. Die
Geschichte des Deutschvölkischen Schutz und Trutz Bundes 1919 1923 (Hamburg, 1970),
68 71.
16
For example, see Peter Walkenhorst, Nation Volk Rasse. Radikaler Nationalismus im
Deutschen Kaiserreich 1890 1914 (Göttingen, 2006).
17
For further details, Wolfgang J. Mommsen, “The Latent Crisis of the Wilhelmine Empire:
The State and Society in Germany, 1890 1914,” in Wolfgang J. Mommsen, Imperial
Germany, 1867 1918: Politics, Culture, and Society in an Authoritarian State, trans. by
Richard Deveson (London, 1995), 141 62.
18
Dirk Stegmann, Die Erben Bismarcks. Parteien und Verbände in der Spätphase des
wilhelminischen Deutschlands. Sammlungspolitik 1897 1918 (Cologne, 1970), 360 68.
19
Retallack, Notables of the Right, 214 15.
    

World War I and the Fatherland Party

The extent to which the anxiety that Germany’s conservative elites felt over
their inability to contain or suppress the challenge for democratic reform may
have contributed to the recklessness that Germany’s political leadership dis-
played during the July crisis of 1914 and remains a question of immense
complexity and enduring controversy.20 Still, there can be little doubt that the
disarray of the German Right on the eve of World War I severely handicapped
the efforts of Germany’s conservative leadership to steer a clear and unequivo-
cal course of action during the first years of the war. The dilemma in which
Germany’s conservative elites found themselves was complicated by the fact
that the proclamation of the Burgfrieden and the enthusiasm with which the
Social Democrats embraced the call to arms in August 1914 intensified the
split between those like Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg who
sought to build a broad domestic consensus for the conduct of the war and
those on the far Right who persisted in their demagogy against organized
labor. The situation was complicated even further by the indecisive nature of
the war itself and the conflict this engendered both outside and within the
cabinet. As the war entered its third year, Bethmann Hollweg’s enemies on the
extreme Right intensified their campaign against his conduct of the war and
demanded his removal from office so that military victory, replete with
extensive territorial conquests on both the eastern and western fronts, might
be possible.21 Not only did agitation of this sort have a polarizing effect upon
German political life as a whole, but it also succeeded in bringing the leader-
ship of Germany’s conservative parties more and more into the orbit of the
radical Right.22
At no point were the polarization of German political life and the radical-
ization of the German Right more apparent than following the passage of the
Peace Resolution in the summer of 1917. The adoption of the Peace Resolution
was significant not only as a barometer of German war-weariness but also
because it signalled a shift in the balance of power within the Reichstag from
those parties that were opposed to the democratization of German political life
to those that sought a thorough reform of the existing political system and the
establishment of a viable parliamentary democracy.23 Rocked by what the
passage of the Peace Resolution meant for its hegemonial aspirations both at

20
See the essay by Mommsen cited above, n. 18, as well as the classic statement of this
argument by Wolfgang J. Mommsen, “Domestic Factors in German Foreign Policy before
1914,” in Mommsen, Imperial Germany, 163 88.
21
For further details, see Heinz Hagenlücke, Deutsche Vaterlandspartei. Die nationale
Rechte am Ende des Kaiserreiches (Düsseldorf, 1997), 49 142.
22
For example, see Retallack, Notables of the Right, 215 20, and Friedrich, “Christlich
soziale Fahne,” 109 14.
23
For further details, see Chickering, Imperial Germany, 160 67.
   , –

home and abroad, the German Right responded by launching the German
Fatherland Party (Deutsche Vaterlandspartei or DVLP). After a series of
preliminary meetings that were conducted with the utmost secrecy in late
August and early September 1917,24 the Fatherland Party held its first public
rally in Berlin’s Philharmonic Hall on 24 September with Wolfgang Kapp,
Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz, and Duke Johann Albrecht zu Mecklenburg as the
featured speakers. In one speech after another, the founders of the new party
hailed the DVLP as a radically new political construction consecrated in the
spirit of August 1914, that mystical moment in which all partisan differences
dissolved in a mood of popular euphoria as a united German nation went to
war.25 Only by invoking the spirit of those sacred August days and by uniting
all those Germans who placed love of nation before partisan or sectarian
interest would it be possible, as the DVLP’s first chairman Alfred Tirpitz
claimed, for Germany to crush the forces of defeatism at home and secure
an honorable peace commensurate with the sacrifices of the German people
and Germany’s mission as a world power.26
The driving force behind the founding of the German Fatherland Party was
Wolfgang Kapp, a former official in the Prussian civil administration who had
spearheaded the campaign against Bethmann Hollweg in 1915–16.27 Kapp,
who enjoyed close ties to the leaders of the Pan-German League, envisaged the
Fatherland Party as a platform for launching the candidacy of the one-time
naval minister Tirpitz for the chancellorship. But Tirpitz, who had endeared
himself to the extreme Right by resigning from the cabinet in March 1916 in
protest against the government’s refusal to resume unrestricted submarine
warfare, shared none of the anti-Catholic, antisocialist animus, or even anti-
Jewish animus that lay at the heart of the Pan-German ideology and embraced
a concept of national inclusiveness that had little in common with that of
Kapp and his supporters on the far Right. Its internal divisions notwithstand-
ing, the Fatherland Party recruited nearly a million members in the first year
of its existence and developed a broad base of support that clearly eclipsed that
of any of Germany’s nonsocialist parties. The key to the DVLP’s success lay
not merely in the massive support it received from its benefactors in German
industry but more importantly from Tirpitz’s refusal to embroil the new party

24
Hagenlücke, Vaterlandspartei, 143 64.
25
Remarks of Gottfried Traub in Deutsche Vaterlands Partei, Deutsche Ziele. Reden bei der
ersten öffentlichen Partei Kundgebung (Berlin, n.d. [1917]), 25 30. See also Jeffrey Ver
hey, The Spirit of 1914: Militarism, Myth, and Mobilization in Germany (Cambridge,
2000), 178 85.
26
Speech by Tirpitz in DVLP, ed., Deutsche Ziele, 5 15. See also Deutsche Vaterlandspartei,
Landesverband Bayern, Was will die Deutsche Vaterlandspartei? (Diessen vor München,
n.d. [1917 18]), esp. 7 10.
27
See the broadside by Wolfgang Kapp, Die nationalen Kreise und der Reichskanzler.
Denkschrift (Königsberg, 1916).
    

in the struggle over domestic political issues such as electoral reform for fear
that this might alienate constituencies he deemed vital for the success of the
party’s struggle for an honorable peace replete with territorial acquisitions on
both the western and eastern fronts. Not surprisingly, the DVLP met with a
cool response from the leaders of the German Conservative Party and failed to
attract significant support outside the ranks of Germany’s educated and
propertied bourgeoisie.28
While the government generally welcomed the support it received from the
Fatherland Party and its efforts to mobilize public opinion for the war effort,
the DVLP remained on the periphery of the decision-making process and
never succeeded in exercising the influence over governmental policy for
which Tirpitz and Kapp had been hoping. Though temporarily buoyed in
the spring of 1918 by military success in the east and by improved prospects
for victory in the west, Tirpitz and the leaders of the Fatherland Party
lamented the lack of support they had received from Germany’s political
parties in their efforts to overcome the partisan divisions that in their mind
continued to undermine Germany’s will to win.29 In the meantime, war-
weariness continued to take its toll on the national will to fight with serious
consequences for the DVLP. As contributions from heavy industry dried up
and membership dues no longer sufficed to cover the expenses of the party’s
elaborate propaganda apparatus, the DVLP found itself in such a severe
financial crisis by the summer of 1918 that even Tirpitz began to despair of
its prospects.30 Not even the founding of the German Workers and Employees’
Party (Deutsche Arbeiter- und Angestelltenpartei or DAAP) in March 1918 as
a front for attracting the support of working-class and white-collar elements
that otherwise would have remained aloof from the Fatherland Party could
reverse the DVLP’s flagging fortunes.31 With the collapse of the much-vaunted

28
See Hagenlücke, Vaterlandspartei, 248 371, and Stegmann, Erben Bismarcks, 497 518.
See also Dirk Stegmann, “Vom Neokonservatismus zum Proto Faschismus: Konservative
Partei, Vereine und Verbände 1893 1920,” in Deutscher Konservatismus im 19. und 20.
Jahrhundert. Festschrift für Fritz Fischer, ed. Dirk Stegmann, Bernd Jürgen Wendt, and
Peter Christian Witt (Bonn, 1983), 218 23. For DVLP’s regional profile, see Hans Peter
Müller, “Die Deutsche Vaterlandspartei in Württemberg 1917/18 und ihre Erbe. Besorgte
Patrioten oder rechte Ideologen?” Zeitschrift für Württembergische Landesgeschichte 59
(2000): 217 45, and Dirk Stegmann, “Die Deutsche Vaterlandspartei in Schleswig
Holstein 1917 1918. Konservative Sammlungsbewegungen in der Provinz,” Demokra
tische Geschichte 20 (2009): 41 75. On Tirpitz and the Pan Germans, see Raffael Scheck,
Alfred von Tirpitz and German Right Wing Politics, 1914 1930 (Atlantic Highlands, NJ,
1998), 65 81.
29
Tirpitz’s speech at the second party congress of the DVLP, 19 Apr. 1918, in Mitteilungen
der Deutschen Vaterlands Partei, 29. Apr. 1918, no. 12.
30
Scheck, Tirpitz, 73 74.
31
On the DAAP, see Hagenlücke, Vaterlandspartei, 344 51, and Dirk Stegmann, “Zwischen
Repression und Manipulation: Konservative Machteliten und Arbeiter und Ange
   , –

“Michael’s Offensive” in the late summer of 1918 and the growing realization
that Germany would have to settle at best for a negotiated peace without
significant territorial gains, the DVLP’s call for an honorable peace was all but
drowned out in the rising tide of war-weariness and economic hardship.32
While the Fatherland Party was effectively paralyzed by the deteriorating
military situation and the erosion of popular support for a continuation of the
war, the parliamentary leaders of Germany’s conservative parties moved
quickly to salvage what they could of their own political position. With
Germany’s military collapse in the fall of 1918, most German conservatives
conceded that far-reaching changes in Germany’s political system were
unavoidable. Under these circumstances, political fragmentation was a luxury
German conservatives could no longer afford. Exploratory negotiations
between representatives of the various conservative parties had taken place
sporadically throughout the war, but with the rapidly deteriorating situation at
the front and the growing specter of revolution at home they assumed even
greater urgency. The leaders of the German Conservative Party had initiated a
comprehensive revision of the 1893 Tivoli party program in the spring of
1918 and had entered into confidential negotations with the other conservative
parties about the establishment of closer ties between their respective organ-
izations. The DKP’s efforts to revise its party program were essentially com-
plete by the end of October 1918, and on 7 November the DKP executive
committee met in emergency session in Berlin to appoint a special commis-
sion under Westarp’s chairmanship to bring the negotiations with the leaders
of the other right-wing parties to a successful conclusion.33 These develop-
ments, however, were quickly overtaken when just two days later Kaiser
Wilhelm II announced his abdication and the Social Democrats’ Philipp
Scheidemann proclaimed the founding of a republic from the balcony of the
Reichstag.

The Search for Conservative Unity

Though not entirely unexpected, the collapse of the Hohenzollern monarchy
on 9 November 1918 sent shock waves throughout the German conservative
establishment. By no means, however, was the upheaval confined to Prussia, as
popular demonstrations in Munich, Stuttgart, Leipzig, and elsewhere heralded
the collapse of the monarchal order throughout Germany. Stunned by these
developments, Westarp left Berlin and did not follow up on his party’s

stelltenbewegung 1910 1918. Ein Beitrag zur Vorgeschichte der DAP/NSDAP,” Archiv
für Sozialgeschichte 12 (1972): 351 432.
32
For further details, see Hagenlücke, Vaterlandspartei, 372 85.
33
Kuno von Westarp, Die Regierung des Prinzen Max von Baden und die Konservative
Partei 1918 (Berlin, n.d. [1928]), 112 14.
    

decision to initiate negotiations with the other right-wing parties about their
consolidation into a single conservative party.34 It was not until after the
leaders of the various conservative parties came together more or less by
coincidence at the funeral of Baron Karl Friedrich von Gamp-Massaunen,
the parliamentary leader of the Free Conservatives who had died on
15 November, that negotiations to found a united conservative party were
resumed.35 Representatives from the four conservative parties met repeatedly
over the course of the next week before issuing an appeal on 22 November that
announced the founding of the German National People’s Party.36 The appeal
took great pains to portray the DNVP as a totally new political party and, at
the insistence of the Free Conservatives and Christian-Socials, assiduously
avoided language that might identify it too closely with the prewar DKP.37
Above all else, the appeal emphasized the sociological heterogeneity of the
DNVP and insisted that the new party, as its name suggested, was a people’s
party that appealed across class, confessional, and regional lines to all sectors
of the German population.38
Both the Christian-Socials and Free Conservatives were quick to endorse
the founding of the DNVP and to recommend it to their followers as the
proud heir to their own political traditions. The Christian-Socials had played a

34
Kuno von Westarp, Konservative Politik im Übergang vom Kaiserreich zur Weimarer
Republik, ed. Friedrich Freiherr Hiller von Gaertringen with assistance from Karl J. Mayer
and Reinhold Weber (Düsseldorf, 2001), 13 15. See also Daniela Gasteiger, Kuno von
Westarp (1864 1945). Parlamentarismus, Monarchismus und Herrschaftsutopien im
deutschen Konservatismus (Berlin, 2018), 149 56.
35
Westarp, Konservative Politik, ed., Hiller von Gaertringen, 17 18. See also Hans
Erdmann von Lindeiner Wildau, “Konservatismus,” in Volk und Reich der Deutschen.
Vorlesungen gehalten in der Deutschen Vereinigung für Staatswissenschaftliche Fortbil
dung, ed. Bernhard Harms, 3 vols. (Berlin, 1929), 2: 49.
36
There is no official protocol of the negotiations that culminated in the founding of the
DNVP. For Westarp’s role, see “Mein Anteil an den Gründungsverhandlungen der
Deutschnationalen Volkspartei,” n.d., Nachlass Kuno Graf von Westarp, Archiv der
Freiherrn Hiller von Gaertringen, Gärtringen (hereafter cited as NL Westarp, Gärtrin
gen), II/1, as well as Westarp, Konservative Politik, ed. Hiller von Gaertringen, 20 22. See
also the detailed report prepared by Brauer for Heydebrand, 24 Nov. 1918, records of the
Deutschkonservative Partei, Bundesarchiv Berlin (hereafter cited as BA Berlin), Bestand
R 8003, 2/2 10. For further information, see Lewis Hertzman, “The Founding of the
German National People’s Party, November 1918 January 1919,” Journal of Modern
History 30 (1958): 24 36; Jan Striesow, Die Deutschnationale Volkspartei und die
Völkisch Radikalen 1918 1922 (Frankfurt a.M., 1981), 9 43, and Ohnezeit, Zwischen
“schärfster Opposition,” 30 46.
37
Westarp to Kreth, 10 Jan. 1919, BA Berlin, Nachlass Kuno Graf von Westarp, 37/6 8.
38
“Gründungsaufruf der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei,” 22 Nov. 1918, reprinted in the
Neue Preußische (Kreuz Zeitung), 24 Nov. 1918, no. 595. See also Henning von Koß, Die
Parteien und ihre Programme im Lichte der Wirklichkeit. Ein politischer Wegweiser,
Deutschnationale Politik, no. 5 (Berlin, n.d. [1919]), 39.
   , –

particularly prominent role in the deliberations that had led to the founding of
the DNVP, and Wilhelm Wallbaum, their present chairman, wasted no time
in petitioning the members of his party’s executive committee for authoriza-
tion to conclude the merger with the DNVP after negotiations with Adam
Stegerwald and the leaders of the Christian labor movement on the founding
of an interconfessional Christian workers’ party had broken down.39 Though
initially more reluctant than most of his colleagues to support the new party,
Stoecker’s son-in-law and Christian-Social parliamentarian Reinhard Mumm
stepped into the breach and succeeded in rallying the Christian-Social
organization throughout the country to the DNVP’s political banner.40 In a
parallel action, the leaders of the Imperial and Free Conservative Party, who
along with the Christian-Socials had been the driving force behind the
founding of the DNVP, voted at a meeting of the RFKP central committee
(Hauptausschuß) on 13 December to instruct all party members to join the
DNVP and to place their party’s resources at the disposal of the DNVP.41 It
was a somewhat different situation within the German Conservative Party.
Heydebrand, Westarp, and their party colleagues were aggravated over the
way in which the Christian-Socials and Free Conservatives had wrested lead-
ership of the movement for conservative unity from their hands and were far
less than enthusiastic about the emerging shape of the DNVP.42 Although
Westarp and his associates found themselves the target of a virtual putsch that
had been organized and conducted by leaders of the DKP organization outside
of Berlin, there was little their opponents could do but endorse the new party.
At a meeting of the DKP executive committee on 3 December party leaders
threw their full support behind the DNVP, though without authorizing the
dissolution of their own party.43 Westarp’s strategy as the DKP’s chief liaison
to the DNVP was first to bring the DKP as intact as possible into the new party
and second to mould the new party as much as possible in the spirit of the

39
Wallbaum to the CSP central executive committee (Hauptvorstand), 27 Nov. 1918, BA
Berlin, Nachlass Reinhard Mumm, 31/7 8. See also Mumm, Christlich soziale Gedanke,
88 130, and Friedrich, Christlich soziale Fahne, 177 88.
40
Mumm to Dietrich, 18 Nov. 1918, BA Berlin, NL Mumm, 277/20 22. See also Friedrich,
Christlich soziale Fahne, 187, and Helmut Busch, “Reinhard Mumm als Reichstagsab
geordneter,” Jahrbuch des Vereins für Westfälische Kirchengeschichte 65 (1972): 189 217,
esp. 190, n. 4. See also the correspondence between Heuser and Mumm, 12 15 Nov. 1918,
BA Berlin, NL Mumm, 277/13 15, and Veidt to Mumm, 16 Nov. 1918, ibid., 277/18 19.
41
For the rationale behind this decision, see Georg von Below, Recht und Notwendigkeit der
Deutschnationalen Volkspartei, Vortragsentwurf, no. 1 (Berlin, n.d. [1919]).
42
For example, see Westarp to Klasing, 25 Mar. 1919, BA Berlin, NL Westarp, 37/42 43.
On Westarp’s strategy, see Gasteiger, Westarp, 159 78.
43
Westarp, Konservative Politik, ed. Hiller von Gaertringen, 24 25. See also Westarp’s
undated memorandum on the meeting of the DKP executive committee, 3 Dec. 1919,
as well as the memorandum from the DKP executive committee to the party’s state and
provincial organizations, n.d., both in NL Westarp, Gärtringen, II/1.
    

DKP.44 In a similar vein, the leaders of the minuscule German-Racist Party

realized that they too had no choice but to cast their lot with the DNVP,
though clearly with the intention of using it into an instrument for the
propagation of their racist and antisemitic propaganda.45
At the same time that the various right-wing parties were lining up in
support of the DNVP, the new party also received surprisingly strong support
from another source, namely, former liberals who had been active in the
Fatherland Party. Here the central figure was Gottfried Traub, a Protestant
pastor who had belonged to the left-liberal Progressive People’s Party (Fort-
schrittliche Volkspartei) before the war but who had become increasingly
involved in the activities of the DVLP during the war aims controversy of
1917–18. After the collapse of November 1918 Traub had hoped that those
National Liberals who had not aligned themselves with the German Demo-
cratic Party (Deutsche Demokratische Partei or DDP) would find their way to
the DNVP and was disappointed by the decision of Gustav Stresemann, the
parliamentary leader of the all but defunct National Liberal Party (Nationalli-
berale Partei or NLP), to found a new party of his own, the German People’s
Party (Deutsche Volkspartei or DVP), instead of joining the DNVP.46 In this
regard Traub worked closely with Georg Wilhelm Schiele, a conservative who
had played a prominent role in the Fatherland Party, in drafting plans for the
creation of a Section for the Liberal Bourgeoisie (Abteilung für das liberale
Bürgertum) within the DNVP as a way of uniting liberal and conservative
behind its banner.47 These efforts received strong support from press magnate
Alfred Hugenberg, himself a product of that National Liberal milieu that had
crystallized during the struggle for German unification and an outspoken and
uncompromising nationalist who had joined the DNVP shortly after its
founding.48 On 10 December the national committee (Reichsausschuß) of
the Fatherland Party met in Berlin to initiate its liquidation and agreed, at

44
Westarp to Kreth, 10 Jan. 1919, BA Berlin, NL Westarp, 37/6 8.
45
Fricke, “Deutschvölkische Partei,” in Lexikon zur Parteiengeschichte, ed. Fricke et al.,
1:561.
46
Gottfried Traub, “Wie ich deutschnationale wurde,” in Deutscher Aufstieg. Bilder aus der
Vergangenheit und Gegenwart der rechtsstehenden Parteien, ed. Hans von Arnim and
Georg von Below (Berlin, 1925), 423 40. On Traub’s involvement in the DNVP, see Willi
Heinrichs, Gottfried Traub (1869 1956). Liberaler Theologe und extremer Nationalpro
testant (Waltrop, 2001), 280 86. On the founding of the DVP, see Larry Eugene Jones,
German Liberalism and the Dissolution of the Weimar Party System, 1918 1933 (Chapel
Hill, NC, 1988), 15 29.
47
See Schiele to Hugenberg, 5 Dec. 1918, and Traub, 6 Dec. 1918, Bundesarchiv Koblenz
(hereafter cited as BA Koblenz), Nachlass Alfred Hugenberg, 46/59 60, 52 53, as well as
the entries in Traub’s diary for 22 Nov. 5 Dec. 1918, BA Koblenz, Nachlass Gottfried
Traub, 8/6 8, and Traub’s unpublished memoirs, ibid., 5/72 73.
48
Heidrun Holzbach, Das “System Hugenberg.” Die Organisation bürgerlicher Sammlungs
politik vor dem Aufstieg der NSDAP (Stuttgart, 1981), 70 73.
   , –

Traub’s urging, to place what little remained of its resources at the disposal of
the DNVP.49 By providing the DNVP with immediate access to the DVLP’s
rank-and-file membership, which tended to be more bourgeois and nationalist
than aristocratic or conservative in its basic political orientation, this only
helped confirm the DNVP’s image of itself as a new and socially comprehen-
sive Sammelpartei unencumbered by the stigma of the prewar DKP.

Diversity in Unity
The founding of the German National People’s Party met with an enthusiastic
response not just from conservative strongholds east of the Elbe50 but from
conservative and nationalist circles throughout the country. In areas as diverse
as Bavaria, Württemberg, Saxony, and Thuringia, news of the party’s founding
provided local conservatives with a sense of the direction in which they should
be headed and galvanized them into action. In Bavaria, where the National
Liberals were quick to cast their lot with the left-liberal German Democratic
Party,51 Franconian conservatives under the leadership of school teacher Hans
Hilpert reacted to the collapse of their efforts to reach an accord with the state
NLP by officially launching a party of their own, the Bavarian Middle Party
(Bayerische Mittelpartei or BMP), in Nuremburg on 10 December 1918.52
Hilpert and his supporters were also anxious to stem the tide of defections
among Munich conservatives led by Baron Wilhelm von Pechmann to the

49
Protocol of the meeting of the DVLP national committee, 10 Dec. 1918, BA Koblenz,
Nachlass Wolfgang Kapp, 7.
50
For example, see Wilhelm Kähler, Die Gründung der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei.
Vortrag, gehalten als Einführung in das Verständnis ihrer Ziele, vor der Greifswalder
Studentenschaft (Greifswald, n.d. [1919]), 13 15. For further details, see Bert Becker,
“Revolution und rechte Sammlung. Die Deutschnationale Volkspartei in Pommern 1918/
19,” in Geist und Gestalt im historischen Wandel. Facetten deutscher und europäischer
Geschichte 1789 1989. Festschrift für Siegfried Bahne, ed. Bert Becker and Horst Lade
macher (Münster, New York, Munich, and Berlin, 2000), 211 30, as well as Matthiesen,
Greifswald in Vorpommern, 82 97.
51
Larry Eugene Jones, “Nationalism, Particularism, and the Collapse of the Bavarian Liberal
Parties, 1918 1924,” Jahrbuch zur Liberalismus Forschung 14 (2002): 105 42, here
110 18.
52
On the founding of the BMP, see Wengg to Weilnböck, 23 Nov. 1918, and Hilpert to
Weilnböck, 21 Nov. and 5 Dec. 1918, BA Koblenz, Nachlass Luitpold von Weilnböck,
46b. For further details, see Hilpert, “Die Gründung der Bayerischen Mittelpartei und
ihre Notwendigkeit,” Blätter der bayerischen Mittelpartei 1, no. 14 (7 Dec. 1919): 79 82,
and no. 15 (21 Dec. 1919): 88 91. See also Manfred Kittel, “Zwischen völkischem
Fundamentalismus und gouvernementaler Taktik. DNVP Vorsitzender Hans Hilpert
und die bayerischen Deutschnationalen,” Zeitschrift für bayerische Landesgeschichte 59
(1996): 849 901, esp. 856 61, and Elina Kiiskinen, Die Deutschnationale Volkspartei in
Bayern (Bayerische Mittelpartei) in der Regierungspolitik des Freistaats während der
Weimarer Zeit (Munich, 2005), 38 44.
    

Bavarian People’s Party (Bayerische Volkspartei or BVP), a party that Georg

Heim, Sebastian Schlittenbauer, and the leaders of the Bavarian branch of the
Christian Peasant Unions had founded in Regensburg four weeks earlier as a
Bavarian alternative to the German Center Party.53 In the meantime, the BMP
party leadership tried to shore up its political prospects by negotiating a
merger with the Bavarian branch of the Agrarian League, the bastion of
agrarian conservatism in prewar Franconia. Although these negotiations failed
to produce the desired result, the Bavarian BdL nevertheless encouraged its
members to vote for the BMP – and by extension for the DNVP as well – in
the upcoming state and national elections.54
A similar pattern emerged in Württemberg, where leaders of the bourgeois
Right reacted to the collapse of the imperial order by founding the Württem-
berg Burgher Party (Württembergische Bürgerpartei or WBP) at a demonstra-
tion in Stuttgart on 19 December 1918. Here the initial impulse came from
Walter Hirzel and Gustav Beißwänger, the latter a one-time disciple of left-
liberal Friedrich Naumann who hoped that it might be possible to unite the
Württemberg bourgeoisie in all of its social and political diversity into a single
political party. But when Johannes Hieber and the left wing of the Württem-
berg National Liberals merged with the prewar German People’s Party to form
the state chapter of the newly founded German Democratic Party, Beißwänger
and his supporters became increasingly dependent upon the leaders of the
Württemberg branch of the German Conservative Party, who up to this time
had done their best to avoid the political limelight.55 In the meantime, the
Burgher Party had begun to receive important declarations of support from
former National Liberals like Wilhelm Bazille and Gottlob Egelhaaf as well as
from many who had not affiliated themselves with any of Württemberg’s
prewar parties.56 All of this made it possible for the WBP’s founders to portray

53
For further details, see Weber to Weilnböck, 23 Nov. 1918, BA Koblenz, NL Weilnböck,
46b. On the founding of the BVP, see Claudia Friemberger, Sebastian Schlittenbauer und
die Anfänge der Bayerischen Volkspartei (St. Ottilien, 1998), 46 62, 98 102.
54
Report on the meeting of the executive committee of the Bavarian BdL, 21 Dec. 1918, BA
Koblenz, NL Weilnböck, 46b.
55
See Ernst Marquardt, “Kaempfer fuer Deutschlands Zukunft und Ehre. Umrisszeichnun
gen aus der Geschichte der deutschnationalen Volkspartei Württembergs,” unpublished
manuscript from 1934 in the Württembergische Landesbibliothek Stuttgart, 10 14. See
also Hans Peter Müller, “Die Bürgerpartei/Deutschnationale Volkspartei (DNVP) in
Württemberg 1918 1933. Konservative Politik und die Zerstörung der Weimarer Repu
blik,” Zeitschrift für Württembergische Landesgeschichte 61 (2002): 375 433, esp. 376 69,
and Reinhold Weber, Bürgerpartei und Bauernbund in Württemberg. Konservativen
Parteien im Kaiserreich und in der Weimarer Republik (1895 bis 1933) (Düsseldorf,
2004), 121 32.
56
On Bazille, see Hans Peter Müller, “Wilhelm Bazille. Deutschnationaler Politiker, würt
tembergischer Staatspräsident 1874 1934,” Lebensbilder aus Baden Württemberg 21
(2005): 480 517, esp. 486 93.
   , –

the Burgher Party as an entirely new conservative Sammelpartei that sought to

rescue the German nation from the morass in which it currently found itself.57
But whatever concessions the founders of the Burgher Party might have made
to attract National Liberal support were undercut by the fact that in campaign
for the elections to the National Assembly the WBP renewed the DKP’s long-
standing alliance with Theodor Körner alt of the Württemberg Peasants and
Winegrowers’ League (Württembergischer Bauern- und Weingärtnerbund or
WBWB).58 As the Württemberg section of the Agrarian League, the WBWB
had been a bastion of Württemberg conservatism before the war and espoused
an unabashedly antisemitic and antirepublican line that undercut the more
moderate profile the Burgher Party hoped to project.59
The founding of the Bavarian Middle Party and the Württemberg Burgher
Party afforded the DNVP access to new and potentially significant voter
constituencies in regions where the conservative parties had not performed all
that well before the war. Moreover, both BMP and WBP would conclude
electoral alliances with the state affiliates of the newly founded German People’s
Party, which had been so decimated by defections to the left-liberal German
Democratic Party that they lacked the organization to conduct campaigns of
their own.60 In Saxony and Thuringia, on the other hand, the DNVP’s state
organizations were more firmly integrated into the national party from the very
outset. The DKP had been a well-established feature of the Saxon political
landscape long before the outbreak of World War I and relied upon an old
and deeply rooted tradition of political antisemitism to mobilize opposition
against liberal efforts to reform Saxony’s political institutions.61 On 5 December
the leaders of the Saxon DKP endorsed the DNVP and encouraged its members
to support it in the upcoming national and state elections.62 At the same time,

57
Richtlinien für die Politik der Württ. Bürgerpartei (Stuttgart, n.d.), esp. 1 2, 9 14,
reprinted in Jahrbuch der Württ. Bürgerpartei Deutschnationalen Volkspartei Württem
bergs 1921, ed. W. Haller Ludwigsburg (N.p., n.d. [1921]), 18 31.
58
Müller, “Bürgerpartei,” 385 87.
59
For further details, see Hans Peter Müller, “Landwirtschaftliche Interessenvertretung und
völkisch antisemitische Ideologie. Der Bund der Landwirte/Bauernbund in Württemberg
1895 1918,” Zeitschrift für Württembergische Landesgeschichte 53 (1994): 263 300. For
the flavor of the WBWB’s antisemitism, see Theodor Körner alt, ed., Das grune Buch der
Bauernpolitik. Ein politisches Handbuch für Wähler in Stadt und Land (Stuttgart, 1931),
22 23.
60
Wolfgang Hartenstein, Die Anfänge der Deutschen Volkspartei 1918 1920 (Düsseldorf,
1962), 65.
61
On this point, see James Retallack, “Conservatives and Antisemites in Baden and
Saxony,” German History 17 (1999): 507 26. See also Retallack, The German Right,
273 324, as well as his magnum opus Red Saxony: Election Battles and the Spectre of
Democracy in Germany, 1860 1918 (Oxford, 2016), 199 231, 255 68.
62
Unpublished memoirs of Albrecht Philipp, “Mein Weg: Rückschau eines Siebzigjähri
gen auf allerlei Geschenisse und Menschen, Dritte Teil: Abgeordnetenjahre in der
    

the Saxon branch of the Agrarian League, which was in the process of
reconstituting itself as the Saxon Rural League (Sächsischer Landbund or
SLB), decided not to follow the example of its Württemberg counterpart by
forming an independent party of its own but threw its full support behind
the DNVP at both the state and national levels.63 In the neighboring state of
Thuringia, on the other hand, none of the prewar conservative parties were
in a position to assume the initiative, which passed into the hands of local
farm leaders who, in breaking away from the Junker-dominated Agrarian
League, formed an independent agricultural interest organization of their
own, the Thuringian Rural League (Thüringer Landbund or TLB). Though
allied with the DNVP at the national level, the founders of the TLB moved
quickly to transform their organization from a simple lobby for the repre-
sentation of agricultural economic interests into a regional political party
with a diversified social base recruited from precisely those elements that had
come to form the backbone of the DNVP’s electoral constituency in other
parts of the country.64
From the outset, the founders of the German National People’s Party
conceived of their new party as a sociologically and confessionally heteroge-
neous conservative Sammelpartei that sought to explode the ecological bound-
aries of prewar German conservatism.65 In this respect, the DNVP resembled
more the wartime German Fatherland Party than the prewar German Conser-
vative Party. The East-Elbian aristocrats who had dominated the DKP before
the war had been pushed to the background as a new cadre of conservative
leaders recruited in large part from the ranks of the Free Conservatives,
Christian-Socials, and German Fatherland Party came to the fore.66 Nowhere
was the shift in leadership more evident than in the election of Oskar Hergt as
the DNVP’s national chairman at the first meeting of the DNVP executive

Weimarer Republik (1919 1930),” Sächsisches Hauptstaatsarchiv Dresden (hereafter

cited as SHStA Dresden), Nachlass Albrecht Philipp, 5/3 7.
63
See Benjamin Lapp, Revolution from the Right: Politics, Class, and the Rise of Nazism in
Saxony, 1919 1933 (Atlantic Highlands, NJ, 1997), 21 52, esp. 26 27.
64
For further details, see Guido Dressel, Der Thüringer Landbund Agrarischer Berufsver
band als politische Partei in Thüringen 1919 1933 (Weimar, 1998), 12 30, and Jochen
Grass, Studien zur Politik der bürgerlichen Parteien Thüringens in der Weimarer Zeit
1920 1932. Ein Beitrag zur Landesgeschichte (Hamburg, 1997), 120 36, 168 83.
65
For example, see Peter Christian Witt, “Eine Denkschrift Otto Hoetzschs vom 5. Novem
ber 1918,” Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 21 (1973): 337 53.
66
Becker, “Revolution und rechte Sammlung,” 215 20. This was also true in West Ger
many. See Gisbert Jörg Gemein, “Politischer Konservatismus am Rhein und in Westfalen
in der Weimarer Zeit am Beispiel der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei,” in Rheinland
Westfalen im Industriezeitalter. Beiträge zur Landesgeschichte des 19. und 20. Jahrhun
derts, ed. Kurt Düwell and Wolfgang Köllmann, vol. 3: Vom Ende der Weimarer Republik
bis zum Land Nordrhein Westfalen (Wuppertal, 1984), 62 75.
   , –

committee on 9 December 1918.67 A career civil servant who had served as

Prussian Finance Minister in 1917–18, Hergt had not belonged to any of the
prewar conservative parties and was thus not identified with any of the
factions that had come together to found the DNVP. Hergt was thus ideally
suited to promote the DNVP’s image as a comprehensive conservative Sam-
melpartei open to all of those who, regardless of class, confession, or geograph-
ical region, were willing to work together in bringing about the rebirth of the
German phoenix from the ashes of defeat and revolution. At the same time,
however, Hergt was unschooled in the ways of party politics, and it was by no
means clear that he was equal to the task of negotiating the conservative ship
of state through the uncharted waters of mass democracy.68 Whether he and
his supporters would succeed in transforming the DNVP into a genuine
people’s party capable of accommodating itself to the demands of the new
political order was far from certain.

Conflicting Messages
German conservatives entered the campaign for the January 1919 elections to
the National Assembly with enormous liabilities. The widespread disillusion-
ment that had accompanied the military and political collapse of November
1918 left German conservatives at a profound psychological disadvantage in
the period leading up to the elections. Their prospects were particularly
depressing in former conservative strongholds east of the Elbe, where socialist
agitators had already started to organize farm laborers into the German Farm
Workers’ Union (Deutscher Landarbeiterverein or DLV), a union affiliated
with socialist labor,69 while in the cities and towns the conservatives were slow
in mobilizing their supporters for the upcoming elections to the National
Assembly and the various constitutional assemblies that were being convened

67
Meeting of the DNVP executive committee, 19 Dec. 1918, BA Koblenz, NL Traub,
50/96 100. See also the report from Marx to an unidentified recipient, 24 Dec. 1918,
Landesarchiv Nordrhein Westfalen Münster, Archiv des Westfälisch Lippischer
Wirtschaftsverband (hereafter cited as LaNRW Münster), Nachlass Clemens Graf von
Schorlemer Lieser, Bestand C113, Bestand B, vol. 42.
68
On Hergt, see Annelise Thimme, Flucht in den Mythos. Die Deutschnationale Volkspartei
und die Niederlage von 1918 (Göttingen, 1969), 34 45.
69
For an overview, see Jens Flemming, “Landarbeiter zwischen Gewerkschaften und
‘Werkgemeinschaft.’ Zum Verhältnis von Agrarunternehmern und Landarbeiterbewe
gung in der Anfangsphase der Weimarer Republik,” Archiv für Sozialgeschichte 14 (1974):
351 418. On the situation in Pomerania, see Shelley Baranowski, The Sanctity of Rural
Life: Nobility, Protestantism, and Nazism in Weimar Prussia (New York and Oxford,
1995), 40 41, and Daniel Hildebrand, Landbevölkerung und Wahlverhalten. Die DNVP
im ländlichen Raum Pommerns und Ostpreußens 1918 1924 (Hamburg, 2004).
    

Figure 1. Photograph of Oskar Hergt, DNVP party chairman from 1918 to 1924 and
vice chancellor and Reich minister of justice in 1927 28. Reproduced with permission
from the Bundesarchiv Berlin, Bild 183 2009 0316 500

in different German states.70 The leaders of the new conservative party also
found themselves competing for the votes of the German people under
circumstances radically different from those that had existed before the war.
The most important of these differences involved the introduction of universal
suffrage and the elimination of the discriminatory franchises in Prussia and
elsewhere that had allowed Germany’s upper classes to retain political power
in the face of an increasingly determined challenge from below.71 These
changes made it incumbent upon the leaders of the DNVP to broaden their

70
Hans Joachim Bieber, Bürgertum in der Revolution. Bürgerräte und Bürgerstreiks in
Deutschland 1918 1920 (Hamburg, 1992), 71 77. On the disorganization of urban
conservatives in the aftermath of the November Revolution, see the entries for 7 14
Jan. 1919, in Georg Schönath, “Göttinger Tagebuch Oktober 1918 bis März 1919,”
Göttinger Jahrbuch 24 (1976): 171 203, as well as Günter Hollenburg, “Bürgertum und
Revolution in Frankfurt a.M. 1918/19,” Blätter für deutsche Landesgeschichte 115 (1979):
69 120, and Günter Hollenburg, “Die bürgerlichen Schichten zwischen Sammlung und
sozialliberaler Koalition 1918/19,” Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 27 (1979): 392 430.
71
For an overview, see Gerhard A. Ritter, “Kontinuität und Umformung des deutschen
Parteiensystems 1918 1920,” in Entstehung und Wandel der modernen Gesellschaft.
Festschrift für Hans Rosenberg zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. Gerhard A. Ritter (Berlin, 1970),
342 84.
   , –

party’s base of support if they hoped to compete in any sort of meaningful way
for control of the state. In this respect, however, party strategists found
themselves at a severe disadvantage. For not only did the political momentum
rest with those parties that identified themselves with Germany’s fledgling
republican order, but the consolidation of the different conservative party
organizations that had come together to found the DNVP was far from
complete by the time the campaign was under way. This, along with the short
time in which the DNVP had to prepare for the election, severely handicapped
party leaders when it came to articulating their message and mobilizing those
sectors of the German population that were still reeling from the shock of the
lost war and collapse of the old imperial order.
In the campaign for the elections to the National Assembly, DNVP party
strategists went to great lengths to portray their party as an entirely new party
unencumbered by the mistakes of the past and inspired by the dream of
reconciling all of those of genuine national feeling in a new and enduring
conservative synthesis.72 As the thirty-seven-year-old Prussian civil servant
Ulrich von Hassell wrote for the Neue Preußische (Kreuz-)Zeitung in early
January 1919, it was the task of the DNVP to rescue all that was “eternal and
valuable from the past” for the creation of the new. This, Hassell continued,
could take place only on the “basis of a strong national state” that is firmly
anchored in German ethnicity, or Deutschtum, and inspired by a genuine
social and Christian spirit. “Then and only then,” concluded Hassell, “would
the party build the bridges between the old and new and win the generations
of the past and future for its political mission, that is, only if it organizes itself
for the new age as a truly new party.”73 Hassell’s initiative received strong
support from those who wished to put as much distance between themselves
and the prewar DKP. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the “Ziele der
Deutschnationalen Volkspartei,” the only comprehensive programmatic state-
ment the DNVP released in the short time that remained before the January
elections. This statement stressed the party’s commitment “to cooperate on the
basis of any form of government in which law and order prevailed.” Although
the statement categorically rejected a one-sided socialist republic, it did not
preclude cooperation on the basis of the republican form of government as
long as all sectors of society could take part in the decision-making process.
Still, the Nationalists remained committed to monarchism as the system of

72
Ohnezeit, Zwischen “schärfster Opposition,” 159 64. See also Lewis Hertzman, DNVP:
Right Wing Opposition in the Weimar Republic, 1918 1924 (Lincoln, NB, 1963); and Jan
Striesow, DNVP und die Völkisch Radikalen, 44 63.
73
Hassell, “Grundsätzliches zur Deutschnationale Volkspartei,” n.d. [Jan. 1919], BA Berlin,
NL Mumm, 276/7. See also Gregor Schöllgen, “Wurzeln konservativer Opposition. Ulrich
von Hassell und der Übergang vom Kaiserreich zur Weimarer Republik,” Geschichte in
Wissenschaft und Unterricht 38 (1987): 478 89.
    

government that experience had shown to be the best guarantor of public

order and security and that had contributed in no small measure to the
greatness of Prussia and Germany.74 At the same time, the “Ziele der Deutsch-
nationalen Volkspartei” committed the DNVP to the struggle against dicta-
torship and terrorism, the preservation of free enterprise and private property,
and the end of wartime economic controls with special attention devoted to
the threat of socialization in agriculture, the economic plight of the German
middle class, and the right of workers to organize for the improvement of their
social and economic circumstances. In a similar vein, the party committed
itself to help those who had been disabled or who had lost their husbands and
fathers in the Great War.75
All of this was designed to present the DNVP in the most favorable light
possible, that is, as a dynamic and socially comprehensive conservative party
with a social conscience and a genuine concern for the material and moral
welfare of all sectors of German society.76 What the “Ziele,” however, did not
reveal was a darker side to the DNVP’s propaganda that surfaced in other party
publications. For at the same time that the DNVP tried to portray itself as a
positive and progressive conservative party, it also preyed upon the fears of
Bolshevism to which events first in Russia and then closer to home had given
rise.77 Party strategists also evoked the “Stab-in-the-Back Legend” to mobilize
popular sentiment against the political legacy of the November Revolution. The
DNVP blamed the revolution for everything from the undisciplined retreat of
German troops from the front and the Allied seizure of locomotives and rolling
stock to the food shortages and other deprivations at home.78 Moreover, attacks

74
Ziele der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei, Deutschnationale Flugschrift, no. 2 (Berlin, n.d.
[1919]), 4. For a particularly eloquent statement of the DNVP’s ideological profile, see
Friedrich Brunstäd, “Die Weltanschauung der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei,” in Der
nationale Wille. Werden und Wirken der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei 1918 1928, ed.
Max Weiß (Essen, 1928), 54 82.
75
Ibid., 4 8.
76
In a similar vein, see Karl Helfferich, Rede des Herrn Staatsministers Dr. Helfferich
gehalten am 7. Januar 1919 in der Öffentliche Versammlung der Deutschnationalen
Volkspartei in Greifswald (Greifswald, n.d. [1919], esp. 9 14.
77
For example, see “Gegen den Bolschewismus. Die dringendsten Pflichten eines Deutschen,”
n.d. [1918 19], DNVP Werbeblatt, no. 56, Bayerisches Hauptstaatsarchiv, Munich, Abtei
lung V, Flugblattsammlung 60 (hereafter cited as BHStA Munich), Abt. V, F 60.
78
“Das Verdienst der Revolution,” n.d. [1918 19], DNVP Werbeblatt, no. 33, BHStA
Munich, Abt. V, F 60. The DNVP targeted veterans of World War I for this propaganda.
See “Soldaten!,” n.d. [1918 19], DNVP Werbeblatt, no. 20, ibid. On the “Stab in the
Back Legend,” see Friedrich Hiller von Gaertringen, “‘Dolchstoß’ Diskussion und ‘Dolch
stoßlegende’ im Wandel von vier Jahrzehnten,” in Geschichte und Gegenwartsbewußtsein.
Historische Betrachtungen und Untersuchungen. Festschrift für Hans Rothfels zum 70.
Geburtstag, ed. Waldemar Besson and Friedrich Hiller von Gaertringen (Göttingen,
1963), 122 60, and Boris Barth, Dolchstoßlegenden und politische Desintegration. Das
   , –

on the legacy of the November Revolution were frequently laced with strong
doses of antisemitism. The last years of World War I had witnessed a veritable
explosion of antisemitism at all levels of German society, and the racists in the
DNVP were anxious to tap into this sentiment as quickly and effectively as
possible.79 One DNVP leaflet entitled “Wählt keine Judenlisten” could not have
been more explicit about the relationship between the revolutionary upheavals
at the end of 1918 and the influence of international Jewry: “The political
collapse of our Fatherland,” it claimed, “can be traced first and foremost to
the destructive influence and single-minded [zielbewußte] activity of inter-
national Jewry. . . The revolutions are the star of Judas.”80
Such attacks became more frequent as the campaign drew to a climax and
stood in sharp contrast to the conciliatory language of the “Ziele der Deutsch-
nationalen Volkspartei.” Even relative moderates like Friedrich Edler von
Braun who campaigned in Bavaria on the joint ticket shared by the DVP
and DNVP felt compelled to address the Jewish question. While acknowledg-
ing the great service that individual Jews had rendered Germany in the areas of
scholarship, literature and art and carefully dissociating himself from the
agitation of radical antisemites, Braun continued:
The Jewish question is one of the most deeply touching problems of the
current scene, and one can not ignore it in formulating quidelines for policy.
The Jews are a people without a home and destroy every national body in
which they gain a decisive influence, for they are international and cosmo
politan in their disposition and historical development and must therefore
necessarily disrupt the processes of national development. Proof of this can
be seen in their close connection with Social Democracy, whose teachings
come from Marx and Lassalle and is therefore born from the Jewish spirit. So
also was the majority of the leaders of the revolution in Russia and Germany
Jews. Here I do not need to remind you of their names but only point to the
fact that far more than a half of the ministers in the revolutionary govern
ment consisted of Jews . . . It is gainst this overgrowth of the Jewish influence
[Überwuchern des jüdischen Einflusses] in politics, against its domination of
capital and the press, that we must turn and protect ourselves if we are not to
fail in our obligations to our own people. We must protect the German oak
from the being choked by the these usurous weeds [Wucherpflanze] if one
day we do not want to appear decayed and rotten to the core.81

Traume der deutschen Niederlage im Ersten Weltkrieg 1914 1933 (Düsseldorf, 2003), esp.
301 21.
79
Jochmann, “Ausbreitung des Antisemitismus,” 409 510, esp. 412 86.
80
Im Deutschen Reich 25 (1919): 71, cited in Striesow, DNVP und die Völkisch Radikalen,
61. See also Jones, “Conservative Antisemitism,” 79 107.
81
[Friedrich Edler von Braun], Wahlrede des Kandidaten der Bayerischen Mittelpartei
(Deutsch Nationale Volkspartei in Bayern und der Deutschen Volkspartei (Nationallibe
rale Partei) Staatsrat von Braun (Augsburg, n.d. [1918 19], 6.
    

Figure 2. Antisemitic handout for the 1919 elections to the Weimar National
Assembly designed by Otto v. Kursell, January 1919. Reproduced with permission from
the Bundesarchiv Berlin, Plakat 0002 033 052

What this revealed was an almost schizophrenic contradiction in the party’s

self-image that was temporarily obscured by the turmoil of 1918–19 but that
would become increasingly apparent with the passage of time. At the heart
of this contradiction lay the fact that the DNVP embraced two fundamental
and ultimately irreconciliable tendencies, one a governmental conservatism
associated with the likes of Hergt, Westarp, and Karl Helfferich that was
prepared to pursue its objectives within the framework of the existing political
order and the other a radical nationalism that was unconditionally opposed to
Germany’s new republican order and sought nothing less than its total
destruction. The fact that the DNVP’s national headquarters was still in the
process of being established and was therefore unable to exercise much control
over the activities of the party’s regional and local organizations further
compromised its ability to develop a unified and coherent electoral message.
In tayloring their party’s campaign propaganda to local conditions, the
DNVP’s local leaders focused on issues of immediate concern that frequently
diverged from the thrust of the party’s national campaign. The fear of revolu-
tion and rejection of the new republican order was frequently much stronger
at the local and regional levels of the DNVP’s national organization than
   , –

among those who had assumed leadership of the party in Berlin, a fact that
only further undermined the coherence of the DNVP’s campaign for the
1919 elections to the National Assembly and undercut the conciliatory tenor
the party’s national leadership sought to project in programmatic statements
such as the “Ziele der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei.” This was particularly
true in Bavaria and Württemberg, where the DNVP’s regional affiliates were
still nominally independent of the national party and relied much more
heavily than the party’s Berlin leadership upon antisemitism as a way of
mobilizing their electorates.82
One area in which all party leaders were in essential agreement, however,
was the need to mobilize the women’s vote.83 In the last decades of the Second
Empire, women had become increasingly active in a wide range of conserva-
tive and right-wing political organizations, including the Association of Con-
servative Women (Vereinigung Konservativer Frauen or VKF) that had been
founded in 1913 as a women’s auxiliary of the DKP.84 The founding of the
VKF, however, was only one sign of the widespread mobilization of conserva-
tive women in the years before and during the war, a phenomenon that also
included the formation of charitable and confessional organizations like the
Protestant Women’s Aid (Evangelische Frauenhilfe) and German Protestant
Women’s League (Deutsch-Evangelischer Frauenbund), housewives’ organiza-
tions like the National Federation of Agricultural Housewives’ Associations
(Reichsverband landwirtschaftlicher Hausfrauenvereine or RLHV) and its
urban counterpart the Federation of German Housewives’ Associations
(Verband Deutscher Hausfrauenvereine) as well as the emergence of patriotic
associations like the Patriotric Women’s Club (Vaterländischer Frauenverein
or VFV), the Naval League of German Women (Flottenbund Deutscher
Frauen), and the Women’s Club of the German Colonial Society (Frauenbund
der deutschen Kolonialsgesellschaft).85 For most of the women involved in

82
On the decentralized character of the DNVP party organization, see Ohnezeit, Zwischen
“schärfster Opposition,” 47 59. On the relative autonomy of the party affiliates in Bavaria
and Württemberg, see Striesow, DNVP und die Völkisch Radikalen, 213 32, and Müller,
“Burgerpartei,” 380 85.
83
Roger Chickering, “‘Casting Their Gaze More Broadly’: Women’s Patriotic Activism in
Imperial Germany,” Past and Present 118 (1988): 156 85. See also Christiane Streubel,
“Frauen der politischen Rechten in Kaiserreich und Republik. Ein Überblick und For
schungsbericht,” Historical Social Research 28 (2003): 103 66.
84
For further details, see Kirsten Heinsohn, “Im Dienste der deutschen Volksgemeinschaft:
Die ‘Frauenfrage’ und konservative Parteien vor und nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg,” in
Nation, Politik und Geschlect. Frauenbewegungen und Nationalismus in der Moderne, ed.
Ute Planert (Frankfurt a.M. and New York, 2000), 131 46.
85
Streubel, “Frauen der politischen Rechten,” 110 24. See also Andrea Süchting Hänger,
Das “Gewissen der Nation.” Nationales Engagement und politisches Handeln konservativer
Frauenorganisationen 1900 bis 1937 (Düsseldorf, 2002), esp. 19 90. On the RLHV, see
Renate Bridenthal, “Organized Rural Women and the Conservative Mobilization of the
    

Figure 3. DNVP campaign placard designed by an unidentified graphic artist for the
1919 elections to the Weimar National Assembly, January 1919. Reproduced with
permission from the Bundesarchiv Berlin, Plakat 002 004 016
   , –

these organizations, their service in the national cause was seen as an attempt
to advance and legitimate their claims to a more responsible role in shaping
the course of their country’s political future. Their male counterparts, some of
whom were organized in the German League against Women’s Emancipation
(Deutscher Bund gegen die Frauenemanzipation),86 remained deeply suspi-
cious of the increased activism of conservative women in the years before the
outbreak of World War I and were strongly opposed to the more emancipa-
tory impulses that had manifested themselves in the women’s movement. But
the war had intensified the degree of political activism on the part of German
women everywhere and made it impossible for the leaders of Germany’s
conservative establish to ignore their demands for a stronger voice in German
political life.87
For the most part, the founders of the DNVP were ambivalent about the
enfranchisement of women. For although they recognized the role that women
had played in a number of patriotic organizations both before and during the
war, old-line conservatives like Westarp were opposed to the enfranchisement
of women for fear that this would benefit the parties of the moderate and
radical Left.88 But with the enactment of a new electoral law based upon the
principle of proportional representation and the extension of the franchise to
all women over twenty-one years of age, the leaders of the DNVP could no
longer afford to ignore the dramatic changes that this entailed for Germany’s
political landscape. Women had already played an important role in the new
party’s internal deliberations, and on 6 December 1918 the DNVP party
leadership established the National Women’s Committee of the German
National People’s Party (Reichsfrauenausschuß der Deutschnationalen Volks-
partei) as the first step toward the mobilization of the women’s vote for the
upcoming elections to the National Assembly.89 This committee, chaired by

German Countryside in the Weimar Republik,” in Between Reform, Reaction, and Resist
ance: Studies in the History of German Conservatism from 1789 to 1945, ed. Larry Eugene
Jones and James Retallack (Providence, RI, and Oxford, 1993), 375 405, esp. 375 82. On
the VFV, see Andrea Süchting Hänger, “‘Gleichgroße mutige Helferinnen’ in der weib
lichen Gegenwelt: Der Vaterländischer Frauenverein und die Politisierung konservativer
Frauen 1890 1914,” in Nation, Politik und Geschlecht, ed. Ute Planert, 215 33.
86
Ute Planert, Antifeminismus im Kaiserreich. Diskurs, soziale Formation und politische
Mentalität (Göttingen, 1998), 118 51.
87
Süchting Hänger, “Gewissen der Nation,” esp. 90 122.
88
Westarp, Konservative Politik, ed. Hiller von Gaertringen, 114 15. See also Matthew Stibbe,
“Anti Feminism, Nationalism and the German Right, 1914 1920: A Reappraisal,” German
History 20 (2002): 185 210.
89
Annagrete Lehmann, “Ziel und Entwicklung der deutschnationalen Frauenarbeit,” in Der
nationale Wille. Werden und Wirken der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei 1918 1928, ed.
Max Weiß (Essen, 1928), 319 36. See also Süchting Hänger, “Gewissen der Nation,”
127 43, and Raffael Scheck, “German Conservatism and Female Political Activism in
the Early Weimar Republic,” German History 15 (1997): 34 55, as well as Christiane
    

the conservative feminist and social activist Margarete Behm, unleashed a

flurry of activity in the time that still remained before election day, portraying
women as the defender of the nation’s moral virtue and articulating an
essentially conservative view of women and their role in German society.90
At the same time, the DNVP reassured women of its support in the struggle
for their political rights. In its campaign appeal from 22 December the DNVP
not only commended German women for “their admirable accomplishments
during the war” but welcomed them as an “equal partner in the restoration of
our nation” and promised its full support in the struggle for the “full right to
participate in structuring public life.”91

Financing the Campaign

The Nationalist campaign for the Weimar and Prussian constitutional assem-
blies required enormous sums of money. In the ten weeks between the
founding of the party in late November and the convocation of the Weimar
National Assembly in early February 1919 the DNVP’s national headquarters
in Berlin raised nearly 2.4 million marks. Of this amount, 800,000 marks
covered printing costs and other expenses direcly related to the campaign,
while another 500,000 marks were used to subsidize the party’s local and
regional chapters. As a result, the party was left with a balance of approxi-
mately one million marks for the post-election period.92 These funds came
from essentially three sources. In the first place, the DNVP was able to raise an
estimated 300,000 marks from wealthy individuals who contributed three,
four, and occasionally five digit sums.93 This money was supplemented by
sizable contributions from the Central Association of German Conservatives
(Hauptverein der Deutschkonservativen), the executive body of the German
Conservative Party and the trustee of the DKP’s financial assets. The Central

Streubel, Radikale Nationalistinnen. Agitation und Programmatik rechter Frauen in der

Weimarer Republik (Frankfurt and New York, 2006), 107 16, and Kirsten Heinsohn,
Konservative Parteien in Deutschland 1912 bis 1933. Demokratisierung und Partizipation
in geschlechthistorischer Perspektive (Düsseldorf, 2010), 62 82.
90
For example, see Die Frauen und die DNVP, Deutschnationale Flugschrift, no. 4 (Berlin,
n.d. [1918]). See also Julie Sneeringer, Winning Women’s Votes: Propaganda and Politics
in Weimar Germany (Chapel Hill, NC, and London, 2002), 42 51.
91
“Wahlaufruf der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei,” n.d. [22 Dec. 1918], Werbeblatt no. 10,
BHStA Munich, Abt. V, F 60.
92
Detailed information on the DNVP’s finances for 1918 19 are to be found in a volume
entitled “DNVP 1918/19,” NL Westarp, Gärtringen, II/2. See also Ohnezeit, Zwischen
“schärfster Opposition,” 74 83.
93
Westarp to Roesicke, 27 Jan. 1919, BA Berlin, NL Westarp, 39/77. For further details, see
Westarp, Konservative Politik, ed. Hiller von Gaertringen, 29 30. See also Kreth to the
Central Association of German Conservatives, 1 Feb. 1919, appended to Kreth to We
starp, 1 Feb. 1919, BA Berlin, NL Westarp, 37/21.
   , –

Association raised 550,000 marks from its own provincial associations for the
DNVP’s use in the campaign, while another 200,000 marks came from large
landowners who had formerly belonged to the DKP’s delegation in the
Herrenhaus, or upper house of the Prussian legislature.94 But as important
as these contributions may have been in helping to establish the DNVP as a
viable political force in the elections to the Weimar and Prussian constitu-
tional assemblies, by far the greatest share of the party’s funds came from
industrial sources.
Before 1914 Germany’s right-wing parties had received the bulk of their
industrial funding through the auspices of the Commission for the Collection,
Administration, and Allocation of the Industrial Campaign Fund (Kommis-
sion zur Sammlung, Verwaltung und Verwendung des industriellen Wahl-
fonds), a body that had been established in 1909 under the aegis of the Central
Association of German Industrialists (Centralverband der Deutschen Indus-
trieller or CDI) and that had served from the last years of the Second Empire
to the early years of the Weimar Republic as a major conduit of funds from
heavy industry to the parties of the political Right.95 But in October 1917 the
Commission for the Industrial Campaign Fund suspended its collections96 and
was slow to react to the dramatic changes that took place in Germany’s
political system in November 1918.97 It was not until the very end of Novem-
ber 1918 that the Commission for the Industrial Campaign Fund resumed its
collections in preparation for the upcoming elections to the National Assem-
bly and constitutional assemblies in the various German states.98 In the
meantime, Carl Friedrich von Siemens and a group of Berlin industrialists
had stepped into the void that had been created by the inactivity of
the Commission for the Industrial Campaign Fund by establishing the
Curatorium for the Reconstruction of German Economic Life (Curatorium
für den Wiederaufbau des deutschen Wirtschaftslebens). Although Siemens
belonged to the newly founded German Democratic Party, the Curatorium

94
Westarp to Heydebrand, 20 Jan. 1919, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, II/78, also in BA Berlin,
R 8003, 2/20 28.
95
On the Commission for the Industrial Campaign Fund, see “Die industriellen Wahl
fonds,” n.d., appended to a letter from Johannes Flathmann to the administration of the
Gutehoffnungshütte (GHH) in Oberhausen, 7 Mar. 1912, as well as Flathmann’s letter to
the GHH administration, 15 Apr. 1913, in the corporate records of the Gutehoffnungs
hütte, Rheinisch Westfälisches Wirtschaftsarchiv zu Köln, Cologne (hereafter cited as
RWWA Cologne), Abt. 130, Allgemeine Verwaltung der GHH, 300106/117.
96
Flathmann to Reusch, 8 Oct. 1917, RWWA Cologne, Abt. 130, Allgemeine Verwaltung
der GHH, 300106/117.
97
For example, see Flathmann to Friedburg, 18 Nov. 1918, records of the Deutsche
Volkspartei, BA Koblenz, Bestand R 45 II, 1/59 63.
98
Flathmann to Reusch, 28 Nov. 1918, RWWA Cologne, Abt. 130, Allgemeine Verwaltung
der GHH, 300106/117.
    

was an ostensibly nonpartisan organization whose primary purpose was to

prevent a socialist victory in the elections to the Weimar National Assembly
and included industrialists who supported parties other than the DDP.99
The DNVP was represented in the Curatorium by Ernst von Borsig, a
leading figure in the Berlin machine manufacturing industry who had taken
part in the founding of the Commission for the Industrial Campaign Fund in
1909–10 and was now a member of the small circle of Berlin industrialists who
belonged to the Curatorium.100 Not only did Borsig’s firm contribute 120,000
marks to the Curatorium for a special account opened in the name of the
Association of Berlin Metal Industrialists (Verband Berliner Metall-Industriel-
ler),101 but he no doubt had a hand in funneling 500,000 of the more than
3,000,000 marks the Curatorium raised for use in the 1919 elections to the
DNVP just days before the elections took place.102 Borsig’s firm also contrib-
uted another 100,000 marks to the “Efforts at Public Enlightenment” (Volks-
aufklärungs-Bestrebungen) that Jakob Wilhelm Reichert, business manager of
the Association of German Iron and Steel Industrialists (Verein deutscher
Eisen- und Stahlindustrieller or VDESI) and a DNVP candidate for the
National Assembly, had launched in early December 1918.103 Though never
part of the DNVP’s official campaign budget, these funds nevertheless worked
to the party’s benefit in the 1919 campaign for the Weimar National Assembly.
The fact that the DNVP was dependent upon a non-partisan agency like the
Curatorium for the Reconstruction of German Economic Life for such a large
part of its campaign budget did not sit well with all quarters of the party.
Concerned that this might compromise the party’s ability to wage an effective
and uncompromising struggle against Germany’s new republican system,
press magnate and former director of the Krupp Steel Works Alfred
Hugenberg stepped into the breach and began to raise money on his own.

99
Siemens, “Kuratorium für dem Wiederaufbau des deutschen Wirtschaftslebens,” n.d.
[4 Feb. 1919], Siemens Historical Institute, Berlin (hereafter cited as SHI Berlin),
Nachlass Carl Friedrich von Siemens, 4/Lf 646. For further details, see Larry Eugene
Jones, “Carl Friedrich von Siemens and the Industrial Financing of Political Parties in
the Weimar Republic,” in Christian Jansen, Lutz Niethammer, and Bernd Weisbrod,
eds., Von der Aufgabe der Freiheit. Politische Verantwortung und bürgerliche Gesellschaft
im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert. Festschrift für Hans Mommsen zum 5. November 1995
(Berlin, 1995), 231 46, esp. 232 35.
100
On the membership of the Curatorium, see Siemens to Ziegler, 11 June 1919, SHI Berlin,
NL Siemens, 4 Lf/646. On Borsig, see Werner Müller and Jürgen Stockfisch, “Borsig und
die Demokratie,” Beiträge, Dokumente, Informationen des Archivs der Hauptstadt der
Deutschen Demokratischen Republik 4, no. 1 (1967): 1 44.
101
Memorandum, “Betr. Zahlung der Firma für Zweck der Volksaufklärung der Wahlpro
paganda, usw.,” 21 Feb. 1919, Borsig Zentralverwaltung GmbH, Landesarchiv Berlin,
Rep. A 226 (hereafter cited as LA Berlin), 59/29 30.
102
Curatorium to the DNVP, 14 Jan. 1919, SHI Berlin, NL Siemens, 4 Lf/646.
103
Reichert to Borsig, 3 Dec. 1918, LA Berlin, Zentralverwaltung Borsig GmbH, 59/2.
   , –

Like Reichert, Hugenberg was a DNVP candidate for the National Assembly.
He belonged, however, with Traub and Schiele to that contingent of former
liberals who had joined the DNVP on the premise that it represented the best
chance of bringing about the fundamental changes in German political life
they thought essential if Germany was to free itself from the yoke of Social
Democracy.104 Before the war Hugenberg had played an active role in the
founding and organisation of the Pan-German League and stood on the
extreme right wing of the DNVP. Relying heavily upon funding from his
associates in the German coal industry, Hugenberg collected over two million
marks for the DNVP in the first months of the Weimar Republic. 750,000
marks of this amount went directly to the party’s national headquarters in
Berlin in the last weeks before the 1919 elections – with another 250,000 to
follow shortly thereafter – while 500,000 marks went to the party’s regional
organizations in Westphalia and the Rhineland.105 Further assistance would be
forthcoming during the course of the year.

Relief and Disappointment

The DNVP was slow in mobilizing its resources for the campaign for the
National Assembly and found itself at a distinct disadvantage vis-à-vis its
opponents in staking out its claim to the loyalties of the German voter. The
DNVP found itself forced on to the defensive by the military and political
collapse of November 1918 and faced a formidable task in reformulating
conservative ideals and objectives in a language that was palatable to an
electorate that had been radicalized by four years of war and hardship. Nowhere
was this more apparent than in former conservative strongholds east of the Elbe,
where socialist agitators were hard at work organizing local farm laborers into
unions that openly challenged the hegemony of local rural elites. While the
leaders of the Agrarian League tried to counter developments in the countryside
by throwing the full weight of their influence and prestige behind the DNVP,106
the effect this had upon a radicalized rural electorate was minimal. In towns and
cities as well, local conservatives were slower than their political rivals in
responding to the radically different circumstances that had been created by
the collapse of the imperial order and in organizing themselves for the upcom-
ing elections. Still, for all of the challenges that it faced in the campaign for the
elections to the National Assembly, the DNVP succeeded in casting itself as a
dynamic, new conservative party untarnished by the follies of the past, in

104
Hugenberg, “Die Deutschnationalen eine Reformpartei,” in Alfred Hugenberg, Streif
lichter aus Vergangenheit und Gegenwart (Berlin, 1927), 122 30.
105
Correspondence between Hergt and Roesicke, 5 20 Mar. 1919, BA Berlin, Nachlass
Gustav Roesicke, 4a/36 39.
106
Roesicke to Weilnböck, 5 Dec. 1918, BA Koblenz, NL Weilnböck, 46b.
    

establishing at least the beginnings of a new national organization in areas

where conservatives had not been particularly strong before the war, and in
mobilizing extensive financial resources for use in the campaign. Buoyed by the
widespread social and political unrest that existed throughout the country, the
prospects of Germany’s conservative establishment were by no means as bleak
on the eve of the election as they had been in November 1918.
By all accounts, the leaders of the DNVP were both gratified and surprised
by their party’s performance in the elections first to the National Assembly on
19 January 1919 and then to the Prussian constitutional assembly seven days
later. If nothing else, the outcome of the elections fully vindicated the enor-
mous effort the leaders of Germany’s conservative establishment had
expended on behalf of the DNVP. Even if the party emerged from the elections
with only 10.3 percent of the popular vote, this was more than twice the 4.4
percentage share of the popular vote that the German People’s Party, its
principal rival on the German Right, received. This, in turn, entitled the
DNVP to forty-four seats in the constitutional convention that was scheduled
to convene in Weimar at the beginning of February. In the elections to the
Prussian constitutional convention a week later the DNVP fared slightly
better, taking 11.2 percent of the popular vote and winning forty-eight seats.
Victory at the polls, on the other hand, belonged to the two socialist parties,
which received over 45 percent of the popular vote between them. But the fact
that they had failed to achieve an absolute majority meant that the more
moderate of the two working-class parties, in this case the Majority Social
Democratic Party, would have to share power with the Center and German
Democratic Party, which received 19.7 and 18.5 percent of the popular vote
respectively and held a combined total of 166 seats in the newly elected
National Assembly.107 To be sure, a socialist majority in the National Assem-
bly had been averted, but power at Weimar would clearly rest in the hands of
those parties that were committed to establishment of a German republic.
The leaders of the DNVP were no doubt relieved that the socialist parties
had failed to gain an absolute majority in the Weimar National Assembly and
that the establishment of a socialist dictatorship, if this was ever a real
possibility, had been averted. In assessing the outcome of the elections, the
leaders of the DNVP had reason to be both surprised and concerned. One of
the most disturbing aspects of the election was the devastating losses the
DNVP had sustained in former conservative strongholds east of the Elbe
River. For example, in the two East Elbian districts of East Prussia and
Pomerania the DNVP’s share of the popular vote in comparison to that the
two most prominent conservative parties – the DKP and RFKP – had received

107
Jürgen Falter, Thomas Lindenberger, and Siegfried Schumann, Wahlen und Abstimmun
gen in der Weimarer Republik. Materialien zum Wahlverhalten 1919 1933 (Munich,
1986), 67, 101.
   , –

in the 1912 Reichstag elections sank from 38.5 to 11.9 and 45.4 to 23.9 percent
respectively.108 What this reflected was not just the radicalization of the rural
proletariat in eastern Germany but also the success with which the two
socialist parties were able to mobilize the frustration and bitterness of farm
laborers for the campaigns in the elections to the National Assembly.109 At the
same time, however, the DNVP was able to compensate for part of these losses
by a stronger performance in large and middle-sized cities than the prewar
conservative parties. For example, the DNVP was able to increase its share of
the popular vote in cities with more than 100,000 inhabitants from 3.5 to 10.4
percent vis-à-vis what the DKP and RFKP had received in 1912, while in
communities with less than 2,000 inhabitants the DNVP recorded modest
gains over and above what its predecessors had received seven years earlier.110
Perhaps the most startling aspect of the 1919 election results was the fact that
Germany’s newly enfranchised women voters supported the DNVP to a signifi-
cantly higher degree than their male counterparts. Contrary to the expectations
of Westarp and other conservative opponents of women’s suffrage, women
voters did not automatically support the parties that had championed their
enfranchisement but turned out in great number for the DNVP. In those
precincts where election results were broken down by gender, between 55 and
60 percent of the Nationalist vote came from women. Only the Center, where
women constituted approximately 60 percent of the party’s electorate, received
a higher share of its votes from women than the DNVP, whereas the DVP
received slightly more and the DDP slightly less than half of its votes from
women voters. The two socialist parties, on the other hand, fared much more
poorly with anywhere from 35 to 45 percent of its popular vote from women.
Had only men voted in the elections to the National Assembly, the two socialist
parties would almost certainly have received an absolute majority between
them. The enfranchisement of women, the unexpectedly high rate of voter
participation by women voting for the first time, and the clear preference of
women voters for those parties like the Center and DNVP that placed a high
premium upon the defense of traditional religious and moral values all played a
critical role in preventing a socialist majority in the National Assembly.111

108
Ritter, “Kontinuität und Unformung,” 367. On Pomerania, see Bert Becker, “Verwaltung
und höhere Beamtenschaft in Pommern 1918/19,” in Pommern zwischen Zäsur und
Kontinuität 1918, 1933, 1945, 1989, ed. Bert Becker and Kyra T. Inachin (Schwerin,
1999), 39 68, esp. 52 61.
109
Martin Schumacher, Land und Politik. Eine Untersuchung über politische Parteien und
agrarische Interessen 1914 1923 (Düsseldorf, 1978), 189 215, 236 47, 294 316.
110
Ritter, “Kontinuität und Unformung,” 370.
111
The electoral data on women’s voting in the elections to the Weimar National Assembly
is extremely sparse and incomplete. The earliest and still most thorough analysis of
women’s voting behavior in the Weimar Republic is R. Hartwig, “Wie die Frauen im
Deutschen Reich von ihrem Wahlrecht Gebrauch machen,” Allgemeines Statistisches
Archiv 17 (1928): 497 512.
    

The founding of the German National People’s Party and the consolidation of
Germany’s prewar right-wing parties into a single political party represented
an important milestone in the history of German conservatism. Yet while the
founders of the DNVP could take credit for having mobilized women and
urban voters who had not previously voted conservative, they were under-
standably disappointed that their party had not performed better at the polls,
lamenting in particular its unexpectedly poor performance in former conser-
vative strongholds east of the Elbe. While the reconquest of the German
countryside would remain one of the DNVP’s top priorities, party leaders
would also turn their attention to the long-term – and, in many ways, more
daunting – task of anchoring their party as firmly as possible in Germany’s
conservative milieu. This task would not be made any easier by the extremely
high degree of interest articulation that had characterized Germany’s social
and economic development in the decades preceding the outbreak of World
War I. Having survived its baptism at the polls in the January 1919 elections to
the Weimar and Prussian constitutional assemblies, the DNVP possessed
considerable potential for future growth if its leaders could only find the
formula that would allow them to reconcile the divergent and often antagon-
istic interests that constituted the infrastructure of the German Right into a
viable and cohesive political organization.
 2

Infrastructure of the German Right

In addition to the various parties through which German conservatives had

sought to articulate and promote their vested class interests, there existed a
wide array of special-interest organizations that had emerged between the
founding of the Second Empire and its collapse a half century later. In
1876 the leaders of German heavy industry had founded the Central Associ-
ation of German Industrialists in an attempt to combat the economic liberal-
ism of the early Second Empire and to pressure the government into adopting
protective tariffs for iron and steel. It was not until the 1890s, however, that
special-interest organizations began to proliferate with the founding of the
Agrarian League, the League of Industrialists (Bund der Industriellen or BDI),
and the German National Union of Commercial Employees. Efforts to reform
the German tax system in 1907–08 provided further impetus to the emergence
of special-interest organizations and led to the founding of the Hansa-Bund
for Commerce, Trade and Industrie (Hansa-Bund für Gewerbe, Handel und
Industrie) and the German Peasants’ League (Deutscher Bauernbund) under
the leadership of political liberals who sought to break the monopoly of power
held by Germany’s conservative establishment. Conservatives responded to
the challenge that not only this but, more importantly, the rapid growth of
Social Democracy posed to their political hegemony by trying to unite the
more traditional elements of the urban and rural middle classes, first through
the founding of the Imperial German Middle-Class League in 1911 and then
with the creation of the Cartel of Productive Estates (Kartell der schaffenden
Stände) in 1913.1
By the outbreak of World War I, an elaborate network of interrelationships,
or Querverbindungen, had developed between political parties and the newly
emergent economic interest organizations. At no point was this more apparent
than in the campaign for the 1912 Reichstag elections, when industrial,

1
For further details, see Dirk Stegmann, Die Erben Bismarcks. Parteien und Verbände in der
Spätphase des Wilhelminischen Deutschlands. Sammlungspolitik 1897 1918 (Cologne,
1970), as well as Hans Jürgen Puhle, “Parlament, Parteien und Interessenverbände
1890 1914,” in Das kaiserliche Deutschland. Politik und Gesellschaft 1870 1918, ed.
Michael Stürmer (Düsseldorf, 1970), 340 77.


      

agricultural, and middle-class interest organizations entered into alliances with

the various non-socialist parties in an attempt to influence the outcome of the
election. The collapse of November 1918, however, temporarily immobilized
Germany’s conservative elites and severely shook the system of
Querverbindungen they had built up over the course of the previous decade.
The democratization of the political system would present Germany’s conser-
vative elites with a whole range of new problems that required fundamentally
different strategies from those they had pursued before the war. For at the
same time that the introduction of proportional representation greatly
enhanced the significance of those special-interest organizations with a mass
membership base, it also weakened those organizations like the Agrarian
League and Central Association of German Industrialists that functioned as
lobbies for specific sectors of Germany’s economic elite.2 The ability of
Germany’s conservative elites to survive the dramatic changes that had taken
place in their political environment since the end of 1918 would depend in no
small measure upon the success with which they were able to reach across class
lines and enter into accommodations with potential allies in the working,
white-collar, and middle classes.

Industry and Big Business

For the most part, Germany’s industrial leaders proved far more flexible in
adjusting to the far-reaching changes that had taken place in the structure of
German political life than their counterparts in the agrarian sector.3 In
November 1918 Germany’s industrial leadership moved quickly to consolidate
its position in face of the revolutionary upheaval that had taken grip of the
country by entering into a special agreement with the leaders of the socialist
labor unions to form the Central Association of Industrial and Commercial
Employer and Employee Associations (Zentralarbeitsgemeinschaft der indus-
triellen und gewerblichen Arbeitgeber- und Arbeitnehmerverbände or ZAG).4
This represented a radical departure from the alliances that Germany’s indus-
trial leadership had cultivated with the Junkers and the middle class before the

2
See Gerhard Schulz, “Räte, Wirtschaftsstände und Verbandswesen am Anfang der Wei
marer Republik,” in Gesellschaft, Parlament und Regierung. Zur Geschichte des Parlamen
tarismus in Deutschland, ed. Gerhard A. Ritter (Düsseldorf, 1974), 355 66.
3
For an overview, see Eduard Hamm, “Die wirtschaftspolitische Interessenvertretung,” in
Volk und Reich der Deutschen. Vorlesungen gehalten in der Deutschen Vereinigung für
Staatswissenschaftliche Fortbildung, ed. Bernhard Harms, 3 vols. (Berlin, 1929), 2:426 59.
4
Gerald D. Feldman, “German Business Between War and Revolution: The Origins of the
Stinnes Legien Agreement,” in Entstehung und Wandel der modernen Gesellschaft. Fest
schrift für Hans Rosenberg zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. Gerhard A. Ritter (Berlin, 1970),
312 41.
   , –

war and involved tacit recognition of the role that organized labor was going to
play in shaping Germany’s political future. What industry hoped to gain from
this arrangement, as the DNVP’s Jakob Wilhelm Reichert explained to a group
of businessmen from the Rhineland and Westphalia on 30 December 1918,
was not merely a way of circumventing economic experimentation and
increased regulation by the new democratic state but also a means of increas-
ing its influence upon the legislative process by establishing a common front
with organized labor.5 A month later the German business community took a
further step toward this end when the Central Association of German Indus-
trialists merged with the League of Industrialists to found the National Feder-
ation of German Industry (Reichsverband der Deutschen Industrie or RDI).
The official founding of the new organization took place at a special demon-
stration in Berlin on 12 April 1919, where Kurt Sorge, a Berlin industrialist
with close ties to Ruhr heavy industry and a member of the German People’s
Party, was elected as its national president.6
Ironically, the reorganization of German economic life on the basis of an
alliance between industry and labor represented a triumph for the more
conservative elements of the German industrial community and helped secure
the predominance of German big business over smaller and less highly
concentrated industrial enterprises.7 The conservative triumph was further
reflected not only in the election of Sorge as president of the RDI,8 but
also in the preferential treatment that representatives of heavy industry
received in the selection of personnel for the RDI executive committee and
presidium and in the exclusion of the DVP’s Gustav Stresemann, one of
Germany’s most prominent liberals, from a position in the RDI leadership.9
Conservative business interests also controlled the Federation of German

5
Jakob Wilhelm Reichert, Entstehung, Bedeutung und Ziel der “Arbeitsgemeinschaft.” Vor
trag, gehalten vor der Vereinigung der Handelskammern des rheinisch westfälischen Indus
triebezirks zu Essen Ruhr am 30. Dezember 1918 (Berlin, 1919), 8 9, 11 12.
6
Bericht über die Gründungsversammlung des Reichsverbandes der deutschen Industrie
Berlin, den 12. April 1919, Veröffentlichungen des Reichsverbandes der deutschen Indus
trie, no. 1 (Berlin, 1919). For further details, see Stephanie Wolff Röhe, Der Reichsverband
der Deutschen Industrie 1919 1924/25 (Frankfurt a.M., 2001), 47 73.
7
Feldman, “German Business between War and Revolution,” 340.
8
For Sorge’s political orientation, see his letter to Hugenberg, 19 May 1919, BA Koblenz,
Nachlass Alfred Hugenberg, 27/165 70.
9
See Stresemann to the League of Industrialists, 30 and 31 Mar. 1919, Politisches Archiv des
Auswärtigen Amts, Berlin (hereafter cited as PA AA Berlin), NL Gustav Stresemann, 114/
122926 27, 122937 42. See also Friedrich Zunkel, “Die Gewichtung der Industriegruppen
bei der Etabilierung des Reichsverbandes der Deutschen Industrie,” in Industrielles System
und politische Entwicklung in der Weimarer Republik. Verhandlungen des Internationalen
Symposiums in Bochum vom 12. 17. Juni 1973, ed. Hans Mommsen, Dietmar Petzina, and
Bernd Weisbrod (Düsseldorf, 1974), 637 47.
      

Employer Associations (Vereinigung der Deutschen Arbeitgeberverbände or

VDA), which had been founded in 1913 to provide the entire industrial
community with a single voice in matters of social and economic policy. After
the November Revolution, the VDA became almost totally subordinate to the
RDI and heartily endorsed the alliance that industry had concluded with
organized labor under the auspices of the Zentralarbeitsgemeinschaft.10 Even
if the German Chamber of Commerce and Industry (Deutscher Industrie- und
Handelstag or DIHT) remained under liberal influence,11 conservative busi-
ness interests still controlled two of the three Spitzenverbände, or peak associ-
ations, that represented the German business community on a national basis.
The same interests also exercised a controlling voice over the policies of
influential regional lobbies such as the Association for the Protection of the
Common Economic Interests in the Rhineland and Westphalia (Verein zur
Wahrung der gemeinsamen wirtschaftlichen Interessen in den Rheinland und
Westfalen), an organization more commonly known as the Langnamverein.12
All of these organizations espoused a policy of complete neutrality with
respect to the various parties that dotted Weimar’s political landscape. Über-
parteilichkeit, or non-partisanship, quickly became a favorite slogan of con-
servative economic interests in the Weimar Republic and underscored their
general estrangement from the existing party system and their lack of com-
mitment to the parliamentary form of government that Germany had
inherited from the November Revolution.13 This, however, did not prevent
them from extending financial assistance to the very parties that they treated
with such disdain. Economic self-interest made it imperative for them to
support the parties that were preparing to wage the struggle in parliament
against Social Democratic demands for the socialization of German industry.14
Although the RDI established an industrial fund of its own and began to solicit

10
Ernst von Borsig, Industrie und Sozialpolitik. Das sozialpolitische Programm der Vereini
gung der Deutschen Arbeitgeberverbände, Schriften der Vereinigung der Deutschen
Arbeitgeberverbände, no. 4. (Berlin, n.d. [1924]), 7 12.
11
On the DIHT, see Wolfgang Hardtwig, Freiheitliches Bürgertum in Deutschland. Der
Weimarer Demokrat Eduard Hamm zwischen Kaiserreich und Widerstand (Stuttgart,
2018), 202 34.
12
On the Langnamverein, see Bernd Weisbrod, Schwerindustrie in der Weimarer Republik.
Interessenpolitik zwischen Stabilisierung und Krise (Wuppertal, 1978), 169 86.
13
Fritz Blaich, “Staatsverständnis und politische Haltung der deutschen Unternehmer
1918 1930,” in Die Weimarer Republik 1918 1933. Politik Wirtschaft Gesellschaft,
ed. Karl Dietrich Bracher, Manfred Funke, and Hans Adolf Jacobsen (Bonn, 1987),
158 78.
14
For an overview of this process, see Theodor Eschenburg, Probleme der modernen
Parteifinanzierung, Tübinger Universitätsreden, 13 (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul
Siebeck), 1961), esp. 5 12.
   , –

donations for the struggle against Social Democracy at the beginning of

1922,15 its organizational statutes barred it from making direct contributions
to political parties. To circumvent this restriction, Germany’s industrial elite
bypassed the RDI to work through what political scientists have labeled
“multi-party conveyor organizations.”16 The oldest of these conduits was the
Commission for the Collection, Administration, and Allocation of the Indus-
trial Campaign Fund. Founded in 1909 under the auspices of the Central
Association of German Industrialists,17 the Commission for the Industrial
Campaign Fund was dominated by conservative industrialists who were deter-
mined to resist the forces of democratic change that had surfaced with such
threatening potential in the last years before the outbreak of the war.18 The
driving force behind the Commission was its general secretary, Johannes
Flathmann, a former National Liberal who joined the DVP immediately after
its founding in the winter of 1918 and who adamantly opposed the creation of
a united liberal party through a merger with the DDP.19 Temporarily immo-
bilized by the turmoil that had accompanied the collapse of the Second
Empire, the Commission was not sufficiently organized to play a significant
role in the elections to the National Assembly. By the spring of 1919, however,
it had begun to recover from the lethargy that had gripped it at the height of
the November Revolution and was in the process of using funds that Ruhr
heavy industry had placed at its disposal to influence the two parties that stood
furthest to the Right, the DVP and DNVP.20 Here the immediate goal was to
bring about closer political and organizational ties between the two right-wing
parties in hopes that together they might be able to thwart Social Democratic

15
See Schweighoffer and Herle to Silverberg, 7 Jan. 1922, BA Koblenz, Nachlass Paul
Silverberg, 238/6, and Bücher to Silverberg, 16 Jan. 1922, ibid., 238/8, as well as the RDI’s
appeal for the creation of an industrial fund, n.d., ibid., 238/2 4.
16
Arnold J. Heidenheimer and Frank C. Langdon, Business Associations and the Financing
of Political Parties: A Comparative Study of the Evolution of Practices in Germany,
Norway, and Japan (The Hague, 1968), 9 13. The section on Germany is badly flawed
and factually inaccurate.
17
Circular from the Commission for the Collection, Administration, and Allocation of the
Industrial Campaign Fund to the members of the Central Association of German
Industrialists, 14 Jan. 1910, SHI Berlin, NL Siemens, 4/Lf 646.
18
In this respect, see “Der industrielle Wahlfonds,” n.d., appended to Meyer and Flathmann
to the GHH, 7 Mar. 1912, as well as a second letter from Meyer and Flathmann to the
GHH, 15 Apr. 1913, both in RWWA Cologne, Abt. 130, Allgemeine Verwaltung der
GHH, 300106/117.
19
Flathmann to Friedberg, 18 Nov. 1918, BA Koblenz, R 45 II, 301/59 63.
20
See Flathmann to Stresemann, 21 Mar. 1919, PA AA Berlin, NL Stresemann, 206/
137704 07, as well as the circular from the Commission for the Industrial Campaign
Fund, Sept. 1919, RWWA Cologne, Abt. 130, Allgemeine Verwaltung der GHH, 300106/
117.
      

schemes for a reorganization of the German economy along lines inimical to

the best interests of big business.21
The second of the three conduits upon which German industry relied to
finance the parties of its choice was of more recent vintage. Founded in
December 1918 on the initiative of Berlin industrialist Carl Friedrich von
Siemens,22 the Curatorium for the Reconstruction of German Economic Life
was created for the immediate purpose of preventing the socialist parties from
gaining an absolute majority in the elections to the Weimar National Assem-
bly.23 Behind this more immediate concern lay a long-range strategic object-
ive, namely, that of filling the void that had been left by the immobilization of
the Commission for the Collection, Administration, and Allocation of the
Industrial Campaign Fund.24 Siemens and his associates were particularly
interested in the newly created German Democratic Party because, of all of
Germany’s nonsocialist parties, it offered the best prospect of developing into
a bourgeois Sammelpartei capable of stemming the tide of social and political
radicalism that was sweeping the country. Not only did Siemens himself join
the DDP, but the Curatorium donated more than a million marks to DDP for
use in the January 1919 elections to the National Assembly, while the DVP
and DNVP each received 500,000 marks.25 The Center also approached the
Curatorium for assistance in its campaign for the National Assembly but was
rebuffed.26
Originally Siemens and the founders of the Curatorium for the Reconstruc-
tion of German Economic Life hoped for an accommodation with the Com-
mission for the Industrial Campaign Fund that would further rationalize the
process by which industry financed those parties that were favorably disposed

21
See Vögler to Hugenberg, 31 Oct. and 8 Dec. 1919, BA Koblenz, NL Hugenberg, 29/
402 04, and 49/36 38, as well as Vögler to Stresemann, 9 Feb. 1920, PA AA Berlin, NL
Stresemann, 220/140114 16.
22
Text of Siemens’s speech in the Berlin Chamber of Commerce (Berliner Handelskam
mer), 4 Feb. 1919, SHI Berlin, NL Siemens, 4/Lf 646. See also Larry Eugene Jones, “Carl
Friedrich von Siemens and the Industrial Financing of Political Parties in the Weimar
Republic,” in Von der Aufgabe der Freiheit. Politische Verantwortung und bürgerliche
Gesellschaft im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert. Festschrift für Hans Mommsen zum 5. November
1995, ed. Christian Jansen, Lutz Niethammer, and Bernd Weisbrod (Berlin, 1995),
231 46.
23
Siemens to Ziegler, 11 June 1919, SHI Berlin, NL Siemens, 4/Lf 646.
24
Speech by before the Berlin Chamber of Commerce, 4 Feb. 1919, SHI Berlin, NL Siemens,
4/Lf 646.
25
See the breakdown of the Curatorium’s disbursements for the elections to the National
Assembly, n.d., SHI Berlin, NL Siemens, 4/Lf 646. See also Siemens to Deutsch, 2
Jan. 1919; Leidig (DVP) to Siemens, 5 Jan. 1919; and the Curatorium to the DNVP, 14
Jan. 1919, ibid.
26
Pfeiffer to Siemens, 17 Jan. 1919, SHI Berlin, NL Siemens, 4/Lf 646.
   , –

to the interests of German big business.27 Negotiations between the Curator-

ium and the Commission, however, broke down in the late spring of 1919,28
with the result that the Curatorium confined its solicitations to Berlin while
the Commission concentrated its efforts in the Rhineland and Westphalia. The
obstacle here was the reluctance of the conservatives who were in control of
the Commission for the Industrial Campaign Fund to share responsibility for
the disbursement of funds with the more liberal elements around Siemens.29
The way in which Ruhr heavy industry tried to monopolize control over the
use of industrial campaign funds was hardly acceptable to the leaders of the
German chemical industry, who in December 1922 established a special
commission of their own under the nominal chairmanship of DVP Reichstag
deputy Wilhelm Ferdinand Kalle.30 The creation of the “Kalle Committee,” as
this commission was unofficially known, was motivated in large part by the
determination of Carl Duisberg and the leaders of the chemical industry to
counter the growing influence that Ruhr heavy industry the more conservative
elements of the German industrial community seemed to be gaining over the
various bourgeois parties.31 The “Kalle Commmittee” differed from the Com-
mission for the Industrial Campaign Fund and the Curatorium for the Recon-
struction of German Economic Life in that it did not limit its support to
campaign contributions but made annual donations to the DDP, DVP, and
Center that, when translated into their post-inflationary equivalents, ranged
from 100,000 to 200,000 marks apiece.32
In the period immediately following the end of World War I, the primary
objective behind the industrial financing of political parties had been to
prevent the socialists from gaining an absolute majority in the elections to
the National Assembly.33 Once the revolutionary threat had abated, however,

27
Proposal for a merger of the two organizations that was approved at a meeting of the
Curatorium, 9 May 1919, SHI Berlin, NL Siemens, 4/Lf 646.
28
Minutes of a joint meeting of the Curatorium and the Commission for the Industrial
Campaign Fund, 15 May 1919, SHI Berlin, NL Siemens, 4/Lf 646.
29
Remarks by Flathmann at the meeting cited in the previous note, as well as Vögler to
Hugenberg, 27 Oct. and 8 Dec. 1919, BA Koblenz, NL Hugenberg, 49/36 42.
30
Duisberg to Wolff, 29 Jan. 1923, Unternehmensarchiv Bayer AG, Leverkusen (hereafter
cited as Bayer AG Leverkusen), Autographen Sammlung Duisberg. On the composition
of the “Kalle Committee,” see Paul Moldenhauer, “Politische Erinnerungen,” BA
Koblenz, Nachlass Paul Moldenhauer, 1/136. See also Peter Hayes, Industry and Ideology:
IG Farben in the Nazi Era (Cambridge, 1987), 48 52.
31
For Duisberg’s antipathy towards Ruhr heavy industry, see his letter to Weinberg, 24
Sept. 1923, Bayer AG Leverkusen, Vorkakten der IG Farben, 4B/20.
32
On the disbursement patterns of the “Kalle Committee,” see the depositions from Pfeiffer
and Kalle, 8 Sept. 1947, Stadtarchiv Nürnberg, Bestand KV Prozesse, Fall 6, Nr. X 3.
33
For example, see Meyer and Flathmann to Reusch, 28 Nov. 1918, RWWA Cologne,
Abt. 130, Allgemeine Verwaltung der GHH, 300106/117. See also Kalle to Duisberg, 1
Oct. 1924, Bayer AG Leverkusen, Vorakten der IG Farben, 4B/20.
      

industry adopted a more aggressive strategy by trying to use its financial

leverage to secure the election of deputies who were favorably disposed to
industrial interests and could influence the policies of their respective parties
in industry’s favor.34 Although this strategy succeeded in bringing men like
Siemens and the DVP’s Hugo Stinnes into the Reichstag,35 it did not neces-
sarily mean that the parties to which they belonged had become pawns of the
German industrial establishment. If anything, Germany’s industrial leadership
remained disgruntled over their lack of leverage over the policies of the
different bourgeois parties. In the meantime, the German big business became
increasingly divided between those industrialists like Siemens, Duisberg, and
Kalle who sought to pursue their objectives within the framework of the
existing political system and those like the DNVP’s Alfred Hugenberg who
remained irreconcilably opposed to the new political order and sought to
subvert it in any way possible. Coupled with Flathmann’s deteriorating health,
this split immobilized the Commission for the Industrial Campaign Fund
during the runaway inflation of the early 1920s and led to its eclipse as an
effective broker of industrial influence. Hugenberg and his associates were
quick to take advantage of this situation by establishing what amounted to a
virtual monopoly over the collection and disbursement of funds for the right-
wing DNVP.36 Although the Curatorium for the Reconstruction of German
Economic Life and the “Kalle Committee” continued to support the more
moderate bourgeois parties after the stabilization of the mark in the winter of
1923–24, the demise of the Commission for the Collection, Administration,
and Allocation of the Industrial Campaign Fund only strengthened Hugen-
berg’s position as the self-appointed spokesman for the more conservative
elements of the Ruhr industrial establishment.

Agriculture
Although the November Revolution had led to far-reaching changes in the
organization and representation of German industrial interests, these changes
did little to dislodge the more conservative elements of the German industrial
community from the citadels of power and influence they had occupied before
the war. If anything, the creation of the Zentralarbeitsgemeinschaft and the

34
Siemens to Fischer, 7 Nov. 1919, SHI Berlin, NL Siemens, 4/Lf 646.
35
See Siemens to the chairman of the DDP, Bezirksverband Berlin, 9 Dec. 1919, SHI Berlin,
NL Siemens, 4/Lf 555, as well as Flathmann to Stinnes, 19 Apr. 1920, Archiv für
Christlich Demokratische Politik (hereafter cited as ACDP Sankt Augustin), Nachlass
Hugo Stinnes, I 220/002/4.
36
Hugenberg and Reichert, “An die industriellen Freunde der Deutschnationalen Volks
partei,” Oct. 1924, Landesarchiv Berlin (hereafter cited as LA Berlin), Zentralverwaltung
Borsig GmbH, 7/77.
   , –

founding of the National Federation of German Industry had only helped

industrial conservatives consolidate their position first vis-à-vis organized
labor and secondly with respect to the less highly concentrated elements of
the German business community. The recovery of Germany’s conservative
elites from the revolutionary upheaval of 1918–19 could also be seen in the
case of German agriculture. The position of Germany’s rural conservatives had
been severely weakened by the war and above all by the radicalizing effects of
wartime economic controls upon small and middle-sized peasant producers.
To be sure, agrarian conservatives in the Weimar Republic were never as
influential or as powerful as they had been before the war. Nor did they
possess the agility or financial resources of their counterparts in the German
industrial community. Still, the wave of agrarian radicalism that swept the
countryside in the aftermath of World War I caught them off-guard and
forced them onto the defensive. Without the agility or financial resources of
their counterparts in the German industrial community, it was unclear
whether Germany’s agricultural elites would be able to regain control of the
countryside and reclaim their role as the dominant voice in the German
agricultural community.37
Before the war the bastion of conservative influence in the countryside had
been the Agrarian League, an organization established in 1893 by East Elbian
landowners with close ties to the prewar German Conservative Party in an
attempt to protect their vital interests as grain producers against the trade
policies of the new chancellor Leo von Caprivi.38 By no means, however, was
the Agrarian League the only organization that claimed to represent the interests
of German agriculture. In the first decade of the twentieth century, the predom-
inance of the Agrarian League within the German agricultural community was
directly challenged, first by the establishment of the Association of German
Peasant Unions (Vereinigung der deutschen Bauernvereine or VdB) in
1900 and then with the founding of the German Peasants’ League under liberal
leadership in 1909. Both of these organizations were founded by farm leaders
who deeply resented the way in which the Agrarian League’s demands for high
agricultural tariffs had sacrificed the interests of small and middle-sized peasants

37
For an overview, see Jens Flemming, Landwirtschaftliche Interessen und Demokratie.
Ländliche Gesellschaft, Agrarverbände und Staat 1890 1925 (Bonn, 1978), 161 251.
38
Hans Jürgen Puhle, Agrarische Interessenpolitik und preußischer Konservatismus im
wilhelminischen Reich. Ein Beitrag zur Analyse des Nationalismus in Deutschland am
Beispiel des Bundes der Landwirte und der Deutsch Konservativen Partei (Hanover, 1966),
23 36. See also Shelley Baranowski, “Continuity and Contingency: Agrarian Elites,
Conservative Institutions, and East Elbia in Modern German History,” Social History
12 (1987): 285 308.
      

to those of large landed agriculture.39 The economic deprivation of World War

I and in particular governmental controls over agricultural prices and produc-
tion did much to radicalize small and middle-sized peasants throughout the
country and severely strained their loyalties to the political system of which the
East Elbian Junkers were such a conspicuous part. When the war finally ended
in November 1918, no element of German society, with the exception of the
industrial working class, was as profoundly alienated from the old imperial
regime as the German peasantry.40 And nowhere was this disaffection more
apparent than in Bavaria, where the leaders of the 25,000-member Bavarian
Peasants’ League (Bayerischer Bauernbund or BBB) not only participated in the
overthrow of the Wittelsbach dynasty but actively supported the provisional
government that assumed office in early November 1918 under the leadership of
Independent Socialist Kurt Eisner.41
The radicalization of Germany’s rural population held immediate and far-
reaching implications for the social and political hegemony of Germany’s
conservative rural elites. At the very least, the introduction of a democratic
franchise throughout the Reich – and particularly the abolition of the three-
class franchise in Prussia – meant that German conservatives were now far
more dependent upon the support of the rural voter than they had been even
before the outbreak of World War I. In an attempt to head off the collapse of
the badly compromised and increasingly defunct Agrarian League, rural
conservatives took it upon themselves to create a series of regional agrarian
leagues, or Landbünde, in Brandenburg, Pomerania, and other parts of the
country in what was generally portrayed as a spontaneous rebellion on the part
of Germany’s rural population.42 In the spring of 1919 Germany’s rural
conservatives then tried to bring this development under their control by

39
Ibid., 144 47. On the German Peasants’ League, see Karl Böhme, Der Bauernstand in
Freiheit und Knechtschaft (Berlin, 1924), 89 97. For further details, see George S. Vascik,
“The German Peasant League and the Limits of Rural Liberalism in Wilhelmine
Germany,” Central European History 24 (1991): 147 75.
40
Robert G. Moeller, “Dimensions of Social Conflict in the Great War: The View from the
Countryside,” Central European History 14 (1981): 142 68.
41
On the BBB’s involvement in the Bavarian revolution, see Der Bayerische Bauernbund im
Jahre 1919, Flugschriften des Bayerischen Bauernbundes, no. 1 (Munich, n.d. [1920]),
1 5, as well as Georg Eisenberger, Mein Leben für die Baueren. Erinnerungen eines
Bauernführers, with an introduction and edited by Johann Kirchinger (Munich, 2013),
esp. 116 19. For further details, see Heinz Haushofer, “Der Bayerische Bauernbund
(1893 1933),” in Europäische Bauernparteien im 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Heinz Gollwitzer
(Stuttgart and New York, 1977), 562 86.
42
Memorandum from Levetzow to the BdL’s provincial, state, and district chairmen, 28
Feb. 1919, BA Koblenz, NL Weilnböck, 20b. For further details, see Heinrich Muth, “Die
Entstehung der Bauern und Landarbeiterräte im November 1918 und die Politik des
Bundes der Landwirte,” Vierteljahreshefte für Zeitgeschichte 21 (1973): 1 58.
   , –

creating the Coalition of German Agriculture (Arbeitsgemeinschaft der

deutschen Landwirtschaft) as an umbrella organization that claimed to repre-
sent the collective interests of the entire agricultural estate.43 Although the
founders of the new organization were prepared to make concessions to small
and middle-sized farmers in an effort to secure their cooperation, the fact that
only the Junker-dominated Agrarian League agreed to join the coalition – both
the Christian peasant unions and the German Peasants’ League declined to do
so – revealed the lack of any genuine consensus within the German agricul-
tural community.44 That being the case, the founders of the Coalition of
German Agriculture decided to recast their organization as the German Rural
League (Deutscher Landbund or DLB), in which the various provincial agrar-
ian organizations that had surfaced since the end of the war would be invited
to participate on the basis of regional autonomy.45
The German Rural League was much more decentralized in its underlying
organizational structure than the prewar Agrarian League and afforded
regional farm organizations such as the Brandenburg Rural League
(Brandenburgischer Landbund or BrLB) much greater autonomy in the con-
duct of their own affairs than the BdL’s regional chapters had enjoyed before
the war.46 The DLB’s objectives were two-fold: firstly, to enhance the repre-
sentation of agricultural economic interests at all levels of the governmental
process and, secondly, to cultivate a greater occupational awareness through-
out the German agricultural community. With respect to the first of these
objectives, the DLB refused to identify itself with any of the existing political
parties in favor of a policy of complete non-partisanship or Überparteilichkeit
that enabled it to pursue its goals in concert with any party that might serve its
purpose.47 By the end of 1919 the DLB claimed nearly half a million registered
members with over 150 individual chapters and regional affiliates in Branden-
burg, Brunswick, Lower Saxony, Mecklenburg, Pomerania, Silesia, and Thur-
ingia.48 In the meantime, the leaders of the German Rural League had entered

43
Protocol of the founding of the Coalition of German Agriculture, 14 Apr. 1919, BA
Koblenz, NL Weilnböck, 20b. See also the coalition’s statutes and guidelines, or Richtli
nien, as well as its appeal “Landwirte, schließt Euch zusammen!,” n.d., ibid.
44
For the position of the Christian peasant unions, see August Crone Münzebrock, ed., Die
Organisation des deutschen Bauernstandes (Berlin, n.d. [1920]), 44 47. For a general
overview, see Klaus Müller, “Agrarische Interesenverbände in der Weimarer Republik,”
Rheinische Vierteljahresblätter 38 (1974): 386 405.
45
For the official version of these developments, see Deutscher Landbund, ed., Der Land
bundgedanke. Zur Organisation des deutschen Landvolkes (Berlin, n.d. [1919]), 4 11. See
also Flemming, Landwirtschaftliche Interessen, 169 97.
46
Rainer Pomp, Bauern und Grossgrundbesitzer auf ihrem Weg ins Dritte Reich. Der
Brandenburgische Landbund 1918 1933 (Berlin, 2011), 35 59.
47
DLB, Landbundgedanke, 11 13, 31 32.
48
Ibid., 7.
      

into negotiations with the prewar Agrarian League as the first step towards the
creation of a single organization capable of representing the corporate interests
of the entire agricultural community. For Gustav Roesicke and the leaders of
the BdL, the imperative behind the negotiations was the need to provide
agricultural interests – and particularly those of large landed agriculture –
with the most effective parliamentary representation possible.49 Negotiations
between the two organizations were anything but easy and often took place in
the face of a peasant animus toward large landed agriculture so strong it
threatened the negotiations with collapse.50 In the final analysis, however,
the logic of interest politics prevailed, and on 1 January 1921 the German
Rural League and Agrarian League formally merged their organizations to
found the National Rural League (Reichs-Landbund or RLB).51
The National Rural League differed from the prewar Agrarian League in
three important respects. In the first place, the negotiators for the DLB had
succeeded in persuading the leaders of the BdL to adopt a far more decentral-
ized organizational structure for the RLB than they had originally been
prepared to accept, with the result that the RLB’s regional affiliates enjoyed
much greater autonomy than had ever been the case within the BdL. Secondly,
the RLB sought to achieve a greater degree of parity between large landed
agriculture and small and middle-sized family farmers than had ever existed in
the Junker-dominated Agrarian League. The desire to present at least the
appearance of such parity was reflected in the fact that Karl Hepp, a farm
activist from Hesse-Nassau and an outspoken advocate of small and middle-
sized agricultural interests, was elected along with the BdL’s Gustav Roesicke
as one of the RLB’s two presidents at its first national congress in March
1921.52 And thirdly, the RLB adopted at the DLB’s insistence a policy of
complete neutrality with respect to the existing political parties.53 This policy
represented a dramatic departure from the close alliance that the BdL had
established first with the German Conservative Party before the war and then

49
Roesicke’s remarks at a meeting of the DLB executive committee, 16 Dec. 1919, records of
the Reichs Landbund, BA Berlin, Bestand R 8034 I, 1/242 43.
50
Report for Roesicke on the negotiations in Stettin, Nov. 15, 1920, BA Berlin, R 8034 I, 1/
41 43.
51
On the negotiations between the BdL and DLB, see the protocol of the critical meetings
between the leadership of the two organizations on 10 August and 4 October 1920, BA
Berlin, R 8034 I, 1/280 91, as well as Paul Boetticher, Der Bund der Landwirte 1918 1920.
Ein Schlußkapitel (Berlin, 1925), 51 60. See also Flemming, Landwirtschaftliche Inte
ressen, 229 51, and Stephanie Merkenich, Grüne Front gegen Weimar. Reichs Landbund
und agrarische Lobbyismus 1918 1933 (Düsseldorf, 1998), 57 72.
52
Reichs Landbund. Agrarpolitische Wochenschrift 1, no. 5 (12 Mar. 1921): 69.
53
See point eight in Programm und Leitsätze des Reichs Landbundes (Beschlossen von der
Vertreterversammlung des Reichs Landbundes am 10. November 1921) (Berlin, n.d.,
[1921]), 8.
   , –

with the newly founded DNVP after the November Revolution. This too was
reflected in the election of Hepp, who unlike most of the RLB’s national
leadership belonged not to the DNVP, but to the liberal German People’s
Party.54 Still, the question as to whether or not all of this was merely a fig leaf
designed to conceal the continued dominance of Germany’s conservative rural
elites in the articulation and representation of agricultural economic interests
remained essentially unanswered. In Bavaria and Württemberg, for example,
the RLB’s state affiliates – in this case, the Bavarian Rural League (Bayerischer
Landbund or BLB) and the Württemberg Peasants and Wine Growers’ League
(Württembergischer Bauern- und Weingärtner Bund or WBWB) – remained
in the hands of virtually the same men who had directed the affairs of local
Agrarian League chapters before the war.55
Over the course of the next several years, the National Rural League
developed into one of the most influential economic interest organizations
in all of Germany. In terms of its basic ideological orientation, the RLB was
militantly anti-socialist and categorically rejected the accomplishments of the
November Revolution as a betrayal of the German peasant. The real key to the
RLB’s success, however, lay not so much in its ideology as in its relentless
campaign against the controlled economy in agriculture. During the war the
government had imposed strict controls over agricultural prices and produc-
tion in an effort to combat the threat of inflation. When these controls were
retained after the end of hostilities in order to assure a steady and relatively
inexpensive supply of food to the cities, they encountered strong and vocifer-
ous resistance from virtually every sector of the German agricultural commu-
nity. This reaction was fueled in large part by the runaway inflation of the early
1920s. Even though the inflation made it possible for farmers to dispose of
mortgages against their property on extremely favorable terms, they com-
plained bitterly that the continuation of the controlled economy in agriculture
sacrificed their vital interests to those of the urban consumer.56 As the struggle

54
For Hepp’s political views, see his letter to Stresemann, 4 Sept. 1921, PA AA Berlin, NL
Stresemann, 231/141458 60.
55
On the situation in Bavaria, see Alois Hundhammer, Die landwirtschaftliche Berufsver
tretung in Bayern (Munich, 1926), 57 68. For the WBWB’s political orientation, see
Theodor Körner alt, ed., Wahlhandbuch zu den Land und Reichstagswahlen 1924. Zum
Gebrauch und zur Aufklärung für die württembergischen Wähler (Stuttgart, 1924), 41 63.
On the continuity of leadership in the WBWB, see Hans Peter Müller, “Wilhelm Vogt.
Württembergischer Bauernbundpolitiker und bäuerlicher Standesvertreter im Kaiser
reich und in der Weimarer Republik 1854 1938,” Lebensbilder aus Baden Württemberg
18 (1994): 395 417.
56
For further details, see Robert G. Moeller, “Winners as Losers in the German Inflation:
Peasant Protest over the Controlled Economy, 1920 1923,” in Die Deutsche Inflation.
Eine Zwischenbilanz/The German Inflation Reconsidered, ed. Gerald D. Feldman, Carl
Ludwig Holtfrerich, Gerhard A. Ritter, and Peter Christian Witt (Berlin and New York,
1982), 255 82.
      

over the controlled economy drew to a climax in 1921–22, the National Rural
League quickly assumed the leadership of efforts to dismantle governmental
controls over agricultural prices and production.57 At the same time, the
leaders of the RLB routinely castigated those parties that continued to support
the controlled economy in agriculture as traitors to the German peasantry in a
transparent attempt to translate peasant frustration over the continuation of
governmental economic controls into a general mandate for political change.58
By the time that governmental controls over agricultural prices and pro-
duction were eventually abandoned in the middle of 1923, Germany’s rural
conservatives had succeeded in reestablishing themselves as the dominant
force within the German agricultural community. Not only did the RLB
embrace more than 1.7 million members – or 5.6 million if one includes
family members, farm laborers, employees, and representatives of other
professions – by the beginning of 1924,59 but the RLB was in the firm control
of political conservatives who were determined to use their influence to protect
large landed agriculture against the twin dangers of economic competition
from abroad and democratic change at home.60 Conservative hegemony in the
countryside was further enhanced by the physical suppression of the socialist
labor movement among the farm workers in Brandenburg and Pomerania61
and by the strategic alliance that evolved in much of Eastern Prussia between
local landowning elites and the National Farm Workers’ League (Reichsland-
arbeiterbund), a “yellow” union that was a pariah from t,he perspective of both
the socialist and Christian labor movements on account of its refusal to
recognize the principle of collective bargaining as enshrined in the Zentralar-
beitsgemeinschaft. This, however, did not prevent Franz Behrens and the
Central Association of Farm Laborers (Zentralverband der Landarbeiter or
ZdL), a Christian farm workers’ union founded under conservative leadership
in 1913,62 from concluding a similar arrangement for its affiliates in Silesia and

57
Karl Hepp, Lage und Aufgaben der deutschen Landwirtschaft. Nach einem Vortrag
gehalten in Darmstadt am 1. April 1921 auf dem Parteitag der Deutschen Volkspartei in
Hessen, Aufklärungsschriften der Deutschen Volkspartei in Hessen, no. 13 (Darmstadt,
1921), 9 11.
58
Josef Kaufhold, Die Sünden der Demokratischen Partei und des Deutschen Bauernbundes
an der Landwirtschaft, Deutschnationale Flugschrift, no. 134 (Berlin, 1922).
59
[Reichs Landbund], Übersicht über die Entwicklung des Organisationswesens in der
deutschen Landwirtschaft (Berlin, 1924), 21.
60
See Dieter Gessner, Agrarverbände in der Weimarer Republik. Wirtschaftliche und soziale
Voraussetzungen agrarkonservativer Politik vor 1933 (Düsseldorf, 1976), 28 65.
61
Jens Flemming, “Die Bewaffnung des ‘Landvolks’. Ländliche Schutzwehren und agra
rischer Konservatismus in der Anfangsphase der Weimarer Republik,” Militärgeschicht
liche Mitteilungen 26 (1979): 7 36.
62
On the founding and goals of the ZdL, see Zehn Jahre christlich nationale Landarbeiter
bewegung 1913 1923. Eine Festschrift zur Erinnerung an das 10jährige Bestehen des
Zentralverbandes der Landarbeiter, ed. Hauptvorstand des Zentralverbandes (Berlin
   , –

Prussian Saxony.63 The increasingly close relationship that evolved between

the RLB and the farm workers’ movement, whether of “yellow” or Christian
provenance, helped keep the latter from falling under the influence of the
Christian trade-union movement.64
Catholic rural conservatives were no less successful than their Protestant
counterparts in reasserting their social and political hegemony in the face of
the dramatic changes that had taken place with the collapse of the Second
Empire and the establishment of the Weimar Republic.65 To be sure, the
Catholic nobility in the Rhineland, Westphalia, and Bavaria felt every bit as
threatened by the triumph of democracy as the landowning classes of East
Elbia. Moreover, the situation was complicated by the fact that the Catholic
peasantry did not always share the animus of many Catholic nobles towards
the Center. If anything, the initial response on the part of the Catholic
peasantry in the Rhineland had been to rally to the support of the Center
and to close ranks for the more effective representation of its interests within
the party, if for no other reason than to prevent the Center from becoming too
heavily dependent upon the Christian labor unions.66 Still, control of the
enormously influential Rhenish and Westphalian peasant associations
remained in the hands of unabashed conservatives like Clemens von Loë-
Bergerhausen and Engelbert Kerckerinck zur Borg, who not only criticized the
Center for its willingness to share governmental responsibility with the Social

1923), 6 13. On the ZdL’s relationship to the DNVP, see Franz Behrens, Die ländlichen
Arbeiter und die Politik. Ein politisches Handbuch für Land , Forst und andere ländliche
Arbeiter, Angestellten und deren Frauen, ed. by Reichsarbeiterausschuß der Deutschna
tionalen Volkspartei (Berlin, 1920).
63
For a defense of this alliance, see Franz Behrens, “Landarbeiterbewegung und
Wirtschaftsfriede,” in Die christlich nationale Landarbeiterbewegung und die Hebung
der landwirtschaftlichen Produktion als Voraussetzung des deutschen Wiederaufstiegs.
Drei Vorträge, Schriftenreihe des Zentralverbandes der Landarbeiter, no. 13 (Berlin,
1922), 27 40. For further details, see Jens Flemming, “Großagrarische Interessen und
Landarbeiterbewegung. Überlegungen zur Arbeiterpolitik des Bundes der Landwirte und
des Reichslandbundes in der Anfangsphase der Weimarer Republik,” in Industrielles
System und politische Entwicklung in der Weimarer Republik, ed. Mommsen, Petzina,
and Weisbrod, 745 62.
64
On the choices facing Christian farm labor, see Jens Flemming, “Zwischen Industrie und
christlich nationaler Arbeiterschaft. Alternativen landwirtschaftlicher Bündnispolitik in
der Weimarer Republik,” in Industrielle Gesellschaft und politisches System. Beiträge zur
politischen Sozialgeschichte. Festschrift für Fritz Fischer zum 70. Geburtstag, ed. Dirk
Stegmann, Bernd Jürgen Wendt, and Peter Christian Witt, 259 76. Bonn, 1978.
65
Larry Eugene Jones, “Catholic Conservatives in the Weimar Republic: The Politics of the
Rhenish Westphalian Aristocracy, 1919 1933,” German History 18 (2000): 61 85.
66
For example, see Bolling’s remarks in Christliche Bauernschaft der Rheinlande, Bericht
über die erste vorbereitende Versammlung am 29. Januar 1919 in Köln (Cologne, 1919),
8 10.
      

Democrats67 but used peasant frustration over the continuation of wartime

economic controls to consolidate their own position as leaders of the most
important regional agricultural interest organizations. The Center’s relations with
the Rhenish and Westphalian peasant associations remained strained throughout
the Weimar Republic despite the fact that the party continued to command the
respect and loyalty of the local peasantry.68 In the Catholic parts of Bavaria, on
the other hand, leadership of the Bavarian Christian Peasants’ Association
(Bayerischer Christlicher Bauernverein) remained in the control of Catholic
conservatives who were closely allied to the Bavarian People’s Party and who
harbored at best an ambivalent attitude towards the Weimar Republic.69
For the most part Germany’s rural conservatives were able to contain the
wave of social and political radicalism that gripped the German countryside in
the wake of the November Revolution. Whatever concessions Germany’s rural
elites had been obliged to make in the reassertion of their social and political
hegemony seemed inconsequential in light of the strong position they had
managed to carve out for themselves in the National Rural League and other
agricultural interest organizations. Not only had Germany’s rural elites man-
aged to survive the social and political upheaval of 1918–19 with much of their
prewar power base intact, but they were well positioned for an assault upon
Germany’s fledgling republican order if and when the appropriate opportunity
presented itself. As in the case of German industry, the forces of social and
political conservatism in German agriculture demonstrated remarkable resili-
ency in rebounding from the collapse of the Second Empire and were far from
dormant in the newly established Weimar Republic.

Christian-National Labor
A third arena in which the vitality of German conservatism made itself
apparent was the Christian labor movement and its affiliated white-collar
unions. To be sure, the conservatism of the Christian labor movement differed

67
Engelbert von Kerckerinck zur Borg, Unsere Stellung zur Zentrumspartei. Vortrag in der
Generalversammlung des Vereins kath. Edelleute zu Münster am 4. Febr. 1919 (Münster,
n.d. [1919]). See also Kerckerinck zur Borg to the archbishop of Cologne, 29 Dec. 1918,
and Erzberger, 14 July 1919, Vereinigte Westfälische Adelsarchive Münster (hereafter
cited as VWA Münster), Nachlass Engelbert Freiherr von Kerckerinck zur Borg, 139. See
also Friedrich Keinemann, Vom Krummstab zur Republik. Westfälischer Adel unter
preußischer Herrschaft 1802 1945 (Bochum, 1997), 365 90, and Gerhard Kratzsch,
Engelbert Reichsfreiherr von Kerckerinck zur Borg. Westfälischer Adel zwischen Kaiserreich
und Weimarer Republik (Münster, 2004), 135 53.
68
Robert G. Moeller, German Peasants and Agrarian Politics, 1914 1924: The Rhineland
and Westphalia (Chapel Hill, NC, 1986), 74 91, 116 38.
69
Hundhammer, Berufsvertretung, 34 56.
   , –

sharply from that of the National Rural League or the German industrial
establishment, so much so, in fact, that many of its most prominent leaders
would have questioned the designation conservative. Still, the leaders of the
Christian labor movement subscribed to an organic theory of society and
rejected the glorification of the individual that had become such a prominent
feature of both the economic and cultural dimensions of modern life. More
importantly, the leaders of the Christian labor movement were unabashedly
nationalistic, so much so that they preferred to refer to their movement as not
simply Christian, but as Christian-national.70 This distinction was particularly
important because those within the German working class who either impli-
citly or explicitly embraced the basic values of the conservative Weltanschau-
ung represented a distinct minority. Before the war, the working-class and
white-collar movements had been split into three ideological camps: Social
Democratic, liberal, and Christian-national. Of these three, the Social Demo-
cratic was clearly the strongest, claiming more than a quarter million members
as opposed to the approximately 342,000 and 106,000 workers who were
affiliated with the Christian-national and liberal labor movements respect-
ively.71 Within the German white-collar movement, on the other hand, the
situation was reversed with the Christian-national and liberal unions claiming
an estimated 450,000 and 91,000 members respectively, while the socialist
white-collar unions could account for only about 81,000 members.72 Although
the war produced a much higher degree of unionization within both the
working-class and white-collar sectors of the German labor force, this tended
to favor the socialist unions at the expense of their Christian and liberal rivals.
By the end of 1919 the socialist unions had increased their membership to
almost five-and-a-half million, whereas the Christian-national and liberal
unions recorded membership increases to 858,000 and 190,000 respectively.
Within the German white-collar movement, on the other hand, conservative
unions now accounted for more than 430,000 members, while the liberal and
socialist white-collar unions claimed the support of an estimated 68,000 and
146,000 members respectively. For the conservative unions this approximated
prewar membership levels, for the liberal unions it reflected the loss of

70
For the ideological orientation of the Christian trade unions, see Die geistigen Grundlagen
der christlich nationalen Arbeiterbewegung (Berlin Wilmersdorf, 1923), as well as the
subsequent revision of this statement by Elfriede Nebgen, Geistige Grundlagen der
christlichen Arbeiterbewegung, ed. Gesamtverband der christlichen Gewerkschaften
Deutschlands (Berlin Wilmersdorf, 1928). For further details, see Michael Schneider,
Die Christlichen Gewerkschaften 1894 1933 (Bonn, 1982), 543 54.
71
Emil Lederer, “Die Gewerkschaftsbewegung 1918/19 und die Entfaltung der wirtschaftli
chen Ideologien in der Arbeiterklasse,” Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik 47
(1920/21): 221 26.
72
Emil Lederer, “Die Bewegung der Privatangestellten seit dem Herbst 1918,” Archiv für
Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik 47 (1920 21): 585 619.
      

approximately 25 percent of their prewar membership, and for the socialist

unions it represented an increase of more than 80 percent over the number of
those who had been affiliated before 1914.73
The collapse of 1918 and the increasing radicalization of the German
working class forced the leaders of the Christian labor movement and its
affiliated white-collar unions into an essentially defensive posture. The leader
of the Christian labor movement was Adam Stegerwald, a member of the
Center Party who had served as chairman of the United Federation of Chris-
tian Trade Unions (Gesamtverband der christlichen Gewerkschaften Deutsch-
lands or GCG) since 1903. Germany’s military defeat and the collapse of the
monarchy had come as a bitter shock to the profoundly conservative Steger-
wald, who desperately sought to shore up his own movement in the face of
what threatened to develop into a mass exodus of Christian workers to the
socialist labor movement.74 It was against the background of these develop-
ments that Stegerwald briefly explored the possibility of creating an intercon-
fessional Christian workers’ party with Franz Behrens and the leaders of the
Christian-national labor movement. Stegerwald had grown increasingly crit-
ical of his own party during the latter stages of World War I and felt that the
impending collapse of the old imperial order would usher in a far-reaching
realignment of the existing party system.75 Four days after the fall of the
monarchy Heinrich Brauns from the People’s Association for Catholic Ger-
many (Volksverein für das katholische Deutschland) proposed the transform-
ation of the German Center Party into a sociologically heterogeneous
interconfessional people’s party whose fundamental orientation would no
longer be exclusively Catholic but Christian in the broadest sense of the
word.76 Not only did Brauns’ proposal to expand the Center’s political base
by opening its doors to Evangelical Christians meet with a warm reception

73
Jürgen Kocka, Klassengesellschaft im Krieg. Deutsche Sozialgeschichte 1914 1918 (Göttin
gen, 1973), 51 57, 76 82.
74
See Bernhard Forster, Adam Stegerwald (1874 1945). Christlich nationaler Gewerkschaf
ter Zentrumspolitiker Mitbegründer der Unionsparteien (Düsseldorf, 2003), 208 20.
75
Stegerwald, “Das Alte stürzt!,” Deutsche Arbeit 3, no. 11 (Nov. 1918): 481 97. See also
Stegerwald to Brauweiler, 3 Sept. 1918, Stadtarchiv Mönchen Gladbach (hereafter cited as
StA Mönchen Gladbach), Nachlass Heinz Brauweiler, Bestand 15, 173. For Stegerwald’s
reasons, see his letter to Becker, 22 Nov. 1918, appended to Stegerwald to Brauns, 22
Nov. 1918, records of the Volksverein für das katholische Deutschland, BA Berlin,
Bestand R 8115 I, 180/20 25. For further details, see Forster, Stegerwald, 208 20; Larry
Eugene Jones, “Adam Stegerwald und die Krise des deutschen Parteiensystems. Ein
Beitrag zur Deutung des ‘Essener Programms’ vom November 1920,” Vierteljahrshefte
für Zeitgeschichte 27 (1979): 1 29; and William L. Patch, Jr., Christian Trade Unions in
the Weimar Republic, 1918 1933: The Failure of “Corporate Pluralism” (New Haven, CN,
1985), 38 45.
76
Brauns to Marx and Kastert, 13 Nov. 1918, BA Berlin, R 8115 I, 180/4 5, also in the
Stadtarchiv Köln (hereafter cited as StA Köln), Nachlass Wilhelm Marx, 222/72 73.
   , –

from party leaders in the Rhineland and west Germany,77 but it comple-
mented a similar appeal that a group of Center politicians in Berlin had issued
for the renewal of the Center as a “Christian people’s party” committed to the
preservation of Christian values and institutions in a time of revolutionary
upheaval.78
In a proclamation issued just days after the collapse of the monarchy, the
executive committee of the United Federation of Christian Trade Unions
expressed its full and unequivocal support for the establishment of a demo-
cratic people’s state on the basis of a free and united German Reich.79 At the
same time, the leaders of the Christian labor movement took note of the
creation of the Zentralarbeitsgemeinschaft and realized that this would require
them to work more closely with the socialist labor movement in order to keep
German big business from dictating the new organization’s agenda and pol-
icies.80 To Stegerwald, these developments signaled a fundamental renewal
and reorganization of German political life that only further dramatized the
need for a sweeping realignment of the German party system.81 But Steger-
wald’s efforts to unite the non-socialist elements of the German working and
white-collar classes into a single political party were hurt from the outset by
the government’s decision to hold the elections to the Weimar National
Assembly in the middle of January 1919 and not in February as originally
planned.82 Without the time to complete arrangements for the founding of a
new party or to resolve some of the outstanding differences that existed in the
area of cultural policy,83 the leaders of the Christian labor movement came
under enormous pressure to affiliate with either the Center or one of the new
political parties that had surfaced since the collapse of the Second Empire in
order to make sure that Christian labor was adequately represented at
Weimar. Under these circumstances, both Franz Behrens, a Protestant labor

77
For example, see Becker to Stegerwald, 19 Nov. 1918, BA Berlin, R 8115 I, 180/12 17, also
in StA Köln, NL Marx, 222/78 83.
78
Das neue Zentrum und die politische Neuordnung, ed. Generalsekretariat der Zentrums
partei (Berlin, n.d. [1918]).
79
Zentralblatt der christlichen Gewerkschaften Deutschlands 18, no. 24 (18 Dec. 1918):
193 94.
80
Bechly, Behrens, and Stegerwald to the members of the executive committee and advisory
council of the German Labor Congress, 28 Nov. 1918, BA Berlin, Nachlass Johannes
Giesberts, 94/14 15.
81
Stegerwald to the executive committees of the Christian labor unions, 30 Nov. 1918, BA
Berlin, NL Giesberts, 94/16 21. For similar sentiments within the Evangelical workers’
movement, see Gutsche, “Wirtschaftsrevolution und Christlich nationale Arbeiterbewe
gung,” Evangelisch soziale Stimmen 14, no. 11 (30 Nov. 1918): 42 43.
82
Stegerwald to Spahn, 31 Jan. 1919, BA Koblenz, Nachlass Martin Spahn, 19.
83
Gutsche’s remarks of 18 Dec. 1918, quoted in Heinrich Imbusch, “10 Jahre Deutscher
Gewerkschaftsbund,” in Der Deutsche 1921 1931. Jubliäums Nummer vom 1. April
1931, 3.
      

leader who had served alongside Stegerwald in the leadership of the German
Labor Congress (Deutscher Arbeiter-Kongreß) before the war, and the leaders
of the Evangelical workers’ movement rallied to the banner of the newly
founded German National People’s Party in early December 1918.84 This
sounded the death knell of Stegerwald’s efforts to found an interconfessional
Christian people’s party, with the result that he and those of his supporters
who belonged to the Center had no choice but to renew their ties to the party,
though without necessarily abandoning hope that it might reform itself along
the lines that he and his associates in the Christian labor movement had
recommended.85 By the same token, Fritz Baltrusch and Georg Streiter from
the United Federation of Christian Trade Unions and Wilhelm Gutsche from
the newly founded German Trainmen’s Union (Gewerkschaft deutscher
Eisenbahner), all of whom had actively supported the creation of an inter-
confessional Christian workers’ party, decided to cast their lot with Gustav
Stresemann and the German People’s Party.86
As efforts to create an interconfessional Christian workers’ party ran out of
steam in the first weeks of December 1918, Stegerwald and his associates began
to focus their attention instead upon the consolidation of all of Germany’s
nonsocialist unions in a new trade-union federation. On 20 November
1918 Stegerwald and Gustav Hartmann, chairman of the liberal Federation
of German Labor Associations (Verband der deutschen Gewerkvereine),
announced the founding of the German Democratic Trade-Union Federation
(Deutsch-demokratischer Gewerkschaftsbund or DDGB) as an umbrella
organization in which the non-socialist elements of the German working
class – liberal as well as conservative – could unite.87 Similar developments
were under way within the German white-collar movement, where Hans
Bechly, chairman of the influential and unabashedly conservative German
National Union of Commercial Employees met with representatives from
more liberal white-collar unions throughout the first half 1919 in an attempt

84
On the breakdown of these negotiations, see Gutsche to Stresemann, 14 Dec. 1918, PA
AA Berlin, NL Stresemann, 183/134088 91.
85
Stegerwald to Spahn, 31 Jan. 1919, BA Koblenz, NL Spahn, 19.
86
Gutsche to Stresemann, 14 Dec. 1918, PA AA Berlin, NL Stresemann, 183/134088 91.
See also Baltrusch to Stresemann, 12 Dec. 1918, ibid., 183/134018 19.
87
On the founding of the DDGB, see Stegerwald to the executive committees of the
Christian labor unions, 30 Nov. 1918, BA Berlin, NL Giesberts, 94/16 21, as well as
Wilhelm Wiedfeld, Der Deutsche Gewerkschaftsbund (Leipzig, 1933), 12 23. See Steger
wald’s speech at the DDGB’s founding ceremonies, 20 Nov. 1918, in Zwecke und Ziele des
Deutsch demokratischen Gewerkschaftsbundes, Schriften des Deutsch demokratischen
Gewerkschaftsbundes, no. 1 (Berlin, 1919), 1 8, as well as the report in Zentralblatt der
christlichen Gewerkschaften Deutschlands 28, no. 24 (18 Nov. 1918): 203 05. For further
details, see Hartmut Roder, Der christlich nationale Deutsche Gewerkschaftsbund (DGB)
im politisch ökonomischen Kräftefeld der Weimarer Republik (Frankfurt am Main, Bern,
and New York, 1986), 235 38, as well as Forster, Stegerwald, 206 08.
   , –

to lay the foundation for a united white-collar union known as the Federation
of Employee Unions (Gewerkschaftsbund der Angestellten or GdA).88 But in
the summer of 1919, just as preparations for the official founding of the new
white-collar union were drawing to a close, the leaders of the DHV announced
that they were withdrawing from further negotiations so as not to compromise
the integrity of their struggle against the so-called Weimar system.89 In a
parallel development, Stegerwald’s efforts to consolidate the non-socialist
elements of the German working class suffered a similar fate when the German
Democratic Trade Union Federation fell apart on 14 November 1919 as a
result of supposedly irreconcilable ideological differences between the Chris-
tian and liberal labor unions.90
These developments revealed the extent to which prewar ideological div-
isions continued to frustrate the unity and effectiveness of the German labor
movement in the immediate postwar period. In both cases, however, the
impulse that led to the breakdown of negotiations came from the more
conservative elements of the working-class and white-collar movements and
was driven by the fear that their affiliation with more liberal unions under the
aegis of the German Democratic Trade-Union Federation or the Federation of
Employee Unions might identify them too closely with Germany’s new repub-
lican system. Following the collapse of the DDGB and the DHV’s withdrawal
from negotiations to found the GdA, the leaders of the Christian-national
labor movement concentrated their efforts on uniting all of those who shared
their basic ideological orientation into a single trade-union federation. These
efforts drew to a successful conclusion with the official founding of the
German Trade-Union Federation (Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund or DGB)
on 22 November 1919.91 The DGB rested upon three organizational pillars,
each of which represented a particular branch or “estate” of the German labor
force. In addition to the United Federation of Christian Trade Unions that
served as the representative for more than a million industrial workers, there
was the United Federation of German Employee Unions (Gesamtverband
deutscher Angestellten-Gewerkschaften or Gedag) under the leadership of
the DHV’s Bechly and the United Federation of German Civil Servant Unions
(Gesamtverband der deutschen Beamten-Gewerkschaften) under the leader-
ship of Wilhelm Gutsche from the newly established German Trainmen’s

88
Heinz Jürgen Priamus, Angestellte und Demokratie. Die nationalliberale Angestelltenbe
wegung in der Weimarer Republik (Stuttgart, 1979), 72 82.
89
For further details, see Iris Hamel, Völkischer Verband und nationale Gewerkschaft. Der
Deutschnationale Handlungeshilfen Verband 1893 1933 (Hamburg, 1967), 169 73.
90
“Die christlichen Gewerkschaften im Jahre 1919,” Zentralblatt der christlichen Ge
werkschaften Deutschlands 20, no. 20 (27 Sept. 1920): 204.
91
Wiedfeld, Deutsche Gewerkschaftsbund, 24 30. See also Schneider, Christliche Ge
werkschaften, 486 96, and Roder, Gewerkschaftsbund, 254 63.
      

Union (Gewerkschaft deutscher Eisenbahner).92 By the fall of 1920, the

German Trade-Union Federation could claim the support of almost two
million members.93 Although it may have been eclipsed in terms of total
membership by the socialist General German Trade-Union Federation
(Allgemeiner Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund or ADGB), the Christian trade-
union movement was no longer the negligible factor in German working-class
politics that it had been before the war.94
The real strength of the Christian labor movement throughout the Weimar
Republic lay not so much in the size of its membership as in the extent of its
political contacts. Unlike the National Rural League which, despite its dis-
claimers to the contrary, was essentially tied to one political party, the German
Trade-Union Association was an organization whose leaders were to be found
in all of Germany’s bourgeois parties with the exception of the DDP. For
although Stegerwald and many of his associates in the leadership of the United
Federation of Christian Trade Unions belonged to the Center, they were
flanked on the left by Hans Bechly, Otto Thiel, and Wilhelm Gutsche from
the DVP and on the right by Franz Behrens, Reinhard Mumm, and Emil
Hartwig from the DNVP. The network of alliances, or Querverbindungen, that
the Christian labor movement forged with the various non-socialist parties in
the first years of the Weimar Republic thus afforded Stegerwald and his
associates a degree of political leverage that not even the much larger ADGB
enjoyed. At the same time, however, the tension between those unions like
Heinrich Imbusch’s Union of Christian Mine Workers (Gewerkverein Christ-
licher Bergarbeiter) or Georg Wieber’s Christian Metal Workers’ Union of
Germany (Christlicher Metallarbeiterverband Deutschlands) that were allied
to the Center and therefore supported the new republican system and those
like Franz Behrens’ Central Association of Farm Workers that were allied to
the DNVP and therefore rejected Weimar was frequently so great that it
threatened to paralyze the entire movement. What many regarded as the
ultimate source of the DGB’s political strength was at the same time a threat
to its unity and continued effectiveness.
On the extreme right wing of the Christian-national labor movement stood
the German National Union of Commercial Employees. Established in
1893 by a handful of political antisemites under the leadership of Wilhelm
Schack, the DHV had evolved over the course of the next quarter decade from
a small racist organization that served as little more than a forum for the

92
Brüning to Stegerwald, 24 Sept. 1921, ACDP Sankt Augustin, Nachlass Adam Stegerwald,
I 206/014. See also Brüning’s memorandum of 24 Nov. 1921, appended to his letter to
Stegerwald, 23 (sic) Nov. 1921, ibid., I 206/018.
93
Schneider, Christliche Gewerkschaften, 492.
94
For the DGB’s accomplishments on behalf of German labor, see Deutscher
Gewerkschaftsbund, ed., Aus der Arbeit des D.G.B. (Berlin Wilmersdorf, n.d. [1926]).
   , –

dissemination of antisemitic propaganda into the largest of Germany’s white-

collar unions representing an estimated 200,000 thousand salesmen and cler-
ical employees throughout the country by the end of 1919.95 The DHV
recruited the bulk of its membership from the ranks of those middle-class
elements whose economic independence had been undermined by the
advanced pace of industrialization and economic rationalization of the late
nineteenth century.96 In the meantime, the leadership of the DHV had been
transferred to a new generation of political pragmatists who no longer
regarded the struggle against the so-called Jewish threat as important as that
for the social, economic, and spiritual welfare of the German salaried
employee. The new generation of DHV leaders was epitomized by Hans
Bechly, a member of the prewar National Liberal Party who was elected to
the chairmanship of the DHV in 1909. Under Bechly’s leadership the DHV
began to cultivate closer ties with all of Germany’s non-socialist parties while
maintaining an official policy of neutrality with respect to the individual
parties themselves. Bechly thus put an end to the DHV’s close identification
with the more reactionary elements on the German Right in favor of a policy
that encouraged it to cultivate closer ties with all parties that were prepared to
support its basic objectives.97
Following the collapse of 1918, the DHV moved quickly to reestablish its
influence within the white-collar movement and to combat the forces of social
and political revolution that had plunged the nation into chaos.98 For the
leaders of the DHV, the November Revolution was little more than an ill-fated
attempt to replace a hierarchical social and political order that had outlived its
usefulness with a new order that was every bit as repressive and exploitive as
the one it sought to replace. In their crusade against the social and political
legacy of the November Revolution, the leaders of the DHV not only sought to

95
Hamel, Völkischer Verband, 52 122.
96
Jürgen Kocka, “Vorindustrielle Faktoren in der deutschen Industrialisierung. Industrie
bürokratie und ‘neuer Mittelstand’,” in Das kaiserliche Deutschland. Politik und
Gesellschaft 1870 1918, ed. Michael Stürmer (Düsseldorf, 1970), 265 86.
97
Hans Bechly, Die Deutschnationale Handlungsgehilfenbewegung und die politischen Par
teien. Vortrag gehalten auf dem Zwölften deutschen Handlungsgehilfentage am 18. Juni
1911 in Breslau (Hamburg, 1911).
98
For further details, see Richard Döring and Bruno Plintz, eds., Der Deutschnationale
Handlungsgehilfen Verband in der Reichshauptstadt von 1895 1925. Ein Beitrag
zur Geschichte der Berliner Handlungsgehilfen Bewegung (Berlin, n.d. [1926]), 115 51,
as well as the unpublished memoirs of Max Habermann, “Der Deutschnationale
Handlungsgehilfen Verband im Kampf um das Reich 1918 1933. Ein Zeugnis
seines Wollens und Wirkens” (1934), archives of the Deutscher Handels und
Industrieangestellten Verband, Hamburg (hereafter cited as DHV Archiv Hamburg),
8 14.
      

mobilize white-collar support with an appeal that was as anti-capitalist as it

was anti-Marxist99 but also exploited the friction between the working-class
and white-collar sectors of the socialist labor movement to gain admission to
the Zentralarbeitsgemeinschaft.100 At the same time, the DHV tried to secure a
foothold within the various non-socialist parties that had emerged from the
ruins of the Second Empire. Following the collapse of efforts to create an
interconfessional Christian workers’ party in early December 1918, Bechly
took part in the official founding of the German People’s Party and worked
closely with party chairman Gustav Stresemann and DHV secretary Otto Thiel
to secure a foothold for the DVP in Germany’s growing white-collar popula-
tion.101 Other DHV officials, in the meantime, joined the DNVP, Center, and
German Democratic Party in accordance with its professed policy of nonpar-
tisanship.102 In his keynote address at the DHV’s Brunswick congress in May
1920, Bechly went to great pains to reaffirm the union’s prewar policy of
nonpartisanship and publicly urged its members to promote the DHV’s social,
economic, and cultural objectives by working within all of Germany’s non-
socialist parties. For although they harbored a deep and abiding animus
towards the republican system of government, Bechly and the leaders of the
DHV also realized that the only way in which they could influence the
legislative process on the behalf of those they represented was to work through
the existing political parties. The DHV’s immediate objective, therefore, was to
secure the election of key union officials to the national parliament, where they
would be able to persuade the parties to which they belonged to support
legislation beneficial to the interests and welfare of the white-collar
employee.103 At the same time, the DHV leadership worked closely with
Stegerwald and his associates to prevent the growing animosity between the

99
For example, see Hans Bechly, Der nationale Gedanke nach der Revolution. Vortrag,
gehalten am vierzehnten Deutschen Handlungsgehilfentag in Leipzig, vom 18. bis 20.
Oktober 1919 (Hamburg, n.d. [1919]), 17 20, 22 36, and Hans Blechly, Volk, Staat und
Wirtschaft. Vortrag gehalten auf dem sechzehnten Deutschen Handlungsgehilfentag in
Königsberg/Pr. am 29. Juni 1924 (Hamburg, 1924).
100
Habermann, “Der DHV im Kampf um das Reich,” DHV Archiv Hamburg, 14.
101
Gutsche to Stresemann, 14 Dec. 1918, PA AA Berlin, NL Stresemann, 183/134088 91.
Bechly involvement in the founding of the DVP, see the minutes of the DVP’s founding
ceremonies, 15 Dec. 1918, BA Koblenz, R 45 II, 301/227 37.
102
For example, see the essays by Lambach (DNVP), Thiel (DVP), Gehrig (Center), and
Richter (DDP), in Jahrbuch für Deutschnationale Handlungsgehilfen für 1921, ed.
Deutschnationaler Handlungsgehilfen Verband (Hamburg, 1921), 50 83.
103
Hans Bechly, Staat, Gesellschaft und Politik. Vortrag, gehalten auf dem Verbandstage in
Braunschweig am 15. und 16. Mai 1920 (Hamburg, n.d. [1920]), 6 12. See also the
correspondence between the DHV’s national leadership and Gehrig, 28 Jan 5 Feb. 1921,
ACDP Sankt Augustin, Nachlass Otto Gehrig, I 087/001/1.
   , –

Center and DNVP from further undermining the unity and effectiveness of
the Christian labor movement.104
The Christian-national labor movement was something of a historical
anachronism that was anything but a sociologically and ideologically homo-
geneous factor in German political life. Its supporters were spread out
through at least three parties, two of which officially supported the Weimar
Republic and a third that actively opposed it. With the exception of those
workers’ associations that belonged to the so-called yellow trade-union
movement, however, the leaders and affiliated unions of the Christian-national
labor movement were committed to pursuing their goals within the frame-
work of Germany’s new republican system despite whatever political or
ideological reservations they may have had about it. The political pragmatism
of the Christian-national labor movement would have a moderating effect
upon the German Right as it mobilized its resources for its struggle against
Weimar democracy.

The Middle Classes

If political and ideological divisions threatened the unity and effectiveness of
the Christian labor movement, this was even more true of the last and most
deeply divided sector of Germany’s conservative milieu, the so-called middle
class or Mittelstand. In fact, the very term Mittelstand was something of a
fiction and suggested a much higher degree of sociological cohesiveness on the
part of those intermediary strata that lay between the two extremes of capital
and labor than actually existed.105 Not only were the German middle strata
deeply fragmented along social, political, and ideological lines, but the degree
of interest articulation was more pronounced here than within any other
sector of German society. For in addition to the salaried employees who
preferred to identify themselves more with the social and cultural values of
the Mittelstand than with those of the industrial proletariat, the so-called
middle class also included the artisanry and small business sector, the liberal
professions such as law, medicine, and journalism, and the professional civil
service including state employees, teachers, and university professors. To
compound the situation, each of these groups was represented by a wide range
of interest organizations, some of which defined themselves by region and
others by ideology. In the final analysis, it was precisely the plethora of special
interest organizations within the German middle strata that militated so

104
Correspondence between Bechly and Stegerwald, 28 Sept. 3 Oct. 1921, ACDP Sankt
Augustin, NL Stegerwald, I 206/014, as well as Habermann, “Der DHV im Kampf um
das Reich,” DHV Archiv Hamburg, 15 17.
105
For example, see David Blackbourn, “The Mittelstand in German Society and Politics,
1870 1914,” Social History, no. 4 (1977): 409 33.
      

decisively against their social and political cohesiveness. Moreover, the eco-
nomic burden of the lost war and the struggle over how this burden was to be
distributed throughout German society as a whole only intensified the general
level of interest antagonism within the German middle strata and made it even
more difficult to blend these interests together into something resembling a
cohesive social force.106 The social and economic fragmentation of the
German middle strata thus mirrored what was happening to German society
as a whole and served as the special case of a more general process that was to
become more and more pronounced as the decade of the 1920s wound to
a close.
Properly speaking, only a part of the so-called German middle class could
rightly be identified as belonging to Germany’s conservative milieu. Many of
those in the liberal professions, for example, had long identified themselves
with the basic values and institutions of the German liberal tradition, although
even here an erosion of liberal commitment had become increasingly apparent
in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.107 The same could be said
of the state civil service, although here the bureaucracy’s professed Überpar-
teilichekeit concealed an underlying commitment to conservative values and
institutions at the same time that it prevented the civil service from becoming
too closely identified with the program or ideology of a particular political
party.108 Still, the sustained assault against the prerogatives of the professional
bureaucracy and the erosion of its economic substance in the first years of the
Weimar Republic led Germany’s civil servants to become more aggressive in
the defense of their special interests with the founding of the German Civil
Servants’ Association (Deutscher Beamtenbund) in December 1918. Although
the leaders and membership of the German Civil Servants’ Association were
recruited by and large from the ranks of Germany’s liberal parties, these
developments had a radicalizing effect upon the civil service and made its
rank-and-file membership increasingly susceptible to the agitation of Ger-
many’s right-wing parties.109

106
Hans Mommsen, “Die Auflösung des Bürgertums seit dem späten 19. Jahrhundert,” in
Bürger und Bürgerlichkeit im 19. Jahrhundert, ed. Jürgen Kocka (Göttingen, 1987),
288 315.
107
See Konrad H. Jarausch, The Unfree Professions: German Lawyers, Teachers, and En
gineers, 1900 1950 (New York and Oxford, 1990), esp. 78 114, and Kenneth F. Ledford,
From General Estate to Special Interest: German Lawyers, 1878 1933 (Cambridge, 1996),
245 99.
108
Peter Christian Witt, “Konservatismus als Überparteilichkeit. Die Beamten der Reichs
kanzlei zwischen Kaiserreich und Weimarer Republik 1900 1933,” in Deutscher Kon
servatismus im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert. Festschrift für Fritz Fischer, ed. Dirk Stegmann,
Bernd Jürgen Wendt, and Peter Christian Witt (Bonn, 1983), 234 41.
109
Andreas Kunz, Civil Servants and the Politics of Inflation in Germany, 1914 1924 (Berlin
and New York, 1986), 132 58, 207 08, 377 82.
   , –

Of all the groups that comprised the German middle strata, none was more
firmly entrenched in Germany’s conservative milieu than the so-called eco-
nomic Mittelstand of artisans and small, independent businessmen. Before
the war this particular sector of the German middle strata had been repre-
sented by the ostensibly nonpartisan German Middle-Class Association
(Deutsche Mittelstandsvereinigung) following its founding in 1904 and then
from 1911 on by the more militantly conservative Reich German Middle-Class
League. With the creation of the Cartel of Productive Estates in 1913, the DKP
assumed the political leadership of an alliance that resisted a reform of
Germany’s political system and provided propagandist support for the
German war effort in the first years of World War I.110 But the collapse of
the Second Empire and the wave of revolutionary turmoil that accompanied
the end of the war sent a shockwave through the various sectors of Germany’s
conservative milieu and left it politically adrift. In the campaign for the
elections to the Weimar National Assembly, for example, the Middle-Class
Association for Political Enlightenment (Mittelstandsvereinigung für poli-
tische Aufklärung) in Greifswald was so obsessed with the fear of socialism
and the threat of expropriation that they withheld their endorsement from any
single party and urged their supporters to vote for any one of the three non-
confessional bourgeois parties – that is, for the DDP, DVP, or DNVP – in
order to prevent Social Democracy from gaining the absolute majority it
needed to use the National Assembly as an instrument of class domination.111
The severe economic hardship that the artisanry and small business sector
experienced after World War I would only intensify the resentment that these
sectors of Germany’s middle-class economy harbored toward the Weimar
Republic and would accelerate their descent into the camp of the anti-
republican German Right.112
All of this worked to the advantage of the DNVP, which moved quickly to
anchor itself as firmly as possible in Germany’s conservative milieu in the
predominantly Protestant areas of Germany that ran from Hesse through
Saxony and Thuringia into Pomerania, Mecklenburg, and the Prussian prov-
inces to the east of the Elbe. With the exception of Saxony, this area lacked
significant industrial development and was predominantly rural with a

110
Stegmann, Erben Bismarcks, 249 56. See also Heinrich August Winkler, Mittelstand,
Demokratie und Nationalsozialismus. Die politische Entwicklung von Handwerk und
Kleinhandel in der Weimarer Republik (Cologne, 1972), 40 64.
111
For example, see the brochures the Mittelstandsvereinigung für politische Aufklärung
distributed in the campaign for the National Assembly, especially Was steht für den
Kleinbesitz auf dem Lande bei den Wahlen auf dem Spiel?, Flugschrift 1; Welcher Partei
soll bei den Wahlen der Handwerker seine Stimme geben?, Flugschrift 2; and Die Zukunft
der Angestellten und die Wahlen zur Nationalversammlung, Flugschrift 3, all published
in Greifswald at the end of 1918 and beginning of 1919.
112
Winkler, Mittelstand, 65 83, 128 34.
      

scattering of small and middle-sized cities. Everyday life was organized around
a rich and variegated associational structure that included everything from
veterans’ organizations and the Lutheran Church and its activities to artisan
guilds, salesmen’s associations, and shooting clubs. Even local taverns played
an important role in fostering a high degree of sociability between individuals
whose social and economic interests might not have had all that much in
common. What united these elements, however, was the sense of having been
left behind and the threat that this posed to their sense of place in Germany’s
political future.113 The task of giving this a coherent political voice fell to a
quartet of “mentors,” or what Wolfgram Pyta calls Meinungsführer – the large
peasant or Großbauer, the manor lord or Gutsherr, the country parson, and
the village school teacher – who would exercise enormous influence over the
voting behavior of the local population. After some initial hesitancy following
the collapse of the Second Empire, these Meinungsführer began to line up in
support of the DNVP, thus enabling the party to establish itself as an agrarian
Volkspartei that represented Germany’s rural conservative milieu in all of its
sociological heterogeneity up until the onset of the agrarian crisis and wide-
spread peasant protest at the end of the 1920s.114

The principal challenge facing the DNVP as it sought to unite the various
forces on the German Right into a cohesive political force was to anchor itself
as firmly as possible in the various sectors of Germany’s conservative milieu.
This would be no easy task in light of the fact that this milieu was anything but
a homogeneous bloc. On the contrary, Germany’s conservative milieu was
riven by all sorts of structural contradictions that would only become deeper
with the passage of time. The general course of German social and economic
development since unification in 1871 had only intensified the degree of
interest articulation and antagonism at all levels of German society and had
made the task of forging the disparate social and economic groups that
comprised Germany’s conservative milieu into a cohesive political force all
the more difficult. At the same time, the challenge of determining how the
social and economic cost of Germany’s lost war would be distributed through-
out German society as a whole made it imperative for influential economic
interest organizations like the National Federation of German Industry, the
National Rural League, and the German Trade-Union Federation to set aside
whatever ideological reservations they may have had about Germany’s new

113
For two excellent regional studies on the DNVP and the conservative milieu of the
Weimar Republic, see Matthiesen, Greifswald in Vorpommern, 75 301, and Bösch, Das
konservative Milieu, 35 133.
114
Pyta, Dorgemeinschaft und Parteipolitik 1918 1933. Die Verschränkung von Milieu und
Parteien in den protestantischen Landgebieten Deutschlands in der Weimarer Republik
(Düsseldorf, 1996), 83 162.
   , –

republican system and to work within that system in order to protect and
advance the social and economic interests of those whom they sought to
represent. This, in turn, placed an increasingly heavy burden on relations
between those who were hoping to gain access to the corridors of power in
order to promote the vital interests of their respective constituencies and those
on the extreme Right who remained implacably opposed to collaboration with
the republican system of government on any terms whatsoever. The tensions
this produced within the German Right would remain more or less obscured
as long as the German National People’s Party – at this time the primary
political representative of Germany’s conservative milieu – refused to waver in
its unconditional opposition to the system of government that Germany had
inherited from the November Revolution. What might happen once it had
become clear that the Weimar Republic had indeed survived the trauma of its
birth was far from certain.
 3

Forging a Conservative Synthesis

The leaders of the German National People’s Party had every reason to be
satisfied with the outcome of the 1919 elections in the Reich and Prussia.
Operating under circumstances that could only be described as difficult, the
DNVP had survived its first test at the polls with flying colors. Still, the
problems facing party leaders following the elections were formidable. First
and foremost was the disunity of the DNVP delegation to the Weimar
National Assembly. The Nationalist delegation was anything but a cohesive
unit, consisting of disparate elements ranging from governmental conserva-
tives like Clemens von Delbrück and Count Arthur von Posadowsky-Wehner,
large landowners like Gustav Roesicke and Martin Schiele, labor leaders like
Franz Behrens and Wilhelm Wallbaum to Pan-German nationalists like Alfred
Hugenberg and Käthe Schirmacher, political antisemites like Albrecht von
Graefe-Goldebee and Wilhelm Bruhn, and refugees from the now defunct
Fatherland Party like Gottfried Traub.1 Little united these groups save their
shared antipathy to the social and political legacy of the November Revolution
and their simmering discontent over the lost war and Germany’s weakness in
the deliberations at the Paris Peace Conference. To mold these groups into a
cohesive and effective parliamentary delegation was the DNVP’s first order of
business as it regrouped for the bitter political struggles that lay ahead in 1919.
In a larger sense, however, the disunity of the DNVP’s delegation to the
Weimar National Assembly only mirrored the situation within the party as a
whole. Here the task of forging a viable and durable synthesis may have been
even more daunting than that of unifying the delegation. For in addition to the
ideological diversity that was so distinctive of the DNVP’s delegation at
Weimar, the party’s national organization had to cope with regional differ-
ences of enormous scale and magnitude. The DNVP’s national party organiza-
tion had come together in the fall and early winter of 1918 as a loose, if not
inchoate, coalition of different regional organizations, some of which were still

1
For a portrait of the Nationalist delegation to the National Assembly, see Gottfried Traub,
Erinnerungen. Wie ich das “Zweite Reich” erlebte. Tagebuchnotizen aus der Hitlerzeit
(Stuttgart, 1998), 190 91. See also Christian F. Trippe, Konservative Verfassungspolitik
1918 1923. Die DNVP als Opposition in Reich und Ländern (Düsseldorf, 1995), 64 70.


   , –

dominated by prewar agrarian elites while others were entirely new construc-
tions that represented much different social and political constituencies. In the
months that lay ahead the DNVP’s national leadership would have to find a
formula that would allow it to consolidate the diverse social, economic, and
regional constituencies that comprised the party’s material base into a cohesive
and effective political organization. To do this, DNVP strategists needed to
anchor the new party as firmly as possible in Germany’s conservative milieu
and, if possible, to extend conservative influence into those sectors of the
population that had remained outside the embrace of prewar German
conservatism.2

In Search of an Identity
The internal consolidation of the DNVP was inextricably related to the task of
developing a party program that would reconcile the values, interests, and
concerns of the diverse factions that constituted the DNVP’s material base.
The party’s earliest programmatic statements, such as the election appeal of
22 November 1918 or “Die Ziele der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei” from
mid-December, were characteristically vague and offered little insight into
how the party stood on specific social, economic, and cultural issues. Although
the DNVP party leadership would not appoint a committee to draft a party
program until September 1919, internal wrangling over the form and content
of the program began almost immediately after the elections. Here the initia-
tive came from a group of self-styled young conservatives led by Ulrich von
Hassell. On 15 February 1919 Hassell and his associates convened the State-
Political Coordinating Committee of the German National People’s Party
(Staatspolitische Arbeitsgemeinschaft der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei) as
a forum for bringing together the different constituencies that were repre-
sented within the DNVP for a free and candid exchange of ideas.3 Hassell’s
primary objective was to ensure that the new party was as comprehensive as
possible and that it appealed to a broad cross-section of the German elector-
ate.4 Over the course of the next twelve months Hassell and his supporters
organized a series of lectures on a wide range of topics of relevance to
Germany’s postwar conservative agenda. Of particular concern was how the

2
For example, see Peter Christian Witt, “Eine Denkschrift Otto Hoetzschs vom 5. Novem
ber 1918,” Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 21 (1973): 337 53. See also the memoran
dum from Meyer, 27 Jan. 1919, appended to Winterfeld to Hergt, 6 Feb. 1919, records of
the Deutschnationale Volkspartei, BA Berlin, Bestand R 8005, 1/82 98.
3
Hassell’s remarks at the official founding of the State Political Coordinating Committee, 15
Feb. 1919, BA Berlin, NL Mumm, 293/137 38. See also Hassell to Mumm, 7 Feb. 1919,
ibid., 293/143.
4
Hassell, “Die Lebensnotwendigkeiten der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei,” Eiserne Blätter
1, no. 12 (21 Sept. 1919): 209 13.
     

party should go about attracting the support of workers, farm laborers,

women, and Catholics, as well as the position the party would take on the
so-called Jewish question.5 The purpose of this, as Hassell explained on the eve
of the DNVP’s Berlin party congress in July 1919, was to make certain that the
DNVP did not deteriorate into a one-sided agrarian party like the prewar
DKP. Calling for the creation of a strong national, unitary, and organic state,
Hassell exhorted his supporters to embrace three basic principles as the
ideological foundation of the DNVP: a Christian concept of the world, a social
concept of the nation, and an organic concept of the state. Then and only then,
Hassell concluded, would the DNVP become “the great right-wing party of the
future [die große Rechtspartei der Zukunft] that will lead our fatherland once
more to better times.”6
Hassell and his associates believed that only the creation of a entirely new
conservative party free from the social, regional, and confessional prejudices of
Germany’s prewar conservative parties could lead the German people from the
ruins of war and revolution to unity and a new sense of its national destiny.7
Hassell’s vision of the DNVP as a socially and confessionally heterogeneous
conservative Sammelpartei stood in sharp contrast to the objectives of the
hard-line Prussian conservatives around Ernst Heydebrand von der Lasa and
Count Kuno von Westarp. Although Westarp had played a major role in
persuading his colleagues in the Central Association of German Conservatives
to throw their support behind the newly founded DNVP,8 its leaders remained
profoundly critical of the new party’s composition and looked forward to the
day when they could take control of the party and purge it of those they
regarded as politically unreliable.9 For his own part, Hergt had made his
acceptance of the DNVP party chairmanship in December 1918 contingent
upon the dissolution of the Central Association of German Conservatives,10

5
These lectures were given at “evening workshops,” or Arbeitsabende, that the State
Political Coordinating Committee held throughout 1919 and early 1920. For the most
part, the transcripts of these lectures can be found in BA Berlin, R 8005, vol. 327.
6
Hassell, “Die Aufgaben einer großen politischen Partei in der Gegenwart,” 11 July 1919,
BA Berlin, R 8005, 327/78 79.
7
Hassell, “Wir jungen Konservativen. Ein Aufruf,” Der Tag, 24 Nov. 1918. For the broader
context, see Peter Fritzsche, “Breakdown or Breakthrough? Conservatives and the
November Revolution,” in Between Reform, Reaction, and Resistance: Studies in the
History of German Conservatism from 1789 to 1945, ed. Larry Eugene Jones and James
Retallack (Providence, RI, and Oxford, 1993), 299 328.
8
Westarp, Konservative Politik, ed. Hiller von Gaertringen, 29 30. On Westarp’s career in
Weimar politics, see Larry Eugene Jones, “Kuno Graf von Westarp und die Krise des
deutschen Konservativismus in der Weimarer Republik,” in “Ich bin der letzte Preuße”:
Kuno Graf von Westarp und die deutsche Politik (1900 1945), ed. Larry Eugene Jones and
Wolfram Pyta (Cologne, Weimar, and Vienna, 2006), 109 46.
9
Westarp to Klasing, 25 Mar. 1919, BA Berlin, NL Westarp, 37/42 43.
10
Hergt to [Dietrich], 19 Dec. 1918, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, II/1.
   , –

but ran into strong opposition from Westarp, who declared in a meeting with
the DNVP party chairman in late January 1919 that for the moment the
Central Association would not dissolve itself but would continue its activities
outside the public eye.11 Westarp succeeded in fending off Hergt’s demand
that the Central Association initiate dissolution proceedings immediately at a
meeting of the DNVP executive committee on 31 January by reminding the
DNVP party chairman that only a DKP party congress was authorized to
undertake such a step and that the outcome of such a meeting could not be
predicted given the widespread uneasiness with the DNVP that existed in
conservative circles throughout the country.12
Westarp’s thinly veiled threat of a conservative secession on the DNVP’s
right wing was sufficient to blunt the thrust of Hergt’s offensive against the
Central Association of German Conservatives until the DNVP revisited the
issue at the first meeting of the DNVP central executive committee in April
1919. Refusing to go ahead with the dissolution of the old party, Heydeb-
rand and the erstwhile leaders of the now defunct DKP maintained that it
was essential to preserve the Central Association of German Conservatives
as an independent organization with sufficient resources to wage its own
campaign in support of conservative values and principles.13 These senti-
ments received strong support from Westarp, who convened a special
session of the Central Association’s Berlin leadership on the eve of the first
meeting of the DNVP central executive committee to publish a resolution
that defended the continued existence of the old conservative party as a
“state-political necessity” to preserve the historical legacy of the Prussian
state and the values for which it had always stood.14 This set the stage for a
furious exchange before the DNVP central executive committee during
which Westarp defended the Central Association and its refusal to close
shop against the attacks of those like Hassell, Traub, and Siegfried von
Kardorff who conceived of the DNVP as a totally new political creation
unencumbered by the follies of the past.15 The conflict over the DNVP’s
identity, however, was far from over.

11
Westarp to Heydebrand, 13 Feb. 1919, ibid., II/79.
12
Ibid.
13
Heydebrand to Westarp, 16 Feb. 1919, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, II/79.
14
“Erklärung der Konservativen Parteileitung,” Kreuz Zeitung, 13 Apr. 1919, quoted in
Westarp, Konservative Politik, ed. Hiller von Gaertringen, 38 39. See also Westarp to
Heydebrand, 7 Apr. 1919, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, II/79.
15
Erste Tagung des Hauptvorstandes der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei im Festsaal der
Preußischen Landes Versammlung in Berlin am 15. und 16. April 1919, Deutschnationale
Tagungsberichte, no. 1 (Berlin, 1919), 11 16. See also the report to Heydebrand, 17
Apr. 1919, BA Berlin, R 8003, 2/49 51, as well as Westarp, Konservative Politik, ed. Hiller
von Gaertringen, 36 42.
     

Defining Itself at Weimar

As the initial skirmishes over the identity and program of the DNVP were
taking shape, party leaders had begun to make progress on the other two
problems that had faced them in early 1919, namely the lack of unity within
the DNVP delegation to the Weimar National Assembly and the need to
consolidate the various groups that constituted the party’s material base into
a comprehensive national organization. To be sure, the internal consolidation
of the DNVP was greatly assisted by the fact that all elements of the party were
unconditionally opposed to the governmental coalition that assumed power at
Weimar in early February 1919.16 Even then, the first meetings of the DNVP
delegation at Weimar were raucous affairs that lacked an agenda and clear,
decisive leadership. The delegation was in fact so disorganized that the dep-
uties could not even agree upon which issues should be dealt with first.17
Gradually, however, a modicum of order and a sense of priorities began to
emerge as experienced governmental conservatives led by Posadowsky-
Wehner and Delbrück began to assert control and as the delegation itself
began to focus on those issues on which there was little, if any, disagreement.18
On no issue was there greater unanimity than on that of monarchism.
Virtually every member of the DNVP’s Weimar delegation believed that
monarchism represented the form of government that was best suited to the
German character. When Posadowsky-Wehner rose up in defense of the “old
system” on 14 February, his impassioned remarks met with enthusiastic
support from every faction within the delegation.19 Although many National-
ists may have been dismayed by the abdication and flight of Kaiser Wilhelm II,
a commitment to the restoration of the monarchical form of government
remained the one issue upon which virtually every member of the Nationalist
delegations in Weimar and Berlin could agree.20

16
See Adolf von Posadowsky Wehner, Siegfried von Kardorff, and Oskar Hergt, Die
Abrechnung mit der Revolution. Reden in der Verfassunggebenden Deutschen National
versammlung in Weimar am 27. März 1919 und in der Verfassunggebenden Preußischen
Landesversammlung in Berlin am 26. und 27. März 1919, Deutschnationale Parlaments
reden, nos. 3 4 (Berlin, 1919).
17
On the DNVP delegation at Weimar, see the excerpts from the diary of DNVP deputy
Ulrich Kahrstedt, 3 7 Feb. 1919, BA Koblenz, NL Traub, 8/14 15.
18
Fur further details, see Westarp, Konservative Politik, ed. Hiller von Gaertringen,
257 305.
19
Traub, Erinnerungen, 192.
20
For example, see Axel von Freytagh Loringhoven, Politik. Eine Einführung in Gegen
wartsfragen (Munich, 1919), 89 136. See also Friedrich Freiherr Hiller von Gaertringen,
“Zur Beurteilung des ‘Monarchismus’ in der Weimarer Republik,” in Tradition und
Reform in der deutschen Politik. Gedenkschrift für Waldemar Besson, ed. Gotthard Jaspers
(Frankfurt a.M., 1976), 138 86.
   , –

An issue of no less significance as a unifying factor in the DNVP’s early

development was the status of the Lutheran church and the place of religious
education in the German school system. In the campaign for the elections to
the National Assembly, the DNVP had devoted an inordinate amount of
attention to warning against the dangers that besieged the Lutheran Church
and committed itself as unequivocally as possible to the defense of Christian
culture and institutions against the rising tide of individualism, secularization,
and religious indifference.21 The fact that no less than eight of the forty-two
Nationalist deputies elected to the Weimar National Assembly were Lutheran
pastors underscored the importance the party attached to religious issues and
the fate of the Church in postwar German society. At Weimar, however, the
DNVP had little direct influence over the policies of the national cabinet since
it did not belong to the governmental coalition that the Majority Socialists,
Center, and DDP formed in early February 1919. But Mumm, Traub, and the
leaders of the party’s Evangelical faction nutured close ties with their counter-
parts in the two liberal parties and worked closely with them to prevent the
disestablishment of the Lutheran Church and other measures that would
seriously weaken its standing in German society.22 At the same time, the
leaders of the DNVP’s Evangelical faction could count on the support of the
Center Party to protect the principle of confessional education against
the efforts of those who wanted to secularize the German school system from
top to bottom. Mumm would later regard the role he had played in preserving
the privileged status of the Lutheran Church in post-revolutionary Germany
as the single most significant accomplishment of his political career.23
The significance of monarchism and the defense of the prerogatives of the
Lutheran Church as issues around which the party faithful could rally, how-
ever, were quickly eclipsed by two issues that dominated the Nationalists’
political agenda in the second half of 1919: the struggle against the Allied
peace terms and the ratification of Germany’s new constitution. Originally the
DNVP’s foreign policy specialists had hoped that American influence would
temper France’s desire for a peace of retribution and were prepared to accept a
peace based upon the principles of Woodrow Wilson’s “Fourteen Points.”24

21
Ziele der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei, Deutschnationale Flugschrift, no. 2 (Berlin, n.d.
[1919]), 10. See also Wilhelm Kähler, “Deutschnationale Kulturpolitik” in Der nationale
Wille. Werden und Wirken der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei 1918 1928, ed. Max Weiß
(Essen, 1928), 178 203, esp. 196 200.
22
Traub, Erinnerungen, 147 48. See also Ludwig Richter, Kirche und Schule in den Bera
tungen der Weimarer Nationalversammlung (Düsseldorf, 1996), esp. 304 20.
23
Reinhard Mumm, Der christlich soziale Gedanke. Bericht über ein Lebensarbeit in
schwerer Zeit (Berlin, 1933), 97 102. See also Friedrich, “Die christlich soziale Fahne
empor!”, 196 204.
24
See the report by Hoetzsch in Erste Tagung des Hauptvorstandes der DNVP, 8 9. as well
as the resolution adopted by the DNVP Central Committee, 16 Apr. 1919, ibid., 11.
     

None of this, however, sat well with old-line conservatives like Westarp, who
railed against the earliest reports emanating from the Allied camp as signs of
an impending Gewaltfriede to which the DNVP would remain irreconcilably
opposed.25 By the same token, Westarp denounced the way in which the
governing councils of Wilson’s League of Nations were constituted as further
proof of a concerted Allied strategy to block Germany’s return to great power
status and to enforce the provisions of a truly Draconian peace.26 When the
Allies presented the German delegation at Paris with their peace terms on
7 May 1919, any chance that the DNVP might ratify the treaty completely
evaporated as the balance within the Nationalist delegation to the National
Assembly shifted in favor of those like Westarp who were intractably opposed
to acceptance of the Allied peace terms. The Nationalists moved quickly to
position themselves at the head of the national protest to which the publica-
tion of the Allied peace terms had given rise.27
In denouncing the proposed peace treaty as a Gewaltfriede that was being
imposed upon Germany at the point of a bayonet,28 the leaders of the DNVP
were anxious not to be outdone by the rival DVP, whose national party
chairman Gustav Stresemann was every bit as uncompromising as the Nation-
alists in his denunciation of Versailles as a “death sentence” aimed at the
annihilation and enslavement of the German people.29 For their own part, the
Nationalists rejoiced in the sense of national solidarity with which Germany’s
political leadership greeted the Allied peace proposal and that manifested itself
most dramatically in the historic session of the National Assembly on 12 May,
when all parties from the Majority Socialists to the DNVP came together to
reject Allied peace terms as an insult to Germany’s national honor.30 By the
same token, the leaders of the DNVP expressed great dismay when this
solidarity began to evaporate as the national cabinet under Majority Socialist
Philipp Scheidemann wrestled with Allied demands that Germany accept the
terms of the proposed peace treaty without amendment or reservation. The
Nationalists were particularly indignant over the possibility that the

25
Kuno von Westarp, Gewaltfriede und Deutschnationale Volkspartei. Rede vom 15. Januar
1919, Konservative Flugschrift, no. 14 (Berlin, n.d. [1919]).
26
Kuno von Westarp, Deutschland im Völkerbund, Deutschnationale Politik, no. 1 (Berlin,
n.d. [1919].
27
For example, see Otto Hoetzsch, “Die Außenpolitik der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei,”
in Der nationale Wille, ed. Weiß, 83 117, esp. 85 90.
28
Hans Erdmann von Lindeiner Wildau, Wie der Gewaltfriede aussieht, Deutschnationale
Flugschrift, no. 17 (Berlin, n.d. [1919]). In a similar vein, see Karl Helfferich, Die
Friedensbedingungen. Ein Wort an das deutsche Volk (Berlin, 1919).
29
[Gustav Stresemann], Dr. Stresemanns Rede gegen den Vernichtungsfrieden, gehalten am
Sonnabend, den 24. Mai 1919, in Stade, Sonderabdruck aus dem “Stader Tageblatt” (N.p.
[Stade], n.d. [1919], 8ff.
30
Traub, Erinnerungen, 195 97.
   , –

government might accede to Allied demands that it accept the treaty intact,
including Articles 227–30 that required Germany to surrender officers and
other high officials responsible for the conduct of the war to the Allies for trial
as war criminals and Article 231 that assigned Germany sole responsibility for
the outbreak of World War I.31 The Nationalists regarded these as non-
negotiable “points of honor,” and when the national government failed to
secure Allied concessions on these points, not even an offer from Reich
President Friedrich Ebert to place the formation of a new government in the
hands of the DNVP could soften the party’s opposition to acceptance of Allied
peace terms.32
As it became increasingly clear that rejection of Allied peace terms would
most likely lead to the occupation and possible dismemberment of the
German Reich, Delbrück and a handful of followers in the DNVP’s Weimar
delegation were willing to provide the national government with a measure of
political cover as long as this did not entail acceptance of those articles of the
proposed peace treaty that constituted an insult to Germany’s national
honor.33 But the furor over Allied peace terms severely weakened the position
of the DNVP moderates and enabled those like Westarp who were most
strongly opposed to an accommodation with the government to gain control
of the delegation and set the tone of its policy toward the Allies. On 22 June
1919 the DNVP delegation to the Weimar National Assembly voted along
with DVP delegation and a majority of the Democratic delegation against
acceptance of the Allied peace terms.34 Supported by both the Majority and
Independent Socialists, the Center, and a minority of the Democratic
delegation, the national government headed now by Majority Socialist Gustav
Bauer succeeded in finding a parliamentary majority for acceptance of the
Allied peace terms, setting the stage for the formal signing of the treaty that
would take place in the Hall of Mirrors at the Versailles Palace in the outskirts
of Paris on 28 June 1919.
The significance of the struggle against Versailles as a catalyst for the
internal consolidation of the DNVP cannot be overemphasized. The struggle
against Versailles temporarily papered over the divisions that had bedeviled
the DNVP ever since its founding at the end of 1918 and provided party
leaders with an issue of such enormous emotional force that they were able to
unite the various constituencies that made up the DNVP’s popular base

31
For the Nationalist position, see Karl Helfferich, Der Friede von Versailles. Rede an die
akademische Jugend gehalten am 26. Juni 1919 im Auditorium Maximum der Berliner
Universität, Deutschnationale Flugschrift, no. 20 (Berlin, n.d. [1919]).
32
Traub, Erinnerungen, 202.
33
Entry in Kahrstedt’s diary, 21 June 1919, BA Koblenz, NL Traub, 8/18.
34
Traub, Erinnerungen, 203 05.
     

behind their crusade for the restoration of Germany’s national honor.35 At the
same time, those moderates who had been moving ever so slowly in the
direction of an accommodation with the national government found them-
selves stymied by the depth of anti-government feeling that had been
unleashed by the struggle against the Versailles Treaty. In his keynote address
at the DNVP’s first party congress in Berlin on 12–13 July 1919, party
chairman Oskar Hergt took special pains to stress the all-inclusive character
of the new party and called upon all of those who shared the DNVP’s
indignation over the terms of the “Versailles Dictate” to join it in the struggle
for right and justice before God and the bar of history.36 But the harshest
words came from Westarp, a former member of the prewar German Conser-
vative Party who had been relegated to the sidelines in the 1919 elections to the
National Assembly. Westarp was determined to use the campaign against
Versailles to consolidate and strengthen the conservative foothold in the
DNVP at the expense of the party’s more moderate leaders like Hergt, Otto
Hoetzsch, and Clemens von Delbrück.37 Labeling Versailles a disgrace and
humiliation for Germans at home and abroad, Westarp called upon the DNVP
to become the heart and soul of German resistance against the enslavement of
the German nation. “Freedom from the slavery of the Versailles Peace Treaty,”
argued Westarp, “that is the task of all politics, that is the goal of every political
struggle. . .It is our task to loosen the frightful chains that bind Germany hand
and foot through unrelenting effort, to protect German Volkstum and German
values whenever the opportunity presents itself, and then to be ready with
watchful eyes and unshakable resolve, to be ready to shake off the bonds of
slavery!”38
The DNVP’s struggle against Versailles would set the stage for the next
major struggle the party would face, the struggle over ratification of the
Weimar Constitution. That the DNVP would not vote for the new consti-
tution was a foregone conclusion. As a party committed to the monarchical
form of government as the form of government best suited to the traditions
and character of the German people,39 the DNVP could not possibly have
supported the republican constitution that the parties of the Weimar coalition
had drafted without irreparably compromising its political and ideological

35
For example, see Westarp to Heydebrand, 20 June 1919, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, II/80.
36
Oskar Hergt, Gegenwart und Zukunft der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei. Rede auf dem
Parteitag der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei in Berlin am 12. und 13. Juli 1919, Deutsch
nationale Flugschrift, no. 21 (Berlin, 1919).
37
Westarp to Heydebrand, 28 May and 7 July 1919, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, II/80.
38
Kuno von Westarp, Deutschlands Zukunftsaufgaben in der auswärtigen Politik. Rede auf
dem Parteitag der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei in Berlin am 12. und 13. Juli 1919,
Deutschnationale Flugschrift, no. 24 (Berlin, 1919), 7.
39
Excerpts from Delbrück’s speech in the National Assembly, 28 Feb. 1919, quoted in
Westarp, Konservative Politik, ed. Hiller von Gaertringen, 264 65.
   , –

integrity. Still, this did not prevent individual Nationalists from taking part in
the deliberations that accompanied the establishment of the new constitutional
order at both the national and state levels. In fact, governmental conservatives
like Delbrück and Adelbert Düringer in the Weimar National Assembly and
Hergt and Hoetzsch in the Prussian Constitutional Assembly as well as their
counterparts in Bavaria, Württemberg, and elsewhere worked diligently to
establish a constitutional framework for the defense of conservative institutions,
interests, and values in Germany’s new republican order.40 Here the National-
ists pursued three goals. First, they sought to strengthen the authority of the
state – admittedly a paradox in view of their opposition to the republican form
in which the state currently existed – by decoupling the exercise of executive
authority from the vicissitudes of the constantly shifting party configurations in
the Reichstag and state legislative bodies and by increasing the powers and
prerogatives of the Reich President and state executives at the expense of
popularly elected legislatures.41 Second, they sought to prevent the dismember-
ment of Prussia for the purposes of creating a unitary German state. Accord-
ingly, the Nationalists fought to preserve as much as possible of Prussia’s
territorial and institutional integrity within the framework of a new federal
arrangement that guaranteed the individual German states a substantial meas-
ure of autonomy from the central government in Berlin.42 Third, the National-
ists sought to sidetrack socialist efforts to include elements of the revolutionary
Rätesystem, or system of revolutionary councils, in the new constitutional order
and called for the reorganization of German economic life along corporatist
lines and the creation of a separate legislative chamber for the representation of
social, economic, and vocational interests.43
On none of these issues would the Nationalists have a significant impact
upon the outcome of the deliberations that culminated in the presentation of
the draft constitution to the Weimar National Assembly in mid-July 1919.
While it was unlikely that even under the best of circumstances the DNVP
would have supported the new constitutional order that was taking shape in
Weimar and elsewhere, Nationalist opposition to the new constitution quickly
hardened in the wake of Versailles, and on 31 July 1919 the DNVP joined the
German People’s Party and Independent Socialists in voting against its ratifi-
cation.44 The resounding “No” with which the DNVP greeted the adoption of
the new constitution, however, was more than a simple vote. It was a symbolic
act that defined the DNVP as a party of “resistance” against the deplorable

40
For further details, see Trippe, Konservative Verfassungspolitik, 62 90.
41
Axel von Freytagh Loringhoven, “Verfassungsfragen,” in Der nationale Wille, ed. Weiß,
143 53, esp. 146.
42
Ibid., 145 46. See also Westarp, Konservative Politik, ed. Hiller von Gaertringen, 270 72.
43
Westarp, Konservative Politik, ed. Hiller von Gaertringen, 294 97.
44
Freytagh Loringhoven, “Verfassungsfragen,” 145.
     

conditions that had been created by the lost war and the political revolution
that followed. It was a “No” directed as much against the spirit of the Weimar
Constitution as it was against the specific provisions of the constitution with
which the Nationalists took issue. The Nationalists disputed the legitimacy of
the National Assembly to write a new constitution and rejected the principle of
popular sovereignty upon which the new constitution rested. The DNVP’s
vote against the Weimar Constitution was, as one of the party’s leading
constitutional theorists put it, not just a vote rejecting the new constitutional
order but a vote against the spirit of Weimar and all the constitution presum-
ably stood for.45
The DNVP’s votes against the Versailles Peace Treaty and the Weimar
Constitution were defining moments in the party’s early history and established
the DNVP as a party of “negative integration,” that is, as a party that sought to
consolidate the diverse and potentially antagonistic constituencies that consti-
tuted its material base by stressing not what these constituencies held in
common, but what they opposed in common. In the final analysis, it was the
struggle against the twin evils of Versailles and Weimar that bound the DNVP
together into a cohesive political force. Not only did this struggle obscure the
divisions that existed within the DNVP’s rank-and-file, but it gave the different
constituencies within the party a sense of mission and purpose without which
the DNVP might very well have broken apart into its constituent elements. It
was what party activist Hans Erdmann von Lindeiner-Wildau called the “unity
of the no [Gemeinsamkeit der Nein)] that defined the DNVP in the first years of
existence and that presented party leaders with the key to its internal consoli-
dation. It remained to be seen whether it would ever be possible to transform
this “unity of the no” into a “unity of the yes” that would allow the DNVP to
perform positive and constructive work on the basis of the new political order to
which the architects of the Weimar Constitution had given birth.46

Building a Social Constituency

The DNVP’s Berlin party congress in mid-July 1919 represented a milestone
in the party’s internal consolidation.47 By then the DNVP was already well
into the process of integrating the various social, economic, and vocational

45
Axel von Freytagh Loringhoven, “Der Geist der neuen Verfassung,” in Jahrbuch 1920 der
Deutschnationalen Volkspartei (Berlin, n.d. [1920]), 87 102.
46
Hans von Lindeiner Wildau, “Konservatismus,” in Volk und Reich der Deutschen, ed.
Bernhard Harms, 3 vols. (Berlin, 1929), 2:58 59. In a similar vein, see David P. Walker,
“The German Nationalist People’s Party: The Conservative Dilemma in the Weimar
Republic,” Journal of Contemporary History 14 (1979): 627 47.
47
For the official record of the DNVP’s Berlin party congress, see Der erste Parteitag der
Deutschnationalen Volkspartei am 12. und 13. Juli 1919 in Berlin. Stenographischer
Bericht, Sonderausgabe der Post (Berlin, 1919).
   , –

groups upon which it depended for the bulk of its electoral support into its
own organizational structure through the creation of vocational committees,
or berufsständische Fachausschüsse.48 The leaders of the DNVP took a par-
ticular interest in their party’s efforts to win the support of the German worker
and white-collar employee. Before the war German conservatives, with the
exception of the Christian-Socials, had paid little more than lip service to the
social and economic interests of the German working class. But the abolition
of the three-class franchise in Prussia and the introduction of a new electoral
system based upon the principle of proportional representation had made it
incumbent upon the leaders of the DNVP to expand their party’s base of
support into Germany’s working and white-collar population. Here the initia-
tive came from Emil Hartwig, a forty-five-year-old trade-union secretary from
the Evangelical-Social Academy (Evangelisch-soziale Schule) in Bethel and the
general secretary of the Christian-Social movement since 1906. In late Novem-
ber 1918 Hartwig and his associates issued an appeal on the DNVP’s behalf to
the leaders of the Christian-Social labor movement throughout the country,
and in January 1919 they founded the Reich Workers’ Committee of the
DNVP (Reichsarbeiterausschuß der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei) to facili-
tate recruitment of the German worker and combat the rising tide of social
and political radicalism within the industrial working class.49
Hartwig’s efforts, which received their impetus from the social gospel of
German Lutheranism and were aimed at improving the spiritual as well as the
material welfare of the industrial worker,50 were complemented by those of
Franz Behrens in the countryside. Like Hartwig, the forty-six-year-old Behrens
subscribed to Luther’s school gospel but concentrated his efforts not on the
industrial worker in predominantly urban areas but upon the farm laborer in
East Prussia and elsewhere. In December 1912 Behrens had founded the
Central Association of German Forest, Farm, and Vineyard Workers
(Zentralverband der Forst-, Land- und Weinbergsarbeiter Deutschlands) –
an organization subsequently renamed the Central Association of Farm

48
Max Weiß, “Organisation,” in Der nationale Wille, ed. Weiß, 362 90, here 386 89.
49
See “An unsere Standesgenossen in Stadt u. Land,” Evangelisch soziale Stimmen 14,
no. 12 (31 Dec. 1918): 42 43. See also Die deutschnationale Arbeiter Bewegung, ihr
Werden und Wachsen, ed. Bundesvorstand des Deutschnationalen Arbeiterbundes
(Berlin, n.d. [1925]), 10. For further details, see Amrei Stupperich, Volksgemeinschaft
oder Arbeitersolidarität. Studien zur Arbeitnehmerpolitik in der Deutschnationalen Volks
partei (1918 1933) (Göttingen and Zurich, 1982), esp. 17 52, and Maik Ohnezeit,
Zwischen “schärfster Opposition,” 62 64.
50
Speech by Hartwig in Die erste deutschnationale Arbeitertagung in Hagen i. W. (N.p., n.d.
[1919]), 1 4. On the Evangelical workers’ movement, see the reports by Werbeck, Grunz,
and Rudolf in Die EAV. Bewegung, ihr Werden und Wollen. Der 24. Vertretertag des
Gesamtverbandes evangelischer Arbeitervereine Deutschlands in Halle a.S. vom 27. 29.
Juni 1925 (Berlin, n.d. [1925]), 12 31.
     

Laborers – that sought to contain the spread of Marxism in the German

countryside by integrating the farm worker as firmly as possible into the
Christian-national labor movement.51 In July 1919 Behrens was given the
opportunity to address the DNVP’s national party congress in Berlin in what
as a clear sign of just how important the worker’s vote was to the party’s future
growth and development. Behrens reminded the party faithful not only that
the full and complete integration of the German worker into the political
fabric of the nation as a whole was one of the DNVP’s most cherished
objectives but also, in what could only have been a direct shot at the anti-
union sentiments on the DNVP’s right wing, that the worker was fully entitled
to organize for the purpose of securing his material interests in the workplace
and society at large.52 Behrens’s speech afforded the leaders of the DNVP’s
labor wing the official imprimatur they needed to intensify their efforts to
integrate the German worker into the DNVP’s organizational framework.
These efforts drew to a preliminary climax in early November 1919 when
the leaders of the DNVP’s labor wing convened the first German National
Workers’ Conference (Deutschnationale Arbeitertagung) in Hagen. Here
Hartwig and Behrens stressed not just their commitment to the material
welfare of the German worker but, more importantly, the importance of not
losing sight of the spiritual dimension of the current political struggle. For, as
Behrens insisted, the collapse of 1918 was more than a military and political
collapse; it was a spiritual collapse that manifested itself first in the profiteering
and racketeering of the lost war and then in the triumph of revolutionary
socialism and its crusade to de-Christianize German life. For Behrens and the
leaders of the DNVP’s labor wing, the challenge was not to succumb to the
rising tide of materialism and self-interest that had led to the collapse of
1918 but to use the collapse as the point of departure for the moral and
spiritual rebirth of the German nation, a rebirth that could take place only on
the basis of the German National People’s Party.53
Similar developments were under way within the German white-collar
movement. Here the central figure was Friedrich Frahm, a forty-four-year-
old official in the German National Union of Commercial Employees who in
January 1919 had been elected to the Prussian Constitutional Assembly. In its
appeal to the German salaried employee, the DNVP adopted the DHV’s

51
On the ZdL, see Zehn Jahre christlich nationale Landarbeiterbewegung 1913 1923. Eine
Festschrift zur Erinnerung an das 10 jährige Bestehen des Zentralverbandes der Land
arbeiter, ed. Vorstand des Zentralverbandes der Landarbeiter (Berlin, 1923), 6 13.
52
Franz Behrens, Arbeiterschaft und Deutschnationale Volkspartei. Rede auf dem Parteitag
der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei in Berlin am 12. u. 13. Juli 1919, Deutschnationale
Flugschrift, no. 23 (Berlin, 1919).
53
Speech by Behrens in Die erste deutschnationale Arbeitertagung in Hagen i. W. (N.p., n.d.
[1919]), 5 10.
   , –

position that the white-collar workforce constituted an “estate,” or Stand, that

distinguished it in particular from the industrial working class below it.54
While this distinction reflected the high degree of status consciousness that
existed in the more conservative sectors of Germany’s white-collar population,
it did not stand in the way of close cooperation between the white-collar and
working-class representatives within the DNVP.55 Following the example of
Hartwig and his associates, the leaders of the DNVP’s white-collar wing
founded the Reich Committee for Sales Clerks and Private Employees (Reichs-
ausschuß für kaufmännische und Privatangestellten) under Frahm’s chair-
manship in early 1919.56 But unlike the DNVP’s workers’ committee, the
committee for salaried employees never developed a particularly prominent
profile within the party organization, in part because the DNVP’s white-collar
contingent already had a powerful voice in the DHV and did not need the
strong internal presence that was essential to the legitimacy of the DNVP’s
working-class wing. This, however, did not keep Walther Lambach, a thirty-
four-year-old DHV offical who replaced Frahm as chairman of the DNVP’s
Reich Committee for Sales Clerks and Private Employees in the summer of
1920, from developing into an articulate and indefatigable advocate of white-
collar interests within the DNVP. Speaking at the DNVP’s second party
congress in Hanover in October 1920, Lambach outlined an ambitious social
program which, if effectively implemented, would lead to the creation of a
genuine Volksgemeinschaft in which the worker and white-collar employee
would take their place as equals in the fabric of the German nation.57
Through its ties to the Evangelical workers’ movement, the Central Associ-
ation of Farm Laborers, and the German National Union of Commercial
Employees, the DNVP established a foothold in the German working and
white-collar classes that was unprecedented in the history of German
conservatism. Yet as promising as these ties were, by no means were they as
important for the future of the DNVP as its relations with the German
agricultural community. Agriculture constituted the heart and soul of the
conservative milieu in which the DNVP was situated and which the DNVP
sought to unite into a cohesive political force. But, as in the case of labor, the
organizational infrastructure of German agriculture had undergone profound
changes during World War I and the ensuing revolution. The war and
revolution had had a radicalizing effect upon Germany’s rural population
and seriously eroded the influence of the land-owning aristocracy east of the

54
Walther Lambach, “Angestelltenfragen,” in Der nationale Wille, ed. Weiß, 225 33.
55
Stupperich, Volksgemeinschaft oder Arbeitersolidarität, 13.
56
Ibid., 22 24.
57
Walther Lambach, Unser Weg zur deutschen Volksgemeinschaft. Rede auf dem 2. Partei
tage der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei in Hannover am 25. Oktober 1920, Deutschna
tionale Flugschrift, no. 79 (Berlin, 1920).
     

Elbe and elsewhere.58 At the same time, the introduction of a democratic

franchise throughout the Reich – and particularly the abolition of the three-
class franchise in Prussia – meant that German conservatives were now far
more dependent upon the support of the rural voter than they had ever been
before the outbreak of the war. The success with which German conservatives
were able to reconstitute their hegemony in the countryside would have
profound implications for the future of the DNVP and its efforts to reinvigor-
ate political conservatism as a factor in German political life.
In the immediate aftermath of the November Revolution, Gustav Roesicke
and the leaders of the Agrarian League lined up behind the DNVP and actively
supported it in the elections to the Weimar and Prussian constitutional
assemblies.59 The DNVP, in return, waged an aggressive campaign designed
to disabuse German peasants and farm workers of the democratic sentiments
that might have captured their support as a result of the war and the
deteriotaring economic situation in the countryside.60 Whatever its short-
comings from the perspective of the East Elbian landowners might have
been,61 the DNVP remained the party of preference for the vast majority of
Germany’s Protestant rural voters. At Weimar as many as sixteen of the forty-
five Nationalist deputies were either farmers or estate owners, while in the
Prussian constitutional assembly seven of the party’s fifty deputies had close
ties to Prussian agriculture. Still, the percentage of deputies with an agricul-
tural pedigree was significantly less than what it had been for the German
Conservative Party before the war. Outside of Prussia the DNVP received
far-reaching support from the BdL’s one-time regional affiliates in Bavaria,
Württemberg, Saxony, and Thuringia even though in some cases those affili-
ates maintained complete organizational independence from the DNVP’s
district organizations.62 More than anything else, it was the DNVP’s unrelent-
ing struggle against the wartime controls that the government had imposed on
agricultural prices and production to combat the threat of inflation that

58
See Flemming, Landwirtschaftliche Interessen, 76 160, and Robert G. Moeller, German
Peasants, 43 67.
59
Roesicke to Wangenheim, Winckel, and Weilnböck, 10 Dec. 1918, BA Berlin, Nachlass
Conrad von Wangenheim, 13/132 34, also in BA Koblenz, NL Weilnböck, 46b.
60
See Oskar Thomas, Demokratie, Landwirtschaft und Landarbeiterschaft, Deutschnatio
nale Flugschrift, no. 29 (Berlin, n.d. [1919].
61
For example, see Levetzow to Wangenheim, 5 Feb. 1919, BA Berlin, NL Roesicke, 4a/294.
62
For further details, see Martin Schumacher, Land und Politik. Eine Untersuchung über
politische Parteien und agrarische Interessen 1914 1923 (Düsseldorf, 1978), 477 80. On
the situation in Württemberg, see Hans Peter Müller, “Landwirtschaftliche Interessen
vertretung und völkisch antisemitische Ideologie. Der Bund der Landwirte/Bauernbund
in Württemberg 1895 1918,” Zeitschrift für Württembergische Landesgeschichte 53
(1994): 263 300, and Reinhold Weber, Bürgerpartei und Bauernbund in Württemberg.
Konservative Parteien im Kaiserreich und in Weimar (1895 bis 1933) (Düsseldorf, 2004),
121 31.
   , –

defined the DNVP’s agrarian profile.63 Of all the parties at Weimar, none was
more uncompromising in its demands for an end to these controls than the
DNVP. At the same time, the DNVP championed the cause of the farm
laborer and called for a comprehensive program of rural resettlement aimed
at repopulating the countryside and transforming the farm laborer into an
independent peasant proprietor.64 The DNVP’s long-term goal was to restore
the hegemonic relationships that had existed in the countryside before the war
and that had been overturned by the spread of socialism into rural Germany in
the revolutionary turmoil of the immediate postwar period.

The Quest for Synthesis

As successful as the DNVP was in establishing footholds within both the
Christian labor movement and organized agriculture, by no means were its
efforts in the immediate postwar period confined to these social strata. By the
end of 1919 the DNVP had also established vocational committees for the
state civil service, teachers, doctors and those in the medical profession,
students, university professors, the economic middle class, and ex-servicemen
and veterans of the recent war in addition to those that had already been
constituted for workers, white-collar employees, and agriculture.65 It was no
idle claim when Nationalist party chairman Oskar Hergt asserted at the
DNVP’s Berlin party congress earlier in the year that “no party could claim
to be as deeply rooted in all sectors of the population, in all parts of the nation”
as the DNVP.66 But the precise content of what Hergt meant when he
portrayed the DNVP as a conservative Sammelpartei open to all Germans
regardless of region, class, or confession remained vague and uncertain.
Whenever Hergt tried to spell out what this was supposed to mean in terms
of the party’s social and economic policy, he became immediately embroiled in
controversy. Speaking in the Prussian Constitutional Assembly on 25 Septem-
ber 1919, Hergt outlined a six-point program for the restoration of order
throughout the country that he hoped would serve as the basis upon which all
of the parties in the Reichstag, including his own DNVP, could unite. Most of
the recommendations contained in Hergt’s so-called Ordnungsprogramm,
such as his call for an end to the controlled economy and for the suspension

63
Moeller, “Winners as Losers in the German Inflation,” 255 82.
64
Joseph Kaufhold, Die Deutschnationale Volkspartei und die Landwirtschaft, Deutschna
tionale Politik, no. 8 (Berlin, 1920), esp. 4 16. See also Albert Arnstadt, “Landwirtschaft
und Deutschnationale Volkspartei,” Jahrbuch 1920 der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei
(Berlin, n.d. [1920]), 24 27.
65
“Geschäftsbericht der Hauptgeschäftsstelle der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei (Juli
1919 bis Oktober 1920),” n.d., BA Berlin, NL Mumm, 276/91 95.
66
Hergt, Gegenwart und Zukunft, 3.
     

of all efforts at socialization, were fairly innocuous and enjoyed widespread, if

not unanimous, support within the DNVP. But when Hergt also had the
temerity to suggest that the DNVP should be prepared to enter the national
government and that Germany’s propertied classes should bear their fare
share of the burden for the reconstruction of the Fatherland,67 his remarks
met with a stony silence from Westarp and the leaders of the party’s right
wing, a silence that underscored just how difficult the task of reconciling the
interests of the various constituencies that made up the party’s material base
was going to be.68
Under these circumstances, the party leadership continued its work on
drafting a comprehensive party program that could reconcile the diverse social
and economic interests that constituted the DNVP’s material base. At Berlin
the DNVP party leadership had empanelled a special commission for the
purpose of drafting a comprehensive party program.69 The commission con-
sisted of fifteen members recruited from the various factions that had come
together to form the DNVP at the end of 1918, and its task was to draft a
program that did not merely highlight the DNVP’s reasons for rejecting the
existing state of affairs but presented a set of positive objectives capable of
attracting the support of the German people. As Hans Erdmann von
Lindeiner-Wildau, the DNVP’s managing secretary, declared at the first meet-
ing of the program commission on 29 September 1919: “The people should
not come to us because we have not taken part in the stupidity of others but
because we can show the path to recovery.”70 The commission’s work was
divided into four subcommittees, one to draft the preamble and the other three
for sections on “nation and state,” “spiritual life,” and “economic life.”71 The
deliberations were tedious and difficult, in part because they afforded the old-
line Prussian conservatives affiliated with the Central Association of German
Conservatives an opportunity to secure for themselves a decisive influence
over the party’s self-image and future political development.72 At the same

67
Oskar Hergt, Das Ordnungsprogramm der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei. Rede in der
Preußischen Landes Versammlung am Freitag, 26. September 1919, Deutschnationale
Flugschrift, no. 31 (Berlin, 1919).
68
For Westarp’s reaction to Hergt’s speech, see his letters to Heydebrand from 1 Oct. 1919
and 7 Jan. 1920, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, II/80.
69
Westarp, Konservative Politik, ed. Hiller von Gaertringen, 93. For further details, see
Hertzman, DNVP, 79 92, and Ohnezeit, Zwischen “schärfster Opposition,” 88 99.
70
Statement by Lindeiner Wildau at the meeting of the DNVP program commission, 29
Sept. 1919, BA Berlin, NL Westarp, 114/6. See also the memorandum that Lindeiner
Wildau attached to his letter to Hergt, 27 May 1919, BA Berlin, R 8005, 3/233 37.
71
Minutes of the first meeting of the DNVP program commission, 29 Sept. 1919, BA Berlin,
NL Westarp, 114/5 9. See also the entry in Kahrstedt’s diary, 29 Sept. 1919, NL Westarp,
Gärtringen, II/4.
72
See Heydebrand’s remarks at a meeting of Nationalist politicians in the Breslau general
secretariat of the DKP, 8 July 1919, appended to Kube to Heydebrand, 26 July 1919, NL
   , –

time, DNVP moderates were anxious to recapture the ground they had lost to
the conservatives in the struggle against Versailles and to reclaim leadership of
the party.73 The two factions were on a collision course that would ultimately
determine the character and nature of the DNVP.
Behind the Central Association of German Conservatives and its efforts to
gain a stronger foothold in the German National People’s Party stood the by
no means inconsiderable resources of Prussia’s land-owning aristocracy. In
Prussia, as throughout the Reich as a whole, the land-owning aristocracy –
along with the monarchy, the military, the ministerial bureaucracy, and the
Lutheran state church – constituted one of the pillars of Germany’s prewar
conservative establishment. Although industrialization and economic mod-
ernization in the last decades of the Second Empire had done much to erode
the place of the land-owning aristocracy in German economic life, the titled
nobility still possessed a measure of social prestige and political influence that
was no longer commensurate with its economic substance. The military and
political collapse of 1918 and the apparent triumph of socialism in the
immediate postwar period were accompanied not just by the loss of the
privileged status the aristocracy had enjoyed under the Prussian constitution
but also by the disruption of traditional hegemonic relationships in the
countryside and the fear that the new government might expropriate large
landed agriculture.74 The leaders of the Central Association of German Con-
servatives regarded the DNVP with deep suspicion and had joined it only in
the hope of transforming it into an instrument of their own political will.75 As

Westarp, Gärtringen, II/79, as well as Schröter (Central Association of German Conserva

tives) to Westarp, 14 Aug. 1919, BA Berlin, NL Westarp, 37/118 22. See also Daniela
Gasteiger, “From Friends to Foes: Count Kuno von Westarp and the Transformation of
the German Right,” in The German Right in the Weimar Republic. Studies in the History
of German Conservatism, Nationalism, and Antisemitism, ed. Larry Eugene Jones (New
York and Oxford, 2014), 48 78, esp. 59 71.
73
For example, see Delbrück to Hergt, 22 Aug. 1919, BA Koblenz, Nachlass Siegfried von
Kardorff, 10/50 59.
74
See Wolfgang Zollitsch, “Die Erosion des traditionellen Konservatismus. Ländlicher Adel
in Preußen zwischen Kaiserreich und Weimarer Republik,” in Parteien im Wandel. Vom
Kaiserreich zur Weimarer Republik. Rekrutierung Qualifizierung Karrieren, ed. Dieter
Dowe, Jürgen Kocka, and Heinrich August Winkler (Munich, 1999), 161 82, as well as
Stephan Malinowski, Vom König zum Führer. Sozialer Niedergang und politische Radi
kalisierung im deutschen Adel zwischen Kaiserreich und NS Staat (Berlin, 2003), 198 259,
and Eckart Conze, “‘Only a Dictator Can Help Us Now’: Aristocracy and the Radical
Right in Germany,” in European Aristocracies and the Radical Right, 1918 1939, ed.
Karina Urbach (Oxford, 2007), 129 47.
75
On hard line Prussian conservatives and their relationship to the DNVP, see Jens
Flemming, “Konservatismus als ‘nationalrevolutionäre Bewegung.’ Konservative Kritik
an der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei 1918 1933,” in Deutscher Konservatismus im 19.
und 20. Jahrhundert. Festschrift für Fritz Fischer, ed. Dirk Stegmann, Bernd Jürgen
Wendt, and Peter Christian Witt (Bonn, 1983), 295 331, and Rainer Pomp,
     

the association’s chairman, Westarp used his appointment to the all-important

subcommittee on “Nation and State” to tie the DNVP as tightly as possible to
the ideological pretensions of the Prussian conservatives and to derail the
efforts of the two other subcommittee members, Ulrich von Hassell from the
DNVP’s State Political Coordinating Committee and former Free Conserva-
tive Siegfried von Kardorff, to cast the DNVP as a broadly based, all-inclusive
conservative party.76
The conflict over the shape and content of the DNVP party program drew
to a climax in the period preceding the meeting of the DNVP program
committee on 29 January 1920, at which time the final outlines of the program
were to be approved. On 21 December 1919 Kardorff wrote to Westarp and
identified foreign policy, monarchism, and federalism as areas of continuing
disagreement. Kardorff criticized in particular the bellicose tone of the Wes-
tarp’s stance toward the Allies, his efforts to identify the party as unabashedly
as possible with a restoration of the Hohenzollern monarchy, and the conser-
vatives’ preference for the more decentralized federal structure of the old
Bismarckian Reich over the unitary state.77 Undeterred by these develop-
ments, the DNVP’s State Political Coordinating Committee continued to work
on the party program before submitting its draft to the party chairman in late
January 1920. Intended only as a general statement of the principles upon
which the party was based, this draft carefully avoided any reference to the
Hohenzollerns in its endorsement of the monarchical form of government and
gracefully skirted the issue of Prussia with little more than an innocuous
bromide against its dismemberment. At the same time, the draft stressed the
national concept, the Christian faith, and the unity of all Germans as the three
principles upon which the rebirth of the German nation was to take place.78
None of this set well with old-line Prussian conservatives like Oskar von der
Osten, a former DKP parliamentarian who had been appointed to the DNVP
program committee and who took issue with the draft’s failure to commit the
party to the restoration of the Hohenzollerns and the decentralized federal
structure of the Bismarckian Reich at the same time that he criticized

“Brandenburgischer Landadel und die Weimarer Republik. Konflikte um Oppositions

strategien und Elitenkonzepte,” in Adel und Staatsverwaltung in Brandenburg im 19. und
20. Jahrhundert. Ein historischer Vergleich, ed. Kurt Adamy and Kristina Hübener (Berlin,
1996), 185 218, esp. 186 96.
76
“Staat und Volk (Nicht Volk und Staat),” n.d. [Jan. 1920], BA Berlin, NL Westarp, 114/
49 52. See also Westarp, Konservative Politik, ed. Hiller von Gaertringen, 94 95.
77
Kardorff to Westarp, 21 Dec. 1919, BA Berlin, NL Westarp, 114/11 12. See also Kardorff
“Richtlinien für eine Erweiterung des Programms der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei,”
n.d., BA Koblenz, NL Kardorff, 16/3 14.
78
“Programm der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei,” n.d., BA Berlin, NL Westarp, 114/
108 17, appended to Trotha to Hergt, 28 Jan. 1920, ibid. 114/19 22.
   , –

Kardorff’s unqualified endorsement of parliamentarism and a democratic

franchise.79
Another issue that required further clarification was the Jewish question.
Despite the affinity that many conservative Jews felt for the parties of the
German Right,80 the antisemites within the DNVP had become increasingly
active in the latter stages of the campaign for the Weimar and Prussian
constitutional assemblies and were pressing the party leadership to adopt a
clear and unequivocal stand against the danger that Jews presumably posed to
Germany’s national life. This coincided with a dramatic upsurge in the general
level of antisemitism throughout German society as organizations on the racist
Right intensified their attacks against the so-called Jewish threat.81 While it is
no doubt true that even the most moderate of the DNVP party leaders like
Clemens von Delbrück harbored a bias against Jews that was particularly
strong toward those Eastern European Jews, or Ostjuden, who had entered
Germany after the war,82 few were willing to make antisemitism a fundamen-
tal tenet of the DNVP’s official program or embrace the radical demands for
the exclusion of Jews from German economic, political, and cultural life.
While some like Kardorff called upon the DNVP to dissociate itself from
antisemitism altogether,83 most preferred to cloak their antisemitism in more
general statements calling for the preservation of Germany’s Christian culture
or the protection of Germany’s unique ethnic character or Volkstum. In
neither case, however, was this sufficiently pointed to satisfy the leaders of
the party’s antisemitic faction, who continued to pressure the party leadership
for a bolder and more defiant statement on the Jewish threat to Germany’s
national life. As a result, the party’s national leaders eventually gave in and
included a sentence in the draft party program that specifically identified “the
increasingly dangerous dominance of Jewry in government and public life
since the revolution” as a threat to the unique ethnic character of the German
nation.84 Even this did not go far enough to satisfy the more rabid antisemites
within the party.85
The DNVP concluded its initial deliberations on the new party program in
January 1920 and immediately began to revise and edit it in anticipation of its

79
Osten to Kardorff, 9 Jan. 1920, BA Berlin, NL Westarp, 114/14 16.
80
For example, see the recent publication by Philipp Nielsen, Between Heimat and Hatred:
Jews and the Right in Germany, 1871 1935 (Oxford, 2019), 135 43.
81
Both of these organizations are discussed in greater detail in chapter 5.
82
For example, see Delbrück to Hergt, 22 Aug. 1919, BA Koblenz, NL Kardorff, 10/50 59.
83
Kardorff to Hergt, 21 Aug. 1919, BA Koblenz, NL Kardorff, 10/46 47.
84
Westarp, Konservative Politik, ed. Hiller von Gaertringen, 108 09. For further details, see
Striesow, DNVP und die Völkisch Radikalen, 146 62, and Jochmann, “Ausbreitung des
Antisemitismus,” 486 500.
85
Graefe Goldbee, “Partei u. Judenfrage,” 5 Feb. 1920, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, VN 29.
     

official adoption later that spring.86 In the meantime, the party continued to
develop and expand its organizational base in preparation for the upcoming
national elections. On 13 March 1920 the DNVP concluded an agreement
with the Bavarian Middle Party whereby the latter would become part of the
DNVP national party organization with concessions regarding its autonomy
in Bavarian state politics.87 By the same token, the DNVP had begun to
normalize its relations with the Württemberg Burgher Party, although here
negotiations would drag on for some time and not reach a final conclusion
until November 1920. In both cases, the Bavarian Middle Party and the
Württemberg Burgher Party would continue to function as the DNVP’s state
affiliates under their original names and with greater independence from the
DNVP’s central headquarters in Berlin than the party’s state, provincial, and
district organizations in other parts of the country generally enjoyed.88
One area, however, in which the DNVP was not able to record much
progress was in its relationship to the German People’s Party. The DNVP
party leadership had hoped for a merger with the DVP after the elections to
the National Assembly but had been stalled by the DVP’s reluctance to
commit itself to anything more elaborate than the creation of a special
committee to coordinate strategy between the parties’ Weimar delegations.89
The fact that the DVP and DNVP both opposed acceptance of the Versailles
Peace Treaty and ratification of the Weimar Constitution did much to revive
hopes that a merger of the two parties might still be in the works. Not only did
Hergt explicitly address such a possibility in his keynote speech at the DNVP’s
Berlin party congress in July 1919,90 but industrial interests in the two right-
wing parties strongly supported the establishment of closer political ties
between the two parties, if for no other reason than to strengthen the

86
“Richtlinien der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei,” n.d. [13. Jan, 1920], BA Berlin, NL
Westarp, 114/83 85.
87
Agreement signed by Hergt, Graef, and Hilpert, 13 Mar. 1920, BA Berlin, R 8005/27/46.
See also “Anschluß der Bayerischen Mittelpartei an die Deutschnationale Volkspartei,”
Blätter der bayerischen Mittelpartei 2, no. 10 (9 Mar. 1920): 37 40, as well as Hans
Hilpert, Die Deutschnationalen in Bayern. Rede auf dem dritten Parteitage der Deutsch
nationalen Volkspartei in München am 2. Sept. 1921, Deutschnationale Flugschrift,
no. 116 (Berlin, 1921), 3 4. For further details, see Elina Kiiskinen, DNVP in Bayern,
70 76.
88
Resolution adopted at the WBP delegate congress in Stuttgart, 4 7 Nov. 1920, in Jahrbuch
der Württ. Bürgerpartei Deutschnationale Volkspartei Württembergs, ed W. Haller
Ludwigsburg (Stuttgart, 1921), 96. See also Bazille, “Der Anschluß der Bürgerpartei an die
Deutschnationale Volkspartei,” Blätter der Württembergischen Bürgerpartei. Halbmo
natschrift der Württembergischen Bürgerpartei 1, no. 2 (24 Oct. 1920): 12 13.
89
Hergt’s comments at a meeting of the DNVP’s organizational representatives, 7 8
Feb. 1919, BA Berlin, R 8005, 1/195 201.
90
Hergt, Gegenwart und Zukunft, 9. See also Hans Erdmann von Lindeiner Wildau, Wir
und die Deutsche Volkspartei, Deutschnationale Flugschrift, no. 77 (Berlin, 1921).
   , –

bourgeois presence and the influence of industry in parliament.91 But Strese-

mann and the leaders of the DVP were extremely wary of any accommodation
with the Nationalists that might restrict their own party’s freedom of move-
ment and ability to act independently of the larger and more conservative
DNVP.92 In a review of the DNVP’s Berlin congress, the DVP’s Julius Curtius
poured cold water on the proposal by stressing the profound ideological
differences that separated the two parties and by asking whether the unre-
solved divisions within the DNVP made it a suitable partner for a merger.93 At
the same time, Stresemann and the leaders of the DVP went to great efforts to
dissociate themselves from the increasingly virulent antisemitism from within
the ranks of the DNVP. To be sure, neither Stresemann nor his supporters
were immune from the antisemitic prejudice that had surfaced with such a
vengeance in the immediate postwar period. But, by the same token, they
regarded Nationalist attacks against German Jews as excessive and dismissed
them as evidence of the DNVP’s political immaturity.94

The Perils of Putschism

Despite its rebuff at the hands of the DVP, the DNVP was slowly, but surely,
positioning itself for the new national elections that were scheduled for some
yet undetermined time in the near future. All of this, however, was suddenly
thrown into confusion when on the morning of 13 March 1920 an insurgent
military force under the command of General Walther von Lüttwitz marched
on Berlin, forced the legitimate government to flee the city to safety in the
south, and installed a new government under Wolfgang Kapp, the onetime
chairman of the now defunct German Fatherland Party, with the ultimate aim
of establishing a national dictatorship that would prepare the way for a
restoration of the monarchy. For the most part, the putschists were members
of free corps units that had made their mark in the struggle against Bolshevism

91
See Vögler to Hugenberg, 17 Oct. 1919, BA Koblenz, NL Hugenberg, 49/39 42; 31
Oct. 1919, ibid. 29/402 04; and 9 Dec. 1919, ibid. 49/36 38.
92
For example, see Gustav Stresemann, Die Deutsche Volkspartei und ihr politisches Pro
gramm. Rede auf dem Leipziger Parteitag der Deutschen Volkspartei am 18. Oktober 1919,
Flugschriften der Deutschen Volkspartei, no. 11 (Berlin, 1919), 22 23.
93
Julius Curtius, “Die deutschnationale Volkspartei, ihre Zusammensetzung, Grundsätze,
Taktik nach dem Berliner Parteitag vom 12. und 13. Juli 1919,” Deutsche Stimmen 31,
no. 41 (19 Oct. 1919): 708 17. For the DVP’s perspective, see Hartenstein, Anfänge der
DVP, 131 42, and Ludwig Richter, Die Deutsche Volkspartei 1918 1933 (Düsseldorf,
2002), 76 87.
94
For the DVP’s position on the “Jewish question,” see the resolution adopted by the DVP
managing committee, 28 Jan. 1920, PA AA Berlin, NL Stresemann, 220/140063. For
Stresemann’s position, see Jonathan Wright, “Liberalism and Anti Semitism in Germany:
The Case of Gustav Stresemann,” in Liberalism, Anti Semitism, and Democracy: Essays in
Honour of Peter Pulzer, ed. Henning Tewes and Jonathan Wright (Oxford, 2001), 102 26.
     

but were now threatened with dissolution as a result of Allied pressure on the
Bauer government. Preparations for the putsch lay in the hands of the
National Association (Nationale Vereinigung), a shadowy organization that
had been founded by Erich Ludendorff in the fall of 1919 and that enjoyed
particularly close ties to the DNVP party leadership.95 The assault against
Germany’s fledgling republic enjoyed widespread support among the aristo-
cratic and bourgeois elites east of the Elbe, where it excited hopes that the
verdict of November 1918 might be reversed.96 At the same time, the Kapp-
Lüttwitz putsch constituted a major crisis for the DNVP, if not so much by
virtue of the undertaking’s ignominious collapse four days later as for the fact
that prominent members of the party, including Westarp and Traub, were
actively involved in its preparation, though not necessarily in its execution.
Moreover, many party leaders had extensive foreknowledge of the putsch and
secretly supported its objectives even though they might not have been directly
involved in the putsch itself.97 The problem now confronting party leaders was
how could they best extricate themselves from the mess that had been created
by the abortive putsch without doing serious damage to the progress they had
recorded in building up their party’s national organization or to their pro-
spects in the upcoming national elections. Their task was complicated by the
fact that the putsch had exposed serious fault lines within the DNVP and
threatened to weaken, if not destroy, its fragile unity with a major secession on
the party’s left wing.
In the period leading up to the putsch, Hergt and the DNVP party leader-
ship had intensified their attacks against the Bauer government and the parties
of the Weimar Coalition in anticipation of new elections in the Reich and
Prussia that would, they hoped, bring their party substantial gains at the
polls.98 At the same time, Hergt and other party moderates did their best to
dissociate themselves from the schemes of right-wing reactionaries and dis-
couraged Lüttwitz and his supporters from going ahead with their plans for a

95
For further details, see Johannes Erger, Der Kapp Lüttwitz Putsch. Ein Beitrag zur
deutschen Innenpolitik 1919/20 (Düsseldorf, 1967), as well as the documentation in Der
Kapp Lüttwitz Ludendorff Putsch. Dokumente, ed. Erwin Könnemann and Gerhard
Schulze (Munich, 2002), 1 134.
96
See Axel Schildt, “Der Putsch der ‘Prätorianer, Junker und Alldeutschen.’ Adel und
Bürgertum in den Anfangswirren der Weimarer Republik,” in Adel und Bürgertum in
Deutschland II. Entwicklungslinien und Wendepunkte im 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Heinz Reif
(Berlin, 2001), 103 25.
97
For further details, see Westarp, Konservative Politik, ed. Hiller von Gaertringen, 200 41,
and Traub, Erinnerungen, 224 69.
98
For example, see Oskar Hergt, Dieser Regierung kein Vertrauen, Deutschnationale Flug
schrift, no. 39 (Berlin, n.d. [1920]), esp. 3 8. See also Westarp to Heydebrand, 16
Feb. 1920, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, II/80.
   , –

military coup d’etat.99 The DNVP headquarters in Berlin, however, reacted to

the news of the putsch on the morning of 13 March with “frivolous jubilation
and hopeful joyousness [eitel Jubel und Hoffnungsfreudigkeit],” all in the naïve
belief that the new age for which the Nationalists had so fervently hoped had
finally arrived.100 But almost immediately party leaders began to distance
themselves from the putsch as the utter hopelessness of the undertaking
became more and more apparent. Now the best party leaders could hope for
was to use their connections with the putschists to seek a return of consti-
tutional government, though under circumstances in which their negotiating
posture would have been greatly improved. Here Hergt and the leaders of the
DNVP’s delegation to the Weimar National Assembly sought an accomoda-
tion between Kapp and the legitimate government in temporary exile in
Stuttgart that would pave the way for new national elections, the election of
a new Reich president by popular vote, the formation of new cabinets in the
Reich and Prussia consisting of specialists chosen for their expertise and not
for their party affiliation, and a general amnesty for all of those on the Left and
the Right from arrest and prosecution.101 In their first public reaction to the
putsch on the evening of 13 March the Nationalists thus tempered their
rejection of the undertaking with sharp criticism of the Weimar government
for having breached the new constitution by failing to call for new elections
once the Weimar National Assembly had completed its work. In the same
breadth, the DNVP pledged itself to work in close concert with all of those
forces committed to the preservation of peace, order, freedom, and national
honor.102
Initially Hergt had hoped that Stresemann and the DVP would support his
party’s efforts to pressure the exile government in Stuttgart into reaching an
agreement with Kapp that would lead to the fulfillment of these and other
conditions.103 But with Kapp’s resignation and the capitulation of the puts-
chists on 17 March, the situation in which the DNVP party leadership found

99
See excerpts from Hergt’s speech before the Prussian constitutional assembly, 13
Jan. 1920, and Posadowsky Wehner’s warning against a putsch in the National Assem
bly, 9 Mar. 1920, quoted in Die Deutschnationale Volkspartei und der Militärputsch vom
13. März 1920, Deutschnationale Politik, no. 10 (Berlin, 1920), 5. On Lindeiner Wildau’s
efforts to dissuade the putschists, see Westarp, Konservative Politik, ed. Hiller von
Gaertringen, 203 04, as well as Lindeiner Wildau’s memorandum, n.d. [19 20
Mar. 1920], BA Berlin, R 8005, 5/48 56.
100
Report to Heydebrand, 1 Apr. 1920, BA Berlin, R 8003, 2/105 10.
101
Reports by Schiele before the DNVP delegation to the Weimar National Assembly, 16
Mar. 1920, BA Berlin, NL Mumm, 276/137 42, and by Graef in the meeting on 17
Mar. 1920, ibid., 147 53. See also Westarp to Heydebrand, 13 Mar. 1920, NL Westarp,
Gärtringen, II/80.
102
Statement by the DNVP party leadership, 13 Mar. 1920, BA Berlin, R 8005, 6/114.
103
Hergt’s remarks at a meeting of the DNVP delegation to the Weimar National Assembly,
16 Mar. 1920, BA Berlin, NL Mumm, 276/138 39, 142.
     

itself suddenly became immensely more complicated. The leaders of the

DNVP moved quickly to shift attention from their contacts with the putschists
before the march on Berlin to the chaotic conditions in Germany that had
supposedly led to the insurrection in the first place. In a statement issued on
18 March the DNVP party leadership launched a blistering attack against the
Weimar government for having failed to live up to the terms of the consti-
tution it had set in place and for having created precisely those circumstances
that had led to the military uprising. According to this account, the DNVP had
only entered into negotiations with the Kapp regime to stabilize a situation
that had been created by the incompetence of the central government and, in
particular, by its failure to resist Allied demands for the dissolution of the
volunteer military units that were necessary to contain the threat of the
revolutionary Left.104
The DNVP’s statements of 13 and 18 March were little more than disin-
genuous ploys to conceal the extent to which members of the party had been
involved in the preparation of the putsch and to disguise the sympathy that
news of the putsch had elicited within the party’s rank-and-file. Not only did
this do little to repair the DNVP’s public image, but it only exposed and
exacerbated the deepening divisions that existed within the party. For while
old-line Prussian conservatives like Westarp and the leaders of the party’s
antisemitic faction generally supported the putsch,105 the DNVP’s governmen-
tal conservatives were openly critical of their party’s connection to the putsch
and feared that it would interrupt or delay what they saw as a decisive shift to
the right on the part of the German middle classes in the lead-up to the
elections.106 Among the most outspoken critics of the DNVP’s posture during
the Kapp-Lüttwitz putsch was Kardorff, the nominal leader of the DNVP’s
Free Conservative faction and a Nationalist deputy in the Prussian consti-
tutional assembly. As a member of the DNVP program committee, Kardorff
was already disturbed by the way in which old-line Prussian conservatives like
Westarp and Osten had side-stepped moderates like himself in drafting the
new party program.107 In February 1920 Kardorff had in fact been so

104
Statement issued by the DNVP party leadership, 18 Mar. 1920, BA Berlin, R 8005, 5/
69 70, quoted in DNVP und Militärputsch, 7 8. See also “Der 13. März und die
Deutschnationale Volkspartei,” n.d., BHStA Munich, Abt. V, Flugblattsammlung 60/
1920, and Wir klagen die Regierung an! Reden der deutschnationalen Abgeordneten
Düringer, Behrens und Hergt zum Kappschen Militärputsch in der Deutschen National
versammlung und in der Preußischen Landesversammlung am 30. März 1920, Deutsch
nationale Parlamentsreden, Heft 16 (Berlin, 1920).
105
Gasteiger, Westarp, 178 85.
106
Comments by Delbrück at a meeting of the DNVP delegation to the Weimar National
Assembly, 17 Mar. 1920, BA Berlin, NL Mumm, 276/147 53.
107
Kardorff to Westarp, 21 Dec. 1919, BA Berlin, NL Westarp, 114/ 11 12.
   , –

infuriated by the sharp criticism a speech he had delivered in Berlin had

provoked from the party’s right wing that he stepped down as vice-chairman
of the Nationalist delegation to the Prussian constitutional assembly and
resigned from the delegation’s executive committee.108 But none of this would
be to much avail.
At the decisive meeting of the DNVP central executive committee on 9 April
Westarp used his rhetorical talents to beat back the moderates and to insinuate
key conservative planks into the DNVP party program.109 At the same time,
Westarp did his best to disabuse his supporters in the Central Association of
German Conservatives of their plans for a break with the DNVP and to
reassure them that collaboration with the DNVP represented the only possi-
bility of accomplishing a conservative agenda.110 For Kardorff, who was
already fuming over the DNVP’s flirtation with the putschists and the prefer-
ential treatment it showed antisemites in the selection of candidates for the
upcoming elections, the meeting of the DNVP central executive committee on
9 April 1920 was the final straw. Joined by two other members of the DNVP’s
Free Conservative faction – Otto Arendt and Otto von Dewitz – Kardorff met
with the DVP party chairman Gustav Stresemann on 15 April 1920 to finalize
plans for their defection to the German People’s Party.111 Two days later, the
three issued a sharply worded statement in which they denounced “the
increasing prominence of extreme right-wing personalities in the DNVP and
their influence upon the development of the party” and announced their
decision to join the DVP. Affirming their unconditional commitment to the
spirit and letter of the Weimar Constitution, Kardorff and his associates
pledged themselves to work within the DVP for the consolidation of all social
classes into a genuine Volksgemeinschaft and to cooperate with all of those,
including the Majority Socialists, who shared their respect for the principles of
constitutional government.112 By no means, however, was Kardorff’s defection
an isolated incident. Only ten days earlier another former Free Conservative,
university professor Johann Victor Bredt, had announced his resignation from
the DNVP – though with much less fanfare than Kardorff – as a protest

108
Kardorff to Hergt, 23 Feb. 1920, PA AA Berlin, NL Stresemann, 221/140215 17.
109
Speech by Westarp before the DNVP central executive committee, 9 Apr. 1920, NL
Westarp, Gärtringen, II/80. See also Westarp, Konservative Politik, ed. Hiller von
Gaertringen, 100 12.
110
Westarp to Heydebrand, 9 Apr. 1920, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, II/80.
111
Stresemann’s memorandum of a meeting with Arendt, Dewitz, Kardorff, and the DDP’s
Jordan, 15 Apr. 1920, PA AA Berlin, NL Stresemann, 213/138848.
112
Statement by Arendt, Dewitz, and Kardorff, n.d., appended to Kardorff’s letter to
Stresemann, 17 Apr. 1920, BA Koblenz, NL Kardorff, 13/145 47. See also Hartenstein,
Anfänge der DVP, 195 99.
     

against the unbridled enthusiasm that local party activists in his home city of
Marburg an der Lahn had shown for the failed Kapp putsch.113
What this revealed was a broad pattern of discontent among DNVP mod-
erates who had become distressed by their party’s slow but steady drift to the
right since the summer of 1919. It was thus with a certain sense of urgency that
the DNVP party leadership resumed its work on the new party program before
finally publishing it on 18 April 1920 under the title “Grundsätze der Deutsch-
nationalen Volkspartei.”114 At the same time, party leaders tried to mollify the
DNVP moderates by allowing the publication of the draft that had been
prepared by the DNVP’s State Political Coordinating Committee under the
title Nationales Manifest der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei.115 By highlighting
the national, Christian, and social principles to which all sectors of the DNVP
were dedicated, these two documents helped party leaders limit the scope of
the Free Conservative defections and prevent a full-fledged secession on the
party’s left wing. As a compromise between the various factions that had come
together in the DNVP, however, the new party program had its shortcomings
and fell short of satisfying everyone in the party. The leaders of the DNVP’s
moderate wing were particularly disappointed with the concessions that had
been made to the conservatives because they had made a merger with the DVP
impossible and only isolated the DNVP from less conservative bourgeois
forces in the middle and moderate Right.116 By the same token, the leaders
of the DNVP’s Christian-Social wing were frustrated by the program’s failure
to recognize labor unions as a legitimate form of working-class organization
and to grant the German worker parity as a fully entitled member of the
Volksgemeinschaft.117 Nor were old-line Prussian conservatives satisfied with
the new program despite the critical role that Westarp had played in its
formulation. For although Westarp urged his associates in the Central Associ-
ation of German Conservatives to accept the program despite its admitted
imperfections, he also lamented its failure to ground the DNVP sufficiently in

113
Joh. Victor Bredt, Erinnerungen und Dokumente 1914 bis 1933, ed. Martin Schumacher
(Düsseldorf, 1970), 158. See also Martin Grosch, Johann Victor Bredt. Konservative
Politik zwischen Kaiserreich und Nationalsozialismus. Eine politische Biographie (Berlin,
2014), 177 82.
114
Grundsätze der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei (Berlin, n.d. [1920]), also published in
Der nationale Wille, ed. Weiß, 391 400.
115
Staatspolitische Arbeitsgemeinschaft der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei, Nationales
Manifest der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei, Apr. 1920, in BA Berlin, NL Mumm, 277/
208a d.
116
Kanitz to Hergt, 15 Apr. 1920, BA Berlin, R 8005, 3/231 32.
117
“Forderungen der deutschnationalen Arbeitervertreter an die Parteileitung,” 24
Mar. 1920, BA Berlin, NL Mumm, 469/75.
   , –

the values of the Prussian tradition and objected to the concessions it had
supposedly made to the principles of parliamentary government.118

To the Polls
Its imperfections notwithstanding, the “Grundsätze der Deutschnationalen
Volkspartei” effectively defined the ideological tenor of the DNVP’s campaign
for the new national elections that were set for 6 June 1920. By portraying the
DNVP as a national party dedicated to the rebirth of the German nation
through its unification and emancipation from foreign domination, as a
Christian party committed to revitalizing the spiritual and moral foundations
of Germany’s national life, and as a social party seeking the reconciliation of all
strata of German society in a greater Volksgemeinschaft, the new program
highlighted those ideals that all of those in the party held in common and
could embrace without equivocation. At the same time, DNVP campaign
strategists complemented their party’s vigorous affirmation of its national,
Christian, and social character with a series of specific appeals targeting the
material concerns of the different social and vocational groups that constituted
the party’s popular base.119 Speaking before the German National Civil Ser-
vants’ Association (Deutschnationaler Beamtenbund) on 26 April 1920,
Westarp reiterated the DNVP’s commitment to the preservation of a profes-
sional civil service free from external political influence and called upon the
government to implement cost-of-living adjustments so that civil servant
salaries could keep pace with the rising costs of food and other consumer
products.120 On 5 May Westarp turned his attention to the plight of the
independent middle class, the artisanry, and the small business sector in a
speech in the Berlin suburb of Charlottenburg. Responding to the charge that
the DNVP, as a party of large landed agriculture, was indifferent to the plight
of the urban middle class, Westarp cited the long history of conservatism’s
involvement with the middle class and reminded government officials of their
constitutional obligation to provide the middle class with the assistance it
needed in order to sustain itself in the struggle between Jewish finance capital
and the organized proletariat.121

118
Westarp to Heydebrand, 15 Apr. 1920, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, II/80, excepts of which
are quoted in Westarp, Konservative Politik, ed. Hiller von Gaertringen, 111.
119
For further details, see Ohnezeit, Zwischen “schärfster Opposition,” 207 18.
120
Kuno von Westarp, Die Beamtenfrage. Rede in der Versammlung des Deutschnationalen
Beamtenbundes am 26. April 1920 in den Kammersälen in Berlin, Deutschnationale
Flugschrift, no. 59 (Berlin, 1920).
121
Kuno von Westarp, Rede über Mittelstand, Handwerk und Kleinhandel. Gehalten in der
Versammlung der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei in Charlottenburg am 5. Mai 1920,
Deutschnationale Flugschrift, no. 60 (Berlin, n.d. [1920]). See also Kuno von Westarp,
Getrennt marschieren, vereint geschlagen werden!, Deutschnationale Flugschrift, no. 58
     

While DNVP party strategists made a concerted effort to mobilize the

support of an increasingly beleagured German middle class, they continued
to reach out to workers and white-collar employees. Here the Nationalists
were able to draw upon the resources of the Evangelical workers’ movement
and the various Christian labor unions that had coalesced into the German
Trade-Union Federation and whose leaders encouraged their followers to
support the DNVP as one of several parties whose ideological objectives were
compatible with their own.122 By the same token, Hans Bechly from the
German National Union of Commercial Employees used the organization’s
Brunswick congress in May 1920 to secure the passage of a resolution that
urged its members to promote the DHV’s social, economic, and cultural
objectives by working within all of Germany’s nonsocialist parties.123 But as
important as all of this might have been to those who conceived of the DNVP
as a socially heterogeneous conservative Sammelpartei, no one received more
attention from party strategists than the German farmer. Not only did the
farmer constitute the social backbone of German conservatism, but the
Nationalists were particularly concerned that regional agricultural interest
organizations might field their own slate of candidates as part of a national
agrarian ticket with devastating consequences for the DNVP’s electoral
prospects.124
No task in the campaign for the 1920 Reichstag elections was more import-
ant for the DNVP party leadership than the reestablishment of conservative
hegemony throughout the German countryside. In this regard, the National-
ists received strong support from the leaders of the Agrarian League, who
regarded the DNVP and DVP as the only parties worthy of agriculture’s
support.125 Germany’s conservative rural elites were anxious to contain the
wave of social and political radicalism that had swept the countryside in the
wake of the November Revolution. This was particularly true in conservative
strongholds east of the Elbe, where the Social Democrats had experienced
considerable success in organizing disgruntled farm laborers and peasants
under the auspices of the German Farm Workers’ Union.126 Working closely

(Berlin, n.d. [1920]). In a similar vein, see Ernst Mentzel, Die Mittelstandspolitik und die
Parteien, Deutschnationale Flugschrift, no. 30 (Berlin, 1919).
122
“Richtlinien des Deutschen Gewerkschaftsbundes für die Reichstagswahlen,” Zentral
blatt der christlichen Gewerkschaften Deutschlands 20, no. 12 (7 Juni 1920): 109 10.
123
Hans Bechly, Staat, Gesellschaft und Politik. Vortrag, gehalten auf dem Verbandstage in
Braunschweig am 15. und 16. Mai 1920 (Hamburg, n.d. [1920]), 6 12.
124
Kanitz to Hergt, 26 Apr. 1920, BA Berlin, R 8005, 3/225 26.
125
Roesicke before the executive committee of the German Rural League, 16 Dec. 1919, BA
Berlin, R 8034 I, 2/242 46.
126
For further details, see Flemming, Landwirtschaftliche Interessen und Demokratie,
76 160, as well as Mechthild Hempe, Ländliche Gesellschaft in der Krise. Mecklenburg
in der Weimarer Republik (Colgone, Weimar, and Vienna, 2002), 71 103.
   , –

with the BdL’s regional affiliates in Pomerania, Brandenburg, and elsewhere,

East-Elbian estate owners went so far as to arm extra-legal paramilitary units
in an attempt to break the back of the DLV by force and to restore the
patriarchal relationships between lord and peasant that had existed before
the war.127 At the same time, the DNVP’s Franz Behrens and his associates in
the Central Association of Farm Laborers were hard at work organizing farm
workers from throughout the east under the banner of the Christian-national
labor movement in hopes of establishing a viable alternative to the socialist-led
DLV.128 Although these efforts invariably cut across those of the estate owners
and their allies in the BdL, they nevertheless helped the DNVP position itself
as the party of preference in the rural areas east of the Elbe.129 This scenario
repeated itself, though with distinctive regional nuances, in Bavaria, where the
leaders of the Bavarian Rural League concluded an electoral alliance with the
DNVP’s state affiliate, the Bavarian Middle Party,130 and in Württemberg,
where Theodor Körner alt, Wilhelm Vogt, and their conferederates in the
leadership of the Württemberg Peasants and Wine Growers’ League ran their
own slate of candidates only to affiliate themselves with the DNVP Reichstag
delegation after the elections.131
In its bid for the support of the German farmer, the DNVP and its allies in
the German agricultural community also relied upon what was more than just
an innocuous dose of antisemitism. Antisemitism had been a hallmark of
prewar rural political culture not just in the conservative strongholds east of
the Elbe132 but also in regions with historically liberal profiles like Württem-
berg and Schleswig-Holstein.133 Frustrated by the DNVP’s failure to include a

127
Hempe, Ländliche Gesellschaft, 213 70.
128
Behrens’s report in Zentralverband der Landarbeiter, Verhandlungs Bericht über den 1.
Verbandstag in Berlin am 16. 19. Mai 1920 (Berlin, 1920), 3 7.
129
Daniel Hildebrand, Landbevölkerung und Wahlverhalten. Die DNVP im ländlichen
Raum Pommern und Ostpreußen 1918 1924 (Hamburg, 2004), 227 39.
130
See “Mittelpartei und Landwirtschaft,” in Die Ziele der bayer. Mittelpartei (Deutschna
tionale Volkspartei in Bayern), ed. Geschäftsstelle der bayerischen Mittelpartei (Nurem
burg, 1920), 22 27. See also Kittel, “Zwischen völkischem Fundamentalismus und
gouvrementaler Taktik,” 861 68.
131
For the WWBB’s political goals in 1920, see Richtlinien der württemb. Bauernpolitik.
Politische Bemerkungen zu den Richtlinien. Zweck, Ziel und Aufgaben des Bundes der
Landwirte/Württemb. Bauern u. Weingärtnerbund. Die landwirtschaftlichen Organisa
tionen Württembergs, ed. Württ. Bauern und Weingärtnerbund, Schriften zur Wahlbe
wegung, no. 2 (Stuttgart, 1920), 3 15.
132
Hans Reif, “Antisemitismus in den Agrarverbänden Ostelbiens während der Weimarer
Republik,” in Ostelbische Agrargesellschaft im Kaiserreich und in der Weimarer Republik.
Agrarkrise junkerliche Interessenpolitik Modernisierungsstrategien, ed. Heinz Reif
(Berlin, 1994), 378 411.
133
On this point, see Hans Peter Müller, “Antisemitismus im Königreich Württemberg
zwischen 1871 und 1914,” Jahrbuch des Vereins für Württembergisch Franken 86 (2002):
547 83, and Peter Wulf, “Antisemitismus in bürgerlichen und bäuerlichen Parteien und
     

more aggressive plank on the so-called Jewish question in the new party
program it promulgated in April 1920, the leaders of the DNVP’s racist wing
redoubled their efforts to move antisemitism to the center of the party’s
campaign for the 1920 Reichstag elections. DNVP racists celebrated what they
saw as a major victory when they succeeded in blocking the nomination of
Anna von Gierke, a member of the DNVP delegation to the Weimar National
Assembly and a conservative feminist renown for her work in the field of
social and child welfare, to a secure candidacy in the 1920 Reichstag elections
on account of her mother’s Jewish ancestry. Both Gierke and her father Otto, a
highly respected professor of law at the University of Berlin, subsequently
resigned from the party in what was clearly another setback for the leaders of
the DNVP’s moderate wing.134 Although the leaders of the DNVP’s racist
wing rejoiced at the rejection of Gierke’s candidacy, the incident severely
compromised efforts by the DNVP party leadership to counter the impression
of a sharp swing to the right that had been created by the secession of the Free
Conservatives under Kardorff.135 At the same time, DNVP racists and their
supporters in the German-Racist Protection and Defense League (Deutsch-
völkischer Schutz- und Trutzbund or DSTB) moved quickly to transform the
DNVP into an instrument of their own political agenda at both the regional and
national levels of the DNVP party organization. For their own part, Hergt and
the DNVP leadership did little to oppose these efforts and more or less
acquiesced in the racists’ takeover of their party’s campaign in the 1920 Reich-
stag elections.136
The Gierke affair also cut across the DNVP’s efforts to win the support of
German women. Having entrenched themselves in the party’s national organ-
ization with the founding of the DNVP’s National Women’s Committee in
December 1918, the party’s women activists had spent most of the following
year consolidating their position within the party and, through the person of
Leonore Kühn, played an important role in drafting the new party program
the DNVP promulgated in April 1920.137 All of this was part of a fundamental
reassessment by conservatives of the place of women in Germany’s national

Verbände in Schleswig Holstein (1918 1924),” Jahrbuch für Antisemitismusforschung 11

(2002): 52 75..
134
See the letters from Otto and Anna von Gierke to the DNVP party leadership, 12 May
1920, in Otto von Gierke, Einige Wünsche an die Deutschnationale Volkspartei, Als
Manuskript gedruckt (Berlin, n.d. [1920]), 22 29. For a Nationalist critique of the
DNVP’s position on antisemitism, see Friedrich von Oppeln Bronikowski, Antisemitis
mus? Eine unparteiische Prüfung des Problems (Charlottenburg, 1920).
135
For example, see Weiß to Westarp, 4 May 1920, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, II/5.
136
Striesow, DNVP und die Völkisch Radikalen, 233 42.
137
For further details, see Süchting Hänger, “Gewissen der Nation,” 143 49, and Raffael
Scheck, Mothers of the Nation: Right Wing Women in Weimar Germany (Oxford and
New York, 2004), 24 32.
   , –

life and stemmed in no small measure from recognition of the critical role that
women voters had played salvaging the DNVP’s electoral fortunes in the
1919 elections to the Weimar National Assembly.138 In the 1920 campaign
the DNVP’s women activists were careful to distance themselves from Gierke
and, with the notable exception of committee chairwoman Margarete Behm,
lined upon behind the DNVP racists and their efforts to cast the DNVP as the
vanguard of racial purity.139 As in the 1919 elections to the National Assembly,
the DNVP once again projected an essentially conservative image of women
and their role in Germany’s national life, highlighting the virtues of domesti-
city, religion, and patriotic sacrifice. Above all, DNVP campaign propaganda
insisted, it was the task and responsibility of women to protect the cherished
values of Germany’s national culture – family, faith, nation, racial hygiene –
against the forces of decay that had been unleashed by the November Revolu-
tion and that had become synonymous with the hated Weimar system.140
Underlying the DNVP’s propaganda in the campaign for the 1920 Reichstag
elections was a pervasive and powerful antisystem bias that stood in sharp
contrast to the hopes of party moderates that the elections would pave the way
to their party’s entry into the national government. For the leaders of the
DNVP the elections were a referendum on the November Revolution, the
consequences of which were portrayed as a disaster for virtually every sector of
German society, including the German worker.141 Speaking at a party rally in
Berlin-Schöneberg on 29 April, Westarp called for an “annihilating [vernich-
tende] settling of accounts” with the new system, a system that in the area of
foreign policy had forced Germany to accept the “disgraceful peace of Ver-
sailles” while at home it had placed the nation at the mercy of undisciplined
masses and had subjected the productive elements in the city and countryside
to the dictatorship of organized labor and its allies on the radical Left. The
coming election, Westarp continued, would decide whether it would be
possible for the German people to forge “a new national feeling” rooted in

138
See Matthew Stibbe, “Anti Feminism, Nationalism and the German Right, 1914 1920:
A Reappraisal,” German History 20 (2002): 185 210, and Kirsten Heinsohn, “Das
konservative Dilemma und die Frauen. Anmerkungen zum Scheitern eines republika
nischen Konservatismus in Deutschland,” in “Ich bin der letzte Preuße”: Der politische
Lebensweg des konservativen Politikers Kuno Graf von Westarp (1864 1945), ed. Larry
Eugene Jones and Wolfram Pyta (Cologne, Weimar, and Vienna, 2005), 77 107, as well
as Kirsten Heinsohn, Konservative Parteien in Deutschland, 82 93.
139
Sneeringer, Winning Women’s Votes, 50.
140
Ibid., 42 51.
141
For example, see Joseph Kaufhold, Die Folgen der Revolution, Deutschnationale Flug
schrift, no. 53 (Berlin, 1920), as well as the two DNVP campaign leaflets “Am 6. Juni
Freiheit!,” n.d. [May 1920], and “Um die Freiheit,” n.d. [May 1920], both in the Nachlass
Berthold Freiherr Hiller von Gaertringen, Archiv des Freiherren Hiller von Gaertringen,
Gärtringen (hereafter cited as NL Hiller, Gärtringen).
     

the “living forces of Christianity,” in monarchism, and in the tried and true
traditions of Prussian-German history. Then and only then would the German
people be able to free itself from the yoke of slavery at home and abroad and
embark upon a new era in pursuit of Germany’s national greatness.142
Westarp’s appeal to the “living forces of Christianity” was not empty
rhetoric but an essential component of the DNVP’s campaign to mobilize
the support of conservative Christians who felt a deep sense of concern over
the place of religion in German public life after the upheavals of 1918–19.
Before the war the German Lutheran Church had constituted one of the main
pillars of support for the forces of political conservatism both inside and
outside of Prussia. But the collapse of the Hohenzollen monarchy and the
subsequent disestablishment of the church by the Weimar and Prussian
constitutional assemblies deprived the Lutheran Church of the privileged
position it had enjoyed before 1914 and caused widespread alarm among
conservative Christians who perceived this as the first in a series of assaults
upon their religious and cultural values.143 In the campaign for the
1920 Reichstag elections the DNVP positioned itself, as it had in 1919, as
the defender of the vital interests of the Lutheran Church and Germany’s
Protestant population.144 At the same time, however, the leaders of the DNVP
also made a concerted bid for the support of German Catholics who had
become estranged from the Center Party as a result of its dramatic shift to the
left in the last years of World War I.145 In January 1920 Hergt issued what
amounted to a programmatic statement by the DNVP party leadership when,
in a letter to the district organization in Münster, he called for an end to the
confessional tensions that had become so deeply embedded in the fabric of
German political life and stressed that all of those, Catholic as well as Protest-
ant, who embraced the struggle for Germany’s national regeneration would be
welcomed as full and equal members of the party.146

142
Speech by Westarp before the DNVP local organization in Berlin Schöneberg, 29
Apr. 1920, BA Berlin, NL Westarp, 125/11 17.
143
Kurt Nowak, Evangelische Kirche und Weimarer Republik. Zum politischen Weg des
deutschen Protestantismus zwischen 1918 und 1932 (Göttingen, 1981), 17 52, esp. 25 31.
144
In this respect, see Wilhelm Kähler, “Die Kulturpolitik der Deutschnationalen Volks
partei,” in Jahrbuch der Erziehungswissenschaft und Jugendkunde, ed. Erich Stern, 3
(1927): 5 30.
145
For example, see the flyer from the DNVP national headquarters “Katholische Glau
bensgenosssen!,” 21 May 1920, Werbeblatt no. 129, as well as the campaign leaflet from
the Württemberg Burgher Party, “Katholiken und Zentrumsleute gegen Erzberger,” n.d.
[1920], both in NL Hiller, Gärtringen.
146
For the text of Hergt’s letter, 2 Jan. 1920, see Politisches Handwörterbuch (Führer ABC),
ed. Max Weiß (Berlin, 1928), 319. See also Landsberg Steinfurt, “Darf ein Katholik
deutschnational sein?,” Eiserne Blätter 1, no. 41 (18 Apr. 1920): 717 20.
   , –

Despite the optimism with which the DNVP party leadership entered the
campaign, the party’s campaign effort was hampered by lingering financial
difficulties that were only partly resolved by the time of the elections. In
building up a strong and comprehensive national party organization, the
leaders of the DNVP had decided not to burden the party’s state and regional
organizations with the responsibility of sharing the funds they had raised
locally with the party headquarters in Berlin. As a result, party leaders in
Berlin found themselves short of funds for use in the campaign and had to
turn, as the DVP and other non-socialist parties had already begun to do, to
potential backers in the German business community.147 The DNVP’s princi-
pal source of financial support in the 1920 campaign was the Commission for
the Collection, Administration, and Allocation of the Industrial Campaign
Fund, where its general secretary Johannes Flathmann worked closely with
Alfred Hugenberg in collecting and distributing campaign funds to the DNVP
and DVP.148 To be sure, Germany’s industrial leaders – including Carl
Friedrich von Siemens, the driving force behind the Commision’s principal
rival in the solicitation of industrial campaign funds, the Curatorium for the
Reconstruction of German Economic Life – would have preferred to support
one rather than two right-wing parties and were disappointed when efforts to
unite the DVP and DNVP broke down in late 1919.149 As a result, Siemens’
Curatorium ended up donating 775,000 marks to the campaign coffers of each
of the two right-wing parties.150 In the meantime, the fact that Flathmann was
able to secure the nomination of Hugo Stinnes, Kurt Sorge, and Reinhold
Quaatz to secure candidacies on the DVP ticket meant that it and not the
DNVP would become the party of preference for the Commission for the
Industrial Campaign Fund and its financial supporters in the Ruhr.151

A Mixed Verdict
If the 1920 Reichstag elections was to be a referendum on the social and
political legacy of the November Revolution, then the leaders of the DNVP
could not have been altogether pleased with the outcome. To be sure, Hergt

147
Hergt and Dryander to Springorum, 7 May 1920, ThyssenKrupp Konzernarchiv,
Außenstelle Hoesch Archiv, Dortmund (hereafter cited as TKA Dortmund), Nachlass
Fritz Springorum, F 4e 3.
148
Heidrun Holzbach, Das “System Hugenberg.” Die Organisation bürgerlicher Sammlungs
politik vor dem Aufstieg der NSDAP (Stuttgart, 1981), 78 82.
149
On the course of these negotiations, see Stresemann to Baumgärtel, 10 Dec. 1919, PA AA
Berlin, NL Stresemann, 208/138114 16.
150
Hergt and Dryander to the Curatorium, 9 June 1920, SHI Berlin, NL Siemens, 4/Lf 646.
151
For further details, see Flathmann to Stinnes, 19 Apr. 1920, and Osius to Stinnes, 20
Apr. 1920, ACDP Sankt Augustin, NL Stinnes, 002/4, as well as Flathmann to Strese
mann, 4 May 1920, PA AA Berlin, NL Stresemann, 212/138646 51.
     

and his associates could derive a measure of satisfaction from the fact that
their party had improved upon its performance in the elections to the Weimar
National Assembly by more than a million votes, increasing its share of the
popular vote from 10.3 to 15.1 percent and its representation in the national
parliament from twenty-nine to sixty-six seats. At the same time, however, the
DNVP’s gains in the 1920 Reichstag were eclipsed by those of its only rival on
the German Right, the German People’s Party, which increased its share of the
popular vote from 4.4 to 13.9 percent and entered the new Reichstag with a
delegation sixty-two strong.152 The fact that the DVP had outperformed the
DNVP by a substantial margin rankled Nationalist party leaders, who imme-
diately found themselves embroiled in a heated public dispute over the role
that antisemitism and the excesses of the party’s antisemitic wing had played
in the DNVP’s disappointing performance vis-à-vis the DVP.153 On the more
positive side, party leaders were pleased with the fact that the DNVP had
succeeded in recapturing a much of the terrain it had surrendered to the two
socialist parties in 1919 in the predominantly rural areas east of the Elbe. In
East Prussia, for example, the DNVP increased its share of the popular vote
from 11.9 to 30.9 percent, in Pomerania and Mecklenburg from 23.9 to 35.5
and 13.1 to 20.6 percent respectively. The party also benefited from strong
gains in Frankfurt an der Oder, Württemberg, Thuringia, Schleswig-Holstein,
and Franconia, all districts in which the support of local farm organizations
contributed susbstantially to the DNVP’s success at the polls. Outside of
Hamburg, where the DNVP increased its share of the popular vote from 3.5
to 12.4 percent, the party’s gains in districts with a more predominantly urban
profile lagged significantly behind that in districts with large rural populations.
In Berlin, for example, the DNVP was able to increase its share of the popular
vote from 9.3 to just 11.5 percent, while in Breslau the party improved upon its
15.3 percentage share of the popular vote in 1919 by a mere 3.1 percent.154
The election outcome revealed a sharp swing to the right in which all of the
parties that belonged to the Weimar Coalition suffered substantial losses. Of
the 466 deputies elected to the Reichstag, the three government parties could
claim the support of only 225. The Majority Socialists saw their share of the
popular vote reduced from 37.9 percent in the elections to the Weimar
National Assembly to 21.6 percent in 1920, while the Independent Socialists
actually improved upon their share of the popular vote from 7.6 percent in
1919 to 18.6 in 1920. In the meantime, the newly founded German

152
Falter, Lindenberger, and Schumann, Wahlen und Abstimmungen, 41, 67 68.
153
Graef, “Die Lehren des Wahlausfalls,” Unsere Partei 2, no. 17 (June July 1920): 1 6.
154
Falter, Lindenberger, and Schumann, Wahlen und Abstimmungen, 67 68. See also
Gerhard A. Ritter, “Kontinuität und Umformung des deutschen Parteiensystems
1918 1920,” in Entstehung und Wandel der modernen Gesellschaft. Festschrift für Hans
Rosenberg zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. Gerhard A. Ritter (Berlin, 1970), 342 76, here 367.
   , –

Communist Party (Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands or KPD) receieved

1.7 percent of the popular vote in its first national campaign.155 The German
Democratic Party, whose campaign had been carefully crafted to resassure
middle-class voters that collaboration with the Majority Socialists had been
necessary to expedite Germany’s political stabilization, lost more than half of
the votes it had received in the elections to the Weimar National Assembly and
saw its share of the popular vote fall from 18.5 percent in 1919 to a 8.3 percent
in 1920. Defections from the left-liberal DDP accounted in no small measure
for the impressive gains recorded by its liberal rival, the DVP, whose leaders
proved remarkably successful in exploiting the anxieties that the DDP’s
performance as a member of the governmental coalition had aroused among
its middle-class supporters.156 Nor was the Center, the third member of the
Weimar Coalition, immune from the sting of defeat. Reeling from the defec-
tion of its entire Bavarian organization to the Bavarian People’s Party that had
been founded in the immediate wake of the November Revolution, the Center
lost a third of the vote it had received in the elections to the Weimar National
Assembly and saw its parliamentary delegation reduced from eighty eight – or
seventy, if one subtracts the eighteen deputies who defected to the BVP – to
sixty-eight mandates.157 That these losses were far less severe than those of the
other coalition parties did little to diminish the enormity of the defeat that the
parties of the Weimar Coalition had suffered at the polls on 6 June 1920.

The outcome of the 1920 Reichstag elections resulted in fundamental and

permanent changes in Germany’s political landscape. The parties of the
Weimar Coalition would never recover the majority they had held in the
National Assembly. Beset by defections to the Left and the Right, the parties
that identified themselves with Germany’s new republican order remained on
the defensive for the remainder of the Weimar Republic. In the short term, this
meant that the parties of the Weimar Coalition had lost their mandate to
govern and that political stability could be achieved only by extending the
governmental coalition to the left to include the Independent Socialists or to
the right to include the DVP. Neither was a particularly attractive option. At
the same time, the bitter defeat that the German electorate had handed the
parties of the Weimar Coalition created a new set of opportunities for the
German Right. Would the DNVP capitalize upon the weakness of Germany’s
republican parties by joining the government itself and reshape Germany’s

155
Heinrich August Winkler, Von der Revolution zur Stabilisierung. Arbeiter und Arbeiter
bewegung in der Weimarer Republik 1918 bis 1924 (Berlin and Bonn, 1984), 350 59.
156
Jones, German Liberalism, 76 80. See also Hartenstein, Anfänge der DVP, 224 53.
157
Rudolf Morsey, Die Deutsche Zentrumspartei 1917 1923 (Düsseldorf, 1966), 320 24.
     

political future from within the existing system of government? Or would it

remain steadfast in its opposition to the new republican order and stay the
course that had served it so well in the first year and a half of its existence?
How these questions were answered would have a profound impact not just
upon the future of the DNVP but on that of the Weimar Republic itself.
 4

Growth and Consolidation

The Reichstag elections of 6 June 1920 marked an important milestone in the

development of the German Right after World War I. Capitalizing upon the
sense of moral outrage to which the imposition of the Versailles Peace Treaty
had given rise, the DNVP had weathered the Kapp putsch to establish itself as
the party of national opposition to the Weimar Republic and all that it
purportedly stood for. The early years of the Weimar Republic were to be
good years for the DNVP and other right-wing organizations. For the humili-
ation of Versailles was to be followed by the London Ultimatum of May
1921 and the partition of Upper Silesia later that fall, and the price increases
of the last years of the war and the early postwar period was to develop into
a full-fledged inflation that severely undermined whatever confidence
Germany’s urban and rural middle classes might have had in the newly
established republican system. This was a situation in which not just the
DNVP, but all right-wing organizations, including those much more radical
than the DNVP, flourished. The problem confronting the leaders of the DNVP
was how best to consolidate their party’s position on the German Right and to
harness the forces of counterrevolution that had been unleashed by the fear of
Bolshevism, the humiliation of Versailles, and the rapidly deteriorating eco-
nomic situation.

Reaffirming the Hard Line

With sixty-two seats in the newly elected Reichstag – a number that would
climb to sixty-six as a result of later elections in the contested areas of
Schleswig-Holstein, East Prussia, and Upper Silesia – the DNVP easily
retained its position as the largest opposition party in parliament. The parties
of the Weimar Coalition no longer commanded the strength to form a new
majority government and would have to bring either the Independent
Socialists or the German People’s Party into the governmental coalition in
order to achieve a parliamentary majority. But Stresemann and the leaders of
the German People’s Party, whose parliamentary strength had increased by
nearly three-fold, categorically rejected an accommodation with either socialist
party, hoping instead to move the fulcrum of power to the right by excluding

    

the socialists from the government. Ideally Stresemann would like to have
shored up his own right flank by tying the DNVP to the new governmental
coalition, but that was unlikely in light of strong opposition from both the
Center and German Democratic Party to a coalition with the Nationalists.1 At
the same time, many of the moderates in the DNVP Reichstag delegation were
intrigued by the possibility of entering the government despite strong resist-
ance from Count Westarp and the leaders of the DNVP’s right wing. The issue
became moot when a minority government consisting of the Center, DDP,
and DVP assumed office under the leadership of the Center’s Konstantin
Fehrenbach on 20 June 1920.2
In outlining his party’s position before the Reichstag on 28 June, DNVP
party chairman Oskar Hergt chastised the Majority Socialists for their refusal
to share governmental responsibility with the DVP and reiterated his own
party’s willingness to form a coalition government with all of Germany’s
bourgeois parties.3 Several days later Karl Helfferich, Germany’s wartime
minister of finance and a newly elected member of the DNVP Reichstag
delegation, sharply attacked the government parties for their failure to accept
the results of the recent elections by forming a new cabinet whose parliamen-
tary mandate was still dependent upon the Majority Socialists. The disastrous
situation in which the Reich found itself and the difficult negotiations that lay
ahead for the German people both at home and abroad, Helfferich concluded,
mandated a government with the broadest possible base of support in the
Reichstag. And on this point, he concluded, the government parties could not
have failed more miserably.4 Yet in their willingness to broach the possibility
of sharing governmental responsibility with other nonsocialist parties, Hergt
and Helfferich found themselves at odds with the leaders of their own party’s
right wing. Hergt had been fully prepared to read a declaration expressing the
DNVP’s willingness to share governmental responsibility with any party,
including the Majority Socialists, that was prepared to work together in the
reconstruction of the German fatherland. But Westarp and his supporters on
the DNVP’s right wing were so strongly opposed to any such gesture by the
DNVP leadership that they threatened to form a separate parliamentary

1
See Wright, Stresemann, 163 67, and Richter, Deutsche Volkspartei, 217 22.
2
Morsey, Deutsche Zentrumspartei, 329 34.
3
Oskar Hergt and Karl Helfferich, Der Block der Mitte. Reden des Reichstagsabgeordnete
Hergt und Helfferich am 28. Juni und 2. Juli 1920 im Reichstage, Deutschnationale
Parlamentsreden, no. 17 (Berlin, 1920), 10 15.
4
Ibid., 28 36. See also Albrecht Philipp, Die deutschnationale Fraktion des Reichstags und
die Reichsregierungen Fehrenbach u. Dr. Wirth (Juni 1920 August 1921, Hanbuch Folge,
no. 5 (Berlin, 1921), 3 6.
   , –

delegation until Hergt desisted and agreed to strike any such statement from
his speech to the Reichstag.5
Uncertainty over the DNVP’s political course persisted through the summer
and early fall of 1920 until its annual party congress in Hanover in late
October 1920.6 In his keynote address on the morning of 25 October, Hergt
moved quickly to dispel the uncertainty that existed in much of the party by
declaring it a “sacred duty” for the DNVP “to wage opposition against the
domination of the existing parliamentary system” and pledged the party to
reject “a politics of compromise” in any form whatsoever. Hergt went on to
draw a sharp distinction between the political course of his own party and that
of its major rival on the Right, the German People’s Party. Whereas the DVP
presumably strived for a programmatic understanding with the Majority
Socialists, the DNVP explicitly rejected a pact with Social Democracy in its
present form and made its willingness to collaborate with Social Democracy at
any point in the future contingent upon its radical ideological reorientation.
The goal of the DNVP, Hergt concluded with an obvious eye to the upcoming
Prussian state elections, was to transform the Prussian state into a bastion of
law and order – in the terminology of the day an Ordnungsstaat – from which
it could conquer the rest of the Reich. This would be possible, however, only if
the DNVP remained true to its sacred mission and resisted the temptation to
seek power in the existing system of government.7
Hergt’s speech constituted a clear and unequivocal rebuff to those both
within and outside the party who hoped that the DNVP might set aside its
ideological objections to the existing system of government and play a more
constructive role in the solution of the myriad problems facing Germany’s
political leadership. Hergt’s vigorous reaffirmation of the DNVP’s role as an
opposition party ushered in a period of relative calm in the DNVP’s internal
development that lasted until the Prussian Landtag elections in February 1921.
The intransigence of the DNVP party leadership was also reflected in two
further speeches on the first day of the congress, the first an impassioned call
for a revision of the Versailles Peace Treaty from Albrecht von Graefe-
Goldebee of the DNVP’s racist faction8 and the second an appeal by Paul

5
On the split in the DNVP Reichstag delegation, see Westarp to Heydebrand, 28 June 1920,
NL Westarp, Gärtringen, II/80 81, and Traub, 3 July 1920, BA Koblenz, NL Traub, 50/
87 89.
6
For the official record of the Hanover party congress, see “Ergebnisse der 2. Parteitages in
Hannover,” Unsere Partei 2, nos. 23 24 (Nov. 1920): 1 20. See also the entries in the diary
of Max von Gallwitz, 23 26 Oct. 1920, BA MA Freiburg, Nachlass Max von Gallwitz, 36.
7
Oskar Hergt, Unser Ziel. Rede auf dem 2. Parteitag der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei in
Hannover am 25. Oktober 1920, Deutschnationale Flugschrift, no. 75 (Berlin, 1920).
8
Albrecht von Graefe Goldebee, Die Revision von Versailles. Rede auf dem 2. Parteitage der
Deutschnationalen Volkspartei in Hannover am 25. Oktober 1920, Deutschnationale
Flugschrift, no. 72 (Berlin, 1920).
    

Baecker of the Deutsche Tageszeitung for the creation of a new German Reich
that included not only the areas that had been severed from Germany after
World War I but also the German-speaking populations of Austria and the
newly created state of Czechoslovakia.9 If nothing else, the speeches by Graefe-
Goldebee and Baecker underscored the psychological inability of the DNVP
party leadership to accept the reality of the lost war and exposed just how
unsuited it was to the task of sharing responsibility with Germany’s other
political parties in the conduct of German foreign policy.10
Aside from Hergt’s speech, the other major highlight of the Hanover
congress was an elaborate discourse by Walther Lambach on the DNVP’s
goals and aspirations in the area of social policy. Just elected to the Reichstag
as a liaison to the German National Union of Commercial Employees, the
thirty-five-year-old union official outlined an ambitious social program that
aimed at the creation of a genuine Volksgemeinschaft in which the worker and
white-collar employee would take their place alongside that of the farmer, the
businessman, and representatives of other vocations.11 In a similar vein, Paul
Rüffer from the DNVP’s fledgling working-class wing expressed satisfaction
with the success of its efforts to secure a foothold within the DNVP’s national
organization and reaffirmed their loyalty to the party and its struggle for the
welfare of the German worker.12 Yet while both efforts drew much of their
impetus from the social gospel of German Protestantism, party leaders were
also hopeful of attracting the support of Catholic conservatives who had
become estranged from the German Center Party.13 In this respect, the
Nationalists were intent upon expanding their party’s political base into
sectors of the population that had fallen outside the orbit of prewar German
conservatism but now, because of the twin shock of defeat and revolution,
were ripe for recruitment to the conservative cause. For the moment, however,
party leaders chose not to endanger their party’s fragile unity by assuming the
burden of governmental responsibility but opted instead to rally the party
faithful around what Hans Erdmann von Lindeiner-Wildau, the DNVP’s

9
Paul Baecker, Die deutsche Frage. Rede auf dem zweiten Parteitage der Deutschnationalen
Volkspartei in Hannover am 25. Oktober 1920, Deutschnationale Flugschrift, no. 78
(Berlin, 1920).
10
Thimme, Flucht in den Mythos, 61 95. See also Boris Barth, Dolchstoßlegenden und
politische Desintegration. Das Traume der deutschen Niederlage im Ersten Weltkrieg
1914 1933 (Düsseldorf, 2003), 302 21.
11
Walther Lambach, Unser Weg zur deutschen Volksgemeinschaft. Rede auf dem 2. Parteitag
der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei in Hannover am 25. Oktober 1920, Deutschnationale
Flugschrift, no. 79 (Berlin, 1920).
12
Paul Rüffer, “Die Stellung des deutschnationalen Arbeiters zur äußeren und inneren
Politik,” in Deutschnationale Arbeitertagung in Hannover am Dienstag, den 26. Oktober
1920, Deutschnationale Flugschrift, no. 88 (Berlin, n.d. [1920]), 3 27.
13
Entry in Gallwitz’s diary, 25 Oct. 1920, BA MA Freiburg, NL Gallwitz, 36.
   , –

general secretary from the party’s founding until the fall of 1921, epigrammat-
ically termed the “unity of the no.”14
Coming after a brief flirtation with the possibility of entering the govern-
ment in the aftermath of the June 1920 elections, the DNVP’s return to the
path of uncompromising opposition to Germany’s new republican order
represented a decisive victory for the party’s right wing. Here the principal
impulse came from the leaders of the party organizations from east of the Elbe,
most notably East Prussia and Pomerania. The DNVP’s East Elbian organiza-
tions had been caught off guard by the collapse of the old imperial order and
had struggled with great difficulty to establish themselves in the face of a
radicalized rural population.15 But by the summer of 1920 the pendulum had
begun to swing back in their favor, and in the June elections they managed to
reconquer much of the terrain they had surrendered in the elections to the
Weimar National Assembly. Reinvigorated by the resurrection of their elect-
oral base in the second half of 1919 and early 1920, the DNVP’s East Prussian
and Pomeranian organizations now began to assert themselves all the more
vigorously in the DNVP’s internal affairs. Nowhere was this more apparent
than at a special congress of the DNVP’s Pomeranian district organization in
Greifswald on 5–6 November 1920. The keynote speaker was none other than
Albrecht von Graefe-Goldebee, one of the DNVP’s most outspoken antise-
mites and an unrelenting opponent of Germany’s new republican system. Not
only was Graefe quick to invoke the “stab-in-the-back legend” with all of its
antisemtic overtones as an explanation for the disasters that befell Germany
between 1914 and 1918, but he categorically rejected any compromise with the
system that these disasters had left in their wake.16 Whether or not intransi-
gence of this sort could be reconciled with the aspirations of those who had
rallied to the DNVP’s banner in the hope that it might play a more positive
role in the reconstruction of German social and economic life was far from
certain.

Catholics on the Right

While the DNVP’s Hanover congress helped restore a sense of calm within the
party and set the stage for its campaign for the upcoming Prussian Landtag
elections, it was soon eclipsed by an event that dramatized just how unstable
Germany’s political landscape was. Speaking at the first postwar congress of
the Christian trade-union movement in Essen on 21 November 1920, Adam

14
Hans Erdmann von Lindeiner Wildau, “Konservatismus,” in Volk und Reich der Deut
schen, ed. Bernhard Harms, 3 vols. (Berlin, 1929), 2:35 61, here pp. 58 61.
15
For further details, see Hildebrand, Landbevölkerung und Wahlverhalten, 159 78.
16
Speech by Graefe Goldebee in Deutschnationaler Parteitag für Vorpommern. Am 6. und
7. November 1920 in Greifswald (Greifswald, n.d. [1920]), 11 20.
    

Stegerwald caused a political sensation when, much to the dismay of his own
party colleagues and to the astonishment of virtually everyone else, he called
for the creation of an interconfessional people’s party resting upon the four
pillars of Christianity, democracy, nationalism, and social equality. Claiming
that neither the Catholic nor the Protestant sector of the population was
sufficiently strong to create such a party by itself, Stegerwald argued that only
the creation of an entirely new party that embraced the best of both confes-
sions and that appealed across class lines to all sectors of German society could
bring about the material and spiritual rehabilitation of the German people.17
A profoundly conservative Catholic who was deeply disturbed by the emer-
gence of Matthias Erzberger as the driving force in the Center after the end of
World War I,18 Stegerwald feared that the growing emnity between the DNVP
and Center might destroy the effectiveness of his own movement, particularly
after the Christian labor unions reaffirmed its loyalty to the republican form of
government in the wake of the ill-fated Kapp-Lüttwitz putsch.19 In the build-
up to the 1920 Reichstag elections Christian labor leaders tried to insulate their
movement against further damage by reiterating the principle of non-
partisanship upon which the German Trade-Union Federation had been
founded. In May 1920 the DGB issued a set of guidelines in May 1920 that
left its affiliated unions free to endorse the candidates of their choice without
regard for party affiliation as long as those candidates embraced the ideals and
principles of the Christian-national labor movement.20
Stegerwald’s and his associates continued to decry the increasing fragmen-
tation of the German party system and the effect it was having upon the unity
and effectiveness of their own movement.21 Stegerwald’s concern was directly
related to a series of developments that directly affected the effectiveness of his

17
Adam Stegerwald, Deutsche Lebensfragen. Vortrag gehalten auf dem 10. Kongreß der
christlichen Gewerkschaften Deutschlands am 21. November 1920 in Essen (Cologne,
1920), 39 42. On the political calculations that lay behind this appeal, see Stegerwald
to Schofer, 3 Aug. 1921, and Brüning to Stegerwald, 4 Aug. 1921, both in ACDP Sankt
Augustin, NL Stegerwald, I 206/018. See also Leo Schwering, “Stegerwalds und Brünings
Vorstellungen über Parteireform und Parteiensystem,” in Staat, Wirtschaft und Politik in
der Weimarer Republik. Festschrift für Heinrich Brüning, ed. Ferdinand A. Hermens and
Theodor Schieder (Berlin, 1967), 23 40, as well as Jones, “Stegerwald,” 1 29, and Forster,
Stegerwald, 279 90. For further information on the Essen congress, see Roder,
Gewerkschaftsbund, 264 82.
18
See Stegerwald’s attack on Erzberger at the meeting of the Center Reichstag delegation, 19
Oct. 1920, BA Koblenz, Nachlass Rudolf ten Hompel, 20.
19
Resolution of the GCG executive committee, 7 8 Apr. 1920, in Zentralblatt der christli
chen Gewerkschaften Deutschlands 20, no. 9 (26 Apr. 1920): 77 78.
20
“Richtlinien des Deutschen Gewerkschaftsbundes für die Reichstagswahlen,” in Zentral
blatt der christlichen Gewerkschaften Deutschlands 20, no. 12 (7 Juni 1920): 109 10.
21
Adam Stegerwald, Sittliche Kraft oder rohe Gewalt? Mahnruf der christlich nationalen
Arbeiterschaft an das deutsche Volk. Vortrag, gehalten auf der Kundgebung der christlichen
   , –

own Center Party. The founding of the Bavarian People’s Party and the end of
its parliamentary alliance with the Center in January 1920, the emergence of
the Christian People’s Party (Christliche Volkspartei or CVP) in the Rhineland
and the western parts of Germany, and the sympathy of Catholic conservatives
who had formerly belonged to the Center for the right-wing DNVP gave rise
to widespread concern about the Center’s survival as a viable factor in German
political life.22 It was against the background of these developments that
Stegerwald and his lieutenants, the most important of whom was DGB secre-
tary Heinrich Brüning, decided to resume their efforts on behalf of a reform of
the German party system. In September 1920 Christian labor leaders drafted
an eight-page memorandum entitled “Arbeiterbewegung und Politik” that
outlined the case for the creation of an interconfessional and socially hetero-
geneous people’s party open to all of those who were prepared to cooperate in
the reconstruction of the German fatherland on a Christian, national, demo-
cratic, and social basis.23 The ideas contained in this memorandum quickly
found their way into Stegerwald’s speech at Essen and became the nucleus of
what came to be known as his “Essen Program.”
Stegerwald’s appeal for the founding of an interconfessional and socially
heterogenous Christian people’s party was addressed in large part to conserva-
tive Catholics who opposed the Center’s sharp swing to the left in the last years
of World War I. Catholic support for the Center had already begun to unravel
in the last years before the outbreak of the war.24 This trend continued into the
early years of the Weimar Republic as Catholic nobles, Catholic workers,
Catholic peasants, and representatives of the Catholic middle class began to

Gewerkschaften in Fredenbaum zu Dortmund am 25. April 1920 (Cologne, 1920). See also
Sedlmayr to Kaiser, 31 May 1920, BA Koblenz, Nachlass Jakob Kaiser, 250.
22
For example, see Heinrich Triepel, Krisis in der Zentrumspartei? (Opladen, n.d. [1920]).
For further details, see Morsey, Zentrumspartei, 273 310.
23
“Arbeiterbewegung und Politik. Als Manuskript gedruckt für die Führer der christlich
nationalen Arbeiterbewegung,” Sept. 1920, ACDP Sankt Augustin, NL Stegerwald, I 206/
001/2.
24
For example, see Engelbert von Kerckerinck zur Borg, Unsere Stellung zur Zentrumspar
tei. Vortrag in der Generalversammlung des Vereins kath. Edelleute zu Münster am 4.
Febr. 1919 (Münster, n.d. [1919]), Vereinigte Westfälische Adelsarchive, Münster (here
after cited as WVA Münster), Nachlass Hermann von Lüninck, 807. See also Gerhard
Kratzsch, Engelbert Reichsfreiherr von Kerckerinck zur Borg. Westfälischer Adel zwischen
Kaiserreich und Weimarer Republik (Münster, 2004), 113 33. On Catholic conservative
estrangement from the Center, see Horst Gründer, “Rechtskatholizismus im Kaiserreich
und in der Weimarer Republik unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der Rheinlande und
Westfalens,” Westfälische Zeitschrift 134 (1984): 107 55, and Christoph Hübner, Die
Rechtskatholiken, die Zentrumspartei und die katholische Kirche in Deutschland bis zum
Reichskonkordat von 1933. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des Scheiterns der Weimarer
Republik (Berlin, 2014), 155 234, as well as Friedrich Keinemann, Vom Krummstab zur
Republik. Westfälischer Adel unter preußischer Herrschaft 1802 1945 (Dortmund, 1997),
364 84.
    

turn away from the Center in search of a new political home.25 DNVP
strategists were quick to take note of this and saw an opportunity to broaden
the base of their political movement by reaching out to Catholics and other
groups that had not previously been identified with the conservative cause.
Here the initiative came from a prominent Westphalian noble, Baron Alfred
von Landsberg-Steinfurt, who took it upon himself to issue an appeal on
behalf of the DNVP calling for all “national Germans” to set aside their
confessional differences and unite against the common threat that “the mar-
riage of Anglo-Saxon lust for world power with the international masonic-
Jewish struggle for world domination through the power of money” posed to
all Christians irrespective of denomination.26 In June 1919 Landsberg’s older
brother Engelbert von Landsberg-Velen, also a highly respected Westphalian
noble, was invited to speak before the DNVP’s State Political Coordinating
Committee on the topic of “Die Deutschnationale Volkspartei und der Katho-
lizismus.” Here the elder Landsberg called upon the DNVP to take the lead in
overcoming the historic schism between Catholic and Protestant and to unite
the two confessions against all those forces in the modern world that
threatened the unity and vitality of the German nation.27 Five months later
Engelbert von Landsberg-Velen had an opportunity to act upon his own
advice when he and a handful of other DNVP Catholics met in Berlin to lay
the foundation for the creation of a national Catholic committee that would
assist the party leadership in winning the support and votes of Catholics in
areas with a significant Catholic population such as Silesia, Westphalia, the
Rhineland, Berlin, and possibly Bavaria.28
Landsberg and his associates clearly had an eye on the Reichstag elections
that were scheduled to take place in early 1920 and were optimistic of
achieving a decisive breakthrough into the ranks of the dissident elements

25
Johannes Schauff, Das Wahlverhalten der deutschen Katholiken im Kaiserreich und in der
Weimarer Republik. Untersuchungen aus dem Jahre 1928, ed. Rudolf Morsey (Mainz,
1975), 70 107.
26
Landsberg Steinfurt, “Zusammenschluß aller nationalen Deutschen,” n.d. [1919], VWA
Münster, Nachlass Engelbert Freiherr von Kerckerinck zur Borg, 139. For further details,
see Larry Eugene Jones, “Catholic Conservatives in the Weimar Republic: The Politics of
the Rhenisch Westphalian Aristocracy, 1918 1933,” German History 18 (2000): 60 85,
here 61 63.
27
Landsberg Velen, “Die Deutschnationale Volkspartei und der Katholizismus,” 15. Arbeits
abend der Staatspolitischen Arbeitsgemeinschaft der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei, 13.
Juni 1919, 91 97, BA Berlin, R 8005, 327. See also the preliminary draft of Landsberg’s
speech with his handwritten corrections under the title “Katholizismus u. nationale
Politik. Vortrag in der Staatspolitischen Arbeitsgemeinschaft der Deutschnationalen
Volkspartei in Berlin am 13. Juni 1919,” VWA Münster, Nachlass Hermann Graf zu
Stolberg Stolberg, Haus Westheim, 170.
28
Notes on the meeting of the DNVP Catholic committee, 5 Nov. 1919, VWA Münster,
Nachlass Engelbert Freiherr von Landsberg Velen, Haus Drensteinfurt, E1.
   , –

on the Center’s right wing.29 Their efforts received what amounted to the
party’s official imprimatur when, in an oft-cited letter to the leaders of the
DNVP’s district organization in Münster on 2 January 1920, DNVP party
chairman Hergt reiterated his party’s conviction that the “life forces of Chris-
tianity” constituted “an essential and indispensable foundation for the whole-
some development of the German fatherland.” In the same breath, Hergt
stressed the DNVP’s eagerness to welcome “all of those – Catholic and
Protestant alike – who embraced a national politics . . . as equal and fully
entitled members” of the party and insisted that it was the duty of all national-
thinking Germans to do whatever they could to eliminate confessional ten-
sions from German public life so as not to further complicate the already
difficult task of Germany’s national recovery on the basis of its Christian and
national values.30 In the short term, however, the DNVP’s hopes of achieving a
major breakthrough into the ranks of the Center’s right wing never material-
ized, in large part because Catholic conservatives in the Rhineland and
Westphalia chose not to affiliate themselves with the DNVP but rather to
launch a new Catholic party of their own, the Christian People’s Party. The
architect of the new party was Baron Hermann von Lüninck, a Westphalian
noble who argued that the Center had lost its historic character as a “Christian-
conservative party” and that it was therefore necessary for Catholic conserva-
tives like himself to found a new Catholic party for those who could no longer
tolerate the direction in which the Center was headed. The party that Lüninck
had in mind would be conservative and monarchist in terms of its basic
political orientation and committed to the defense of those religious and
cultural values that lay at the heart of the old Center’s political mission.31
From December 1919 through the spring of 1920 Lüninck worked closely
with Baron Clemens von Loë-Bergerhausen from the Rhenish Peasants’ Union
(Rheinischer Bauernverein) and Heinz Brauweiler of the Düsseldorfer Tages-
blatt in establishing the foundations of the new party.32 The CVP made its

29
Landsberg Steinfurt, “Darf ein Katholik deutschnational sein?” Eiserne Blätter 1, no. 41
(18 Apr. 1920): 717 20.
30
“Die Deutschnationale Volkspartei und die Katholiken,” 2 Jan. 1920, in Politisches
Handwörterbuch (Führer ABC), ed. Max Weiß (Berlin, 1928), 319.
31
In this respect, see Hermann von Lüninck, Das Zentrum am Scheidewege (Munich, 1920),
and Hermann von Lüninck, “Die politische Vertretung des deutschen Katholizismus,”
ibid., no. 9 (1 May 1920): 555 72.
32
Notes on a meeting of the CVP executive committee, 13 Apr. 1920, StA Mönchen
Gladbach, NL Brauweiler, 162. On the founding of the CVP, see Lüninck to Hermann zu
Stolberg Stolberg, 26. Feb. 1920, VWA Münster, NL Hermann zu Stolberg Stolberg, 167,
and Lüninck to Josef zu Stolberg Stolberg, 12, 14, and 19 Apr. 1920, all in VWA Münster,
Nachlass Josef Graf zu Stolberg Stolberg, 330. For further details, see Reis, “Die deutsch
nationalen Katholiken,” 262 92. On Brauweiler’s role in launching the CVP, see the
unpublished dissertation by Carina Simon, “Heinz Brauweiler. Eine politische Biographie
    

public debut in Cologne on 13 April 1920 with an appeal that denounced “the
frightful revolution from the Left” and called for “Germany’s rebirth out of the
womb of Christianity.” This broadside was directed almost exclusively against
the Center, which was condemned for having abandoned the social and
religious values that lay at the heart of its political mission and was therefore
responsible for the deep spiritual and political crisis that had descended upon
the German people.33 In the June 1920 Reichstag elections the Christian
People’s Party fielded its own slate of candidates in the four districts along
the lower and middle Rhine – Cologne-Aachen, Koblenz-Trier, and the two
Düsseldorf districts – and received over 65,000 votes without either the
resources or time to develop an effective party organization.34 The CVP’s
success at the polls not only confirmed the deepening crisis in which the
Center Party had found itself since the summer of 1917, but it lent renewed
encouragement to those within the DNVP who were hopeful of breaking the
Center’s hold on the political loyalties of Germany’s Catholic conservatives. At
the same time, the CVP’s performance in the 1920 Reichstag elections under-
scored the need for the DNVP to preempt the challenge of the new party by
intensifying its own efforts to win the support of Catholic conservatives who
could no longer countenance the direction in which the Center was presum-
ably headed.
On 10 August 1920 Landsberg-Velen and a handful of his closest associates
met in Berlin with Lindeiner-Wildau and Graef-Anklam from the DNVP’s
national headquarters to finalize preparations for the creation of a special
committee for Catholics within the DNVP’s organizational structure.
Landsberg-Velen, who had previously served as chairman of the Catholic
Committee of the DNVP’s State Political Coordinating Committee, was
chosen to chair the new committee.35 The purpose of this committee was to
make certain that the legacy of the Kulturkampf had been extinguished at all

im Zeichen des antidemokratischen Denkens” (Ph. D. diss., Universität Kassel, 2016),

101 06.
33
“Aufruf! An unsere christlichen Gesinnungsgenossen in Stadt und Land!,” n.d. [13
Apr. 1920], VWA Münster, NL Josef Graf zu Stolberg Stolberg, 327.
34
Die Christliche Volkspartei, ed. Generalsekretariat der Christlichen Volkspartei, Rhei
nische Bücherei, no. 1 (Koblenz, n.d. [1921]), esp. 17 29.
35
Report of the constituitive assembly of the “Reich Committee of Catholics in the German
National People’s Party,” Berlin, 10 Aug. 1920, VWA Münster, NL Landsberg, E1, also in
LaNRW Münster, NL Schorlemer Lieser, C113/B 42. See also Lejeune Jung to Stolberg,
23 Aug. 1920, VWA Münster, NL Josef zu Stolberg, 324. For further details, see Reiß,
“Die deutschnationalen Katholiken,” 349 412; Hübner, Rechtskatholiken, 235 64, and
Larry Eugene Jones, “Catholics on the Right: The Reich Catholic Committee of the
German National People’s Party, 1920 33,” Historisches Jahrbuch 126 (2006): 221 67,
here 223 30.
   , –

levels of the party organization, to advise party leaders on matters of concern

to German Catholics, and to assist the party in representing “the religious,
cultural, ecclesiastical, and political interests of German Catholics” as vigor-
ously as possible.36 Its ultimate goal, as Paul Lejeune-Jung wrote to the
Center’s Martin Spahn in the summer of 1921, was the “de-confessionaliza-
tion” of German political life and the creation of a Christian platform upon
Catholics and Protestants could stand in unity.37 The official founding of the
DNVP’s new Catholic committee took place on 25 October 1920 at the
DNVP’s second annual party congress in Hanover.38 The ceremonies were
modest with between twenty-five to thirty party members in attendance. The
fact, however, that the participants included more Protestants than Catholics
and that the founding ceremonies of the DNVP’s Catholic committee took
place in Hanover’s Lutheran Guild House (Evangelisches Vereinhaus)39 could
only have sent a confusing message to the very Catholics the DNVP was
targeting for recruitment. At the same time, Landsberg-Velen and his associ-
ates tried to overcome whatever reservations of the Catholic church hierarchy
may have had about their undertaking by sending a letter to the Catholic
bishops and the recently appointed Papal Nuncio Eugenio Pacelli in which
they outlined the reasons that had led him and his fellow Catholics to join the
DNVP and requested that the party to which they now belonged be accorded
the same support and understanding historically reserved for the Center.40 But
this overture encountered a cool response from the German episcopacy and
did little to soften the essentially negative attitude of Germany’s Catholic
hierarchy to the DNVP and its solicitation of Catholic votes.41 The obstacles
confronting the leaders of the DNVP’s Reich Catholic Committee in their
efforts to secure a breakthrough into the right wing of the Center were indeed
formidable.

36
“Aufgaben der Ausschüsse der Katholiken in der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei,” n.d.,
VWA Münster, NL Landsberg, E1, also in Über die politische und parteipolitische Stellung
der katholischen Deutschen. Von einem solchen (Berlin, n.d. [1921]), 47 48.
37
Lejeune Jung to Spahn, 21 July 1921, BA Koblenz, Nachlass Martin Spahn, 172.
38
Landsberg, “Der Reichsausschuß der Katholiken in der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei,”
Katholisches Korrespondenzblatt, Werbe Nummer (n.d.), 2 3. See also Viktor Lukasso
witz, Wir Katholiken in der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei (Breslau, n.d. [2001]), 134 38.
39
Report of unknown provenance on the founding of the DNVP’s National Committee for
Catholics, 25 Oct. 1920, BA Koblenz, Nachlass Josef Wirth, 62. See also the entry in
Gallwitz’s diary, 25 Oct. 1920, BA MA Freiburg, NL Gallwitz, 36.
40
Undated copies of the letter addressed to Pacelli and the Denkschrift accompanying it are
to be found in VWA Münster, NL Landsberg, E4, and in Stadtarchiv Paderborn (here
after cited as StA Paderborn), “Dokumentation Paul Lejeune Jung,” Bestand S 2/125.
41
Minutes of the DNVP’s Reich Catholic Committee, 3 Feb. 1921, VWA Münster, NL
Landsberg, E1.
    

The Prussian Campaign

The first test for DNVP’s Reich Catholic Committee would come in the
campaign for the Prussian state elections on 20 February 1921. From the
perspective of the DNVP, Prussia had been the driving force behind the process
of German unification in the previous century and embodied all of those
traditions that were associated with Germany’s rise as a great power. It was
to these traditions, the Nationalists asserted, that Germany would have to
return if she was ever to regain the great-power status she had enjoyed before
World War I. But Prussia had been controlled by the parties of the Weimar
Coalition ever since the elections to the Prussian constitutional assembly in
early 1919, a position from which they had encouraged the dismemberment of
Prussia by granting far-reaching autonomy to its various provinces. The call
for new elections thus afforded the leaders of the DNVP an opportunity not
only to break the Weimar Coalition’s hold on power in Prussia but also to put
a stop to its efforts to destroy the very institutions that were essential for
Germany’s return to great-power status.42 At the same time, the Nationalists
sought to use the Prussian campaign as a public referendum on the policies of
the Fehrenbach cabinet since assuming office in the summer of 1920. DNVP
strategists thus pursued a two-fold goal in the 1921 Prussian campaign. For
just as they hoped that the results of the February election would produce
a fundamental change in the policies and composition of the Prussian govern-
ment, they also they sought to inflict such heavy damage upon the three
parties that supported the Fehrenbach cabinet – the Center, DDP, and
DVP – that the national government’s mandate to rule would be seriously
compromised. This would then provide the Nationalists with the leverage they
needed to force a change of government in the Reich as well. The conquest of
Prussia represented the first step toward the reestablishment of conservative
hegemony throughout the rest of Germany at the same time that it constituted
an essential prerequisite for the success of this endeavor.43
Hergt opened the Nationalist campaign in the Prussian Landtag elections
with a major programmatic speech in Berlin’s Philharmonic Hall on 9 January
1921. His speech began with a brief but nonetheless dramatic sketch of the
desperate diplomatic situation in which Germany found itself sign the ratifi-
cation of the Versailles Treaty and attacked the Fehrenbach government and
the parties that supported it for Germany’s diplomatic weakness. In the course
of his remarks Hergt took special pains to include Stresemann’s German

42
“Preußenprogramm der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei, n.d. [Jan. 1921], NL Westarp,
Gärtringen, VN 32.
43
Undated draft of its election appeal for the Prussian campaign, NL Westarp, Gärtringen,
VN 30, as well as Kreth to Oldenburg Januschau, 27 Oct. 1920., ibid., II/5. For further
details, see Ohnezeit, Zwischen “schärfster Opposition,” 222 26.
   , –

People’s Party in his condemnation of the Fehrenbach cabinet and cited in

particular its failure to block acceptance of the recent reparations accord that
Germany had signed at Spa as a sign of the DVP’s unreliability in matters of
foreign policy. By the same token, the DVP was also held responsible for the
continuation of Erzberger’s fiscal policies under Joseph Wirth, his successor at
the ministry of finance, and for the government’s refusal to schedule new
Prussian elections as soon as possible. All of this, concluded Hergt, suggested
that the DVP was unwilling to pursue any course of action that might
jeopardize the possibility of a coalition with the Majority Socialists. This, to
his way of thinking, constituted nothing less than a betrayal of the mandate the
DVP had received in the June 1920 Reichstag elections.44 By targeting the
DVP in this fashion, Hergt and the leaders of the DNVP were trying to reverse
the victory the DVP had scored at the polls in the most recent Reichstag
elections and to reestablish their party as the dominant force on the German
Right. Stresemann and the leaders of the DVP immediately countered this
strategy by inviting all of those, including the DNVP and the Majority
Socialists, who were prepared to set aside their domestic differences for the
sake of greater national solidarity in the conduct of German foreign policy to
join the DVP and other government parties in the creation of a “national unity
front.”45 When the Nationalists rejected this proposal on 2 February 1921,46
Stresemann immediately seized upon the DNVP’s refusal to participate in a
broadly based “war cabinet” embracing all of those who had rallied to the
German war effort in August 1914 as a sign of its unreliability in matters of
Germany’s national interest and assailed the Nationalists for placing short-
term electoral gains ahead of the need for national unity in the face of Allied
pressure.47
While Hergt made the DVP the principal target of his attack in his speech in
Berlin’s Philharmonic Hall, by no means did the Nationalists exempt the
Center from its invective against the national government and the parties that
supported it.48 With the creation of the DNVP’s Reich Catholic Committee

44
Oskar Hergt, Auf zum Preußenkampf. Rede am Sonntag, den 9. Januar 1921, in der
Philharmonie in Berlin, Deutschnationale Flugschrift, no. 93 (Berlin, 1921), esp. 10 13.
45
Nationalliberale Correspondenz. Pressedienst der Deutschen Volkspartei, 17 Jan. 1921,
no. 13.
46
On these negotiations, see Die Bemühungen der Deutschen Volkspartei um die Bildung
einer nationalen Einheitsfront, ed. DVP, Reichsgeschäftsstelle (Berlin, n.d. [1921]), 1 9.
For the DVP’s position, see Stresemann to Hergt, 3 and 10 Feb. 1921, PA AA Berlin, NL
Stresemann, 237/142456 58, 142503 04.
47
[Stresemann], “Zur Frage der nationalen Einheitsfront,” Deutsche Stimmen 33, no. 8 (20
Feb. 1921): 113 17.
48
For example, see Walther Graef Anklam, Preußenpolitik. Rede in der Preuß. Landesver
sammlung am 14. Januar 1921, Deutschnationale Flugschrift, no. 99 (Berlin, n.d. [1921]),
10 11.
    

the Nationalists began to target the Center’s electoral base in the same way that
it had attacked that of the DVP. The campaign found the Center very much on
the defensive, in part because it was still recoiling from the heavy losses it had
sustained in the June 1920 Reichstag elections49 but also because Stegerwald’s
appeal at Essen for the creation of a “sociologically heterogeneous, intercon-
fessional Christian people’s party” had given rise to a new round of doubts
about the Center’s future existence. Speaking at a seminar for DNVP activists
in December 1920, Paul Lejeune-Jung cited Stegerwald’s Essen appeal as
further evidence of the deepening crisis in which the Center found itself and
as a sign of the political realignment that had been taking place among
German Catholics since the last years of the war. A former Centrist who had
defected to the DNVP earlier in the year and was now Landsberg-Velen’s
second-in-command in the leadership of the DNVP’s Reich Catholic
Committee, Lejeune-Jung claimed that under Erzberger the Center had rebap-
tized itself as a middle party and in so doing had jettisoned the religious and
conservative principles upon which it had been founded. The only way the
Center could revive its flagging electoral fortunes, Lejeune-Jung concluded,
was to evoke the specter of a new Kulturkampf, whereas the DNVP sought to
exclude confessional differences from German political life and hoped to unify
the two confessions in the defense of Germany’s Christian culture.50 The
Center responded by denouncing the DNVP’s appeal for an interconfessional
defense of Germany’s Christian culture as little more than a ploy to dupe well-
meaning Catholics into embracing an essentially Lutheran vision of what that
culture should be and took particular umbrage at the anti-Catholic polemics
on the part of prominent DNVP Protestants.51 The leaders of the DNVP’s
Reich Catholic Committee responded to this charge by attacking the Center
for injecting divisive confessional issues into the campaign at a time when the

49
On the situation in the Center, see the minutes of the conference of representatives of the
Center’s provincial and state committees in Würzburg, 12 Sept. 1920, records of the
German Center Party, ACDP Sankt Augustin, Bestand VI 051, 081.
50
Paul Lejeune Jung, Das Zentrum. Vortrag im politischen Lehrgang der Deutschnationalen
Volkspartei am 17. Dezember 1920, Deutschnationale Flugschrift, no. 83 (Berlin, 1921),
2 4, 7 8. See also Lejeune Jung’s comments at the 82nd evening workshop of the
DNVP’s State Political Coordinating Committee on “Stegerwald und wir,” 12
Oct. 1921, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, II/8. On Lejeune Jung’s political career, see Franz
Josef Weber, “Paul Lejeune Jung (1882 1944),” in Deutsche Patrioten in Widerstand und
Verfolgung 1933 1945. Paul Lejeune Jung Theodor Roeningh Josef Wirmer Georg
Frhr. von Boeselager. Ein Gedenkschrift der Stadt Paderborn, ed. Friedrich Gerhard
Hohmann (Paderborn, 1986), 7 19.
51
For example, see Franz Steffen, Deutschnationale Volkspartei Christentum Katholi
zismus. Eine grundsätzliche Auseinandersetzung (Berlin, 1922), esp. 38 93. See also
“Wahlkampfmethoden der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei,” Mitteilungen der Deutschen
Zentrumspartei 2, nos. 7 8 (28 Feb. 1921): 56 61.
   , –

need for national unity was greater than ever.52 At the same time, the DNVP
Catholics repeatedly challenged the Center’s credentials as a “true” represen-
tative of Germany’s Catholic population and asked whether it, by virtue of its
close identification with Germany’s new republican system, had effectively
abdicated its commitment to defend its interests.53
With their attacks against the DVP and Center, DNVP campaign strategists
clearly hoped to accelerate the swing to the right that had made itself felt in the
June 1920 Reichstag elections. As in the past, the DNVP supplemented its
broadsides against political rivals with direct appeals to the social and eco-
nomic interests of the various vocational groups that constituted its material
base. For example, the DNVP appealed to the farmer by pointing to its efforts
to dismantle the controlled economy in agriculture and end government
controls over agricultural prices and production,54 to the salaried employee
by championing a reform and expansion of the exiting program of white-
collar insurance and addressing the housing shortage that weighed so heavily
upon the welfare of Germany’s white-collar population,55 to the wage laborer
by urging a reform of the existing system of unemployment insurance and the
creation of workers’ courts to adjudicate disputes with management,56 to
the civil servant by stressing its commitment to defend the historic rights of
the professional civil service in the face of the leveling pressures of the modern
democratic state,57 to the public school teacher not only by reaffirming the
Christian foundations of German public education, but also by supporting
measures to alleviate the salary inequities teachers had experienced as a result
of the postwar inflation,58 and lastly to the independent middle class and small

52
Declaration adopted by the DNVP’s Reich Catholic Committee, 3 Feb. 1921, VWA
Münster, NL Landsberg, E1, and published in the Katholisches Korrespondenzblatt 1,
no. 2 (8 Apr. 1921): 1 2. See also Reichsausschuß der Katholiken in der Deutschnatio
nalen Volkspartei, Die Deutschnationale Volkspartei und der katholische Volksteil
Deutschlands, Deutschnationales Rüstzeug, Sonder Lieferung 1 (Berlin, n.d. [1921]).
53
Der Kampf gegen die deutschnationalen Katholiken, ed. Landes Ausschuß der Katholiken
in der deutschnationalen Volkspartei für die Provinz Westfalen (Münster, 1921).
54
Josef Kaufhold, Die Tätigkeit der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei für die Landwirtschaft im
Reichstage, Deutschnationale Flugschrift, no. 70 (Berlin, n.d. [1920]. See also Emil
Ebersbach, Die Tätigkeit der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei in der verfassungsgebenden
Preußischen Landesversammlung (Berlin, n.d. [1920]), 15 19.
55
Gustav Lindenberg, Politische Aufgaben der Angestellten, Deutschnationale Flugschrift,
no. 56 (Berlin, 1920), 16 18. See also Paul Krellmann, Die Privatangestellten und die
Deutschnationale Volkspartei, Deutschnationale Flugschrift, no. 100 (Berlin, 1921), 5 11.
56
Arbeiterfragen in der Preußenversammlung, Deutschnationale Flugschrift, no. 64 (Berlin,
1920), 2 4.
57
“Ein Jahr Deutschnationale Beamtenschaft,” n.d. [Feb. 1921], NL Westarp, Gärtringen,
VN 32. See also Ebersbach, Tätigkeit, 22 29.
58
Viktor Lukassowitz, Die Tätigkeit der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei in der Preuß. Lan
desversammlung für die Volksschule und ihre Lehrer, Deutschnationale Flugschrift, no. 74
(Berlin, n.d. [1920]), 2 4, 12 18. See also Ebersbach, Tätigkeit, 25 26, 29 31.
    

business sector by reminding it of its unequivocal commitment to the struggle

against socialism in all of its mriad forms.59 But one issue that did not figure as
prominently in the DNVP’s Prussian campaign as it had in the party’s
previous campaigns was antisemitism. After the 1920 Reichstag elections
Hergt and the party’s more moderate leaders had concluded that the agitation
of the DNVP’s antisemitic wing had damaged their party’s performance at the
polls.60 But the decision to mute the antisemitic rhetoric that had played such
a prominent role in the 1919 and 1920 campaigns came under a sharp attack
from Graef-Anklam and party racists at the DNVP’s national headquarters in
a way that seriously exacerbated the rift within the party on the so-called
Jewish question. As the former general and DNVP Reichstag deputy Max von
Gallwitz noted in his diary after a particularly heated session of the DNVP
Reichstag delegation, the issue was so divisive that the unity of the party itself
was at stake.61
For all of the energy the leaders of the DNVP had invested in the crusade to
free Prussia from the grips of the Weimar Coalition outcome of the Prussian
elections on 20 February 1921 proved a bitter disappointment. DNVP party
leaders could derive a measure of satisfaction from the fact that their party had
improved upon its performance in the 1919 elections to the Prussian consti-
tutional assembly by approximately 1.1 million votes and had increased its
percentage share of the Prussian vote from 11.2 in 1919 to 18.0 in 1921, thus
extending a string of victories that had begun with the 1920 Reichstag elec-
tions.62 But the Nationalists had anticipated even more significant gains than
those their party actually achieved and were particularly annoyed by the fact
that the rival DVP had outperformed the DNVP by increasing its popular vote
by almost 1.4 million votes and its share of the Prussian vote from 5.7 to 14.0
percent.63 And while the Center lost more nearly a quarter of its 1919 vote, it
actually improved upon its performance in the 1920 Reichstag elections by
more than a percentage point, an outcome that party officials attributed in part
to the Center’s success in recapturing much of the ground it had surrendered
in 1920 to the Christian People’s Party in Koblenz-Trier and to the DNVP in

59
Gustav Budjuhn, Mittelstandsfragen. Vortrag im Politischen Lehrgang der Deutschnatio
nalen Volkspartei am 15. Dezember 1920, Deutschnationalen Flugschrift, no. 81 (Berlin,
1921), 3 6, 10 12, and Gustav Budjuhn, Gewerbliche Mittelstandspolitik in der Preu
ßischen Landesversammlung, Deutschnationale Flugschrift, no. 92 (Berlin, 1921).
60
For example, see Kahrstedt, “Kritik,” Eiserne Blätter 1, no. 50 (20 June 1920): 864 66, and
Kahrstedt, “Nochmals zum Antisemitismus,” ibid., 2, no. 4 (25 July 1920): 51 55.
61
Entry in Gallwitz’s diary, 31 Jan. 1921, BA MA Freiburg, NL Gallwitz, 36.
62
Falter, Lindenberger, and Schumann, Wahlen und Abtimmungen, 101.
63
Letter from Ada Gräfin von Westarp to Gertraude Freifrau Hiller von Gaertringen, 23
Feb. 1921, NL Westarp, Gärtringen.
   , –

other parts of the Rhineland and Westphalia.64 What this suggested was that
the DNVP’s Reich Catholic Committee had not been particularly successfully
in winning the support of Catholic conservatives who had become disillu-
sioned with the Center’s shift to the left. Despite their gains at the polls, the
DNVP and DVP had failed to break the hold the parties of the Weimar
coalition held over Prussian political life and that they were still confronted
by a parliamentary majority that was firmly committed to the republican
system of government. Although the government parties had seen their
mandate in the Prussian Landtag reduced from 304 to 211 seats, they still
held a slim parliamentary majority that left their control of the state govern-
ment weakened but essentially intact.65 If the outcome of the Prussian Landtag
elections was to have any political fallout, it would not be in Prussia but in
the Reich.

Retreat into Demagogy

The results of the Prussian Landtag elections in February 1921 confirmed the
swing to the right that had taken place in Germany’s political landscape since
the summer of 1919. The political mandate of the Fehrenbach cabinet was
severely weakened by the election outcome, and pressure for the extension of
the government to the right continued to mount in the wake of the DNVP’s
victory at the polls. Acting on his own initiative and without encouragement
from the DVP’s coalition partners,66 Stresemann wrote to Hergt in late
February and proposed that representatives from their two parties meet to
discuss the circumstances under which the DNVP might enter the govern-
ment. Hergt promptly responded that his party fully recognized the dangers
inherent in Germany’s diplomatic situation and was therefore willing to
discuss entering into negotiations aimed at the formation of a “broad-based
coalition born out of national need [aus der nationalen Not geborenen Gesamt-
koalition],” though without explicitly committing himself or his party to a
coalition with the Majority Socialists.67 On 2 March Stresemann and two other
members of his party – Alfred Zapf and Adolf Kempkes – met with Hergt,
Helfferich, and Westarp from the DNVP. This time Hergt indicated that his
party was not only willing to enter into formal negotiations about the creation

64
Alois Kloecker, Der erste Preußische Landtag. Ein Handbuch über die preußischen Land
tagswahlen und den Landtag (Berlin, 1921), 24 44.
65
Dietrich Orlow, Weimar Prussia, 1918 1925: The Unlikely Rock of Democracy (Pitts
burgh, PA, 1986), 77 81.
66
Stresemann’s notes on a meeting with the leaders of the other government parties, 22
Feb. 1921, PA AA Berlin, NL Stresemann, 237/142497 502.
67
Hergt to Stresemann, 25 Feb. 1921, PA AA Berlin, NL Stresemann, 237/142520 21. No
copy of Stresemann’s letter to Hergt has survived.
    

of a “national unity front,” but that it was also prepared to make far-reaching
concessions to make the formation of such a front possible. In return, Hergt
stipulated that the government in Prussia should be reorganized along the
same lines as in the Reich and that certain Social Democratic demands, such as
those for socialization of industry, be shelved for the duration of the proposed
unity front. Skeptical that either the DDP or Center would go along with such
an arrangement, Stresemann suggested that, should these efforts fail, the DVP
would then seek to reorganize the government in Prussia along the lines of the
bourgeois minority coalition that currently governed the Reich. In this case,
Stresemann insisted, the support of the DNVP would be crucial and a test of
just how serious the party was about sharing the burden of governmental
responsibility.68
The following day Stresemann met with the DNVP party leaders again, this
time with representatives from the two parties’ delegations to the newly elected
Prussian Landtag. Once again the two parties affirmed their willingness to join
a broadly based coalition government stretching from the DNVP to the
Majority Socialists, but only if the government in Prussia was reorganized
along the same lines on which the national government was taking shape.69
But this was a condition to which the Center would not accede, and in the
second week of March Carl Trimborn, the Center’s national party chairman,
announced that his party would not take part in a reorganization of the
Prussian cabinet and would insist instead upon the retention of the existing
governmental coalition.70 Trimborn’s declaration, which spelled an end to
Stresemann’s efforts to bring the DNVP into the government, could only have
brought a sigh of relief from those in the DNVP who were not yet prepared to
share the burden of governmental responsibility. There remained, however, a
remote possibility that Stresemann might still be asked to form a new govern-
ment that could conceivably include representatives from the DNVP. But
when the Allied Supreme Council in London issued an ultimatum on 5 May
1921 that threatened occupation of the Ruhr if Germany did not accept an
Allied schedule for the payment of reparations with Germany’s total obligation
set at 132 billion gold marks, Stresemann informed the other government
parties that he could not assume responsibility for the formation of a new

68
Memorandum of a meeting of the DVP’s Stresemann, Kempkes, and Zapf with the
DNVP’s Hergt, Helfferich, and Westarp, 2 Mar. 1921, BA Koblenz, R 45 II, 355/93 97.
69
For the DNVP’s position, see Westarp to Traub, 2 Apr. 1921, NL Westarp, Gärtringen,
II/83.
70
Stresemann’s remarks at a meeting of the DVP managing committee, 8 Mar. 1921, BA
Koblenz, R 45 II/355/143 73, reprinted in Nationalliberalismus in der Weimarer Repu
blik. Die Führungsgremien der Deutschen Volkspartei 1918 1933, ed. Eberhard Kolb and
Ludwig Richter, 2 vols. (Düsseldorf, 1999), 1:404 16. See also Stresemann’s memoran
dum, 9 Mar. 1921, PA AA Berlin, NL Stresemann, 237/142566 69. For further details, see
Wright, Stresemann, 167 79, and Richter, Deutsche Volkspartei, 223 39.
   , –

government if that also meant that he and his party would have to vote for the
unconditional acceptance of the allied ultimatum.71
Stresemann’s announcement cleared the way for the installation of Joseph
Wirth, a member of the Center’s left wing closely identified with the much
reviled Erzberger, as the new chancellor on 9 May 1921.72 With Wirth’s
appointment as chancellor, the DNVP retreated once again to the comfort
of unconditional opposition.73 No Nationalist was more effective in mobilizing
the passions of its electorate in the immediate postwar period than Karl
Helfferich. Born in 1872, Helfferich had a long and distinguished career as
one of Germany’s leading experts in the field of public finance before the
outbreak of World War I. During the war he had risen to the post of state
secretary in the Reich Ministry of Finance and had become as one of chancel-
lor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg’s most trusted political advisors with his
appointment as vice chancellor and Reich minister of the interior in 1916. But
his close wartime ties to Bethmann had made him persona non grata in
conservative circles during the latter stages of the war, and he failed in his
efforts to secure a candidacy on the Nationalist ticket in the elections to
the Weimar National Assembly.74 Helfferich languished on the margins
of German political life for several months before launching his political
comeback with a impassioned speech against Germany’s acceptance of the
Versailles Peace Treaty at the University of Berlin on 26 June 1919. Helfferich
would use this as an occasion to resume his crusade against the one person
whom he held more responsible than any other for the humiliation of
Versailles, Reich Finance Minister Matthias Erzberger. Not only had Erzberger
been the driving force behind the passage of the Peace Resolution in July 1917,
but it was Erzberger who had travelled to Compiegne in November 1918 to
sign the armistice that ended the war. And now it was Erzberger who, in
apparent indifference to the deep sense of national outrage to which the
publication of the Allied peace terms had given rise, went to Versailles and
signed a treaty that constituted the epitome of German disgrace. And for this,
Helfferich concluded, Erzberger had earned for himself the title of “debaucher
of the Reich [Reichsverderber].”75

71
Wright, Stresemann, 179 81.
72
For further details, see Ulrike Hörster Philipps, Joseph Wirth 1879 1956. Eine politische
Biographie (Paderborn, 1998), 98 115.
73
For further details, see Philipp, Die Deutschnationale Fraktion, 136 52, as well as
Wilhelm Bazille, “Die Annahme des Londoner Ultimatums im Reichstag,” Nationale
Blätter, ed. Württembergische Bürgerpartei 1, no. 19 (19 June 1921): 153 57.
74
John G. Williamson, Karl Helfferich, 1872 1924: Economist, Financier, Politician (Prince
ton, NJ, 1971), 60 285.
75
Karl Helfferich, Der Friede von Versailles. Rede an die akademische Jugend gehalten am
26. Juni 1919 im Auditorium Maximum der Berliner Universität, Deutschnationale
Flugschrift, no. 20 (Berlin, n.d. [1919]).
    

Figure 4. Photograph of Karl Helfferich, DNVP Reichstag deputy from 1920 to 1924
and the party’s most prominent critic of German reparations policy. Reproduced from
the private collection of the author

Helfferich’s attacks against Erzberger and his famous battle-cry “Fort mit
Erzberger” quickly moved him to the center of Germany’s political stage.76
The crusade against Erzeberger drew to a preliminary climax in the spring of
1920 when the beleagured finance minister sued Helfferich for slander and lost
his case in court.77 The role that Helfferich played in bringing about Erzber-
ger’s political disgrace no doubt helped him win election to the Reichstag in
June 1920, whereupon he was quickly accepted into the inner councils of the
Nationalist party leadership and became one of Hergt’s most trusted
advisors.78 Helfferich resumed his attacks against Erzeberger following the
former finance minister’s attempts at political rehabilitation in early 1921 and
emerged as one of the German Right’s most unrelenting and effective critics of
the “policy of fulfillment” that Wirth and his foreign minister Walther

76
See Helfferich’s wartime speeches against Erzberger in Karl Helfferich, Fort mit Erzberger!
(Berlin, 1919).
77
See Karl Helfferich, Wer ist Erzberger? Rede im Prozeß Erzberger Helfferich (Sitzung vom
20. Januar 1920), Deutschnationale Flugschrift, no. 44 (Berlin, n.d. [1920]).
78
Westarp to Heydebrand, 30 Mar. 1921, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, II/85.
   , –

Rathenau initiated upon assuming office in May 1921. An expert in the area of
public finance, Helfferich postulated a direct relationship between the onset of
the inflation in the early 1920s and efforts by Erzberger, Wirth, and their
Social Democratic allies to finance the payment of reparations through the
expropriation of Germany’s propertied classes. Helfferich was thus able to lay
the increasing economic hardship that the German middle classes experienced
in the first years of the Weimar Republic at the doorstep of those republican
politicians who were committed to fulfilling the terms of the Versailles Peace
Treaty and the London Ultimatum.79 Helfferich’s speeches from 1919 to 1923
were masterpieces of political demagogy that enabled the DNVP to translate
nationalist frustration over the Versailles peace settlement and middle-class
anxiety over the collapse of the mark into a mandate for repudiation of the
Weimar Republic. The Nationalists were thus able to shift the focus of middle-
class anxiety over the collapse of the German currency from the economic to
the political arena. Only the repudiation of the London Ultimatum and all
future reparations demands, the Nationalists argued, would make it possible
for Germany to recover from the ravages of war and inflation. And this would
require not just a change of goverments but, more importantly, a change of
governmental systems.80

Tweaking the Nationalist Profile

Though temporarily shaken by Erzberger’s assassination by right-wing
extremists on 24 August 1921 and stunned by allegations that held the DNVP
accountable for Erzberger’s murder, neither Helfferich nor the leaders of the
DNVP let this deter them from their emotionally charged crusade against the
policy of fulfillment and the political system they held responsible for Ger-
many’s diplomatic impotence.81 Erzberger’s murder and the crusade against
fulfillment formed the immediate context for the DNVP’s third annual party
congress in Munich in the first week of September 1921.82 Party strategists
were eager to secure an organizational foothold in Bavaria, a predominantly

79
Karl Helfferich, Schuldknechtschaft! 155 Milliarden jährliche Reichsausgabe. Reichstags
rede am 6. Juli 1921 (Berlin, 1921), 4 22.
80
For samples of Helfferich’s rhetoric, see Karl Helfferich, Steuerkompromiß und nationale
Opposition. Reichstagsreden vom 16. und 20, März 1922 (Berlin, 1922), and idem,
Deutschlands Not. Reichstagsrede, gehalten am 23. Juni 1922 (Berlin, 1922).
81
Karl Helfferich, Deutschland in den Ketten des Ultimatums, Deutschnationale Flugschrift,
no. 107 (Berlin, 1921).
82
On the Munich congress, see Pflug’s report at the 81st evening workshop of the DNVP’s
State Political Coordinating Committee on “Der Münchener Parteitag,” 19 Sept. 1921, NL
Westarp, Gärtringen, II/8, as well as the detailed report in “Der Parteitag der Deutsch
nationalen Volkspartei in München,” supplement to the Nationale Blätter, ed. Württem
bergische Bürgerpartei 2, no. 1 (9 Oct. 1921): 9 12.
    

Catholic state in which conservatives had not fared particularly well before
1914 and where disgruntlement over the Center’s political course had led to
the founding of a separate Catholic party in the form of the Bavarian People’s
Party. By holding the 1921 party congress in the citadel of Bavarian Catholi-
cism, the DNVP hoped to take advantage of the growing rift that had
developed between Munich and Berlin over the disarmament of Bavaria’s
civilian defense units, or Einwohnerwehren, at the same time that they sought
to help the Bavarian DNVP secure a breakthrough into the ranks of Bavaria’s
Catholic conservataives who were in the process of launching their own
political party, the Bavarian Royal Party (Bayerische Königspartei) to the right
of the BVP.83 Given the deep-seated hostility that broad sectors of Bavaria’s
propertied classes felt toward the policies emanating from Berlin, the leaders
of the DNVP sought to insinuate their party as skillfully as possible into the
Bavarian equation and mobilize a source of electoral support that had previ-
ously stood well outside the orbit of political conservatism.84
In his keynote address on the evening of 1 September 1921, DNVP party
chairman Oskar Hergt reaffirmed his party’s unconditional opposition to
the national government and its domestic and foreign policies. Refering
to the recent Allied demarché calling for the partition of Upper Silesia despite
the outcome of the League of Nations conducted there, Hergt declared: “In the
area of domestic politics our position commits us to the sharpest opposition
against the national government as the bearer of the ultimatum and the
policies that led to it. And if we had not yet arrived at the resolve to wage
the strongest possible opposition,” Hergt continued, “then after the events of
the last days it would be more necessary than ever.” Then, towards the end of
his speech, Hergt entoned what would become the Leitmotiv of the congress
when he dedicated the DNVP to the “consolidation of all those national
elements at home that have taken a stand against international insanity, that
are committed to the struggle for national self-determination, and that are
fighting alongside us in the battle for the freedom of Germany’s national
economy.”85
On the second day of the congress Friedrich Brunstäd, a Lutheran theolo-
gian from the University of Erlangen, spoke on the topic of “Völkisch-natio-
nale Erneuerung.” Highly regarded in right-wing circles as an eloquent and

83
Rudolf Endres, “Der Bayerische Heimat und Königsbund,” in Land und Reich/Stamm
und Nation. Probleme und Perspektiven bayerischer Geschichte. Festgabe für Max Spindler
zum 90. Geburtstag, ed. Andreas Kraus, 4 vols. (Munich, 1984): 3: 415 36, esp. 416 18.
84
On the DNVP in Bavaria, see Kittel, “Zwischen völkischen Fundamentalismus und
gouvernementaler Taktik,” 868 77.
85
Oskar Hergt, Deutschnationale Politik im Reich und Preußen. Rede auf dem dritten
Parteitage der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei in München am 1. September 1921,
Deutschnationale Flugschrift, no. 118 (Berlin, 1921), 17 19.
   , –

articulate spokesman for the Christian-social philosophy of the state, Brunstäd

took it upon himself to sketch out the ideological and spiritual foundation
upon which the consolidation of German Right should take place. Denouncing
the atomization and fragmentation of modern mass society, Brunstäd stressed
the organic character of state, society, and nation, all of which were rooted in
and derived their vitality from the life of the Volk.86 Brunstäd was followed by
Hans Hilpert, chairman of the DNVP in Bavaria who portrayed his party as
the only truly national force in Bavarian political life and recounted the role it
had played in the reestablishment of law and order following the Munich
soviet of 1919.87 And on the following day Helfferich produced a detailed, if
not depressing, analysis of Germany’s financial situation in which he
denounced the Wirth government for its financial irresponsibility and
attacked in particular the high rate of direct taxation on income and property
to which Wirth had resorted as assault upon the institution of private
property.88 But the greatest sensation of the Munich congress was reserved
for Martin Spahn, a prominent Catholic intellectual who announced to the
great jubilation of the DNVP’s Reich Catholic Committee that he was leaving
the Center to join the DNVP in its crusade for a united German Right. That
the DNVP should be meeting in the heart of Bavaria, continued Spahn, was
both proof that the DNVP embodied a new and more comprehensive species
of German conservatism and an invitation to Catholics throughout the coun-
try to rethink their political sympathies and join forces with the Nationalists in
the creation of a greater German Right. In the DNVP, Spahn concluded, “we
Catholics see the embryo of an emerging great united Right” whose mission it
will be to lay the groundwork for the resurrection of Bismarck’s political
masterpiece, the German Empire.89
Spahn was a major figure in the young conservative intelligentsia of the
early Weimar Republic, and his defection to the DNVP sent shock waves

86
Friedrich Brunstäd, Volkisch nationale Erneuerung. Rede auf dem dritten Parteitage der
Deutschnationalen Volkspartei in München am 2. September 1921, Deutschnationale
Flugschrift, no. 119 (Berlin, 1921).
87
Hans Hilpert, Die Deutschnationalen in Bayern. Rede auf dem dritten Parteitage der
Deutschnationalen Volkspartei in München am 2. September 1921, Deutschnationale
Flugschrift, no. 116 (Berlin, 1921).
88
Karl Helfferich, Die Lage der deutschen Finanzen. Rede auf dem dritten Parteitage der
Deutschnationalen Volkspartei in München am 3. September 1921, Deutschnationale
Flugschrift, no. 121 (Berlin, 1921).
89
Martin Spahn, Der Weg zur deutschen Rechten. Rede auf dem dritten Parteitag der
Deutschnationalen Volkspartei in München am 2. Sept. 1921, Deutschnationale Flug
schrift, no. 115 (Berlin, 1921). See also Martin Spahn, “Mein Wechsel der politischen
Partei,” Das neue Reich. Wochenschrift für Kultur, Politik und Volkswirtschaft 3, no. 8 (20
Nov. 1921): 136 39. For further information, see Gabriele Clemens, Martin Spahn und
der Rechtskatholizismus in der Weimarer Republik (Mainz, 1983), 145 68.
    

through the ranks of the German Center Party. As young Catholic intellectuals
responded to Spahn’s appeal for the creation of a united German Right with
notable enthusiasm,90 the leaders of the DNVP’s Reich Catholic Committee
moved to capitalize upon the excitement generated by Spahn’s announcement
and redoubled their efforts to secure a breakthrough into the right wing of the
Center.91 Yet while these efforts received strong and unequivocal support from
Hergt and the DNVP’s national leadership,92 they caused considerable alarm
among the party’s Evangelical leaders, who complained that the creation of the
DNVP’s Reich Catholic Committee had given Catholics too much influence
within the party organization and began to agitate for permission to organize a
similar committee for themselves. At the end of October the DNVP’s official
party correspondence published an appeal calling for the creation of a Evan-
gelical Reich Committee (Evangelischer Reichsausschuß) and inviting inter-
ested party members to the official founding of the new committee in Berlin
on the anniversary of Martin Luther’s birthday, 10 November 1921.93 In
December 1921 Reinhard Mumm, university professor Wilhelm Kähler, and
Carl Günther Schweitzer were elected as co-chairs of the new committee.
Although the DNVP was committed to the principle of confessional parity,
the DNVP’s Evangelical Reich Committee was dominated by conservative
Lutherans who regarded their primary mission to be the defense of the
Lutheran Church in an age of rampant individualism and secularism.94 As
such, its members had little intrinsic interest in cooperating with Catholics on
issues of common concern and actually saw the creation of the Evangelical
Reich Committee as a way to preempt the formation of an interconfessional
committee consistent with the DNVP’s professed commitment to parity
between Catholic and Lutheran.
The DNVP’s two confessional committees stood outside the organizational
structure that party leaders had created for the vocational and professional
committees representing agriculture, workers, white-collar employees, civil
servants, teachers, and the independent middle class. This was also true of
the DNVP’s committees for women and youth. Women had played an
important role in the mobilization of the Nationalist vote in the 1919 and
1920 elections and had worked closely with women from other parties to

90
For example, see Everding to Spahn, 6 Sept. 1921, BA Koblenz, NL Spahn, 177.
91
Lejeune Jung to Spahn, 1 Oct. 1921, BA Koblenz, NL Spahn, 172.
92
Hergt to Landsberg, 17 Nov. 1921, VWA Münster, NL Landsberg, E5.
93
Korrespondenz der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei 4, no. 255 (29 Oct. 1921).
94
For example, see Wilhelm Kähler, Politik und Kirche. Die Wahrnehmung der evange
lischen Belange in der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei, Deutschnationale Flugschrift,
no. 170 (Berlin, 1924). See also Nobert Friedrich, “‘National, Sozial, Christlich’. Der
Evangelische Reichsausschuß der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei in der Weimarer
Republik,” Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte 6 (1993): 290 311.
   , –

organize opposition to the Versailles Peace Treaty.95 Still, women in the

DNVP complained about being underrepresented in the inner councils
of the party leadership and felt that they were not being taken seriously by
the party’s male leaders.96 The DNVP’s women activists were also stung
by the fact that Anna von Gierke, one of three women who had been elected
to the Weimar National Assembly on the Nationalist ticket, had been denied
an opportunity to run for reelection in 1920 because of her mother’s Jewish
ancestry.97 In preparation for the 1921 Munich party congress the DNVP’s
Reich Women’s Committee circulated a set of guidelines designed to shape the
party’s position on issues related to the status of women. Reflecting the ideas
and influence of the committee’s first chairwomen, Christian-Social labor
leader Margarete Behm, this document was essentially a catalog of political
demands that touched upon everything from the struggle against filth and
trash in the theater and cinema to the creation of parity between men and
women in access to education, compensation in the workplace, and the choice
of a professional career outside the home.98 From the perspective of the DNVP
party leadership, however, such a document was ill-suited as an instrument for
the recruitment of women and was subsequently replaced by a more grandoise
statement of the party’s goals for women that had been drafted by Magdalene
von Tiling, a prominent Lutheran theologians with a decidedly more conser-
vative cast of mind than Behm. This document, entitled “Grundsätze deutsch-
nationaler Frauenarbeit,” was more ideological in tone and sacrificed the
emphasis that the earlier statement had placed on practical measures aimed
at achieving parity between men and women for a more traditional definition
of the role of women in home and society.99 This shift of emphasis toward a

95
See Raffael Scheck, “German Conservatism and Female Political Activism in the Early
Weimar Republic,” German History 15 (1997): 34 55, and Raffael Scheck, “Women
Against Versailles: Maternalism and Nationalism of Female Bourgeois Politicians in the
Early Weimar Republic,” German Studies Review 22 (1999): 21 42. See also Sneeringer,
Winning Women’s Votes, 42 51.
96
Comments by Diers and Lehmann in the 27th evening work session (Arbeitsabend) of
the DNVP’s State Political Coordinating Committee, 14 Nov. 1919, BA Berlin, R 8005,
327/52 55.
97
Westarp, Konservative Politik, ed. Hiller von Gaertringen, 143.
98
“Richtlinien der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei für Frauenfragen,” DNVP Werbeblatt,
no. 106, n.d. [1921], NL Westarp, Gärtringen, VN 35, republished as “Deutschnationale
Frauenpolitik. Richtlinien der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei für Frauenfragen,” in
Jahrbuch 1921 der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei (Berlin, n.d. [1921]), 30 32. For
further details, see Raffael Scheck, “Women on the Weimar Right: The Role of Female
Politicians in the Deutschnationale Volkspartei (DNVP),” Journal of Contemporary
History 36 (2001): 547 60, esp. 551 54.
99
Annagrete Lehmann, “Ziel und Entwicklung der deutschnationalen Frauenarbeit,” in
Der nationale Wille, ed. Weiß, 326 28. On the background of this statement, see
Jordan to Westarp, 18 Aug. 1921, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, VN 35. See also Andrea
    

more conservative conception of the German woman and her place in German
society was further reflected in the speech that Paula Mueller-Otfried delivered
at the 1921 Munich party congress on the role that women were to play in the
rebirth of the German nation.100 The extent to which this would help or
hinder the recruitment of German women remained to be seen.
The recruitment of German youth posed a different set of problems. In
Weimar political parlance the term “youth” was generally reserved for those
who had been born since the turn of the century and whose formative life
experience had been the deprivation of the war and the immediate postwar
period. In many respects, this was a superfluous generation whose access to
economic opportunity and political power was blocked by a gerontocracy that
had survived the collapse of 1918 with most of its prerogatives intact. In a
broader sense, however, the term “younger generation” was frequently used to
include those who had been born in the 1880s and 1890s and whose social and
political values had been shaped first by their involvement in the prewar
German youth movement and then by their experiences at the front in World
War I. In either case, the members of these two cohort groups tended to be
deeply alienated from the basic values and institutions of both prewar and
postwar German political life. Overcoming this alienation and integrating the
so-called younger generation into the fabric of German political life would
remain one of the difficult challenges that faced the parties of the Weimar
Republic.101
Of all of the major parties of the Weimar Republic, the DNVP was the last
to create its own youth organization. Like the rival German People’s Party,
the DNVP chose to work through the German National Youth League
(Deutschnationaler Jugendbund or DNJ), an ostensibly nonpartisan youth

Süchting Hänger, “Gewissen der Nation,” 143 49, 193 212; and Kirsten Heinsohn,
“‘Volksgemeinschaft’ als gedachte Ordnung. Zur Geschlechterpolitik in der Deutschna
tionalen Volkspartei,” in Geschlechtergeschichte des Politischen. Entwürfe von Geschlect
und Gemeinschaft im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Gabriele Boukrif, et al (Münster,
2002), 83 106.
100
Paula Mueller Otfried, Die Mitarbeit der Frau bei der Erneuerung unseres Volkes. Rede
auf dem dritten Parteitage der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei in München am 2. Septem
ber 1921, Deutschnationale Flugschrift, no. 117 (Berlin, 1921). In a similar vein, see
Elisabeth Spohr, “Die soziale Aufgabe der deutschnationalen Frau,” in Deutschnationaler
Parteitag für Vorpommern, 20 25.
101
On the role of generational cleavages in Weimar political culture, see Detlev J. K.
Peukert, Die Weimarer Republik. Krisenjahre der klassischen Moderne (Frankfurt am
Main, 1987), 25 31. On the challenges of organizing German youth for political
purposes, see Krabbe, Jugendorganisationen bürgerlicher Parteien, 35 41, and Larry
Eugene Jones, “Generational Conflict and the Problem of Political Mobilization in the
Weimar Republic,” in Elections, Mass Politics, and Social Change in Modern Germany:
New Perspectives, ed. Larry Eugene Jones and James Retallack (Cambridge, 1992),
347 69.
   , –

organization in which all of those who were committed to the reconstruction

of the Fatherland on the basis of Germany’s Christian culture could unite.102
Under the leadership of the DNVP’s Wilhelm Foellmer,103 the DNJ enrolled
90,000 members in the first year of its existence and seemed well on its way
to establishing itself as a mass organization for the more nationalistic elem-
ents of Germany’s bourgeois youth.104 But at its Nuremberg congress in
August 1921 the DNJ splintered into three separate factions: the Young
German League (Jungdeutscher Bund), the Young National League (Jungna-
tionaler Bund), and what still remained of the badly decimated DNJ. The
fragmentation and subsequent demise of the DNJ left the leaders of the
DNVP with no alternative but to found their own youth organization. Acting
on an initiative that Frank Glatzel, a young conservative activist with
close ties to the German National Union of Commercial Employees and
co-founder of the Young German League in August 1919, had taken at the
DNVP’s 1920 party congress,105 the party’s youth leaders met in Hanover
at the beginning of 1922 to found the National Federation of DNVP Youth
Groups (Reichsverband der Jugendgruppen der Deutschnationalen Volks-
partei), an organization that renamed itself the Bismarck Youth of the
German National People’s Party (Bismarckjugend der Deutschnationalen
Volkspartei) later that fall.106 Unlike youth organizations attached to the
Center or DDP, the Bismarck Youth was completely subordinated to the
DNVP party organization and had no autonomous existence of its own.107
Even then, the Bismarck Youth proved relatively successful in the first year or
so of its existence in recruiting new party members from the ranks of the
younger generation. By the middle of 1923, however, these efforts began to

102
Westarp, Konservative Politik, ed. Hiller von Gaertringen, 153 55.
103
Foellmer’s brief report at a meeting of the DNVP’s organizational representatives, 7 8
Feb. 1919, BA Berlin, R 8005, 1/200.
104
On the founding and program of the DNJ, see Wilhelm Foellmer, Der deutschnationale
Jugendbund. Vorschläge und Anregungen (Berlin, 1919).
105
Speech by Glatzel at the DNVP Hanover party congress, 25 Oct. 1920, BA Berlin,
R 8005, 53/332 34, reprinted in Parteijugend zwischen Wandervogel und politischer
Reform. Eine Dokumentation zur Geschichte der Weimarer Republik, ed. Wolfgang
R. Krabbe (Münster, 2000), 49 50.
106
“Geschäftsbericht der Hauptgeschäftsstelle der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei (Septem
ber 1921 bis Oktober 1922),” NL Westarp, Gärtringen, 88. For further details, see “Der
Bismarckjugend der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei,” in Die deutschen Jugendverbände.
Ihre Ziele, ihre Organisation sowie ihre neuere Entwicklung und Tätigkeit, ed. Hertha
Siemering (Berlin, 1931), 255 58, as well as Wolfgang R. Krabbe, “Die Bismarckjugend
der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei,” German Studies Review 17 (1994): 9 32.
107
Konrad Meyer, Organisationsfragen. Vortrag, gehalten am 23. September 1925 auf der
deutschnationalen Schulungswoche, Deutschnationale Flugschrift, no. 226 (Berlin, 1925),
12 14.
    

stagnate, and it was not until the end of the decade that the Bismarck Youth
was able to recover any sort of momentum.108
In a parallel move, the DNVP also took steps to improve and consolidate its
ties to labor and industry. Ever since the founding of the DNVP in the last
days of 1918 Emil Hartwig, Paul Rüffer, and the leaders of the party’s
Christian-Social faction had been busy at work building up the Reich Workers’
Committee of the DNVP.109 By the time of the DNVP’s Hanover party
congress in October 1920, the leaders of the party’s working-class movement
could claim 15,000 registered members in fifteen district organizations across
the country in addition to an estimated 45,000 to 50,000 workers and white-
collar employees who belonged to the party but not to their organization.110 In
fact, the leaders of the DNVP’s labor wing had been so successful in building
up their organization that they demanded and received a charter that was
fundamentally different from that of other party organs. At Munich Hartwig
and his associates received permission to reconstitute the Reich Workers’
Committee as the German National Workers’ League (Deutschnationaler
Arbeiterbund or DNAB), a body that reported to the DNVP’s national and
district leadership but enjoyed a corporate existence of its own within the
DNVP party organization. This unique, if not awkward situation afforded the
DNAB a measure of independence within the party organization that none of
the DNVP’s other vocational committees enjoyed.111
Just as the leaders of the DNVP were trying to solidify their party’s position
among the nonsocialist elements of the German labor movement, they also
sought to improve ties to the German industrial establishment. The DNVP had
received substantial support from both the Curatorium for the Reconstruction
of German Economic Life and the Commission for the Collection, Adminis-
tration, and Allocation of the Industrial Campaign Fund in the 1920 Reichstag
elections and the 1921 elections to the Prussian Landtag despite the fact that
for many industrialists the DVP remained the party of preference by virtue of
its unequivocal commitment to the free enterprise system.112 Most of the

108
Krabbe, “Bismarckjugend,” 20 27.
109
For further details, see Die deutschnationale Arbeiter Bewegung, ihr Werden und Wach
sen, ed. Bundesvorstand des Deutschnationalen Arbeiterbundes (Berlin, n.d. [1925]),
10 29. See also Emil Hartwig, “Deutschnationale Arbeiterbewegung,” in Der nationale
Wille, ed. Weiß, 215 24.
110
“Geschäftsbericht der Hauptgeschäftsstelle der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei (Juli
1919 bis Oktober 1920),” n.d., BA Berlin, NL Mumm, 276/91 95.
111
On the DNAB, see Aufbau und Tätigkeit des Deutschnationalen Arbeiterbundes, ed.
Bundesvorstand des Deutschnationalen Arbeiterbundes (Berlin, 1925), 6 31.
112
On industrial support of the DNVP’s campaigns in 1920, see Dryander to the Curator
ium for the Reconstruction of German Economic Life, 9 June 1920, SHI Berlin, NL
Siemens, 4/Lf 646, and Flathmann to Hugenberg, 16 June 1920, BA Koblenz, NL
Hugenberg, 15/37. For 1921 see the memorandum of Siemens’s meeting with Vögler,
   , –

money the DNVP received from the Commission for the Industrial Campaign
Fund was funneled through film and press magnate Alfred Hugenberg, a
member of the DNVP Reichstag delegation with extensive contacts to German
industry and the Germany business community.113 The purpose of this sup-
port was not just to strengthen the non-socialist parties to the point where they
could block further socialist experimentation with the economy but also to
elect deputies who either came from industry or who were sympathetic to
industrial concerns.114 Industrialists close to the DNVP would have preferred a
merged with the DVP and occasionally intervened when the rhetoric between
the two parties threatened to become too inflamatory.115 But as the two right-
wing parties drifted further apart in 1920–21, the leaders of the DNVP’s
industrial wing became increasingly concerned about their lack of influence
within the party and moved to organize themselves more effectively for
the sake of a stronger voice on issues related to industrial matters. In
1919 the party had established the Reich Industrial Committee of the DNVP
(Reichs-Industrieausschuß der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei) under the
chairmanship of DNVP Reichstag deputy Jakob Wilhelm Reichert,116 but this
committee had had little effect upon the party’s economic and fiscal policies. In
an effort to correct this situation, Hugenberg and Reichert met with approxi-
mately fifty party members who were either industrialists or enjoyed close ties
to industry at the DNVP’s 1921 party congress in Munich to found the
Coordinating Committee of German National Industrialists (Arbeitsausschuß
deutschnationaler Industrieller or ADI).117
The purpose of this organization, as Reichert explained at the ADI’s official
founding on 2 September 1921, was to make certain that economic factors
received adequate attention within the party by providing DNVP industrialists
from all parts of the Reich with a forum from which they could offer their
views on policy issues affecting their welfare. The committee would pursue this
objective first by compiling a comprehensive list of all the entrepreneurs and
high-level corporate employees who belonged to the party and second by
making it possible for those party members who were active in industry to
meet and exchange views with those Nationalist deputies in the Reichstag and

n.d. [Feb. 1921], SHI Berlin, NL Siemens, 4/Lf 646) and Dryander to Hugenberg, 23
Feb. 1921, BA Koblenz, NL Hugenberg, 11/193 94.
113
Holzbach, Das “System Hugenberg,” 70 89.
114
Hugenberg to Dryander, 15 Jan. 1921, BA Koblenz, NL Hugenberg, 11/313 16, and
Flathmann to Hugenberg, 7 and 10 Feb. 1921, ibid., 20/60 64.
115
For example, see the correspondence between Stresemann and Vögler, 3 9 Feb. 1920,
PA AA Berlin, NL Stresemann, 220/140087 90, 140114 16.
116
“Geschäftsbericht der Hauptgeschäftsstelle der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei (Juli
1919 bis Oktober 1920),” n.d., BA Berlin, NL Mumm, 276/91 95.
117
Report of the ADI’s first meeting, 2 Sept. 1921, Staatsarchiv Hamburg (hereafter cited as
StA Hamburg), corporate archives of Blohm und Voß GmbH, 1210/11.
    

the various state parliaments.118 The committee, which reserved for itself the
right to form subcommittees at the district level of the party’s national
organization, would solidify its ties to the party leadership by inviting a
member of the DNVP’s Reich Vocational Committee (Berufsständischer
Reichsausschuß der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei) to serve on its executive
committee. At the same time, the committee would appoint Abraham Frowein
and Fritz Tänzler as liasons to the National Federation of German Industry
and the Federation of German Employer Associations to mediate between the
party and the most influential of Germany’s industrial lobbies.119 The com-
mittee was to be headed by Hugenberg himself, who along with Reichert and
the ADI’s business manager would represent the ADI and its concerns to the
DNVP party leadership.120 The one task that did not fall within the ADI’s
purview was the collection of campaign funds from the DNVP’s industrial
backers, although that would change with the demise of the Commission for
the Industrial Campaign Fund in the wake of the great inflation of 1922–23.121

By the summer of 1922 the leaders of the DNVP had succeeded in creating a
comprehensive party organization that securely anchored their party in virtu-
ally every corner of Germany’s conservative milieu. The DNVP was far more
successful that any of its prewar predecessors in attracting a broad and socially
diversified base of support. To be sure, the DNVP had been able to take
advantage of the fact that as an opposition party it was spared the unpopular
choices that the parties of the Weimar coalition as well as the German People’s
Party had to make in allocating the social cost of Germany’s lost war. The
legitimacy of Germany’s new republican order as well as that of those parties
with which the republic had become identified had been severely comprom-
ised by the disgrace of the Versailles Peace Treaty and the uncontrollable
inflation of the early 1920s. All of this helped create a situation into which the
DNVP, as the party that was most resolutely opposed to the new republican
order, could insinuate itself with consummate ease.

118
Reichert’s remarks at the meeting of the ADI, 2 Sept. 1921, StA Hamburg, Blohm und
Voß GmbH, 1210/11.
119
Report by Willamowitz Moellendorf at the meeting of the ADI, 2 Sept. 1921, StA
Hamburg, Blohm und Voß GmbH, 1210/11.
120
Report of the first meeting of the ADI, 2 Sept. 1921, StA Hamburg, Blohm und Voß
GmbH, 1210/11. See also the ADI statutes, adopted at a meeting of the ADI on 4
Nov. 1921, ibid., 1210/2.
121
Hugenberg and Reichert, “An die industriellen Freunde der Deutschnationalen Volks
partei,” Oct. 1924, StA Hamburg, Blohm und Voß GmbH, 1210/11.
 5

The Radical Right

By the beginning of 1922 the German National People’s Party was well on its
way to developing a comprehensive party organization that was securely
anchored in virtually every sector of Germany’s conservative milieu. Yet for
all of its success in the early years of the Weimar Republic, the DNVP still
remained deeply divided on fundamental questions of tactics and strategy. For
although the party drew much of its integrative potential from its unremitting
hostility to Germany’s republican system, there remained an unresolved
conflict between those who were prepared to work within the existing political
system to bring about a conservative regeneration of the German state and
those who rejected collaboration with Germany’s fledgling republican order in
any form whatsoever. This last sentiment was particularly strong among the
plethora of patriotic societies and paramilitary organizations that had surfaced
in Germany since the last years of the Second Empire and that stood outside
the orbit of party control. What these organizations hoped to create was a
sense of national identity sufficiently powerful in terms of its emotional appeal
to override the social and economic cleavages that had become so deeply
embedded in the fabric of Germany’s political life. Most of these organizations
were militantly anti-Marxist, and many regarded the Jewish problem as the
ultimate source of Germany’s national weakness. The oldest of Germany’s
patriotic societies – the Pan-German League, the German Naval League, the
Society for the Eastern Marches – all traced their origins to the crisis of
National Liberal hegemony in the 1880s and to the dramatic transformation
that took place in the structure of the German Right in the last decade of the
nineteenth century.1 Most of these organizations, however, would disappear
from Germany’s political landscape after the end of World War I, while those
that survived the collapse of 1918–19 were eclipsed by paramilitary organiza-
tions that drew their impetus from the explosion of violence that had

1
Geoff Eley, “Reshaping the Right: Radical Nationalism and the German Navy League,
1898 1908,” Historical Journal 21 (1978): 327 54, as well as his more detailed study
Reshaping the German Right: Radical Nationalism and Political Change after Bismarck
(New Haven and London, 1980), 19 98.


    

accompanied the collapse of the Second Empire and the birth of the Weimar
Republic.
What the patriotic Right brought to German political culture was a new and
more stridently populist tone that was directed not just against Marxists and
Jews but also against established political elites and the organizations through
which they exercised their social and political hegemony.2 Not only did this
reflect the general decline in civility and the heightened propensity to violence
that characterized German political culture after World War I,3 but it posed a
direct challenge to the authority of the DNVP party leadership, which valued
the patriotic societies as allies in the struggle against the Weimar system but
experienced considerable difficulty in harnessing them to the strategic goals of
the party.4 The organizations of the patriotic Right, on the other hand,
generally looked upon the world of party politics with great disdain and
consistently portrayed themselves as überparteilich, that is, as associations that
stood above the incessant haggling of the individual political parties. The
patriotic societies were also extremely critical of the role that organized
economic interests had come to play in the German political process and
regarded it as their special mission to free Germany’s national life from the
tyranny of economic self-interest. Only after the grip of special interests had
been broken would Germany’s national rebirth be possible.

The Pan-German League

Of all the organizations on the prewar patriotic Right that survived the
collapse of 1918–19, none was more important than the Pan-German League.
When the Pan-German League – or, more correctly, its immediate predeces-
sor, the General German League (Allgemeiner Deutscher Verband) – was
established as an offshoot of the German Colonial Society (Deutsche Kolo-
nialgesellschaft) in 1891, its threefold purpose was to mobilize patriotic

2
This has been persuasively argued in Peter Fritzsche, Rehearsals for Fascism: Populism and
Political Mobilization in Weimar Germany (New York and Oxford, 1990), esp. 3 16, and
Geoff Eley, “Conservatives Radical Nationalists Fascists: Calling the People into
Politics, 1890 1930,” in Transformations of Populism in Europe and the Americas: History
and Recent Tendencies, ed. John Abromeit et al. (London, 2016), 15 31.
3
Bernd Weisbrod, “Gewalt in der Politik. Zur politischen Kultur in Deutschland zwischen
den beiden Weltkriegen,” Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Unterricht 43 (1992): 391 404.
On the violence that accompanied the birth of the Weimar Republic, see Mark Jones,
Founding Weimar: Violence and the German Revolution of 1918 1919 (Cambridge, 2017).
4
For the DNVP’s attitude towards the patriotic Right, see Otto Schmidt Hannover, Die
vaterländische Bewegung und die Deutschnationale Volkspartei. Vortrag, gehalten in Berlin
am 28. März 1924, Deutschnationale Flugschrift, no. 167 (Berlin, 1924), and Max Weiß,
“Wir und die vaterländische Bewegung,” in Der nationale Wille. Werden und Wirken der
Deutschnationalen Volkspartei 1918 1928, ed. Max Weiß (Essen, 1928), 351 61.
   , –

consciousness at home, support the aspirations of ethnic Germans abroad, and

promote the extension of German power and the creation of a colonial empire
throughout the world.5 Plagued by internal disorganization, declining mem-
bership, and chronic financial difficulties, the General German League
reconstituted itself as the Pan-German League in 1894 and under the chair-
manship of Ernst Haase expanded its national membership from an estimated
7,700 at the end of 1895 to more than 10,000 by the middle of 1897 before
reaching a peak of approximately 23,000 in 1901.6 At the same time, the Pan-
Germans became increasingly critical of the general weakness that character-
ized the conduct of national affairs under Bismarck’s successors to the
chancellorship. In 1903 Heinrich Claß, Haase’s heir apparent as the ADV’s
national chairman, delivered a blistering attack against the government of
Bernhard von Bülow that reflected the organization’s increasing radicalization
and its disaffection from the symbols and institutions of the Second Empire.7
With Claß’s election to the ADV national chairmanship in February 1908,
the triumph of the more radical elements within the Pan-German League was
effectively secured. Galvanized not only by the diplomatic embarrassment that
Germany had suffered in the First Moroccan Crisis but more recently by the
Kaiser’s indiscretions in connection with the Daily Telegraph affair, the ADV
portrayed itself as the leader of the “national opposition” whose mission was to
redeem the national cause from those, including the Kaiser, who had served it
with little more than weakness, incompetence, and betrayal.8 For his own part,
the thirty-five-year-old Claß was a psychologically insecure individual who
harbored a deep and abiding hatred for those whom he deemed as enemies of
Germany’s historic mission, most notably Marxists and Jews. His ascendancy
to the ADV’s national leadership was accompanied by an intensification of
Pan-German tirades against the predominant position that Jews had allegedly
secured for themselves in German cultural, economic, and political life since
their formal emancipation with the founding of the Second Empire in 1871.

5
Roger Chickering, We Men Who Feel Most German: A Cultural Study of the Pan German
League, 1886 1914 (Boston, 1984), 49. In addition to the book by Chickering, see also
Rainer Hering, Konstruierte Nation. Der Alldeutsche Verband 1890 bis 1939 (Hamburg,
2003), esp. 110 62; Barry A Jackisch, The Pan German League and Radical Nationalist
Politics in Interwar Germany, 1918 39 (Farnham, 2012); and Björn Hofmeister, “Between
Monarchy and Dictatorship: Radical Nationalism and Social Mobilization of the Pan
German League, 1914 1939” (Ph.D. diss., Georgetown University, 2012).
6
Chickering, We Men Who Feel Most German, 57, 213.
7
Ibid., 214 17. See also Claß, “Wandlungen in der Weltstellung des Deutschen Reiches,” in
Zwanzig Jahre alldeutscher Arbeit und Kämpfe, ed. Hauptleitung des Alldeutschen Ver
bandes (Leipzig, 1910), 157 227. See also Heinrich Claß, Wider den Strom. Vom Werden
und Wachsen der nationalen Opposition im alten Reich (Leipzig, 1932), 91 97.
8
Claß’s speech, “Zusammenbruch der reichsdeutschen Politik und seine Folgen,”
21 Nov. 1908, in Zwanzig Jahre, ed. ADV, 389 98.
    

Claß and his associates subscribed to a particularly virulent brand of racial

antisemitism that regarded Jews as biologically inferior to their Aryan coun-
terparts and demanded nothing less than their total exclusion from all aspects
of German life.9
In the last years before the outbreak of World War I, the Pan-Germans
became increasingly outspoken in their criticism of the Kaiser and routinely
denounced the policies of his chancellor, Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg, as
both the source and symbol of Germany’s national weakness. Nowhere was
the depth of Pan-German alienation from the symbols and institutions of the
Second Empire more apparent than in the book that Claß, writing under the
pseudonym of Daniel Frymann, published in 1912 under the title Wenn ich
der Kaiser wär’. Here Claß denounced the Social Democratic gains in the
recent Reichstag elections as a symptom of a deeper political crisis that was to
be traced back in all of its myriad manifestations to a campaign of domestic
subversion by Jews and their political acolytes. Only through the creation of a
völkisch dictatorshp in which Jews were deprived of their rights and Socialists
expelled from the country would it be possible to overcome the alienation of
the Volk from the state and thus create a new Germany in which all classes and
confessions were reconciled to each other in support of a dynamic and
expansionist foreign policy throughout the world.10 As its title suggested,
Claß’s book was both an attempt to cloak the Pan-German agenda in the
symbols of royal authority and a direct attack upon the Kaiser for having failed
to undertake the sweeping reform of Germany’s domestic political system that
was necessary if the nation was ever to fulfill its historic mission as a world
power. Nor did Claß’s attacks abate with the outbreak of World War I. Claß’s
memoirs record the jubilation he and his colleagues felt at the outbreak of
hostilities in the fall of 1914, and they were quick to place themselves in the
vanguard of those who demanded territorial annexations in both the east and
the west as a conditio sine qua non for an end to the war.11

9
Report by Kuhlenbeck, “Die politischen Ergebnisse der Rassenforschung,” at the ADV
congress in Wurms, 15 17 June 1905, in Zwanzig Jahre, ed. ADV, 272 75. On Claß’s rise
to the ADV leadership, see Johannes Leicht, Heinrich Claß 1868 1953. Die politische
Biographie eines Alldeutschen (Paderborn, 2012), 113 25. On the ADV’s conversion to
antisemitism, see Chickering, We Men Who Feel Most German, 230 45, and Hering,
Konstruierte Nation, 187 219.
10
Leicht, Claß, 151 64. See also Björn Hofmeister, “Weltanschauung, Mobilisierungsstruk
turen und Krisenerfahrungen. Antisemitische Radikalisierung des Alldeutschen Ver
bandes als Prozess 1912 1920,” Jahrbuch für Antisemitismusforschung 24 (2015):
120 153, esp. 134 44.
11
Heinrich Claß, “Der Alldeutsche Verband,” Der Panther. Monatsschrift für Politik und
Volkstum, 3, no.10 (Oct. 1915): 1137 47. See also the memorandum Claß released on 28
Aug. 1914 in Heinrich Claß, Zum deutschen Kriegsziel. Eine Flugschrift (Munich, 1917).
   , –

Through the creation of ancillary organizations such as the Independent

Committee for a German Peace (Unabängiger Ausschuß für einen deutschen
Frieden),12 the Pan-Germans were able to exercise enormous influence upon
the formation of public opinion during the war. But as the war dragged on,
their exasperation over Germany’s failure to secure a quick military victory
and the vehemence of their attacks against those who either questioned the
wisdom of the war or could be held responsible for its conduct began to
mount.13 Following the passage of the Peace Resolution in the summer of
1917, the Pan-Germans threw their support behind the German Fatherland
Party, a militantly nationalistic party that had been founded without Pan-
German participation in September 1917. Whereas the ADV was an elitist
organization whose prewar membership had never exceeded 23,000,14 the
Fatherland Party was a mass political party that claimed a greatly exaggerated
total of 1.25 million members at the height of its influence in the summer of
1918.15 As it became ever more clear in the fall of 1918 that Germany was
about to lose the war, the Pan-Germans found themselves forced more and
more to the margins of German political life. At a meeting of the ADV
managing committee in late October 1918 Claß and other Pan-German
leaders railed against the domestic reforms of Max von Baden and his govern-
ment’s peace overtures toward the Allies. At the same time, the committee laid
the groundwork for an intensification of its crusade against the Jews in
postwar Germany by making preparations for the creation of a new organiza-
tion devoted to the dissemination of racist and antisemitic propaganda. At the
close of the meeting, the ADV published a resolution calling for the formation
of a “cabinet of national defense” that would reestablish the spirit of August
1914 and that was committed to pursuing the war to the only acceptable
conclusion, total victory.16
Following the German collapse in November 1918, the Pan-Germans were
so severely compromised by their rabid support for Germany’s most extreme

12
See Unabhängiger Ausschuß für einen Deutschen Frieden, Durch deutschen Sieg zum
Deutschen Frieden. Mahnruf ans Deutsche Volk. Fünf Reden zur Lage gehalten am 19.
Januar 1917 in der Versammlung des “Unabhängiger Ausschuß für einen Deutschen
Frieden im Sitzungssaale des Abgeordnetenhauses zu Berlin (Berlin, 1917).
13
For example, see Max Kloß, Die Arbeit des Alldeutschen Verbandes im Kriege. Rede,
gehalten auf der Tagung des Alldeutschen Verbandes zu Kassel, am 7. Oktober 1917
(Munich, 1917), esp. 10 15.
14
Chickering, We Men Who Feel Most German, 213.
15
Hagenlücke, Vaterlandspartei, 143 64. On the shifting political landscape in the late
Second Empire, see Dirk Stegmann, “Vom Neokonservatismus zum Proto Faschismus:
Konservative Parteien, Vereine und Verbände 1893 1920,” in Deutscher Konservatismus
im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert. Festschrift für Fritz Fischer, ed. Dirk Stegmann, Bernd Jürgen
Wendt, and Peter Christian Witt (Bonn, 1983), 199 230, esp. 180 87.
16
Resolution of the ADV managing committee, 19 20 Oct. 1918, records of the All
deutscher Verband, Bestand R 8048 (hereafter cited as BA Berlin, R 8048), 121/67 68.
    

war aims that they found themselves relegated to the periphery of Germany’s
national political life.17 This, however, did little to moderate its radicalism or
its political militancy. Meeting in Bamberg on 16 February 1919, the ADV
managing committee drafted what amounted to a virtual declaration of war
against Germany’s emerging democratic system and called upon its supporters
throughout the country to help rescue the future of the German people from
the forces of decay and revolution. The “Bamberg Declaration” became the
basis of ADV policy throughout the Weimar Republic and demanded, among
other things, the restoration of the German empire, the reacquisition of
Germany’s lost territories, the incorporation of Austria into a greater Germany
and, most ominously, the struggle against “all forces that inhibited or damaged
the racial development of the German people – including in particular the
fetish for foreign things [Fremdsucht] and the Jewish predominance [that had
made themselves manifest] in virtually every aspect of German political,
economic and cultural life.”18 With the proclamation of the “Bamberg Declar-
ation,” the antisemitism that had never been far from the surface of the ADV’s
prewar campaign for an expansionist foreign policy now became a clear and
unmistakable feature of its postwar political profile. For not only did Claß and
the leaders of the ADV hold Jews directly responsible for Germany’s military
defeat and for the collapse of the old imperial order, but they insisted that the
systematic elimination of the Jewish influence from all aspects of their coun-
try’s national life constituted an essential precondition for Germany’s national
recovery.19
For all of its fury, the “Bamberg Declaration” did little more than confirm
the Pan-German League’s virtual isolation in the new and radically different
circumstances that had been created by the collapse of the monarchy and the
establishment of the Weimar Republic. Their predicament was compounded
by the fact that the newly founded German National People’s Party seemed a
particularly awkward instrument for the conquest of political power and did
little to reassure them about the future of their own political agenda. Under
these circumstances, Claß and the leaders of the ADV began to explore the
possibility of closer relations with other right-wing organizations, including
the nascent National Socialist German Workers’ Party that had been founded

17
The essentially defensive character of the ADV’s postwar posture is clearly reflected in
Alldeutscher Verband, Hauptleitung, ed., Der Alldeutsche Verband. Eine Aufklärungsschrift
(Berlin, n.d. [ca. 1918]). See also Jackisch, Pan German League, 13 29.
18
For the text of the “Bamberger Erklärung,” see Alldeutsche Blätter, 29, no. 9
(1 Mar. 1919): 65 69.
19
Speech by Claß, “Der Einfluß des Judentums, der deutsche Zusammenbruch und die
Wiederaufrichtung,” at the ADV’s first postwar congress in Berlin, 1 Sept. 1919, in
Alldeutsche Blätter 29, no. 36 (6 Sept. 1919): 304. See also Georg Fritz, “Die Überwindung
der jüdischen Fremdherrschaft,” in Deutschvölkisches Jahrbuch 1920, ed. Georg Fritz
(Weimar, 1920), 63 74.
   , –

in Munich under the leadership of Adolf Hitler.20 At the same time, they
decided to shift the focus of their activities from the political to the cultural
arena and to concentrate their efforts on the dissemination of racist and
antisemitic ideas throughout the public at large. In October 1919 the leaders
of the ADV founded the German-Racist Protection and Defense League both
as a forum for the propagation of their ideas and as a crystallization point
around which all of those who shared those ideas could unite.21 According to
its official charter, the DSTB’s purpose was to enlighten the public about
the nature and extent of the Jewish peril and to combat that peril with all
the economic and political means at its disposal. In fulfilling this mandate, the
DSTB saturated the German public with a steady stream of racist and anti-
semitic literature that, by the account of its general secretary Alfred Roth,
produced more than twenty million pieces of propaganda in 1920 alone.22 At
the same time, the DSTB sought to establish a foothold for itself within the
right-wing DNVP in hopes of transforming it into an instrument of the racist
cause.23
The early years of the Weimar Republic were heady days for political
antisemites like Claß and Roth. Germany’s defeat in World War I and the
emergence of the “Stab-in-the-Back Legend,” the omnipresent threat of
Bolshevism and social revolution, the runaway inflation of the early 1920s
and, last but certainly not least, the large-scale influx of east European Jews
combined to excite the antisemitic prejudices of the German people and to
transform what in the Second Empire had been a general, yet essentially
benign, undercurrent of antisemitic bias into open hostility.24 To be sure, this

20
For further details, see Joachim Petzold, “Claß und Hitler. Über die Förderung der frühen
Nazibewegung durch den Alldeutschen Verband und dessen Einfluß auf die nazistische
Ideologie,” Jahrbuch für Geschichte 21 (1980): 247 88, See also Leicht, Claß, 285 97, and
Barry A. Jackisch, “Continuity and Change on the German Right: The Pan German
League and Nazism, 1918 1939,” in The German Right in the Weimar Republic: Studies in
the History of German Conservatism, Nationalism, and Antisemitism, ed. Larry Eugene
Jones (New York and Oxford, 2014), 166 93, esp. 166 73.
21
Uwe Lohalm, Völkischer Radikalismus. Die Geschichte des Deutschvölkischen Schutz und
Trutz Bundes 1919 1923 (Hamburg, 1970), 19 24. See also Breuer, Völkischen in
Deutschland, 150 60.
22
Alfred Roth, Aus der Kampfzeit des Deutschvölkischen Schutz und Trutzbundes. Eine
Erinnerungsschrift (Hamburg, 1939), 19 23. See also Uwe Lohalm and Martin Ulmer,
“Alfred Roth und der Deutschvölkische Schutz und Trutz Bund. ‘Schrittmacher für das
Dritte Reich’,” in Wegbereiter des Nationalsozialismus. Personen, Organisationen und
Netzwerke der extremen Rechten zwischen 1918 und 1933, ed. Daniel Schmidt, Michael
Sturm, and Livi Massimiliao (Essen, 2015), 21 36.
23
For further details, see Striesow, DNVP und die Völkisch Radikalen, 102 62, 233 447.
24
See Jochmann, “Die Ausbreitung des Antisemitismus,” 409 510, as well as Heinrich
August Winkler, “Die deutsche Gesellschaft der Weimarer Republik und der Antisemi
tismus Juden als Blitzableiter,” in Vorurteil und Völkermord. Entwicklungslinien des
    

was an environment in which the political message of the Pan-German League

and the German-Racist Protection and Defense League found a ready audi-
ence, and there is no doubt that their relentless propaganda against the Jew
and the influence he allegedly exercised over the various aspects of Germany’s
national life did indeed strike a resonant chord in diverse sectors of German
society. Yet for all of the resonance that antisemitic propaganda began to
experience in the immediate postwar period, neither the Pan-German League
nor the German-Racist Protection and Defense League were able to break out
of the political isolation in which they found themselves during the first years
of the Weimar Republic.

Racism and the DNVP

Of the various parties that had emerged from the November revolution, only
the DNVP held any real appeal for the Pan-German League and its allies in
the German-Racist Protection and Defense League.25 Racial antisemites like
Ferdinand Werner, Wilhelm Bruhn, and Albrecht von Graefe-Goldebee had
been involved in the DNVP since its founding in November 1918 and had
used the Nationalist campaign for the 1919 elections to the Weimar and
Prussian constitutional assemblies as a forum for the dissemination of their
propaganda. Encouraged by their role in the 1919 elections, DNVP racists
with close ties to the DSTB made a concerted effort to have an antisemitic
plank inserted into the DNVP’s official party program at the DNVP’s Berlin
party congress in the summer of 1919, but were rebuffed by party moderates
who feared that this might offend significant elements of Germany’s bourgeois
and middle-class electorates.26 After the DNVP’s disappointing performance
in the 1920 Reichstag elections in which its gains at the polls failed to keep
pace with those of the rival DVP, the leader’s of the DNVP’s racist faction were
quick to attribute this to the party’s failure to highlight the Jewish question as
prominently as it should have.27 Party moderates, on the other hand, main-
tained that the excesses of the antisemites had offended potential voters and
were thus responsible for the DNVP’s poor showing relative to that of the
DVP in the 1920 elections.28

Antisemitismus, ed. Wolfgang Benz and Werner Bergmann (Freiburg, Basel, and Vienna,
1997), 341 62.
25
Axel von Freytagh Loringhoven, “Der Alldeutsche Verband und die Parteien,” All
deutsche Blätter 30, no. 28 (16 Oct. 1920): 226 27.
26
Streisow, DNVP und die Völkisch Radikalen, 130 62. See also Breuer, Völkischen in
Deutschland, 183 93, and Jones, “Conservative Antisemitism,” 79 107.
27
See Freytagh Loringhoven to Westarp, 20 July 1920, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, VN 25.
28
See Kahrstedt, “Kritik,” Eiserne Blätter 1, no. 50 (20 June 1920): 864 66, and Kahrstedt,
“Nochmals zum Antisemitismus,” ibid., 2, no. 4 (25 July 1920): 51 55.
   , –

Following the 1920 elections in which no fewer than six racists were
elected to the Reichstag on the Nationalist ticket, the party’s racist faction
intensified its efforts to force a change in the DNVP’s organizational
statutes aimed at barring Jews from party membership.29 At the same time,
the party’s racists were particularly active in efforts to organize support
from university students on the basis of a radical nationalist and antise-
mitic program.30 For its own part, the DNVP’s national leadership was
becoming increasingly wary of the negative effects that the agitation of
Wulle and his associates was having upon the party’s electoral prospects
and was looking for a way to rein the antisemites in before further damage
was done. In his speech on the DNVP’s cultural program at the 1920 Han-
over party congress Karl Bernhard Ritter, a Protestant pastor and a deputy
in the Prussian Landtag, signaled the party’s disapproval of radical anti-
semitism by devoting not so much as a single word to Germany’s supposed
Jewish problem.31 Party leaders also made a concerted, though not wholly
successful, effort to mute the antisemitic demagogy of the party’s racist
wing in the 1921 elections to the Prussian Landtag for fear that, if unre-
strained, its antics might drive potential voters away from the party.32 Even
Reinhard Mumm, one of the DNVP’s most prominent Protestant leaders
and a candid Christian anti-Semite in his own right, rejected racial anti-
semitsm and particularly the way its more radical exponents used
antisemitism to justify “malicious attacks on the Old Testament.”33 The
crowning indignity, however, came at the DNVP’s Munich party congress
in September 1921 when Friedrich Brunstäd, a professor at the University
of Erlangen and one of the party’s preeminent ideologues, defined the
Jewish problem in a fashion that infuriated the party’s antisemites. For
while Brunstäd admitted that “the Jewish question was in truth a German
question,” he also contended that “the struggle against Jewry is but a small
part of the overall struggle for the soul of our people. In essence it is a
question of the soul. The Jewish problem will be solved when every
German man and every German woman solves it for themselves . . . This
struggle will not be decided by individual legal measures but by the return

29
Streisow, DNVP und die Völkisch Radikalen, 242 69.
30
For example, see the recent contribution by Benjamin Ziemann, “Martin Niemöller als
völkisch nationaler Studentenpolitiker in Münster 1919 bis 1923,” Vierteljahrshefte für
Zeitgeschichte 67 (2019): 209 34, esp. 212 18.
31
Karl Bernhard Ritter, Volkstum und deutsche Zukunft. Ein deutschnationales Kulturpro
gramm, Deutschnationale Flugschrift, no. 71 (Berlin, n.d. [1920]).
32
Entry in Gallwitz’s diary, 31 Jan. 1921, BA MA Freiburg, NL Gallwitz, 36.
33
Mumm, “Die Judenfrage vom christlichen Standpunkt,” 5 Apr. 1921, BA Berlin, NL
Mumm, 356/22.
    

of the German people to health and by overcoming the danger of degener-

ating into an amorphous mass [Massenwerdung].”34
This was a formula for the solution of Germany’s so-called Jewish problem
and a prescription for Germany’s racial regeneration with which the more
militant racists within the DNVP could not possibly agree.35 For the racists
Brunstäd’s speech was but the last in a long series of indignities they had
suffered at the hands of the party leadership, and it only strengthened their
determination to do what they could to reverse the direction in which they saw
their party headed.36 Led by the triumvirate of Albrecht von Graefe-Goldebee,
Wilhelm Henning, and Reinhold Wulle, the DNVP’s racist wing held inter-
national Jewry responsible for the increasingly desperate situation in which
Germany found itself and demanded that the DNVP pursue a more aggres-
sively antisemitic campaign against those German Jews whom they saw as
instruments of international Jewry.37 Henning was particularly critical of
DNVP moderates for their eagerness to work within the framework of the
existing political system and their willingness to sacrifice their party’s basic
principles for the sake of short-term political gains. Such an attitude, Henning
argued in a position paper he wrote at the end of June, led to softness and
inconsequence and crippled the strong will that was necessary to achieve
power.38
Henning’s worst fears could only have been confirmed when on 25 Novem-
ber 1921 the DNVP party representation (Parteivertretung) rejected three
motions that would have had effectively barred Jews from membership in
the party and then proceeded to adopt by a relatively narrow 103 to 81 margin
a resolution introduced by Helfferich that blocked a change in the party
statutes on the so-called Jewish question. According to the terms of this
resolution, the party’s district organizations were barred from amending their
statutes to exclude Jews from party membership, although precisely how this

34
Friedrich Brunstäd, Völkisch nationale Erneuerung. Rede auf dem 3. Parteitag der
Deutschnationalen Volkspartei im München am 2. September 1921, Deutschnationale
Flugschrift, no. 119 (Berlin, 1921), 16 17.
35
For example, see Brauer to Heydebrand, 4 Nov. 1921, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, II/82,
40 41, as well as the discussion on “Die völkische Frage” at the 85th evening workshop of
the DNVP’s State Political Coordinating Committee, 23 Nov. 1921, NL Westarp, Gär
tringen, II/8. In a similar vein, see Wangenheim (Deutschvölkischer Arbeitsring) to
Hergt, 22 Aug. 1921, BA Berlin, R 8005, 3/131, and Schultz to the DNVP national
headquarters, 26 Aug. 1921, ibid., 3/116 17.
36
“Darstellung des Abgeordneten Henning über die Ereignisse, die zu seinem Ausschluß
aus der Fraktion geführt haben,” n.d. [Sept. Oct. 1922], NL Westarp, Gärtringen, VN 88.
See also Striesow, DNVP und die Völkisch Radikalen, 341 420; Lewis Hertzman, DNVP,
124 64, and most recently Ohnezeit, Zwischen “schärfster Opposition,” 134 58.
37
Graefe Goldebee to Westarp, 8 Jan. 1922, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, VN 25.
38
Henning, “Gedanken zur grundsätzlichen Haltung unserer Partei,” 30 June 1921, BA
Berlin, NL Mumm, 277/269 70.
   , –

would pertain to the two or three district organizations that had already
adopted a so-called Jewish paragraph remained unclear.39 The leaders of the
DNVP’s racist wing were infuriated over this turn of events and decided that
the time to organize themselves and their followers at both the national and
district levels of the DNVP organization had arrived.40 But their efforts faced
strong opposition from Hergt, Helfferich, and Hugenberg, while Westarp, who
privately agreed with Graefe on the nature of the Jewish threat, remained cool
to the idea of a separate racist organization within the party.41
In their crusade to free the German nation from the grip of international
Jewry, the DNVP racists focused much of their venom on the person of
Walther Rathenau, a prominent Jewish industrialist and intellectual who had
been appointed first minister of reconstruction and then foreign minister in
the Wirth cabinet.42 But when Rathenau moved to center stage with the
conclusion of the Rapallo Treaty with Soviet Russia in the last days of the
Genoa conference in April 1922, the DNVP party leadership antagonized
the party’s racist wing by refraining from a full-scale attack against Rapallo.43
By the same token, the Nationalists decided not to press for a no-confidence
vote against the Wirth government prior to the chancellor’s trip to Paris at the
end of May in search of an international loan that would have helped stabilize
the mark and allow for the German economy to recover from the ravages of the
inflation.44 The crisis came to a head when in the June issue of the Konservative
Monatsschrift Henning broke with the party leadership and launched a par-
ticularly scurrilous attack on Rathenau and his alleged betrayal of Germany at
Rapallo.45 When Rathenau was assassinated by right-wing extremists on his
way to the German foreign office the morning of 24 June, the tables were
suddenly reversed as the DNVP found itself reviled as a “party of murderers”
whom the government and its backers held directly responsible for having
created the climate in which such an atrocity could take place. No words took
a greater toll upon party morale than those of the chancellor Joseph Wirth,
when on the day after Rathenau’s murder he attacked the DNVP party
chairman Hergt for not having taken a clear and unequivocal stand against
those who had done so much to poison Germany’s national life. Then, turning
to the Right, Wirth concluded with words that struck deep into the heart of the

39
Brauer to Heydebrand, 1 Dec. 1921, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, II/82.
40
Ibid.
41
Brauer to Heydebrand, 16 Jan. 1922, ibid.
42
For example, see Alfred Roth, Rathenau “Der Kandidat des Auslandes” (Hamburg,
1922).
43
Brauer to Heydebrand, 24 Apr. 1922, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, II/82.
44
Memorandum by Westarp, 2 June 1922, appended to Brauer to Heydebrand, 2 June 1922,
NL Westarp, ibid.
45
Henning, “Das wahre Gesicht des Rapallo Vertrags,” Konservative Monatsschrift 79, no. 6
(June 1922): 521 26.
    

DNVP: “There stands the enemy that pours its poison into the wounds of the
nation. There stands the enemy. And let there be no doubt on this, this enemy
stands on the Right!”46
Wirth’s words and the unmitigated passion with which they were spoken
constituted a direct challenge to Hergt and the leaders of the DNVP. After his
speech in the Reichstag Wirth went to Hergt and declared that he could only
believe in the DNVP’s innocence in the matter of Rathenau’s murder if it drew
a clear and unequivocal line between it and the group of radical racists around
Henning. At a meeting of the DNVP party representation on 4 July, a group of
party moderates led by Adelbert Düringer, Otto Hoetzsch, and Count Gerhard
von Kanitz pressed for Henning’s expulsion from the party and demanded –
apparently with Hergt’s tacit support – that the party draw a clear line between
itself and the racists who had helped set the stage for Rathenau’s murder.47
Helfferich, an early target of Wirth’s polemics because of his attacks upon first
Erzberger and then Rathenau, was an adamant opponent of antisemitism in
any form whatsoever and sided with Hergt and those who believed that a
purge of the party’s racist wing was essential to restore the its respectability
and credibility as a future coalition partner.48 The question of the DNVP’s
position on racism and antisemitism thus became inextricably intertwined
with that of its future role in the national government. Efforts to force the
racists from the party also received support from the DNVP’s industrial
backers, who were as disturbed over the racists’ increasingly intemperate
diatribes against the capitalist economic order as they were over their anti-
semitic excesses.49 With the quadrumvirate of Hergt, Helfferich, Hoetzch, and
Hugenberg leading the charge, the DNVP Reichstag delegation formally
expelled Henning from the delegation, though not from the party, by more
than a two-thirds majority at meetings of both the delegation and the party
executive committee on 19 July.50 Not even this, however, was sufficient to
placate Düringer, who announced his resignation from the DNVP on the
following day in protest against its failure to take a clear and unequivocal
stand against racial antisemitism.51 For Henning, on the other hand, his

46
Joseph Wirth, Reden während der Kanzlerschaft (Berlin, 1925), 397 406.
47
Brauer to Heydebrand, 8 July 1922, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, II/83. See also “Darstellung
des Abgeordneten Henning über die Ereignisse, die zu seinem Ausschluß aus der Frak
tion geführt haben,” n.d. [Sept. Oct. 1922], NL Westarp, Gärtringen, 88.
48
Williamson, Helfferich, 368 71.
49
Frowein to Hergt, 8 July 1922, BA Berlin, R 8005, 3/30 32.
50
Brauer to Heydebrand, 20 July 1922, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, II/83. See also Henning,
“Darstellung des Abgeordneten Henning. . .,” (see n. 46). For a defense of the party’s
action, see “Zur Abwehr,” 29 July 1922, BA Berlin, NL Mumm, 277/281 87.
51
On Düringer, see Weiß to Traub, 7 July 1922, BA Koblenz, NL Traub, 50/93 94, as well
as Thomas Wirth, Adelbert Düringer: Jurist zwischen Kaiserreich und Republik (Mann
heim, 1989), 177 80.
   , –

expulsion from the Reichstag delegation was only the most recent example of
the campaign of defamation and slander the party had waged against his
personal honor.52
Stung by Henning’s expulsion, Graefe-Goldebee and Wulle announced their
resignation from the DNVP Reichstag delegation as a sign of solidarity with
their beleaguered colleague, but they remained in the party in order to
continue their crusade for racist ideas within the DNVP.53 In justifying their
step, Graefe-Goldebee and the leaders of the DNVP’s racist wing claimed that
only a complete overhaul of the party leadership and Henning’s reinstatement
to full membership in the DNVP Reichstag delegation would allow the party
to fulfill its mission as an instrument of Germany’s racial and national regen-
eration.54 In their efforts to remake the DNVP in the racist image, the leaders
of the DNVP’s racist wing enjoyed strong support at the local and regional
levels of the Nationalist party organization not just in former conservative
bastions east of the Elbe but also in Bavaria.55 Westarp, who was fully aware of
the sympathy the racists enjoyed at the base of the DNVP party organization,
was determined to prevent a secession and mediated between the racists and
the party leadership in hopes that a break could still be avoided.56 Westarp
readily conceded the threat that Jewish domination posed to German eco-
nomic, cultural, and political life but cautioned against attributing all of
Germany’s ills to Jewish machinations or making the struggle against Jewry
the sole object of the DNVP’s political mission. As Westarp insisted in a
statement released to the German press on 22 August 1922, the struggle
against the threat of Jewish dominance must be subordinated to the overall
strategic goals of the party.57

52
Henning, “‘Des Nächsten Ehre.’ An die Deutschnationale Volkspartei,” 1 Aug. 1922, NL
Westarp, Gärtringen, VN 88.
53
Brauer to Heydebrand, 20 July 1922, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, II/83. See also Wulle, “Die
Vorgänge in der deutschnationalen Volkspartei,” n.d. [July 1922], NL Westarp, Gärtrin
gen, VN 87.
54
Protocol of a meeting of approximately forty DNVP racists convened by Wulle, 31 July
1922, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, VN 25. See also Brauer to Heydebrand, 18 July 1922, ibid.,
II/83.
55
See the letters from the DNVP headquarters in Pomerania to Westarp, 20 July 1922, NL
Westarp, Gärtringen, VN 87, and from Koennecke of the DNVP headquarters in
Potsdam II, 25 July 1922, ibid., VN 88. On the situation in Bavaria, see Xylander to
Hergt, 6 July 1922, BA Berlin, R 8005, 3/38 40, as well as Dungern to Westarp, 11
Sept. 1922, ibid., VN 89.
56
See Westarp’s letters to Heydebrand, 2 Aug. 1922, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, II/82;
Marcinowski, 22 Sept. 1922, ibid., VN 86; and Dungern, 28 Sept. 1922, ibid., VN 89.
57
Statement by Westarp, 22 Aug. 1922, quoted in Walther Graef (Anklam), “Der Werde
gang der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei 1918 1928,” in Der nationale Wille, ed. Weiß,
42. See also Westarp, Konservative Politik, ed. Hiller von Gaertringen, 139 49, as well as
Gasteiger, Westarp. 189 95, and Stephan Malinowski, “Kuno Graf von Westarp ein
    

Secession
The threat of a general secession on the part of the DNVP’s racist wing placed
Westarp and those who had formerly belonged to the prewar German Con-
servative Party in an increasingly difficult situation.58 For although Westarp
and indeed many of his associates from the former DKP sympathized with
Graefe and his bias against Jews, Westarp felt a strong sense of loyalty to the
DNVP and was committed to maintaining party unity in face of the racist
challenge. On 14 August Westarp met with Wulle and other members of the
party’s racist faction and succeeded in tempering their desire for a confron-
tation with the DNVP party leadership.59 At a meeting of the DNVP executive
committee on 14–15 September 1922 Westarp was successful in defending
Graefe-Goldebee and Wulle from efforts by party moderates to have them,
along with Henning, expelled from the party, but he was unable to persuade
Hergt and the DNVP party leadership to make a conciliatory gesture toward
the racists that might have preserved the unity of the party.60 Westarp’s efforts
to mediate between the racists and the DNVP party leadership suffered
another blow when on the second day of the meeting the leaders of the
DNVP’s racist wing announced the establishment of the German-Racist
Coalition (Deutschvölkische Arbeitsgemeinschaft or DvAG) as a special
organization within the DNVP that would presumably keep those who shared
their concern about the urgency of the so-called Jewish threat from leaving the
party.61 In his efforts to prevent the racists from leaving the party, Westarp
received strong support from a surprising source, the Pan-German League. On
19 September Baron Leopold von Vietinghoff-Scheel and Baron Axel von
Freytagh-Loringhoven from the Pan-German leadership met with a contin-
gent of DNVP racists in an attempt to dissuade them from leaving the party.
Vietinghoff-Scheel cautioned the racists in particular against plans to found a
new party of their own.62

missing link im preußischen Adel. Anmerkungen zur Einordnung eines untypischen

Grafen,” in “Ich bin der letzte Preuße”: Der politische Lebensweg des konservativen
Politikers Kuno Graf von Westarp (1864 1945), ed. Larry Eugene Jones and Wolfram
Pyta (Cologne, Weimar, and Vienna, 2006), 9 32.
58
For example, see Brauer to Heydebrand, 20 July 1922, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, II/83.
59
Report on the meeting of 14 Aug. 1922, BA Berlin, NL Mumm, 277/276 78.
60
Brauer to Heydebrand, 19 Sept. 1922, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, II/83. See also the report
on the meeting of the DNVP party representation, 15 Sept. 1922, SHStA Dresden, NL
Philipp, 13.
61
Brauer to Heydebrand, 19 Sept. 1922, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, II/83. See also Kube to
Westarp, 20 Sept. 1922, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, VN 87, as well as the comments by
Graefe Goldebee, Henning, and Butzbach at a meeting of the DNVP executive commit
tee, 28 29 Sept. 1922, in a report by Weiß, 2 Oct. 1922, ibid., VN 87. For further details,
see Graefe Goldebee to Westarp, 17 Sept. 1922, ibid., VN 88.
62
Brauer to Heydebrand, 20 Sept. 1922, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, II/83.
   , –

On 28 September 1922 the DNVP racists officially launched the German-

Racist Coalition at a small meeting in Berlin-Charlottenburg. Graefe-Goldebee
was elected chairman of the seven-member executive committee responsible
for organizing all of those within the DNVP who shared their commitment to
Germany’s racial and national regeneration. In addition to Graefe-Goldebee,
the committee also included Henning and Wulle, the latter as its executive
secretary. Although the DvAG would function as an independent organization
within the DNVP and organize its followers into separate cells at the local and
provincial levels of the DNVP’s national organization, the founders of the
DvAG took special pains to stress that it was not their intention “to throw
down the gauntlet” to the DNVP. “Our struggle,” the communiqué continued,
“has never been directed against the party but always against a system within
the party.”63 This disclaimer did little to reassure the DNVP party representa-
tion, which was meeting in Berlin that very weekend to discuss, among other
items, the problem the racists had created with the founding of their own
organization. Declaring “the existence of the German-Racist Coalition with an
organization of its own within the DNVP as incompatible with the vital
interests, unity, and solidarity of the party,”64 the party leadership handed
Graefe-Goldebee and his associates a stinging rebuff that left their continued
presence in the DNVP in doubt.65
Given the gravity of the situation, the DNVP party leadership decided to
refer the question of the DvAG’s future status to the DNVP party congress
that was scheduled to meet in Görlitz in late October 1922. The action that the
DNVP party representation had taken at its meeting in Berlin constituted a
clear victory for Hergt and the moderates who were in control of the party
executive committee and prompted a disgruntled Westarp to remark that one
day the conservatives too would have to leave the party because after the
racists had left it would be impossible to halt the DNVP’s drift to the left.66
Westarp’s efforts to mediate between the racists and the DNVP party leader-
ship were repeatedly thwarted by the latter’s intransigence and its determin-
ation to subject the party’s racist faction to party discipline.67 By the third
week of October the rupture had become irreparable. Hergt and particularly
Helfferich were relentless in their crusade to drive the racists from the party
and to block the reinstatement of Graefe-Goldebee and Wulle to the DNVP

63
“Die Gründung der Deutschvölkischen Arbeitsgemeinschaft,” n.d. [Oct. 1922], NL We
starp, Gärtringen, VN 88. See also Graefe Goldebee to Westarp, 17 Sept. 1922., ibid., as
well as the agenda for the meeting on 28 Sept. 1922, appended to Kube to Westarp, 20
Sept. 1922, ibid., VN 87.
64
Memoranda from Weiß to the party’s state and regional organizations, 2 and 4 Oct. 1922,
NL Westarp, Gärtringen, VN 87. See also Brauer to Heydebrand, 3 Oct. 1922, ibid., II/83.
65
Graefe Goldebee to Westarp, 23 Sept. 1922, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, VN 25.
66
Brauer to Heydebrand, 3 Oct. 1922, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, II/83.
67
Brauer to Heydebrand, 13 Oct. 1922, ibid.
    

Reichstag delegation in the period that led up to the Görlitz congress. As it

was, only thirteen members of the delegation joined Westarp in his efforts to
negotiate a compromise that would have made it possible for the racists to
remain in the party, while thirty-six deputies supported the DNVP party
leadership in attaching conditions to the reinstatement of the racists that
Graefe-Goldebee and his associates would find impossible to accept.68
The DNVP’s Görlitz party congress 25–28 October 1922 was dominated
from beginning to end by the racist question. In comparison to the party’s
most recent congress at Munich, the Görlitz congress was a much more
subdued affair. Whereas at Munich the DNVP had celebrated its success in
building a comprehensive organization that firmly anchored the party in
Germany’s conservative milieu, at Görlitz party leaders were anxious to paper
over the divisions that the racist conflict had opened up within party and to
prevent the conflict over the party’s handling of the racist issue from triggering
a full-fledged secession on the DNVP’s right wing. In his keynote address on
the first day of the congress, Nationalist party chairman Hergt went out of his
way to pacify the more radical elements on the party’s right wing by reaffirm-
ing as categorically as possible the DNVP’s unconditional opposition to the
republican form of government and its steadfast refusal to join the other non-
socialist parties in a coalition government committed to fulfilling the terms of
the Versailles Peace Treaty.69 Then, in one of the featured speeches on the last
day of the congress, Max Wallraf from the DNVP Prussian Landtag delegation
went to great pains to portray the DNVP as a völkisch party opposed to all
alien influences upon Germany’s national life.70 But none of this did much to
placate the leaders of the DNVP’s German-Racist Coalition, whose demands
for a “reformation” of the DNVP at all levels of its national organization
evoked nothing but a deaf response at the upper echelons of the Nationalist
party leadership. Mediation between the two groups became pointless, and on
28 October 1922 the faction around Graefe-Goldebee, Wulle, and Henning
used a change in the party statutes that prohibited the existence of separate
organizations like the German-Racist Coalition within the DNVP party appar-
atus as the pretext for severing their ties to the party.71 Two months later, the
secessionists formally reconstituted themselves as the German-Racist Freedom

68
Brauer to Heydebrand, 18 Oct. 1922, ibid.
69
Oskar Hergt, Von deutscher Not. Rede auf dem Vierten Deutschnationalen Reichspartei
tage in Görlitz am 27. Oktober 1922, Deutschnationale Flugschrift, no. 140 (Berlin, 1922).
70
Max Wallraf, Die deutschen Parteien am Schweidewege! Rede auf dem Vierten Deutsch
nationalen Reichsparteitage in Görlitz am 28. Oktober 1922, Deutschnationale Flugschrift,
no. 139 (Görlitz, 1922), 11 12.
71
“Vertrauliche Information: Görlitzer Parteitag. Gründung der Deutschvölkischen
Arbeitsgemeinschaft außerhalb der Partei,” n.d. [ca. Okt. Nov. 1922], NL Westarp,
Gärtringen, VN 88.
   , –

Party (Deutschvölkische Freiheitspartei or DVFP), thus putting the final

touches on their break with the Nationalist party organization.72
The founding of the German-Racist Freedom Party reverberated through-
out the DNVP organization and threatened the party with a mass secession of
its racist wing.73 In an attempt to shore up their flank, the DNVP party
leadership authorized the creation of a special organization within the party
for those racists who had remained with the DNVP.74 But what proved
decisive in the DNVP’s efforts to contain the racist secession was the strong
support it received from Claß and the Pan-German League. For although the
Pan-Germans espoused a racial antisemitism that was virtually indistinguish-
able from that of Graefe-Goldebee and Wulle, they remained adamantly
opposed to the founding of the new racist party and threw their full support
behind the DNVP in the critical days following the Görlitz congress. Long-
standing animosities between Claß and Graefe-Goldebee no doubt played a
decisive role in shaping the ADV’s response to these developments as the Pan-
Germans held the founders of the new party responsible for the splintering of
the antisemitic movement and never wavered in their belief that their agenda
could be advanced only in collaboration with the DNVP.75 The key figure in
this regard was Baron Axel von Freytagh-Loringhoven, a Nationalist deputy in
the Prussian Landtag from Breslau who enjoyed close ties to the Pan-German
leadership. Not only did Freytagh-Loringhoven go head-to-head with Graefe-
Goldebee in keeping the DNVP’s rank-and-file from bolting the party,76 but
he took the lead in organizing the DNVP’s racist wing into a special committee
within the DNVP party apparatus.77 The official founding of the DNVP’s
National Racist Committee (Völkischer Reichsausschuß der Deutschnationa-
len Volkspartei) under the chairmanship of Walther Graef-Anklam, a member
of the Nationalist delegation to the Prussian Landtag, in early 1923 represented
Freytagh-Loringhoven’s crowning achievement in that it not only stemmed
the defection of DNVP racists to the DVFP but provided the Pan-Germans
with an organizational foothold in the DNVP. The stated purpose of this
committee was first to create greater awareness of the threat of Jewish domin-
ance in the German press, second to fight with all legal means the efforts of
international Jewry to destroy the German economy, and third to unite all

72
Reimer Wulff, “Die deutschvölkische Freiheitspartei 1922 1928” (Ph.D. diss. Universität
Marburg, 1968), 6 14. See also Breuer, Völkischen in Deutschland, 194 208.
73
For example, see Weiß (DNVP Reichsgeschäftsstelle) to Westarp, 23 Jan. 1923, NL
Westarp, Gärtringen, VN 37. See also Merkel (DNVP Potsdam I) to Westarp, 8
Feb. 1923, ibid.
74
Korrespondenz der DNVP, 1 Nov. 1922, no. 215.
75
Jackisch, Pan German League, 46 49, 54 62.
76
Hamel (DNVP Mecklenburg Schwerin) to Westarp, 8 Jan. 1923, NL Westarp, Gärtrin
gen, VN 37. See also Graefe Goldebee to Claß, 8 Jan. 1923, BA Berlin, R 8048, 226/38 39.
77
For example, see Freytagh Loringhoven to Claß, 6 Aug. 1923, BA Berlin, R 8048, 209/177.
    

German-racist elements on the basis of the DNVP for concerted action against
the onslaught of international and Jewish dominated forces.78
By no means did the outcome of the racist conflict within the DNVP mean
that the party had purged itself of antisemitism or that it was now prepared to
seek a more responsible role in determining Germany’s political future. In
point of fact, antisemitism itself was never at issue for the vast majority of
those who were involved in the conflict. Antisemitism was a well defined
feature of Germany’s conservative milieu long before the conflict ever erupted,
and only a handful of those who belonged to the DNVP’s inner councils
denied the existence of a “Jewish question” in Germany’s national life. What
was really at stake in the racist conflict of 1921–22 was not the existence of a
“Jewish threat” but the means with which the struggle against this threat was
to be waged and just where this particular struggle ranked in relationship to
the other issues that faced the party. Whereas the racists around Graefe-
Goldebee, Henning, and Wulle believed that no issue was more important
than the struggle for Germany’s racial regeneration, the DNVP party leader-
ship argued that the struggle against the influence that German and inter-
national Jewry presumably exercised over German cultural, economic, and
political life had to be subordinated to other issues of more immediate import,
issues such as the fight against Versailles and the policy of fulfillment and the
struggle for the rehabilitation of German agriculture. The struggle against the
Jewish dominance of Germany’s national life could wait until after these more
immediate issues had been addressed.79

The Paramilitary Right

Party leaders faced a similar, though less vexing problem with the various
paramilitary organizations that had sprung up across the country in the wake
of World War I. The war – and particularly its duration – had had a brutaliz-
ing effect on those who had served at the front and made it difficult for many
to reintegrate themselves into civilian life after the end of the war. The
situation was further exacerbated by the continuation of fighting long after
the official conclusion of hostilities in the fall of 1918 and by the threat that the
spread of Bolshevism throughout central and eastern Europe posed to the

78
Minutes of the meeting of the DNVP National Racist Committee, 22 Apr. 1923, BA
Berlin, R 8005, 361/230 31, also in BA R 8048, 223/5 6. See also Graef Anklam, “Die
völkischen Zielen der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei,” n.d. [Apr. 1923], ibid., 223/219.
See also Jackisch, Pan German League, 96 100, and Hofmeister, “Between Monarchy and
Dictatorship,” 271 82.
79
“Zu den Angriffen der Deutschvölkischen Freiheitspartei,” n.d. [ca. Jan. 1923], SHStA
Dresden, NL Philipp, 13.
   , –

propertied classes throughout the area.80 While the vast majority of those
Germans who had served at the front were able to find their way back into the
German workforce and returned to what passed for normal civilian life, others
found the transition difficult and tried to preserve what they could of their
experience at the front by joining special combat units that were fully com-
mitted to the use of violence in defense of the existing social and economic
order. The founding of the Weimar Republic was marked by a dramatic
escalation of political violence as militant organizations on the Left and the
Right fought for control of the streets. The first years after the end of war
witnessed the emergence of any number of paramilitary combat leagues, some
of which were militantly opposed to Germany’s new republican system and
others that were motivated more by the fear of Bolshevism than anything else.
In almost all cases, these organizations drew their impetus from the collapse of
established political authority, disorder on the home front to which veterans of
the Great War were returning, the apparent triumph of political radicalism,
and with it the ubiquitous, if not imagined, threat of Bolshevism. The old
order had indeed collapsed, and German veterans of the Great War, drawing
their inspiration from the sense of solidarity to which fighting at the front had
forged, saw themselves as harbingers of a new era from which the social,
economic, and political cleavages of the world into which they had been born
would be banished.81
The initial and by far most widespread phenomena of this sort in Germany
were the so-called Free Corps, or Freikorps, that had been formed by soldiers
returning from the eastern front where exposure to large numbers of Eastern
European Jews and ideological indoctrination on the dangers of Bolshevism
had left them vulnerable to the antisemitic histrionics of the Pan-German
League and German-Racist Protection and Defense League.82 Despite their
militancy and high political profile, the Free Corps encompassed only a small
fraction of those who had served at the front with an estimated membership of

80
For further details, see Robert Gerwarth, “The Central European Counter Revolution:
Paramilitary Violence in Germany, Austria, and Hungary after the Great War,” Past and
Present 200 (2008): 175 209, as well as the introduction by Robert Gerwarth and John
Horne, “Paramilitarism in Europe after the Great War: An Introduction,” in War in
Peace: Paramilitary Violence in Europe after the Great War, ed. Robert Gerwarth and
John Horne (Oxford, 2012): 1 18.
81
On the contours of paramilitary violence in postwar Germany, see Dirk Schumann,
Political Violence in the Weimar Republic, 1918 1933: Fight for the Streets and Fear of
Civil War, trans. by Thomas Dunlap (New York and Oxford, 2009), 3 34.
82
Bernhard Sauer, “Freikorps und Antisemitismus in der Frühzeit der Weimarer Republik,”
Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft 56 (2008): 5 29. See also Joachim Schroeder, “Der
Erste Weltkrieg und der ‘jüdische Bolschewismus’,” in Nationalsozialismus und Erster
Weltkrieg, ed. Krumeich (Essen, 2010), 77 96 and Brian E. Crim, “‘Our Most Serious
Enemy’: The Specter of Judeo Bolshevism in the German Military Community,
1914 1923,” Central European History 44 (2011): 624 41.
    

400,000 as opposed to the thirteen million Germans who had been mobilized
between 1914 and 1918.83 The Free Corps were notorious for their lack of
discipline and committed atrocities that led to their forced dissolution in 1920.
While many of those affected by this action subsequently made their way into
the ranks of the fledgling National Socialist German Workers’ Party, the
persistence of the “red scare” prompted the creation of volunteer civilian
defense leagues known as Einwohnerwehren for the ostensible purpose of
defending the existing social order against the threat of the radical Left. In
Prussia the Einwohnerwehren played a critical role in stabilizing bourgeois
social and economic power during a period of revolutionary turmoil and
received strong support from both civilian and military authorities even after
the Versailles Treaty expressly prohibited the existence of any organization
outside of the 100,000-man Reichswehr that bore arms or otherwise concerned
itself with military matters.84 Nowhere were the Einwohnerwehren more
important than in Bavaria, where they played a decisive role in the reestablish-
ment of law and order following the suppression of the Munich soviet in the
spring of 1919 and enjoyed the support and protection of influential govern-
ment officials, not the least of whom was Gustav von Kahr, the Bavarian
minister president from March 1920 to September 1921. Not only did Kahr
rely upon the civilian defense leagues to contain the plebeian unrest that
threatened to spread to Bavaria following the collapse of the Kapp putsch,
but his patronage helped shield the Bavarian defense leagues against Allied
efforts to force their dissolution.85
Following the suppression of the Einwohnerwehren in Prussia and else-
where, Kahr provided the political cover that made it possible for forestry
official Georg Escherich to organize the various defense units that had sprung
up in Bavaria, Austria, and other parts of the country into an organization that
bore his name, Organization Escherich (Organisation Escherich or Orgesch).

83
For a contemporary overview of this phenomenon, see Frank Glatzel, “Wehrverbände
und Politik,” in Politische Praxis 1926, ed. Walther Lambach (Hamburg, n.d. [1926]),
313 28. For more scholarly treatments, see Kristian Mennen, “‘Milksops’ and ‘Bemed
alled Old Men’: War Veterans and the War Youth Generation in the Weimar Republic,”
Fascism 6 (2017): 13 41, here 19. On the reintegration of World War I veterans into
postwar German society, see Richard Bessel, “Militarismus im innenpolitischen Leben der
Weimarer Republik. Von den Freikorps zur SA,” in Militär und Militärismus in der
Weimarer Republik, ed. Klaus Jürgen Müller (Düsseldorf, 1978), 193 222, esp. 200 03,
and Benjamin Ziemann, Front und Heimat. Ländliche Kriegserfahrungen im südlichen
Bayern 1914 1923 (Essen, 1997), 394 437.
84
Peter Bucher, “Zur Geschichte der Einwohnerwehren in Preußen 1918 1921,” Militär
geschichtliche Mitteilungen 10 (1971): 15 59.
85
On the patriotic movement in Bavaria, see Harold J. Gordon, Jr., Hitler and the Beer Hall
Putsch (Princeton, NJ, 1972), 88 119, and Hans Fenske, Konservatismus und Rechtsra
dikalismus in Bayern nach 1918 (Bad Homburg, 1969), 76 112, as well as James M. Diehl,
Paramilitary Politics in Weimar Germany (Bloomington, IN, 1977), 69 88, 100 07.
   , –

A self-styled adventurer and outspoken anti-Communist,86 Escherich had

begun by organizing the counterrevolutionary defense units in his hometown
of Isen after the end of the war. Orgesch was formally established at Regens-
burg on 8–9 May 1920 and cemented Escherich’s place as the undisputed
leader of the volunteer defense movement in all of Germany.87 Although the
leadership of Orgesch rested almost exclusively in the hands of Escherich and
his associates from the Bavarian volunteer defense leagues, the two remained
juridically independent of each other and served fundamentally different
purposes. In the case of the Orgesch, that purpose was less the actual preser-
vation of peace and order in the face of Bolshevism than the establishment of
closer organizational ties between the Bavarian civilian defense leagues and
similar groups in other parts of the country. The true nature of the new
organization, however, was partly obscured by the fact that the four-point
program Escherich proclaimed at Regensburg committed Orgesch, among
other things, to the “defense of the constitution” and the “rejection of putsch-
ism from right or left.”88 Much of this was no doubt a ploy to shield the
Orgesch and its affiliated organizations against the threat of suppression by the
Reich in the wake of the Kapp putsch. In point of fact, the true spirit that
animated the new organization had less to do with the preservation of the
existing constitutional system than with the defense of the bourgeois social
order against Bolshevism and socialism in any of their myriad forms.
In the weeks that followed, representatives from the Orgesch travelled
throughout Germany in an attempt to solidify the ties that had been cultivated
at Regensburg. Among those with whom Orgesch officials met was the
DNVP’s Alfred Hugenberg, who assured them of his support but declined to
commit himself with respect to financing until after the Reichstag elections
scheduled for June 1920 had taken place.89 While Orgesch leaders felt suffi-
ciently encouraged by their contacts with like-minded groups in the other
parts of the country to continue their efforts on behalf of a national volunteer
defense league modeled after the Bavarian prototype,90 they also began to
encounter strong resistance in Prussia, where neither the “ultra-reactionary”
Right nor the socialist Left showed much interest in their plans. Orgesch,
which Escherich and his associates continued to portray as a nonpartisan

86
For example, see Georg Escherich, Von Eisner bis Eglhofer. Die Münchener Revolution
vom November 1918 bis zum Zusammenbruch der Räteherrschaft, 6 vols. (Munich, 1922).
87
Escherich’s handwritten notes on the “Regensburger Tagung,” 8 9 May 1920, records of
the Einwohnerwehren Bayerns, Bayerische Hauptstaatsarchiv Munich, (hereafter cited as
BHStA Munich), Abt. IV, EWB, 5/3a.
88
Günther Axhausen, Organisation Escherich. Die Bewegung zur nationalen Einheitsfront
(Leipzig, 1921), 16 19.
89
Report by Kannengiesser on his trip to northern Germany, 25 May 5 June 1920, BHStA
Munich, Abt. IV, EWB, 5/3a.
90
Ibid.
    

“union of the middle” whose main goal was the defeat of Bolshevism,91 was
either too radical for the self-defense organizations that had surfaced under
aristocratic leadership in Prussia’s eastern provinces or too reactionary for
those within the socialist labor movement who were loyal to the existing
political system.92 The most serious obstacle to the expansion of the Orgesch
north of the Main, however, was Allied pressure for the disarmament of
Germany’s civilian population and the dissolution of all paramilitary combat
leagues.93 While Kahr continued to protect the Bavarian volunteer defense
leagues against demands for their dissolution, officials serving the Reich and
Prussia had little choice but to comply with Allied demands and ordered the
dissolution of Orgesch and its affiliates in the spring and summer of 1920.94
Kahr was able to resist pressure from Berlin until late May 1922, when he
found it necessary to cut his political losses and asked Escherich to initiate a
partial disarmament of the Bavarian volunteer defense units.95 After a period
of initial defiance and procrastination,96 Escherich eventually realized that he
had no alternative but to submit to Allied pressure and reluctantly began to
comply with Kahr’s orders. On 1 June 1921 Escherich ordered the disarma-
ment of the Bavarian volunteer defense units, thus setting the stage for the
official dissolution of the Orgesch four weeks later.97
At the time of their dissolution, the Bavarian volunteer defense leagues
numbered over 360,000 members,98 while the membership of the Orgesch and
its Austrian counterpart, the Organization Kanzler (Organisation Kanzler),
has been placed at nearly two million.99 For those who went through this
experience, the Orgesch and its affiliated defense leagues in Bavaria and other
parts of the country constituted an important way-station on their path to
more radical paramilitary organizations. Of the countless such organizations
that flourished in the middle and late years of the Weimar Republic, none were

91
Escherich, “Aufklärung über die Organisation Escherich,” 5 Aug. 1920, BHStA Munich,
Abt. IV, EWB, 5/3b.
92
Kustermann to Orgesch business leaders, 6 Oct. 1920, BHStA Munich, Abt. IV, EWB,
5/3b.
93
For further details, see Michael Salewski, Entwaffnung und Militärkontrolle in Deutsch
land 1919 1927 (Munich, 1966), 137 46.
94
Bucher, “Einwohnerwehren in Preußen,” 53 58.
95
Kahr to Escherich, 21 May 1921, BHStA Munich, Abt. IV, EWB, 3/11.
96
For example, see Escherich to Kahr, 27 and 28 May 1921, BHStA Munich, Abt. IV, EWB,
3/11.
97
Statement by Escherich, 29 June 1921, BHStA Munich, Abt. IV, EWB, 5/3d. For further
details, See also Kanzler, Bayerns Kampf, 81 82, 108 18. On developments in Baden, see
Helmut Neumaier, “Die Organisation Escherich in Baden. Zum Rechtsextremismus in
der Frühphase der Weimarer Republik,” Zeitschrift für die Geschichte des Oberrheins 137
(1989): 341 82.
98
Kanzler, Bayerns Kampf, 162 63.
99
Large, Politics of Law and Order, 77.
   , –

more important than the Stahlhelm and Young German Order (Jungdeutscher
Orden). Like the Orgesch, these organizations emerged in the general chaos
that accompanied the end of Word War I and were strongly committed to the
reestablishment of “law and order” throughout the country. Each had received
its baptism of fire in the defense of Germany’s eastern borders against the
threats of Bolshevism and Polish aggresion and worked closely with volunteer
defense leagues in Bavaria and other parts of the country in the suppression of
Bolshevism. Not surprisingly, both the Stahlhelm and the Young German
Order recruited the bulk of their rank-and-file membership from those who
had served at the front and were often experiencing difficulty adjusting to the
demands of civilian life and the collapse of domestic political authority. Unlike
the Orgesch, however, both the Stahlhelm and Young German Order were
more than military combat leagues and espoused political goals that went far
beyond the representation of veterans’ interests or the reestablishment of law
and order and the defeat of Bolshevism.

The Stahlhelm
The Stahlhelm – League of Front Soldiers (Stahlhelm – Bund der Frontsolda-
ten) was founded in Magdeburg on 25 December 1918 on the initiative of
Franz Seldte, a decorated reserve officer in the German infantry who had lost
his left arm at the battle of the Somme.100 Like most of those who had served
at the front, Franz and his brother Georg had been swept up in the wave of
national enthusiasm that had accompanied the outbreak of hostilities in
August 1914. But by the end of 1915 – and particularly after the bloody battle
of the Somme – the sense of euphoria they had experienced at the outbreak of
the war began to crack under the hard realities of trench warfare and gave way
to a new mood informed above all else by a sense of duty to nation and
comrade. Like so many of their comrades, the Seldte brothers too began to
believe that the heroism of the front was only a small part of a much larger
struggle that was slowly, but surely, transforming the face of all mankind.101

100
Facsimile of the handwritten protocol of the Stahlehlm’s founding on 25 Dec. 1918 in
Der Stahlhelm. Erinnerungen und Bilder aus den Jahren 1918 1933, ed. Franz Seldte, 2
vols., (Berlin, 1933), 1:169. See also Alois Klotzbücher, “Der politische Weg des Stahl
helms, Bund der Frontsoldaten, in der Weimarer Republik. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte
der ‘Nationalen Opposition’ 1918 1933” (Ph.D. diss., Universität Erlangen Nürnberg,
1964), 1 30; and Volker R. Berghahn, Der Stahlhelm Bund der Frontsoldaten
1918 1935 (Düsseldorf, 1966), 13 53.
101
On the mythos of the “front experience,” see Richard Bessel, “The ‘Front Generation’
and the Politics of Weimar Germany,” in Generations in Conflict: Youth Revolt and
Generation Formation in Germany, 1770 1968, ed. Mark Roseman (Cambridge, 1995),
121 36.
    

Not even the news of the general strike, the Kaiser’s abdication, or the
proclamation of the republic could shake the strength of this conviction. It
was to sustain their faith in the transformative power of the front experience
and to fulfill their commitment to those of their comrades who had fallen at
the front that the Seldte brothers and associates launched the Stahlhelm in the
first days of the November Revolution.
In its initial attempt at self-definition, the Stahlhelm proclaimed three goals:
to represent the interests of the front soldier so that he might find the place he
rightfully deserved in public and professional life, to provide for law and order
so that the task of national reconstruction could begin, and to provide mutual
support for those who had served at the front without regard for class or party
affiliation.102 In the immediate context, the second of these three goals took
clear precedence over the other two. The phrase “restoration of law and order”
was little more than a euphemism for the suppression of Marxism and
provided the Stahlhelm with all the justification it needed to intervene against
the revolutionary Left in the turmoil of the postwar period. By its own account,
the Stahlhelm played a major role in the “liberation” of Magdeburg, Halle, and
much of central Germany from the threat of Marxist insurrection.103 At the
same time, Seldte had begun to cultivate close ties with Escherich and repre-
sented the north German civilian defense leagues at the Orgesch’s founding
ceremonies in Regensburg.104 The fact that the Stahlhelm defined itself as an
organization for the promotion of veterans’ interests, however, helped shield it
from the fate that befell the Free Corps and Germany’s other paramilitary
combat leagues when the government ordered their dissolution in late
1919 and early 1920. As its ranks swelled through the influx of new members
who had formerly belonged to organizations now banned by the state, the
Stahlhelm spread from its original stronghold in and around Magdeburg
across the rest of central Germany and into eastern Prussia. Between March
1920 and January 1922 the Stahlhelm grew from an organization with thirty
local chapters to one with approximately six hundred.105 The Stahlhelm’s
greatest success occurred in the fall of 1924 when the Westphalian League
(Westfalenbund), which had been founded in the summer of 1921 out of the

102
Franz Seldte, “Der Stahlhelm,” n.d., [ca. 1926 27], records of the Stahlhelm, BA Berlin,
Bestand R 72 22/229 31.
103
Sechs Jahre Stahlhelm in Mitteldeutschland, ed. Stahlhelm, Landesverband Mittel
deutschland (Halle, 1926), 11 16.
104
Press release issued by Orgesch on the Regensburg conference, n.d. [9 May 1920],
BHStA Munich, Abt. IV, EWB, 5/3a. See also Seldte to Escherich, 21 Jan. 1920, ibid.,
3/1c, and Seldte to Escherich, 8 Apr. 1920, ibid., 5/3a.
105
Sigmund Graff, “Gründung und Entwicklung des Bundes,” in Der Stahlhelm. Erinne
rungen und Bilder aus den Jahren 1918 1933, ed. Franz Seldte, 2 vols., (Berlin, 1933),
1:19 107, here 38 40.
   , –

remnants of the Westphalian chapter of Organization Escherich and stood

under the leadership of Baron Ferdinand von Lüninck, formally dissolved
itself to become the Stahlhelm’s regional affiliate.106
Initially the Stahlhelm had typically recruited the bulk of its membership
from the ranks of veterans who had managed the transition to postwar
civilian life with relative ease and never experienced the deep-seated alienation
from postwar bourgeois society that most of those who gravitated to the more
militant combat leagues had felt. Ridiculed by its rivals on the political Left as
an organization of “milksops” and “bemedalled old men,” the Stahlhelm’s
rank-and-file displayed little of the militancy in the first years of the Weimar
Republic that would become the hallmark of Germany’s paramilitary Right.107
Over time, however, the Stahlhelm began to attract the support of aristocrats
whose dreams of a career in the German officer corps or the state civil service
had been cut short by the revolutionary upheaval of 1918–19 and who
remained implacably opposed to the changes that had taken place in Ger-
many’s political system.108 This, however, did not take place without a certain
price. For whereas beforehand the Stahlhelm had opened its ranks to all of
those – including Jews and Social Democrats – who had served a minimum of
six months in the armed services, the sudden influx of new members from
more radical organizations such as the League of Nationalist Soldiers
(Verband nationalgesinnter Soldaten) had a dramatic effect on the Stahlhelm’s
political profile and quickly transformed it into a vanguard of counterrevolu-
tionary and revanchist sentiment.109 The storm of national protest that greeted
ratification of the Versailles Peace Treaty in the summer of 1919 greatly
accelerated the radicalization and growth of the Stahlhelm. Still, the Stahlhelm
continued to profess an official policy of neutrality, or Überparteilichkeit, with
respect to the existing political parties. Its nonpartisan character was further
underscored by the fact that Seldte, the driving force behind its founding
and early expansion, was a member of the German People’s Party, while
Theodor Duesterberg, rapidly emerging as the leader of the Stahlhelm’s
more radical elements, was chairman of the DNVP district organization in

106
Seldte, “Der Stahlhelm,” (see n. 102). See also Gerd Krüger, “Von den Einwohnerwehren
zum Stahlhelm. Der nationale Kampfverband ‘Westfalenbund e.V.’ (1921 1924),” West
fälische Zeitschrift 147 (1997): 405 32. On the paramilitary Right in Westphalia, see
Gerd Krüger, ‘Treudeutsch allewege!’ Gruppen, Vereine und Verbände der Rechten in
Münster (1887 1929/30) (Münster, 1992), esp. 71 134.
107
Mennen, “‘Milksops’ and ‘Bemedalled Old Men’,” 31.
108
Marcus Funck, “Schock und Chance. Der preußische Militäradel in der Weimarer
Republik zwischen Stand und Profession,” in Adel und Bürgertum in Deutschland II.
Entwicklungslinien und Wendepunkte im 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Heinz Reif (Berlin, 2001),
127 71.
109
See Berghahn, Stahlhelm, 26 39, and Diehl, Paramilitary Politics, 96 97.
    

Halle-Merseburg.110 But nonpartisanship had a peculiar meaning for the

leaders of the Stahlhelm and was not synonymous with neutrality. For while
the Stahlhelm claimed to stand above the sordid world of party politics, its
policy of nonpartisanship was a discriminatory strategy that consistently
favored those parties whose national pedigree was above reproach at the
expense of those that had allowed themselves to become too closely identified
with the defense of Germany’s new republican order.111
As the Stahlhelm gravitated more and more into the orbit of the radical
Right, it came under increasingly close scrutiny from officials of the central
and state governments and was one of the first organizations to be officially
banned as an enemy of the republic in the wake of Rathenau’s assassination.112
The ban on the Stahlhelm remained in effect for the next six months and did
much to enhance its popularity as a member of the national movement. It was
not until after Seldte took it upon himself to publicly reaffirm the Stahlhelm’s
loyalty to the existing system of government that the Stahlhelm was allowed to
resume its role in the public sphere.113 In the meantime, Seldte was finding it
increasingly difficult to control the more radical elements that had begun to
attach themselves to Duesterberg’s political star. In April 1923 Duesterberg
was appointed leader of the Stahlhelm organization in Halle-Merseburg as
part of an arrangement whereby he agreed to resign his post as chairman of
the DNVP district party organization.114 This provided Duesterberg’s follow-
ers with a foothold within the Stahlhelm organization from which they could
undercut Seldte and his proclamations of loyalty for the Weimar Republic. As
a result, the Stahlhelm pursued an uncertain and sometimes confused policy
that only mirrored the differences that existed at the upper echelons of its
national leadership. While Duesterberg and the leaders of the Stahlhelm’s
radical wing flirted with Bavarian putschists hoping to emulate Mussolini’s
“March on Rome” with a march on Berlin and even advocated the cultivation
of closer ties with the National Socialists,115 Seldte and his supporters pressed
first Stresemann and then General Hans von Seeckt for the creation of a

110
On Duesterberg, see his letter to Westarp, 21 Dec. 1922, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, VN
87. Resolution by the Stahlhelm executive committee, 6 Oct. 1925, reprinted in Graff,
“Gründung und Entwicklung des Bundes,” 58 59.
111
For example, see the resolution adopted by the Stahlhelm leadership on the “Stahlhelm
und nationale Parteien,” 3 Oct. 1926, and the programmatic statement by Heinz
Brauweiler, “Stahlhelm und Politik,” in Stahlhelm Handbuch 1927, ed. Walter Kellner
and Heinrich Hildebrandt (Berlin, 1927), 45 46, 51 57.
112
Graff, “Gründung und Entwicklung,” 40 44.
113
Berghahn, Stahlhelm, 37.
114
Sechs Jahre Stahlhelm in Mitteldeutschland, 52.
115
Hans Langermann, “Kampf und Sieg des Stahlhelm in Mitteldeutschland,” in Deutsch
lands Erwachen. Das Buch vom Niedergang und Aufstieg des deutschen Volkes
1918 1933, ed. Hans Henning Grote (Essen, n.d. [ca. 1933]), 296.
   , –

national dictatorship capable of leading Germany out of the morass in which

it currently found itself.116 These differences became increasingly apparent
as the situation in the Reich continued to deteriorate throughout the course
of 1923.

The Young German Order

The Stahlhelm’s principal rival for the leadership of the paramilitary Right in
the early years of the Weimar Republic was the Young German Order.117 Like
the Stahlhelm, the Young German Order had surfaced in the chaos that
immediately followed the end of the World War I. But whereas the Stahlhelm
tended to be strongest in the Prussian provinces to the east of the Elbe River,
the Young Germans experienced their greatest success in the western and
central parts of Germany. The Young German Order owed its founding to the
initiative of Artur Mahraun, a young lieutenant colonel who had served in the
Prussian army since 1908 and a former activist in the prewar German youth
movement. On 10 January 1919 Mahraun formed a volunteer unit consisting
of about 200 officers, non-commissioned officers, and soldiers from his home-
town of Kassel to combat the threat of social revolution and to assist in the
restoration of law and order.118 This unit, which officially rechristened itself
the Young German Order on 17 March 1920, went on to play a significant role
in suppressing left-wing unrest in Hesse and Thuringia following the collapse
of the Kapp putsch. In the summer of 1920 the Order affiliated itself with the
Organization Escherich and joined forces with the more militant combat
leagues in the suppression of Marxism until it, like the Orgesch, was officially
banned in parts of Prussia later that August.119 From all appearances, the
Young German Order was scarcely distinguishable from other organizations
on Germany’s paramilitary Right and had to be regarded, along with the
Stahlhelm, as one of Weimar’s most resolute enemies.
For all of their similarities, the Young German Order and Stahlhelm
differed in several important respects. In the first place, the Young German

116
See the text of Seldte’s telegram to Stresemann, 4 Nov. 1923, reprinted in Heinz
Brauweiler, “Der Anteil des Stahlhelm,” in Curt Hotzel, ed., Deutscher Aufstand. Die
Revolution des Nachkriegs (Stuttgart, 1934), 221.
117
On the history of the Young German Order, see Klaus Hornung’s Der Jungdeutsche
Orden (Düsseldorf, 1958), as well as the more reliable accounts by Diehl, Paramilitary
Politics, 95 100, 118 19, and Brian E. Crim, Antisemitism in the German Military
Community and the Jewish Response, 1916 1938 (Lanham, MD, 2014), 65 96.
118
Artur Mahraun, Gegen getarnte Gewalten. Weg und Kampf einer Volksbewegung (Berlin,
1928), 13 19.
119
On ties between the Young German Order and Escherich, see Krayse, “Bericht über
meinen Empfang in München am 30.8.21,” 5 Sept. 1921, records of the Young German
Order, BA Koblenz, Bestand R 161, 1.
    

Order saw itself as a bridge to the prewar German youth movement and, like
the Wandervögel before it, evinced a general disdain for the social and political
values of the all but moribund bourgeois order.120 Mahraun and the Young
Germans characteristically dissociated themselves from efforts to restore
things to the way they had been before 1914 and called for a more fundamen-
tal rebirth of state and society on the basis of the Volksgemeinschaft.121
Secondly, high-ranking officers and members of Germany’s industrial and
agricultural elites were never as prominently represented in the Young
German Order as they were in the Stahlhelm, a fact that helped explain the
more superficial differences in style between the two organizations. By the
same token, the Young German Order was more sincerely committed to
winning the support of the German worker, although it, like the Stahlhelm,
remained a predominantly middle-class organization that sought to accom-
plish this objective not so much by raising the banner of class warfare as by
appealing to the worker’s sense of national solidarity.122 Thirdly, the Young
German Order’s commitment to the preservation of German Christian culture
and its statutory ban against membership for Jews made it something of a
haven for racists and political antisemites, many of whom had been affiliated
with the German-Racist Protection and Defense League. Even though
Mahraun and his closest associates did not sympathize with the more virulent
expressions of antisemitic feeling that had surfaced in Germany since the end
of the war, the Young German leadership routinely recommended antisemitic
tracts such as Theodor Fritsch’s Handbuch zur Judenfrage and Adolf Bartel’s
Rasse und Volkstum for the edification of its rank-and-file membership.123 Its
identification with the revolutionary élan of the prewar German youth move-
ment, its appeal across class lines for the support of the German worker and its
defense of Germany’s Christian culture against those “un-German” elements
that threatened to subvert it all tended to highlight the differences that
separated the Young German Order from the more traditional fusion of

120
Kurt Pastenaci, “Der Jungdeutsche Orden und die Jugendbewegung,” Süddeutsche
Monatshefte 23, no. 9 (June 1926): 177 80.
121
[Artur Mahraun], “Ein Wendepunkt,” in Jungdeutscher Orden, Rundbriefe des Hoch
meisters Nr. 1 (Berlin, n.d. [ca. 1925 26]), 1 6.
122
For example, see [Jungdeutscher Orden], Denkschrift zur westdeutschen Kundgebung des
Jungdeutschen Ordens am 17. und 18. Juni 1922 in Barmen Elberfeld (N.p., 1922), 16.
123
For a statement of Young German racial policy, see Mahraun, “Jungdeutsch völkische
Politik,” in Artur Mahraun, Reden und Aufsätze, 3 vols. (Kassel, n.d. [1923 24]),
2:16 21. See also Crim, Antisemitism, 81 91, and Wieland Vogel, Katholische Kirche
und nationale Kampfverbände in der Weimarer Republik (Mainz, 1989), 13 20, as well
as the regional study by Werner Neuhaus, “Der Jungdeutsche Orden als Kern der
völkischen Bewegung im Raum Arnsberg in den Anfangsjahren der Weimarer Repu
blik,” Sauerland. Zeitschrift des Sauernländer Heimatbundes 43, no. 1 (Mar. 2010):
15 20.
   , –

nationalism and bourgeois conservatism that lay at the heart of the Stahlhelm’s
ideological orientation.

United Patriotic Leagues

The period from 1919 to 1923 marked the heyday of Germany’s patriotic
movement. The Pan-German League, Stahlhelm, and Young German Order
represented only a small fraction of the vast array of patriotic associations that
dotted Germany’s political landscape in the early 1920s. By the end of
1922 there were more than a hundred such organizations scattered throughout
the Reich, some small with little more than a local or regional profile, others
with a mass membership and a broad base of popular support. Their existence
constituted an increasingly serious threat to established political authority to
which the government and the parties supporting it did their best to respond.
Following Rathenau’s assassination inJ une 1922 the Wirth government
moved quickly and forcefully against the threat that extremist organizations
on the right posed to the stability of the republic. The chancellor proceeded to
use presidential emergency powers to enact two decrees aimed at curtailing the
activities of right-wing and anti-republican groups throughout the country by
establishing a new federal court responsible for political crimes and threats
against the republic. The government parties also began work on a “Law for
the Protection of the Republic” that was approved by the Reichstag on 21 July
1922 and that provided legal justification for perpetuating the measures
contained in Wirth’s initial emergency decree. Armed with these powers, the
government went after the German-Racist Protection and Defense League
with such vehemence that the DSTB was eventually forced to dissolve itself
in early 1923, while the Pan-Germans were obliged to curtail much of their
activities in order to escape a similar fate. At the same time, both the Stahlhelm
and the Young German Order were banned throughout much of the Reich,
along with a number of other paramilitary organizations.124
It quickly became increasingly apparent that the various organizations on
Germany’s patriotic and paramilitary Right would benefit from tighter and
more effective organization among themselves. During the war more than fifty
such organizations had come together to form the Central Office of Patriotic
Leagues (Zentralstelle vaterländischer Verbände) under the leadership of
Count Friedrich von Baudissin. After Baudissin’s death in February 1921,
the Central Office of Patriotic Leagues merged in December 1922 with the
Alliance for Patriotic Enlightenment (Arbeitsgemeinschaft für vaterländische
Aufklärung) and the National Unity Front (Nationale Einheitsfront) to form

124
Gotthard Jasper, Der Schutz der Republik. Studien zur staatlichen Sicherung der Demo
kratie in der Weimarer Republik (Tübingen, 1963), 56 69.
    

the United Patriotic Leagues of Germany (Vereinigte vaterländische Verbände

Deutschlands or VVVD).125 The VVVD’s immediate objective was “the cre-
ation of a national unity front inside and outside of parliament with the
ultimate goal of restoring Germany’s freedom, unity, power, and greatness.”
In pursuit of this goal, the VVVD professed a policy of complete neutrality
with respect to Germany’s political parties and the various branches of the
Christian faith.126 What the VVVD actually meant by this, however, was
highly selective and extended only to those parties whose national credentials
were beyond reproach. The VVVD was, if nothing else, militantly anti-Marxist
and sought to free Germany from the Bolshevik curse that had descended
upon it with the defeat and collapse of 1918.127 This, however, entailed a series
of far-reaching domestic changes that included the elimination of the existing
parliamentary system, the creation of a strong hereditary monarchy, and a
return to a modified form of the constitutional arrangements that Bismarck
had devised more than a half-century earlier. In the area of international
affairs, the VVVD called for the repudiation of Versailles, the restoration of
Germany’s colonial empire, and the creation of a greater German Reich
through the absorption of the German-speaking areas adjacent to Germany’s
postwar borders. Only the relatively moderate tone of the VVVD’s appeal for a
struggle against the Jewish spirit in scholarship, art, and the press distin-
guished its program from that of the Pan-Germans.128
The leadership of the VVVD rested in the hands of Fritz Geisler, a one-time
member of the DVP Reichstag delegation and a prominent figure in the
“yellow” trade-union movement.129 The yellow unions were company unions
that had been established in the last decade before the outbreak of World War
I in an attempt to check the spread of the Christian and socialist labor
movements.130 In the late summer of 1920 Geisler succeeded in consolidating
what remained of the prewar yellow unions into a new organization calling
itself the National Federation of German Unions (Nationalverband deutscher

125
Schultz Oldendorf (Zentralstelle Vaterländischer Verbände), circular of 11 Dec. 1922,
NL Westarp, Gärtringen, VN 86. See also James M. Diehl, “Von der ‘Vaterlandspartei’
zur ‘Nationalen Revolution.’ Die Vereinigten Vaterländischen Verbände Deutschlands
(VVVD) 1922 1932,” Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 33 (1985): 617 39.
126
“Richtlinien der Vereinigten vaterländischen Verbände Deutschlands,” May 1924,
BHStA Munich, Abt. IV, EWB, 10/2.
127
See Geisler’s remarks in “Ein Jahr Vereinigte vaterländische Verbände,” 26 Jan. 1924,
BHStA Munich, Abt. IV, EWB, 10/2, as well as Jahresbericht der Vereinigten Vaterlän
dischen Verbände Deutschlands für das Berichtsjahr 1923 (Berlin, n.d. [1924]), 3 4.
128
“Richtlinien der Vereinigten vaterländischen Verbände Deutschlands,” n.d. [May 1924],
BHStA Munich, Abt. IV, EWB, 10/2.
129
See Rüdiger von der Goltz, “Die vaterländische Verbände,” in Volk und Reich der
Deutschen, ed. Bernhard Harms, 3 vols. (Berlin, 1929): 2:155 77, esp. 173 77.
130
For further details, see Klaus J. Mattheier, Die Gelben. Nationale Arbeiter zwischen
Wirtschaftsfrieden und Streik (Düsseldorf, 1973).
   , –

Gewerkschaften). The purpose of this organization, as Geisler explained in a

speech in Hamburg in late August, was to promote Germany’s national
renewal by liberating the German worker from the spirit of self-interest that
had come to dominate both the socialist and Christian labor movements.131
But by the end of 1922 Geisler’s advocacy of the yellow labor unions had so
severely strained his ties to DVP national chairman Gustav Stresemann that he
left the party to join the more militantly anti-republican DNVP.132 Under
Geisler’s leadership, the VVVD struck a militantly anti-Marxist and antiso-
cialist tone that appealed to a broad cross-section of Germany’s conservative
and nationalist associational life. Among the more than the hundred or so
organizations affiliated with the VVVD were the Pan-German League, the
National Rural League, the German National Youth League, the National
Association of German Officers (Nationalverband Deutscher Offiziere), the
National League of German White-Collar Professional Associations (Reichs-
bund Deutscher Angestellten-Berufsverbände), the National Farm Workers’
League (Reichlandarbeiterbund), and the National Alliance of Patriotic
Workers’ Clubs (Reichsbund vaterländischer Arbeitervereine). More than
any other organization of its day, the VVVD served as a magnet to which
right-wing organizations of all kinds were immediately attracted.133
The VVVD’s rapid growth in the first year of its existence stemmed in no
small measure from its ability to capitalize upon the upsurge in national
feeling that had greeted the Franco-Belgian occupation of the Ruhr in January
1923. In appealing to this sentiment, the leaders of the VVVD made conveni-
ent use of the “stab-in-the-back legend” and exhorted the various elements on
the German Right to join forces in the struggle to free the Fatherland from the
liberal and Marxist forces they held responsible for Germany’s political and
military collapse. Racism and antisemitism, on the other hand, played a
relatively subordinate role in the VVVD’s political calculations and were never
as important in terms of its self-definition as they were for the Pan-German
League, the Young German Order, and other right-wing organizations.
Though by no means free of antisemitic prejudice, Geisler and the leaders of

131
Fritz Geisler, Die nationale, wirtschaftsfriedliche Gewerkschaftsbewegung beim Wieder
aufbau Deutschlands. Rede gehalten im National Klub von 1919 in Hamburg am 31.
August 1920 (Hamburg, n.d. [1920]), 39 40. See also Geisler’s letter to the VVVD,
Feb. 1, 1923, PA AA Berlin, NL Stresemann, 256/145106 08, as well as Geisler to
Stresemann, 25 Aug. 1922, BA Koblenz, R 45 II, 37/133 35, and Geisler to Jarres,
1 Sept. 1924, BA Koblenz, NL Jarres, 54.
132
See Geisler, “Eine Warnung an die Deutsche Volkspartei,” Das freie Wort, 10 Sept. 1922,
no. 37, as well as Geisler’s letter to Heyl von Herrensheim, 6 Dec. 1922, BA Koblenz, NL
Dingeldey, 72/103. On the final break between Geisler and the DVP in February 1923,
see Stresemann to Uebel, 15 Mar. 1923, PA AA Berlin, NL Stresemann, 257/145240 42,
as well as the report in the Nationalliberale Correspondenz, 15 Mar. 1923, no. 22.
133
Goltz, “Die vaterländische Verbände,” 155 73.
    

the VVVD argued that the “Jewish problem” was secondary to the larger task
of uniting all national forces into a comprehensive political front capable of
freeing the German people from the domination of Social Democracy at home
and the shackles of Versailles abroad.134

Born of the sense of national desperation that accompanied Germany’s mili-

tary defeat, the patriotic societies took their place alongside political parties
and economic interest organizations as the third pillar of organized conserva-
tism in the Weimar Republic. To be sure, relations between these three pillars
were fraught with all sorts of tensions, and it was never easy to reconcile the
brand of radical nationalism articulated by the patriotic societies to the more
mundane concerns that political parties and economic interest organizations
faced as part of their everyday agenda. Indeed, the fate of political conserva-
tism in the Weimar Republic would depend upon the extent to which it
succeeded in harnessing the activism of the patriotic societies to its own
political agenda. At no point would this challenge be more daunting than
during the crisis year of 1923. The descent into hyperinflation, the Franco-
Belgian occupation of the Ruhr, the omnipresent specter of Communism, the
challenge of Bavarian separatism, and the rise of National Socialism
culminating in the abortive “Beer Hall putsch” of November 1923 would all
create new opportunities for the leaders of both the German National People’s
Party and the other organizations that stood on Germany’s radical Right. At
the same time, these developments would only exacerbate the rift between
those on the German Right who were now prepared to cooperate with
Germany’s fledgling republican order for fear of what might happen if they
failed to do so and those who remained implacably opposed to any accommo-
dation with the hated Weimar system and indeed hoped to use the ever
deepening crisis of 1923 to overthrow that system.

134
Reichsgeschäftsstelle der vereinigten vaterländischen Verbände Deutschlands, Deutsch
völkische Freiheitspartei und vaterländische Bewegung. Ein Wort der Abwehr und Mah
nung zur Einigkeit der vaterländischen Bewegung (Berlin, 1923).
 6

1923 – A Missed Opportunity?

The years from 1919 to 1923 were heady years for the German Right. The
general crisis that surrounded the founding of the Weimar Republic provided
the various organizations on the German Right with an opportunity to adjust
to the dramatic changes that had taken place in Germany’s political structure
as a result of the November Revolution and to lay the foundations for a
sustained offensive against Germany’s fledgling republican institutions. Not
only had the founders of the Weimar Republic left the social and economic
bases of conservative power essentially intact, but the fact that the various
factions in the German National People’s Party were united in opposition to
the new political order temporarily shielded it from the threat that acceptance
of political responsibility would have posed to its unity. The DNVP’s remark-
able success in the early years of the Weimar Republic stemmed in no small
measure from its ability to establish itself as the party of “national opposition”
to the dramatic changes that had taken place in Germany’s domestic and
international situation following its defeat in World War I.1 Its unconditional
opposition to the Weimar Republic and the policy of fulfillment had allowed
the DNVP to reclaim much of the nationalist terrain that political conserva-
tism had surrendered in the last years of the Wilhelmine Empire and to forge a
new alliance between governmental conservatives and radical nationalists. At
the same time, the DNVP was able to reach across the ecological limits of
prewar German conservatism to embrace soal groups that had previously
remained outside its orbit. Much of the DNVP’s success in this regard was
fueled by the runaway inflation of the early 1920s. What remained uncertain
as the German inflation drew to its frenetic climax in the summer and fall of
1923 was not the DNVP’s growing popularity as an alternative to the more
moderate bourgeois parties but whether or not the DNVP would be able to
translate its political mandate into an effective and coherent program of
political action.

1
See the official party history by Axel von Freytagh Loringhoven, Deutschnationale Volks
partei (Berlin, 1931), 10 16, as well as Max Maurenbrecher, Die Taktik der Parteien
1920 1924. Betrachtungen über die parlamentarische Politik der nationalen Opposition
(Berlin, 1924), esp. 45 49, 93 95.


  –   ? 

Coping with Inflation

The social and political consequences of the German inflation were enormous.
The inflation originated not just in wartime shortages of food, raw materials,
and other commodities but, more importantly, in the government’s decision to
finance the war by selling war bonds instead of increasing direct or indirect
taxation beyond the limits of the tax model established in the 1913 budget. By
the end of the war Germany’s national indebtedness – mostly to its own
citizens and domestic financiers – had reached unmanageable proportions,
with the result that monetary depreciation had become an inescapable fact of
German life. Given the fact that the military victory with which the German
government had planned to repay this debt failed to materialize, the govern-
ments of the early Weimar Republic were left with no alternative but to repay
the debt with currency that was no longer worth as much as it had been when
the debt was originally contracted.2 An inflationary fiscal policy also had
political benefits in that it enabled the German economy to remain more or
less at full employment and thus avoided the mass unemployment with all of
its attendant consequences that had accompanied economic demobilization in
Great Britain and France.3 The acceptance of the London Ultimatum in May
1921 and the establishment of Germany’s reparations burden at 132 billion
gold marks dramatically intensified the inflationary pressures already at work
in the German economy and set the stage for a new round of attacks on the
stability of the German mark in the summer and fall of 1921.4 Efforts to
stabilize the mark – most notably in the spring of 1922 when the Wirth
government fashioned a tax compromise designed to bring the inflationary
spiral of the postwar era to a sudden halt – failed in part for the lack of a
domestic consensus that was willing to accept the higher taxes it would have
taken to balance the budget but also because the Allies were unwilling to
negotiate a reduction in Germany’s reparations burden that would have
afforded the German government the time it needed to put its financial house
back in order.5 The assassination of German Foreign Minister Walther

2
On the German inflation, see the authoritative synthesis by Gerald D. Feldman, The Great
Disorder: Politics, Economics, and Society in the German Inflation, 1914 1924 (Oxford,
1993), 25 96. On its international context, see Charles S. Maier, Recasting Bourgeois
Europe: Stabilization in France, Germany, and Italy in the Decade after World War I
(Princeton, NJ, 1975), 358 63, 385 86.
3
Gerald D. Feldman, “The Political Economy of Germany’s Relative Stabilization during
the 1920/21 World Depression,” in Die deutsche Inflation. Eine Zwischenbilanz/The
German Inflation Reconsidered, ed. by Gerald D. Feldman, Carl Ludwig Holtfrerich,
Gerhard A. Ritter, and Peter Christian Witt (Berlin and New York, 1982), 180 206.
4
Feldman, Great Disorder, 309 417.
5
For further details, see Peter Christian Witt, “Staatliche Wirtschaftspolitik in Deutschland
1918 bis 1923. Entwicklung und Zerstörung einer modernen wirtschaftspolitischen
   , –

Rathenau by right-wing extremists in the summer of 1922 destroyed the last

vestige of international confidence in Germany’s ability to restore fiscal and
economic solvency and accelerated the flight of foreign capital from the mark
into more stable currencies. As a result, the inflation rapidly degenerated into a
hyperinflation that over the course of the next sixteen months was to reduce
the German mark to an infinitesimal fraction of its original worth.6
The net effect of the inflation was to accelerate the disintegration of those
social strata that constituted the backbone of the German middle class and to
intensify the degree of social and economic antagonism at all levels of German
society. The social fabric of German political life dissolved into a Hobbesian
state of bellum omnium contra omnes with organized economic interests
serving as the principal solvent. In the meantime, the inflation greatly radical-
ized those social strata upon which the more moderate bourgeois parties
depended for the bulk of their popular and electoral support. This was
particularly true of the two liberal parties, both of which saw the social
constituencies upon which they had traditionally relied decimated by the
inflation.7 The leaders of the DNVP, on the other hand, moved quickly to
mobilize middle-class frustration over the deteriorating economic situation
into a mandate for political change. The fact that the second wave of inflation
in the summer and fall of 1921 coincided with the publication of Allied
reparations demands made it easy for the Nationalists to explain the inflation
as a consequence of Allied intransigence on reparations and the compliance of
Germany’s republican government in fulfilling the terms of the Versailles
Peace Treaty and London Ultimatum. With Helfferich setting the tone, the
leaders of the DNVP made reparations the ultimate cause of the inflationary
spiral that was pressing so heavily upon the German middle classes. At the
same time, Helfferich and the DNVP vehemently opposed any new taxes on
Germany’s propertied classes that might have alleviated the government’s
budgetary crisis.8 From Helfferich’s perspective, not only was the inflation
part of a conspiracy by the Social Democrats and Allied powers to confiscate
the wealth of Germany’s propertied classes for the payment of reparations, but
those who supported the policy of fulfillment were witting accomplices in the
expropriation of the German middle classes. Only by ending the policy of
fulfillment and the system of government that had made it possible, argued

Strategie,” in Die deutsche Inflation/The German Inflation Reconsidered, ed. Feldman et al.,
(Berlin and New York, 1982), 151 79.
6
Feldman, Great Disorder, 513 697.
7
Larry Eugene Jones, “Democracy and Liberalism in the German Inflation: The Crisis of a
Political Movement, 1918 1924,” in Konsequenzen der Inflation/Consequences of Inflation,
ed. Gerald D. Feldman, Carl Ludwig Holtfrerich, Gerhard A. Ritter, and Peter Christian
Witt (Berlin, 1989), 3 43.
8
Karl Helfferich, Steuerkompromiß und nationale Opposition. Reichstagsreden vom 16. und
20. März 1922 (Berlin, 1922).
  –   ? 

Helfferich, could one put an end to the suffering of the German middle
classes.9
By blaming the inflation and the economic misery it had left in its wake on
the Allies and those domestic politicians who were committed to fulfilling
Allied reparations demands, the Nationalists were able to shift the focus of
middle-class anxiety over the collapse of the German currency from the
economic to the political arena. The implicit assumption that lay at the heart
of the Nationalist position was that only by bringing the DNVP into the
government would it be possible to marshal the national resources necessary
to put an end to the policy of fulfillment and to resist future reparations
demands. In a larger sense, however, this presupposed a fundamental realign-
ment of the existing party system. For at the heart of Germany’s political
weakness, argued the Nationalists, lay a party system in which the balance of
power rested with the parties of the middle or parliamentary center. Not only
did these parties lack the resolve to join the DNVP in the creation of a united
national front capable of bringing the revolutionary state of affairs that had
existed in Germany since November 1918 to a close,10 but the parties that
supported the Weimar Republic were all in such a state of internal dissolution
that neither the unification of the Independent and Majority Socialists nor the
creation of the Coalition of the Constitutional Middle (Arbeitsgemeinschaft
der verfassungstreuen Mitte) by the DDP, DVP, Center, and Bavarian People’s
Party in the summer of 1922 could provide Germany with the political
stability it so sorely needed. Only through the creation of a united German
Right on the broadest possible basis, the Nationalists insisted, could one
reconcile the class antagonisms that had become so deeply embedded in the
fabric of German society in the spirit of a genuine Volksgemeinschaft.11

Cuno, the DNVP, and the Patriotic Right

On 14 November 1922 the Wirth government submitted its resignation after
efforts to bring the German People’s Party into the cabinet had foundered on
the opposition of the Majority Socialists. Two days later Reich President

9
See Karl Helfferich, Deutschlands Not und Rettung. Reichstagsrede gehalten am 26. Januar
1923 (Berlin, 1923), and Karl Helfferich, Steuern, Geldentwertung und Sozialdemokratie.
Reichstagsrede gehalten am 15. März 1923 (Berlin, 1923), as well as Helfferich’s most
sustained polemic against the policy of fulfillment in Karl Helfferich, Die Politik der
Erfüllung (Berlin, 1922), esp. 81 90.
10
Georg von Below, Politik der Mitte Politik der Schwäche, Deutschnationale Flugschrift,
no. 129 (Berlin, 1922), 7 8.
11
For example, see Walther Lambach, Die breitere Front im politischen Kampf, Deutschna
tionale Flugschrift, no. 132 (Berlin, 1922), 22 23, and Max Wallraf, Die deutschen
Parteien am Scheidewege! Rede auf dem vierten Deutschnationalen Reichsparteitage in
Görlitz am 28. Oktober 1922, Deutschnationale Flugschrift, no. 139 (Görlitz, 1922), 4 11.
   , –

Friedrich Ebert entrusted the task of forming a new government to Wilhelm

Cuno, the politically unaffiliated general director of the Hamburg-America
Line (Hamburg-Amerikanische Packetfahrt-Actien-Gesellschaft or HAPAG).
Chosen primarily because of his business and economic acumen, Cuno
announced the formation of a new government consisting of representatives
from the three parties of the Coalition of the Constitutional Middle and the
Bavarian People’s Party on 22 November. The DNVP party leadership greeted
the fall of the Wirth government with a collective sigh of relief and welcomed
Cuno’s appointment as chancellor. Cuno was the first chancellor in Weimar’s
short history who enjoyed close personal ties to the leaders of the DNVP. Both
Westarp and Helfferich could look back upon a long and warm relationship
with both Cuno and his foreign minister, Frederic von Rosenberg, and they
moved quickly to bring DNVP party chairman Oskar Hergt into their circle of
confidence. At the same time, the Nationalists remained deeply suspicious of
the chancellor’s ties to Reich President Ebert and the four middle parties that
had come together in the Coalition of the Constitutional Middle, and they
vigorously resisted efforts by the presidential palace to draw the Social Demo-
crats into the governmental coalition.12 As a result, the declaration of support
with which Hergt greeted the new cabinet upon its presentation to the
Reichstag on 24 November 1922 was tempered by private misgivings on the
part of Westarp and other party leaders about its ability to pursue an inde-
pendent course of action.13
All of this dramatically changed when Germany was declared in default on
the payment of reparations and French and Belgian troops occupied the Ruhr
on 11 January 1923. The leaders of the DNVP fully anticipated the Allied
action and had already begun to prepare the public for the struggle that lay
ahead with appeals for national unity in face of the threat that occupation of
the Ruhr posed to the existence of the Reich.14 The DNVP rallied quickly to
the support of the Cuno government and worked behind the scenes to stiffen
its resolve to carry the policy of passive resistance in the Ruhr to a successful
conclusion.15 This was particularly true of Helfferich, who had served as
Cuno’s superior in the Office of the Treasury during the war and whose views

12
Manuscript of Westarp’s unpublished memoir from 1944 45, “Der Ruhrkampf. Kapitel
1: Regierung Cuno,” NL Westarp, Gärtringen, VN 93, 1 5.
13
Ibid., 7 9. See also the DNVP’s statement on the formation of the Cuno government, [24]
Nov. 1922, BA Berlin, R 8005, 9/114 19, as well as Brauer to Heydebrand, 1 Dec. 1922,
NL Westarp, Gärtringen, II/83.
14
For example, see Helffferich, “Um Leben und Tod,” Der deutsche Führer. Nationale
Blätter für Politik und Kultur 2, no. 3 (Feb. 1923): 63 65. See also Westarp, “Der
Ruhrkampf. Kapitel 1: Regierung Cuno,” NL Westarp, Gärtringen, VN 93, 32 38.
15
See Hergt’s memorandum of 3 Feb. 1923 of a meeting with Cuno on the previous day, BA
Berlin, R 8005, 2/36, as well as Brauer to Heydebrand, 21 Mar. 1923, NL Westarp,
Gärtringen, II/83.
  –   ? 

on foreign policy and reparations coincided closely with those of the new
chancellor. Helfferich not only exhorted the government in public to respond
to the Allied occupation of the Ruhr with vigorous and decisive action,16 but
he consulted with Cuno and other cabinet officials on a regular basis through
the spring and early summer of 1923 in an effort to shore up their support for
efforts in the Ruhr at a time when the struggle was not going as well as they
had hoped.17 At the same time, Helfferich and the DNVP party leadership
pressed the other parties from the Social Democrats to the racists on the
DNVP’s right to unite behind the chancellor in his struggle to save the Ruhr
from Allied aggression. National unity, in the eyes of Westarp and his associ-
ates, constituted an indispensable prerequisite for success in the Ruhr, and
they were unsparing in their attacks against the German Left for having placed
partisan political interests before the struggle to preserve Germany’s territorial
integrity from Allied designs on the Ruhr.18
Throughout all of this, the leaders of the DNVP pursued a policy of
“tempered opposition” with respect to the Cuno cabinet. What this meant
was trying to keep the chancellor in power as long as possible and working
through him to strengthen the backbone of resistance in the Ruhr.19 At the
same time, Westarp and the DNVP party leadership worked behind the scenes
to restrain the more militantly anti-republican elements on their party’s right
wing from attacking the Cuno government too aggressively for its failure to
check the fall of the mark or break the deadlock in the Ruhr. But if Helfferich
and Westarp were able to soften criticism of Cuno within the ranks of the
DNVP, neither they nor anyone else in the party were able to do much to
dampen the aspirations of Germany’s patriotic Right. With Fritz Geisler
setting the tone, the newly founded United Patriotic Leagues of Germany
immediately tried to position itself at the forefront of the national opposition
to the Franco-Belgian occupation of the Ruhr. But the VVVD’s propaganda
was directed less against the occupying powers than against the Social Demo-
crats for having allegedly undermined the German worker’s will to resist. To
address this situation, the VVVD sponsored the creation of local action
committees in the Ruhr for the three-fold purpose of countering the effects
of socialist subversion, destroying the French front in the Ruhr, and

16
Helfferich, “Entschlossenheit im Ruhrkampf und Aktivität in der Außenpolitik,” 18
Apr. 1923, in Karl Helfferich, Reichstagsreden 1922 1924, ed. J. W. Reichert (Berlin,
1925), 133 53.
17
Hergt to Westarp, 28 May 1923, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, II/9. See also Williamson,
Helfferich, 373 78.
18
For further details, see Westarp’s unpublished manuscript “Der Ruhrkampf. Kapitel 2:
Auftakt Januar 1923,” NL Westarp, Gärtringen, VN 93, 13 28.
19
Brauer to Heydebrand, 7 May 1923, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, II/84.
   , –

forwarding reports on the situation in the Ruhr to the VVVD leadership in

Berlin.20 At the same time, the VVVD attacked the leaders of Germany’s more
moderate bourgeois parties for having failed to recognize the true motives of
Social Democracy and for having deluded themselves into thinking that the
socialists could overcome the crass egoism of the free trade-unions to take
their place in the fight for German freedom.21 As it became increasingly clear
by the summer of 1923 that the policy of passive resistance had failed to free
the Ruhr from foreign occupation, the VVVD called upon its allies on the
patriotic Right to intensify their propaganda in order to prevent a complete
breakdown of resistance in the Ruhr.22
Nowhere was the role of the patriotic Right more controversial than in
Bavaria. The experience of the Munich soviet and its violent suppression in the
spring of 1919 had done much to radicalize Bavarian political culture and to
implant the fear of Bolshevism far more firmly in the psyche of Bavaria’s
propertied classes than in other parts of the country. After the Kapp putsch in
the spring of 1920 the BVP’s Gustav von Kahr, a political neophyte with close
ties to Bavaria’s paramilitary Right, assumed the post of Bavarian minister
president. Kahr had been in office less than a month when he created a
sensation by publicly raising the possibility that Bavaria might secede from
the Reich if Berlin caved into Allied pressure for the dissolution of the civilian
defense units, or Einwohnerwehren, and other paramilitary organizations that
had taken refuge in Bavaria.23 Although Kahr could not, in the final analysis,
shield the Einwohnerwehren from Allied demands for their dissolution and
eventually had to step down as Bavarian minister president in September
1921 in favor of the more compliant Count Hugo von Lerchenfeld,24 Bavaria
nevertheless became a haven for those on the radical Right who were prepared
to use force to overthrow the Weimar Republic and replace it with a more

20
VVVD Geschäftsstelle, “Bericht über die Zersetzungsversuche der Sozialdemokratie im
Ruhrrevier,” 1 Feb. 1923, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, VN 42. On the VVVD’s struggle in
the Ruhr, see Jahresbericht der Vereinigten Vaterländischen Verbände Deutschlands für
das Berichtsjahr 1923 (Berlin, n.d. [1924]), 6 14.
21
VVVD Geschäftsstelle, “Was wollen wir?,” Mar. 1923, NL Westarp, VN Gärtringen,
VN 42.
22
VVVD Geschäftsstelle, “Bericht über den Stand der Ruhrkampf,” 28 June 1923, NL
Westarp, VN Gärtringen, VN 42.
23
See Kahr’s remarks at a reception for the leaders of the civilian defense leagues, 9
Apr. 1920, Frankfurter Zeitung, 13 Apr. 1920, no. 267. See also Gustav von Kahr, Reden
zur bayerischen Politik. Ausgewählte Reden, Politische Zeitfragen, nos. 22 24 (Munich,
1920), esp. 384 91.
24
Wolfgang Zorn, Bayerns Geschichte im 20. Jahrhundert. Von der Monarchie zum Bundes
land (Munich, 1986), 240 45.
  –   ? 

authoritarian system of government.25 At the same time, Bavarian authorities

were vehemently opposed to the “Law for the Protection of the Republic” that
the Reichstag had adopted in the wake of Rathenau’s assassination and
steadfastly refused to execute its provisions against the right-wing organiza-
tions that had sought refuge in Bavaria.26 In the summer of 1922 twenty-one
of the patriotic and veteran associations that maintained a presence in Bavaria
came together to found the United Patriotic Leagues of Bavaria (Vereinigte
Vaterländische Verbände Bayerns or VVVB) with none other than the vener-
able Kahr as its honorary chairman. With “Through White-Blue against Red-
Gold-Black to Black-White-Red” as its motto, the founders of the VVVB
sought nothing less than to revoke the social and political legacy of the
November Revolution and restore the German imperial order beginning with
the restoration of the Wittelsbach dynasty in Bavaria.27
All of this had enormous implications for the future of the Bavarian Middle
Party, as the state chapter of the DNVP was generally known. Founded in the
immediate aftermath of the November Revolution, the BMP had officially
reconstituted itself as the DNVP’s Bavarian chapter shortly before the June
1920 Reichstag elections. The DNVP national leadership would invest a great
deal of energy and resources in establishing a foothold in Bavaria, a region in
which conservatives had not done particularly well before 1914. As it was, the
BMP’s organization was largely confined to predominantly Protestant Fran-
conia, and party leaders were eager to extend their party’s influence into
Upper Bavaria and those parts of the state with a predominantly Catholic
population. The choice of Munich as the site of the DNVP’s 1921 party
congress was part of a calculated attempt to achieve a breakthrough into the
ranks of Bavarian Catholics. Energized by Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber’s
caustic denunciation of the Weimar Constitution at the 1922 German Catholic
Congress (Deutscher Katholikentag) in Munich as a product of “perjury and
high treason” that bore the “mark of Cain,”28 the leaders of the DNVP’s Reich

25
For further details, see Bruno Thoß, Der Ludendorff Kreis 1919 1923. München als
Zentrum der mitteleuropäischen Gegenrevolution zwischen Revolution und Hitler Putsch
(Munich, 1978), and Gordon, Hitler and the Beer Hall Putsch, 3 21.
26
Gotthard Jasper, Der Schutz der Republik. Studien zur staatlichen Sicherung der Demo
kratie in der Weimarer Republik (Tübingen, 1963), 92 100.
27
Untitled report on the paramilitary Right in Bavaria, 28 Apr. 1923, BA Berlin, R 8005, 27/
69 71. See also the circular from the VVVB, 26 Oct. 1923, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, VN
42. For further details, see Gordon, Hitler and the Beer Hall Putsch, 88 119, and Hans
Fenske, Konservatismus und Rechtsradikalismus, 164 69.
28
Faulhaber’s remarks in Die Reden gehalten in den öffentlichen und geschlossenen Ver
sammlungen der 62. General Versammlung der Katholiken Deutschlands zu München 27.
bis 30. August 1922 (Würzburg, 1923), 4.
   , –

Catholic Committee hoped that this would provide them with a decisive
breakthrough into the ranks of Bavaria’s Catholic population.29
All of this came to naught as the racist crisis that erupted within the DNVP
in the summer and early fall of 1922 set the stage for a full-fledged fight for
control of the BMP between the party’s racist faction around Rudolf von
Xylander and Rudolf Buttmann and the state party chairman Hans Hilpert.
Although Hilpert, a secondary school teacher who had headed the party since
its founding in 1918, managed to hang on to his position as BMP’s chair-
man,30 the secession of Graefe-Goldebee and his associates at the DNVP’s
Görlitz party congress and the subsequent expulsion of the group around
Xylander and Buttmann from the BMP left the party vulnerable to the agita-
tion of a new player on the Bavarian scene, the National Socialist German
Workers’ Party under the leadership of Adolf Hitler. The NSDAP had made
significant gains ever since Hitler assumed control of the party in the summer
of 1921 and appealed in large part to precisely the same voters whom the BMP
hoped to attract. Hitler’s appeal was not lost upon the DNVP’s Bavarian
supporters, many of whom began to express a private admiration for his
tactical and oratorical skills at the same time that the BMP leadership were
becoming increasingly concerned about the inroads of Hitler’s party into the
ranks of the BMP.31 As the BMP’s situation continued to deteriorate through
the spring and early summer of 1923 with continued losses to the NSDAP in
places like Kulmbach, Bayreuth, and Hof, its future effectiveness as a force in
Bavarian political life became increasingly uncertain.32

From Cuno to Stresemann

As it became clear by the summer of 1923 that passive resistance had failed to
dislodge the French and Belgians in the Ruhr and that the costs of passive
resistance had made it impossible to stabilize the German mark, Cuno’s hold
on power became increasingly tenuous. Not only had the Allied rejection of

29
Lejeune Jung to Westarp, 28 Aug. 1922, “Dokumentation Lejeune Jung,” StA Paderborn,
S2/125/32.
30
Report on the extraordinary BMP party congress, 18 Nov. 1922, BA Berlin, R 8005, 26/
56 60.
31
Minutes of the BMP executive committee, 20 Dec. 1922, BA Berlin, R 8005, 26/46 49. On
the appeal of Hitler to the DNVP’s Bavarian supporters, see Traub, “Die Hitlersche
Bewegung,” Eiserner Blätter 4, no. 33 (11 Feb. 1923): 501 05, as well as Traub to Tirpitz,
21 Oct. 1922, BA MA Freiburg, Nachlass Alfred von Tirpitz, 265/110 12.
32
Hopp to Weilnböck, 13 Apr. 1923, BA Koblenz, NL Weilnböck, 4c. For two exemplary
local studies, see Robert F. Hopwood, “Mobilization of a Nationalist Community,
1919 23,” German History 10 (1992): 149 76, and Alex Burkhardt, “Postear ‘Existential
Conflict’ and Right Wing Politics in Hof an der Saale, 1918 1924,” German History 36
(2018): 522 43.
  –   ? 

the government’s reparations note from 2 May 1923 made Germany’s diplo-
matic isolation more apparent than ever, but by late summer the mark had
fallen to a mere twentieth of what it had been worth only months before. At
the same time, there were ominous signs that support for passive resistance
was beginning to unravel. In late July a wave of wildcat strikes and rioting
spread throughout the Ruhr and parts of unoccupied Germany, with the result
that the Social Democrats began to waver in their support of passive resistance.
No less ominous were the growing strength of the radical Left in Saxony and
Thuringia and the increasing popularity of separatist movements in Bavaria
and the Rhineland.33 As rumors of Cuno’s impending resignation became
more and more persistent in the first week of August 1923, Helfferich met with
the chancellor on 10 August in an ultimately futile attempt to persuade him to
remain in office and take the lead in introducing a new currency based upon
the value of Germany’s rye production, a move that would have greatly
enhanced the status and influence of the landowning aristocracy.34 At the
same time, Germany’s paramilitary Right and their patrons in Berlin and
Munich were busy at work hatching plans for a military coup and the
establishment of a national dictatorship more or less along the lines of what
Benito Mussolini had accomplished the previous fall in Italy.35 The leaders of
the DNVP did little to discourage these schemes, no doubt expecting that the
collapse of the Cuno government would remove the last obstacle on their road
to power. But when Reich President Ebert chose not one of their own but the
DVP’s Gustav Stresemann to assume responsibility for the formation of a new
cabinet following Cuno’s resignation on 11 August 1923, the leaders of the
German Right suddenly found themselves confronted with a new situation
that required an entirely new set of strategic calculations.36
Stresemann and the leaders of the DVP had begun to lay the foundation for
a transfer of power in early July 1923 by suggesting that under certain
circumstances they were prepared to discuss sharing governmental responsi-
bility with the Social Democrats.37 Realizing that Germany could ill afford the

33
On the plight of the Cuno government, see Maier, Recasting Bourgeois Europe, 364 73,
and Rupieper, Cuno and Reparations, 174 99.
34
On Helfferich’s meeting with Cuno, see Westarp’s unpublished manuscript entitled
“Inflation” from 1944 45, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, VN 93, 30 31. See also Cuno to
Gildemeister, 26 Feb. 1924, StA Hamburg, records of the Hapag Lloyd Rederei, Handak
ten Cuno, 1489.
35
For further details, see Raffael Scheck, “Politics of Illusion: Tirpitz and Right Wing
Putschism, 1922 1924,” German Studies Review 18 (1995): 29 49. See also Bruno Thoß,
“Nationale Rechte, militärische Führung und Diktaturfrage in Deutschland 1913 1923,”
Militärgeschichtliche Mitteilungen 42 (1987): 27 76.
36
On Cuno’s resignation, see Rupieper, Cuno and Reparations, 211 17.
37
Stresemann’s speech before the DVP central executive committee, 7 July 1923, in
Nationalliberalismus in der Weimarer Republik, ed. Kolb and Richter, 1:467 74. For
   , –

strain of a prolonged cabinet crisis, the Social Democrats indicated that they
too were prepared to enter a government of the Great Coalition with a
nonsocialist as chancellor.38 Although the idea of coalition with the Social
Democrats met with strong opposition from the leaders of the DVP’s right
wing, Stresemann persuaded a majority of his colleagues at a meeting of
the DVP Reichstag delegation on 10 August 1923 to seek a government of
the Great Coalition with a nonsocialist as chancellor should efforts to keep the
Cuno government in office fail.39 Ignoring pressure from within his own party,
Ebert accepted the recommendation of the Coalition of the Constitutional
Middle and entrusted Stresemann with the task of forming a new government.
With remarkable dispatch, Stresemann was able to organize his cabinet in time
for its installation in office on the evening of 13 August 1923. To be sure,
Stresemann would have preferred the formation of a national unity front
reaching from the Social Democrats to the Nationalists, but the latter, in
Stresemann’s eyes, had taken themselves out of the running as a prospective
coalition partner by virtue of their relentless and unscrupulous agitation
against the Social Democrats.40 Under the circumstances, Stresemann felt that
the Nationalists had left him with no alternative but to reach an accommoda-
tion with the Social Democrats that saw them receive four cabinet posts,
including the all-important ministries of finance and interior.41
The Nationalists were infuriated by the way in which they had been passed
over in favor of the Social Democrats in the reorganization of the national
cabinet. They were particularly concerned that Stresemann’s appointment as
chancellor foreshadowed the end of passive resistance in the Ruhr,42 and in his
official interpellation in the Reichstag on 14 August Hergt not only criticized
the new government’s dependence upon the Social Democrats in the Reich
and Prussia but exhorted it to intensify the struggle against the French in the
Ruhr.43 But the party was far from united in its position on the Stresemann
cabinet. At a meeting on 14 August the DNVP Reichstag delegation had split

further details, see Wright, Stresemann, 195 212, and Richter, Deutsche Volkspartei,
267 72.
38
On Stresemann’s contacts with the Social Democrats, see his letters to Kempkes, 29 July
1923, PA AA Berlin, NL Stresemann, 260/145780 84, and Leidig, 29 July 1923, ibid.,
145788 90.
39
Minutes of the DVP Reichstag delegation, 10 Aug. 1923, PA AA Berlin, NL Stresemann,
87/171264 65.
40
Henry Bernhard, Das Kabinett Stresemann (Berlin, 1924), 5.
41
For the composition of the first Stresemann cabinet, see Gustav Stresemann, Vermächt
nis. Der Nachlaß in drei Bänden, ed. Henry Bernhard and with the collaboration of
Walter Goetz, 3 vols. (Berlin, 1932 33), I:88 89.
42
Unpublished memoir by Westarp from 1945, “Ruhrkampf und Regierung Stresemann,”
NL Westarp, Gärtringen, VN 93, 1 3.
43
Ibid., 82 83.
  –   ? 

down the middle in a vote on the wording of its official response to the
formation of the Stresemann cabinet and ultimately opted for the more
measured tone that Hergt had taken in his interpellation before the
Reichstag.44 For the moment, the DNVP party leadership was content to
temper its criticism of the Stresemann cabinet in the hope that some sort of
accommodation with the new government might still be possible. As a concili-
atory gesture, Stresemann invited Helfferich to meet with members of his
cabinet on 18 August to present the outlines of his proposal for stabilization of
the mark.45 But a formal proposal that Helfferich submitted to the cabinet
three days later was referred to a committee of experts, where it languished
until the confusion surrounding the formation of the new government could
resolve itself. In the meantime, the Social Democrats launched a major press
attack against the Helfferich proposal under the slogan “Los von Helfferich
und seinem Projekt.” From the DNVP’s perspective, these attacks were polit-
ically motivated and designed, in Westarp’s words, “to keep this exceptionally
energetic and dangerous leader of the national opposition [i.e. Helfferich]
from showing the governing majority the way to salvation” and thus prevent
his party from receiving the “credit and fame to which it was entitled.”46
Whatever its motives might have been, the Social Democratic campaign
against Helfferich’s currency proposal was not without effect upon the coali-
tion parties, with the result that it never made it out of the committee to which
it had been referred.47
The Nationalists responded to their exclusion from the Stresemann cabinet
and its dismissal of Helfferich’s proposal for a reform of the German currency
with a fourteen-point action program on 28 August 1923. The “Aktionspro-
gramm der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei” denounced the Stresemann gov-
ernment for its dependence upon the Social Democrats and called for a
vigorous foreign policy aimed at intensifying national resistance in the Ruhr
and Rhineland. At the same time, the Nationalists warned against a second
German revolution and demanded measures to restore of the authority of the
state not only by making it independent of the mood of the masses but, more
radically, by placing extraordinary powers in the hands of a special office that
could “save the honor and future of the German people” free from the pressure

44
Entry in Gallwitz’s diary, 14 Aug. 1923, BA MA Freiburg, NL Gallwitz, 39.
45
Reichert’s protocol of a meeting between representatives of the Stresemann cabinet and a
three man delegation from the DNVP, 18 Aug. 1923, in Akten der Reichskanzlei: Die
Kabinette Stresemann I u. II. 13. August bis 6. Oktober 1923. 6. Oktober bis. 30. November
1923, ed. Karl Dietrich Erdmann and Martin Vogt, 2 vols. (Boppard am Rhein, 1978),
1:23 29.
46
Westarp, “Inflation,” NL Westarp, Gärtringen, VN 93, 33 34.
47
For further details, see Claus Dieter Krohn, “Helfferich contra Hilferding. Konservative
Geldpolitik und die sozialen Folgen der deutschen Inflation 1918 1923,” Vierteljahrs
schrift für Sozial und Wirtschaftsgeschichte 62 (1975): 62 92.
   , –

of the streets, parties, and party coalitions. At the same time, the program also
advocated a number of specific measures aimed at providing tax relief for
agriculture, creating an “honest currency,” improving domestic productivity,
and halting, if not reversing, the flood of alien – in particular east European
Jewish – elements into Germany.48 The publication of this program repre-
sented nothing less than a declaration of war against the Stresemann cabinet
and committed the DNVP to a course of unconditional opposition to both its
domestic and foreign policies.49
Within the DNVP, Stresemann’s most determined opponent was Alfred
Hugenberg, whose enmity towards the new chancellor dated back to the last
years of the Second Empire. Writing to the DVP’s Hugo Stinnes two days
before Stresemann’s appointment as chancellor, Hugenberg explained:
I have nothing against the person of Stresemann. But he has neither nerve
nor inner strength nor political instinct; in decisive moments (see his
vacillation at the time of the [London] Ultimatum) he never does the right
thing. In himself he embodies all that is weak and politically immature in
the German bourgeoisie. I think it is therefore highly likely if not
certain that if he becomes Reich Chancellor at this point in time, this
would be the fateful end [Verhängnis] of the German bourgeoisie.
I therefore implore you, before I travel away for the next forty eight
hours, to do your best to see that not he but [Albert] Vögler after all
I have to name another name becomes Reich Chancellor.50
Hugenberg’s hostility towards Stresemann had less to do with the latter’s
alleged lack of nerve or political instinct than with the fact that the two men
represented fundamentally different strategies for resolving the crisis in which
Germany found itself. Stresemann was convinced that the painful measures
necessary to stabilize the currency and restore economic productivity could be
implemented only on the basis of a broad parliamentary mandate that
included the Social Democrats as the representative of that group most likely
to bear the brunt of Germany’s fiscal and economic stabilization.51 Hugenberg,
on the other hand, was adamantly opposed to any sort of collaboration with
the Social Democrats and believed that the entire parliamentary system had to
be dismantled before Germany could begin its recovery from the deepening

48
Albrecht Philipp, Von Stresemann zu Marx. Sechs Monate deutschnationaler Politik
(August 1923 Januar 1924), Deutschnationale Flugschrift, no. 146 (Berlin, 1924), 4 8.
See also Westarp, “Ruhrkampf und Regierung Stresemann,” NL Westarp, Gärtringen, VN
93, 100.
49
For the mood in the DNVP, see Westarp to Helfferich, 1 Sept. 1923, NL Westarp,
Gärtringen, II/9, as well as the memorandum appended to Lindeiner Wildau to Hergt,
4 Sept. 1923, BA Berlin, R 8005, 2/32 35.
50
Hugenberg to Stinnes, 11 Aug. 1923, ACDP Sankt Augustin, NL Stinnes I 220/022/2.
51
Stresemann to Schultz, 9 Oct. 1923, PA AA Berlin, NL Stresemann, 87/171367 69.
  –   ? 

economic crisis.52 Hugenberg also disagreed with the fundamental premise of

Stresemann’s foreign policy by insisting that Germany should not negotiate
with the Allies over the revision of Versailles and the reduction of her
reparations burden but should repudiate them outright.53 Underlying these
differences lay an even more fundamental difference in that Hugenberg was
fully prepared to use the crisis that had descended upon Germany to destroy
the republican system of government while Stresemann remained deeply
committed to the principles of parliamentary government and eventually
hoped to stabilize the Weimar Republic by winning the cooperation of the
German Right.
The conflict between Stresemann and Hugenberg was to become the defin-
ing feature of German bourgeois politics for the next half decade. In his efforts
to undercut Stresemann’s position as head of the German government,
Hugenberg found ready allies in the chancellor’s own party, where no fewer
than twenty-two members of the DVP Reichstag delegation had registered
their disapproval of Stresemann’s coalition with the Social Democrats by
abstaining in the formal vote of confidence that took place in the Reichstag
on 14 August 1923.54 The driving force behind the anti-Stresemann fronde in
the DVP was Stinnes, who had been on a collision course with the party leader
ever since he entered the Reichstag in the summer of 1920.55 As one of
Germany’s most powerful industrialists, Stinnes was convinced that the stabil-
ization of the German currency should not take place until certain conditions
designed to improve the nation’s industrial productivity had been satisfied.
First and foremost among those measures was a repeal of the eight-hour day, a
reform that organized labor had rightfully come to regard as the most import-
ant social achievement of the November Revolution.56 Stinnes opposed Stre-
semann’s “Great Coalition” with the Social Democrats for the simple reason
that the composition of the new government would prevent it from enacting
the reforms he thought essential for Germany’s economic recovery. Neither
the appointment of Rudolf Hilferding, a prominent Social Democratic fiscal
specialist, to the all-important ministry of finance nor the fact that Hans von

52
Hugenberg, “Parteien und Parlamentarismus,” in Alfred Hugenberg, Streiflichter aus
Vergangenheit und Gegenwart (Berlin, 1927), 79 83.
53
Hugenberg, “Locarno,” ibid., 88 91.
54
For further details, see Jones, German Liberalism, 197, and Richter, Deutsche Volkspartei,
273 75.
55
Gerald D. Feldman, “Hugo Stinnes, Gustav Stresemann, and the Politics of the DVP in
the Early Weimar Republic,” in Gestaltung des Politischen. Festschrift für Eberhard Kolb,
ed. Wolfram Pyta and Ludwig Richter (Berlin, 1998), 421 42.
56
See Hugo Stinnes, Mark Stabilisierung und Arbeitsleistung. Rede gehalten am 9.
November 1922 im Reichswirtschaftsrat (Berlin, 1922), as well as the memorandum of
his conversation with Stresemann, 19 Mar. 1923, PA AA Berlin, NL Stresemann, 257/
145243 45.
   , –

Raumer, the DVP’s most eloquent spokesman for cooperation with the Social
Democrats, had been entrusted with the ministry of economics helped assuage
the fears of Stinnes and his associates that, if Stresemann was to have his way,
the stabilization of the mark would take place on terms they could ill afford to
accept.57
At a meeting of the DVP Reichstag delegation on 12 September 1923,
Stinnes fired the first salvo in what would quickly develop into a virtual
rebellion on the party’s right wing when he attacked the national government
for its passivity during the past five weeks and warned that if it did not take
immediate action to create more work, stabilize the currency, and remove the
left-wing governments in Saxony and Thuringia, then civil war would erupt in
the next fourteen days.58 With the termination of passive resistance in the
Ruhr, the campaign against Stresemann would become even more heated.
Stresemann’s announcement on 26 September 1923 that the government
would no longer support passive resistance in the Ruhr provoked a storm of
protest throughout right-wing circles across the country. The anti-Stresemann
forces in the DVP responded by intensifying their campaign against his
chancellorship and leadership of the party. At a meeting of the DVP Reichstag
delegation on 25 September – the day before the termination of passive
resistance was officially announced – Reinhold Quaatz, a Stinnes protégé with
close ties to Hugenberg, denounced the government’s decision as an act of
“capitulation ultima forma” that could only end in the formation of a separate
Rhenish state. Quaatz demanded nothing less than the repudiation of the
Versailles Peace Treaty and preparations for a struggle that Germany could
not yet afford to fight. “Whoever does not want to cooperate in these prepar-
ations in the nation at large,” continued Quaatz, “must be beaten to the
ground with a mailed fist [bewaffneter Hand].”59
Within the DNVP Stresemann’s decision to terminate passive resistance in
the Ruhr met with almost universal condemnation.60 As late as two days
before the official announcement terminating passive resistance in the Ruhr,
Westarp and his associates in the DNVP leadership had reason to believe that
Ernst Scholz, chairman of the DVP Reichstag delegation, and Karl Jarres,
Reich commissar for the occupied territories, would succeed in persuading
Stresemann to abandon plans for the termination of passive resistance and

57
For further details, see Peter Wulf, Hugo Stinnes. Wirtschaft und Politik 1918 1924
(Stuttgart, 1979), 425 65, and Gerald D. Feldman, Hugo Stinnes. Biographie eines Indus
triellen 1870 1924 (Munich, 1998), 884 905.
58
Minutes of the DVP Reichstag delegation, 12 Sept. 1923, PA AA Berlin, NL Stresemann,
87/171307.
59
Minutes of the DVP Reichstag delegation, 25 Sept. 1923, ibid., 87/171326 31. See also
Günter Arns, “Die Krise des Weimarer Parlamentarismus im Frühherbst 1923,” Der Staat
8 (1969): 181 216.
60
Entry in Gallwitz’s diary, 10 Sept. 1923, BA MA Freiburg, NL Gallwitz, 39.
  –   ? 

that he would break with the Social Democrats in favor of a coalition with the
DNVP.61 The Nationalists denounced the end of passive resistance as an act of
capitulation to the French and blasted the Stresemann cabinet for having
abandoned the struggle against the Allied occupation of the Ruhr without
significant concessions from the enemy. All of this the Nationalists attributed
to Stresemann’s dependence upon the Social Democrats, who had consistently
refused to join the DNVP and other groups on the German Right in a united
national front against Allied aggression in the Ruhr. By allying himself with
the Social Democrats, the Nationalists claimed, Stresemann had become their
willing accomplice in orchestrating Germany’s defeat in the Ruhr. Now,
Westarp argued in a lead article for the Neue Preußische (Kreuz-) Zeitung,
only a complete break of diplomatic relations with France could compensate
for the humiliation of defeat in the Ruhr, as he exhorted Stresemann to sever
all ties with the Social Democrats so that the next phase in the struggle for
Germany’s national rehabilitation could begin.62

Putschism on the Right

Stresemann’s decision to terminate passive resistance in the Ruhr galvanized
the German Right both within and outside of parliament. This was particu-
larly true in Bavaria, where the state government reacted to the termination
of passive resistance by declaring a state of emergency and investing Gustav
von Kahr with special executive powers as general state commissar. Kahr,
who had served as Bavarian minister president for fifteen months from the
spring of 1920 to the summer of 1921, was an outspoken monarchist with
little love for the Weimar Republic who had played a leading role in
organizing the various patriotic organizations that had taken refuge in
Bavaria into the United Patriotic Leagues of Bavaria.63 While Kahr’s appoint-
ment had the effect of placing an official stamp of approval on the patriotic
leagues’ struggle against the so-called Weimar system, it was also an attempt
to contain the more radical elements on the patriotic Right that had
coalesced behind the NSDAP’s Adolf Hitler and war hero Erich Ludendorff
in the German Combat League (Deutscher Kampfbund) at the beginning of
September 1923.64 Kahr’s appointment greatly exacerbated the tensions

61
Westarp, “Ruhrkampf und Regierung Stresemann,” NL Westarp, Gärtringen, VN 93, 87.
See also Brauer to Heydebrand, 24 Sept. 1923, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, II/84.
62
Westarp, “Ruhrkampf und Regierung Stresemann,” NL Westarp, Gärtringen, VN 93,
31 36. In a similar vein, see Wir Deutschnationalen und die Regierung Stresemann.
Sonderabdruck aus der “Hessischen Landeszeitung,” Darmstadt, Nr. 217 und 222 vom
17. und 22. September 1923 (n.p. [Darmstadt], n.d. [1923]).
63
Fenske, Konservatismus und Rechtsradikalismus, 188 223.
64
Kahr to Stegmann, 14 Oct. 1923, BA Koblenz, Nachlass Hermann Stegmann, 1.
   , –

between Munich and Berlin and revived the specter of a new constitutional
crisis when on 27 September Kahr refused to execute a federal order from
Reich Defense Minister Otto Gessler to ban the Völkischer Beobachter, the
official Nazi party organ, because of its seditious attacks against officials of
the central government.65

Figure 5. Photograph of Adolf Hitler at a rally of right wing forces at the Deutscher
Tag in Nuremburg, 1 September 1923. This is the earliest photograph of Hitler as leader
of the Nazi party. Reproduced with permission from the Bundesarchiv Berlin, Bild
102 16148

65
Gordon, Hitler and the Beer Hall Putsch, 212 37.
  –   ? 

It was against the background of these developments that the Reichswehr’s

Hans von Seeckt, one of the most enigmatic figures in Weimar politics,
became more actively involved in efforts to seek a solution to the crisis that
had paralyzed Germany’s parliamentary institutions. Ever since his appoint-
ment as chief of army command in the aftermath of the Kapp putsch, Seeckt
had pursued one overriding goal, namely, to keep the Reichswehr from being
drawn into the domestic political conflict so that at the proper moment it
could serve as an instrument of German foreign policy. As much as Seeckt
sought to immunize the Reichswehr against the factionalism of Weimar
political life, he also remained a profoundly conservative individual who
believed that monarchy was the form of government best suited to the
traditions and psychology of the German people.66 With the virtual collapse
of state authority during the course of 1923, Seeckt found himself under
growing pressure from various factions on the German Right to assume a
more active role in the search for a solution to the political crisis that
threatened the complete paralysis of Germany’s national life. On 23 September
Seeckt received Hergt and Westarp from the DNVP party leadership and
might have responded more favorably to their suggestion that he become
chancellor had it not been for the counsel of his closest advisors.67 But when
the Pan-German League’s Heinrich Claß implored him to take matters into his
own hands and seize power by force, Seeckt countered in such a way as to
suggest that he regarded the radical Right a threat to the unity of the Reich that
was every bit as serious as the radical Left.68 From beginning to end, Seeckt
remained unalterably opposed to the putschist ambitions of the radical Right.
As much as Seeckt was committed to preserving the political neutrality of the
Reichswehr, he deeply despised Stresemann and anxiously awaited the failure of
his misguided experiment with the Social Democrats. Whatever initial reticence
Seeckt may have had about becoming more actively involved in the domestic
political arena, however, quickly evaporated in the wake of Stresemann’s deci-
sion to terminate passive resistance in the Ruhr and the crisis this triggered in
the Reich’s relations with Bavaria. When the Bavarian government responded
to the termination of passive resistance by proclaiming a state of emergency,
Seeckt saw this as a clear and unequivocal threat to the unity of the Reich and
the authority of its central government. Despite his deep-seated aversion to
politics and his desire to preserve the political neutrality of the Reichswehr,
Seeckt began to entertain the possibility of assuming the chancellorship himself
and turned to Friedrich Minoux, one of Stinnes’s closest political associates, for

66
F. L. Carsten, The Reichwehr and Politics 1918 to 1923 (Oxford, 1966), 103 24. See also
William Mulligan, “The Reichswehr, the Republic, and the Primacy of Foreign Policy,
1918 1923,” German History 21 (2003): 347 68.
67
Hans Meier Welcker, Seeckt (Frankfurt, 1967), 374.
68
Ibid., 374 75. On Claß’s contacts with Seeckt, see Leicht, Claß, 315 23.
   , –

advice on fiscal and economic matters. Minoux’s influence on Seeckt’s thinking

was reflected in two lengthy memoranda – one entitled “Ein Regierungspro-
gramm” and the other “Entwürfe zur etwaigen Regierungsübernahme” – that
Seeckt composed on or around 27 September. Here Seeckt outlined a series of
far-reaching constitutional and economic changes that included a reform of
Germany’s federal structure aimed at ending the dualism between the Reich
and Prussia, an increase in the voting age to twenty-five, the creation of a
national chamber of estates (Reichs-Ständekammer), the prohibition of cartels
and trusts, the cancellation of collective labor agreements, and the replacement
of trade unions by occupational chambers (Berufskammer).69 The implemen-
tation of these reforms would be entrusted to a transitional cabinet, or direc-
torium, appointed by Reich President Ebert and vested with special emergency
powers authorized by Article 48 of the Weimar Constitution. The three men
whom Seeckt had in mind for the directorium were himself, Minoux, and the
former director of the Krupp Steel Works and current ambassador to the
United States, Otto Wiedfelt.70
In the meantime, events in Berlin were assuming a momentum of their own.
The newspapers under the control of Hugenberg and Stinnes had been quick
to seize upon the termination of passive resistance to launch a series of attacks
against the Social Democrats just as Hilferding and Raumer were putting the
finishing touches on a special enabling act designed to stabilize the mark.
Frustrated by the Social Democrats’ refusal to include a provision extending
the length of the work day in the proposed enabling act, Stinnes and his
supporters were so abusive in their attacks against the government’s economic
policy that on 2 October Hilferding and Raumer resigned from the cabinet.71
Two days later – thus at a point in the negotiations when it was still unclear
whether Stresemann would succeed in retaining the support of the Social
Democrats – the leaders of the DVP Reichstag delegation approached the
DNVP to determine if it would support a Stresemann cabinet without formal
ties to individual political parties and if it would vote to authorize the special
emergency powers the cabinet needed to deal with the rapidly deteriorating

69
These two documents, the originals of which are in BA MA Freiburg, Nachlass Hans von
Seeckt, 139/6 15, have been reprinted in Kabinette Stresemann, ed. Erdmann and Vogt,
2:1203 10.
70
Eberhard Kessel, “Seeckts politisches Programm von 1923,” in Spiegel der Geschichte.
Festgabe für Max Braubach zum 10. April 1964, ed. Konrad Repgen and Stephan Skalweit
(Münster, 1964), 887 914. On Seeckt’s plans for the creation of a directorium, see Meier
Welcker, Seeckt, 390 94, 400 04, 412 15, and Cartsen, Reichswehr and Politics, 153 95.
On the relationship between Stinnes and Seeckt, see Wulf, Stinnes, 452 65, and Feldman,
Stinnes, 889 93, 902 05.
71
Raumer to Stresemann, 2 Oct. 1923, in Kabinette Stresemann, ed. Erdmann and Vogt,
1:446.
  –   ? 

situation in central Germany and Bavaria.72 Just two days earlier all but one
member of the DNVP Reichstag delegation – Gustav Roesicke – had rejected
their party’s participation in a cabinet that was not formally tied to individual
political parties.73 Now, on the question of the DNVP’s participation in a
bourgeois coalition government under Stresemann’s leadership the delegation
split down the middle with twenty-seven deputies in support and twenty-eight
opposed.74 But all of this fell apart when on 6 October Stresemann, contrary to
all expectations, reached a compromise with the Social Democrats on the
contentious issue of work hours that secured their participation in a second
Stresemann cabinet with a profile decidedly more conservative than that of the
first.75
The Nationalists responded to this turn of events with a bitter invective that
was directed not just against the concept of the “Great Coalition” but against
the parliamentary system of government itself.76 None of this did much to
mollify Stresemann’s enemies on the right wing of his own party. Neither the
appointment of Count Gerhard von Kanitz and Karl Jarres – both politicians
with impeccable conservative credentials – to the ministries of agriculture and
interior respectively nor the transfer of Hans Luther, an influential municipal
politician with close ties to the Ruhr industrial establishment, from the
ministry of agriculture to the all-important ministry of finance could assuage
the frustration that Stinnes and the leaders of the DVP’s right wing felt over
the fact that, despite their best efforts, the Social Democrats were still members
of a national government in which the DVP was represented by no less than
the chairman of their own party.77

The Crisis Peaks

While the Stresemann cabinet used the emergency powers it had received on
13 October to order federal troops into Saxony and Thuringia to depose the

72
Westarp, “Ruhrkampf und Regierung Stresemann,” NL Westarp, Gärtringen, VN 93,
88 89. See also the letter from Ada Gräfin von Westarp to Gertraude Freifrau Hiller von
Gaertingen, 4 Oct. 1923, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, as well as Philipp, Von Stresemann zu
Marx, 12 16.
73
Entry in Gallwitz’s diary, 2 Oct. 1923, BA MA Freiburg, NL Gallwitz, 39.
74
Entry in Gallwitz’s diary, 4 Oct. 1923, ibid.
75
For further details, see Jones, German Liberalism, 200 02; Wright, Stresemann, 223 26;
and Richter, Deutsche Volkspartei, 284 86.
76
Westarp, “Ruhrkampf und Regierung Stresemann,” NL Westarp, Gärtringen, VN 93,
92 97.
77
See the sharp exchange of letters between Stinnes and Stresemann, 7 11 Oct. 1923, PA
AA Berlin, NL Stresemann, 2/154192 94, 154226 28, as well as Feldman, Stinnes,
883 905.
   , –

left-wing governments that had assumed power there,78 the Bavarian govern-
ment refused to recognize the legitimacy of the cabinet’s emergency powers.
For his own part, Kahr hoped that the defiance of the Bavarian government
would pave the way for Stresemann’s dismissal or resignation.79 To Kahr’s
supporters in the patriotic movement, it seemed as if the moment for which
they had been waiting had at long last arrived. Not only did it seem as if Kahr
and his shadow government were about to emulate Mussolini’s celebrated
“March on Rome” with their own “March on Berlin,” but it would be an event
in which the patriotic associations would fulfill their historic destiny by freeing
Berlin from the grip of the November criminals and by demolishing the
system of government they held responsible for Germany’s national weak-
ness.80 Emboldened by his success in Bavaria, Kahr began to cultivate contacts
with Seeckt and other prominent conservatives outside his home state. One of
those with whom Kahr made contact was the retired admiral and former
secretary of the navy Alfred von Tirpitz, whom he had met at a conference on
“National Propaganda for the Countryside” that a trio of right-wing intellec-
tuals – Paul Nikolaus Coßmann of the prestigious Münchner Neueste
Nachrichten, Martin Spahn from the newly founded Political College for
National Political Training and Pedagogy (Politisches Kolleg für nationalpo-
litische Schulungs- und Bildungsarbeit) in Berlin, and the celebrated neocon-
servative historian Oswald Spengler – had organized for approximately sixty
supporters of the German Right in Munich for three days in early November
1922.81 Over the course of the next several months Tirpitz intensified his
contacts with Kahr82 and other representatives of the Bavarian Right and lent
his support to the establishment of a new right-wing press office known as the
Joint Committee (Gemeinsamer Ausschuß or GA, later as Gäa) that was
founded in Munich on 14 December 1922.83 Like Kahr and Stinnes, Tirpitz
was to remain a key player in the conspiratorial calculations of the German
Right through the fall of 1923 and into the spring of the following year.84

78
Wright, Stresemann, 238 44. See also Donald B. Pryce, “The Reich Government versus
Saxony, 1923: The Decision to Intervene,” Central European History 10 (1977): 112 47,
and Benjamin Lapp, Revolution from the Right: Politics, Class and the Rise of Nazism in
Saxony, 1919 1933 (Atlantic Highlands, NJ, 1997), 76 110.
79
Kahr to Stegmann, 14 Oct. 1923, BA Koblenz, NL Stegmann, 1.
80
Remarks by Geisler and Bauer at the VVVD delegate conference in Berlin, 13 Oct. 1923,
NL Westarp, Gärtringen, VN 42.
81
“Tagung über nationale Aufklärung auf dem flachen Land,” Nov. 1922, BA MA Freiburg,
NL Tirpitz, 293/156 57. On Tirpitz’s involvement, see Scheck, Tirpitz, 82 94.
82
For example, see Tirpitz to Kahr, 12 Nov. 1922, BA MA Freiburg, NL Tirpitz, 254.
83
On the founding and goals of the Gäa, see Oettingen Wallenstein to Tirpitz, 16 Feb. 1923,
BA MA Freiburg, NL Tirpitz, 296/13 14, as well as Karl Alexander von Müller, Im
Wandel einer Welt. Erinnerungen 1919 1932 (Munich, 1966), 120 24.
84
Scheck, Tirpitz, 95 113.
  –   ? 

Throughout all of this, Hergt and the leaders of the DNVP had maintained
a conspicuously low profile. The Nationalists had steadfastly resisted Strese-
mann’s entreaties to accept a share of governmental responsibility in a broadly
based cabinet of national concentration and strongly opposed the emergency
authorization the chancellor received from the Reichstag on 13 October.85
Westarp in particular remained adamantly opposed to the DNVP’s participa-
tion in a Stresemann cabinet despite the fact that a number of his colleagues in
the DNVP Reichstag delegation were prepared to enter into the national
government if Stresemann were replaced as chancellor by someone like the
decidedly more conservative Jarres.86 Having met with Seeckt on several
occasions in late September and early October, Hergt and Westarp became
convinced that only the replacement of the Stresemann cabinet with a national
dictatorship of one sort or another would put an end to the existing political
crisis.87 Hugenberg, on the other hand, remained ambivalent about the dicta-
torial schemes of Tirpitz and his entourage and discreetly dissociated himself
from their plans for a national dictatorship.88 But, as the crisis persisted into
the first and second weeks of October, the Nationalists threw their full support
behind the Bavarian government in its defiance of Berlin in the hope that Kahr
would succeed in harnessing the energies of Hitler and his followers without
having to suppress them by force.89 Still, many Nationalists feared that Kahr’s
antics would lead to Bavaria’s secession from the Reich and sought to steer his
efforts into what they regarded as a more positive direction, namely, the
overthrow of Germany’s republican system and its replacement by a more
authoritarian form of government. The leaders of the DNVP were convinced
that Stresemann’s days as chancellor were indeed numbered and that it was
only a matter of time before they were entrusted with the reins of power.
In the meantime, the crisis in Berlin was quickly drawing to a climax. The
federal government’s intervention against the left-wing governments in
Saxony and Thuringia in late October and early November was bitterly
denounced by the Social Democrats and led to their resignation from the
second Stresemann cabinet on 2 November. Contrary to all expections, Ebert
reappointed Stresemann as head of a rump cabinet supported by the two
liberal parties, the Center, and the Bavarian People’s Party that would oversee

85
Philipp, Von Stresemann zu Marx, 16 21. See also Helfferich, “Diktatorische Ermächti
gung des Kabinetts,” 9 Oct. 1923, in Helfferichs Reichstagsreden, ed. Reichert, 177 96.
86
Brauer to Heydebrand, 10 Oct. 1923, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, II/84, 344.
87
For further details, see Meier Welcker, Seeckt, 374 75.
88
Correspondence between Tirpitz and Hugenberg, 14 22 Sept. 1923, BA MA Freiburg,
NL Tirpitz, 192.
89
For indications of Nationalist sympathy for Kahr, see Traub to Kahr, 29 Sept. 1923, BA
Koblenz, NL Traub, 64/47, as well as Westarp, “Ruhrkampf und Regierung Stresemann,”
NL Westarp, Gärtringen, VN 93, 121 22.
   , –

the affairs of state until the political situation had sorted itself out.90 Strese-
mann, however, found himself under increasingly heavy pressure from the
leaders of his party’s right wing to extend the governmental coalition to the
right even if this meant that their own party leader would had to be sacrificed
in order to placate his enemies in the DNVP.91 The DNVP party leadership,
on the other hand, remained adamantly opposed to the DNVP’s participation
in a Stresemann cabinet and would only consider his retention as chancellor if
he broke with the Social Democrats in both the Reich and Prussia. Many
Nationalists were in fact so confident that they would be asked to assume the
reins of power that in the DNVP Reichstag delegation they had already begun
to allocate the cabinet posts among themselves.92 Throughout all of this, the
Nationalist party leadership was in constant contact with Seeckt, who had
resuscitated his plans for the establishment of a directorium – this time, with
Ebert’s express approval – and had reestablished contact with those to whom
he had originally broached the idea.93
In reviving his plans for a national dictatorship, Seeckt was motivated by his
concern over the continuing deterioration of relations between the Reich and
Bavaria and his fear that this might result in the establishment of an independ-
ent Bavarian state.94 On 3 November Colonel Hans von Seißer from the
Bavarian state police went to Berlin on behalf of Kahr and the third member
of their triumvirate, commander-in-chief of the Bavarian Reichswehr Otto von
Lossow, to meet with Seeckt and Minoux as well as with representatives of the
patriotic leagues and the National Rural League. What these meetings revealed
was a total lack of consensus as to what sort of government should take the
place of the Stresemann cabinet once it had been forced from office. While all
of those with whom Seißer met agreed that Stresemann should be forced out of
office at the earliest possible opportunity, Minoux rejected the idea of a
military coup and expressed little confidence in men like Hitler and Erich
Ludendorff, whereas Seeckt stressed the importance of resolving the crisis
without violating the constitutional chain of command. In the final analysis,
all seemed to hinge upon the attitude of the Reichswehr, for none of those
whom Seißer contacted, including the leaders of the patriotic leagues and
National Rural League, were prepared to act without the support and cooper-
ation of the military. On this point Seeckt’s adherence to the form, if not the

90
Wright, Stresemann, 238 44.
91
Remarks by Scholz and Albrecht at a meeting of the DVP Reichstag delegation, 5
Nov. 1923, PA AA Berlin, NL Stresemann, 87/171432 37. See also Quaatz, “Illusionen,”
Der Tag, 4 Nov. 1923, no. 251.
92
Brauer to Heydebrand, 30 Oct. 1923, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, II/84.
93
Handwritten draft of Seeckt to Wiedfeldt, 4 Nov. 1923, BA MA Freiburg, NL Seeckt, 179/
88. On the DNVP’s contacts with Seeckt, see Brauer to Heydebrand, 30 Oct. 1923, NL
Westarp, Gärtringen, II/84.
94
Handwritten draft of Seeckt to Kahr, 2 Nov. 1923, BA MA Freiburg, NL Seeckt, 108/3 5.
  –   ? 

substance, of legality proved the major stumbling block in the calculations of

the antirepublican Right.95
Seißer returned to Munich convinced that the northern leaders of the anti-
Stresemann fronde lacked the resolve and resources to take the decisive action
that was necessary to bring about the fundamental changes in Germany’s
political system that Kahr and the leaders of the Bavarian government were
planning to implement. This left Kahr and his entourage with no alternative
but to act on their own despite strong words of caution from Seeckt and
without appreciable support from their counterparts in the north.96 In the
meantime, a veritable mutiny had erupted within the DVP Reichstag delega-
tion where Quaatz, Alfred Gildemeister, Oskar Maretzky, and other members
of the party’s right wing had launched a vicious attack against Stresemann’s
performance as chancellor and DVP party leader.97 With his own party on the
verge of repudiating his chancellorship, Stresemann’s position could not
possibly have been weaker than it was in the first week of November 1923.
It was against the background of these developments that Kahr and his
associates finalized plans for a major rally in Munich’s fashionable Bürger-
bräukeller for the evening of 8 November. The purpose of this rally would be
to provide Kahr and his allies in the Bavarian general state commissariat with
an overwhelming demonstration of support by Bavaria’s political and eco-
nomic elites. But all of this began to unravel when Hitler, as leader of the more
militant German Combat League, refused to heed the warnings of Kahr,
Seißer, and Lossow and went ahead with his plans to use Bavaria as the staging
base for a “March on Berlin” in the spirit of what Mussolini had accomplished
in Rome scarcely a year earlier. In hopes that Kahr and his allies might still be
persuaded to join him in his plans for a strike on Berlin, Hitler wrangled an
invitation to the rally in the Bürgerbräukeller, interrupted Kahr approximately
thirty minutes into his speech, and took the general state commissar, Seißer,
and Lossow into an anteroom where he extracted under great duress a promise
of cooperation and support.98 When the Bavarian triumvirate failed to honor

95
Memorandum on Seißer’s conversations in Berlin, 3 Nov. 1923, in Der Hitler Putsch.
Bayerische Dokumente zum 8./9. November 1923, ed. Ernst Deuerlein (Stuttgart, 1962),
301 04. See also Gordon, Hitler and the Beer Hall Putsch, 247 49. On Seißer’s meeting
with Minoux, see the report by Kroeger, 4 Nov. 1923, ACDP Sankt Augustin, NL Stinnes,
I 220/029/1.
96
Gordon, Hitler and the Beer Hall Putsch, 250 51, 255 58.
97
Minutes of the DVP Reichstag delegation, 6 Nov. 1923, PA AA Berlin, NL Stresemann,
87/171457 58, 1171442. For further details, see Jones, German Liberalism, 204 05, and
Richter, Deutsche Volkspartei, 289 98.
98
For Kahr’s account of these events, see “Zum Vorgang in der Nacht vom 8. auf 9.
Nov. 1923 im Bürgerbräu[keller] in München,” n.d. [Dec. 1923], as well as the report
of the Bavarian government, “Der Putsch am 8. November 1923. Vorgeschichte
und Verlauf,” n.d., appended to Kahr to Stegmann, 1 Jan. 1924, both in BA Koblenz, NL
   , –

this promise on the following day, a desperate Hitler and the venerable, if not
unstable, Ludendorff tried to salvage what remained of their political fantasies
by staging a “March on Munich” that ended in disaster on the steps of the
Feldherrnhalle.99 All hopes of uniting the patriotic movement, both in Bavaria
and in the Reich as a whole, had collapsed.
The implications of Hitler’s beer hall fiasco on the future development of
the German Right were enormous. In the short term, the abortive putsch had
the effect of temporarily stabilizing Stresemann’s position as chancellor and
DVP party chairman. As the VVVD’s Fritz Geisler laconically remarked at a
delegate conference of the United Patriotic Leagues of Germany in Berlin on
17 November 1923: “Stresemann had every reason to be thankful to Hitler for
his attempted coup because, if nothing else, it momentarily strengthened
Stresemann’s position.”100 Chastened by news of the events in Munich, all
but the most irascible of Stresemann’s opponents within the DVP Reichstag
delegation closed ranks behind the beleaguered chancellor.101 At the same
time, Stresemann responded to criticism of his “rump cabinet” from his
party’s right wing by reopening negotiations with the DNVP in the hope that
the recent events in Munich had made its leaders more amenable to a coalition
with the other nonsocialist parties. Ernst Scholz and Rudolf Heinze from the
DVP Reichstag delegation met with Hergt and Westarp on the evening of
9 November, but the Nationalists, who continued to advocate the creation of a
directorium that was independent of the Reichstag and vested with special
emergency powers, refused to enter a cabinet in which Stresemann remained
on as either chancellor or foreign minister.102 Stresemann, on the other hand,
continued to insist that considerations of foreign policy made the creation of a
directorium along the lines suggested by Seeckt or Minoux impossible and

Stegmann, 1. For eye witness accounts of these events, see Müller, Im Wandel einer
Welt, 160 66; Traub, Erinnerungen, 323 32; and Lehmann to his daughter, 10
Nov. 1923, in Verleger J. F Lehmann. Ein Leben im Kampf für Deutschland. Lebenslauf
und Briefe, ed. Melanie Lehmann (Munich, 1935), 188 96. For further details, see
Gordon, Hitler and the Beer Hall Putsch, 270 312, and Zorn, Bayerische Geschichte,
270 88.
99
Gordon, Hitler and the Beer Hall Putsch, 313 65.
100
Report on the VVVD delegate conference, 17 Nov. 1923, NL Westarp, Gärtringen,
VN 42.
101
Minutes of the DVP Reichstag delegation, 9 10 Nov. 1923, PA AA Berlin, NL Strese
mann, 87/171465 79. See also the entries in Gallwitz’s diary, 13 14 Nov. 1923, BA MA
Freiburg, NL Gallwitz, 39.
102
Philipp, Von Stresemann zu Marx, 21 23. See also Stresemann’s remarks at a cabinet
meeting, 19 Nov. 1923, in Die Kabinette Stresemann, ed. Erdmann and Vogt, 2:1130 33.
See also the remarks by Scholz, Gildemeister, and Lersner before the DVP Reichstag
delegation, 6 Nov. 1923, PA AA Berlin, NL Stresemann, 87/171457 58, 1171442, as well
as the resolution adopted by the delegation, 9 Nov. 1923, BA Koblenz, R 45 II, 338/
77 78.
  –   ? 

resolved to remain in office, if only as the head of a “rump cabinet” that no

longer commanded a parliamentary majority, as long as his party continued to
support him.103
Stresemann was to remain in office for the next two weeks until his failure
to secure a positive vote of confidence in the Reichstag on the evening of
23 November finally forced him from office. Not even his own party would
close ranks behind him as six members of the DVP Reichstag delegation,
including Stinnes and Quaatz, were conspicuously absent from the plenary
session when the decisive vote was taken.104 These were nevertheless
extremely productive days for the Stresemann cabinet and included some of
its most notable accomplishments, not the least of which was the establish-
ment of the Rentenbank on 15 November 1923 and the issuance of a new
currency with an exchange rate of one Rentenmark to a trillion paper marks.
The creation of the Rentenmark represented one of the decisive events in
ending the inflation and helped restore at least a modicum of public confi-
dence in the value of German money. Combined with earlier measures to
reduce the size of Germany’s civil administration and to introduce consump-
tion taxes of such items as sugar, salt, playing cards, and tobacco, Germany
had taken the first tentative steps toward the stabilization of its currency and a
return to economic normalcy.105 At the same time, the restoration of federal
authority in the renegade states of Saxony, Thuringia, and Bavaria and the
defeat of the anti-republican challenge on both the Left and the Right augured
well for the future of German democracy and suggested that Germany had
indeed begun to emerge from the dark crisis that had gripped it from the early
1920s. This – and not the turmoil and tumult that had descended upon
Germany in the fall of 1923 – was the true legacy of Stresemann’s hundred
days as chancellor.

At the Crossroads
The abortive Hitler-Ludendorff putsch gave the Stresemann cabinet the respite
it needed to establish the Rentenbank and take the first critical steps toward
Germany’s economic and political stabilization. At the same time, the Munich
fiasco had a sobering effect on the German Right and forced its leaders to
reevaluate their political options and strategies. For although the VVVD
persisted in its putschist fantasies and denounced Hitler for having sabotaged

103
Stresemann’s speech before the DVP central executive committee, 18 Nov. 1923, in
Nationalliberalismus in der Weimarer Republik, ed. Kolb and Richter, 1:476 85.
104
Wright, Stresemann, 253 58.
105
For further details, see Holtfrerich, Inflation, 298 314, and Feldman, Great Disorder,
780 802.
   , –

a process that in time would have led to the overthrow of the Weimar
Republic,106 other right-wing organizations began to reconcile themselves to
the stabilization of Germany’s beleaguered republican system and to make the
necessary strategic adjustments in their quest for political power. This was
particularly true in the case of the DNVP, whose leaders had peered into the
abyss into which Germany had nearly fallen and now began to negotiate in
earnest about assuming a share of governmental responsibility despite their
deep-seated hostility toward Stresemann.107 Following Stresemann’s defeat in
the Reichstag on 23 November, Ebert met privately with the leaders of the
various parties from the SPD to DNVP to determine if and under what
conditions they might be willing to serve in a caretaker government that
would remain in office at least until new national elections were held the
following spring. In his meeting with Ebert, the DNVP party chairman Oskar
Hergt expressed his party’s willingness not only to take on the responsibility of
forming a new government but also to allow its members to participate in a
government led by someone from another party if certain conditions
regarding its future political course could be met. Over the course of the next
several days, however, the DNVP rejected first the DVP’s Siegfried von
Kardorff and then Heinrich Albert, a politically unaffiliated former cabinet
officer who hoped to organize a nonpartisan government of experts, after
Ebert had asked them each to try their hand at forming a new government.108
Following the collapse of Albert’s efforts on 27 November the Nationalists
urged the president to call for new elections so that the nation as a whole
might have an opportunity to determine the composition of the Reichstag and,
with it, the shape of the new government that was to follow the Stresemann
cabinet.109 Ebert, however, turned to the Center’s Adam Stegerwald in hopes
that he might be able to reach an accommodation with the DNVP. Not only
had Stegerwald taken a public stand in favor of a coalition with the DNVP, but
he also enjoyed close ties to influential elements in the Nationalist party
leadership. On the evening of 27 November the Nationalists indicated that
they were prepared to enter into negotiations with Stegerwald but made their
entry into a cabinet under his leadership conditional upon the simultaneous
reorganization of the state government in Prussia. Although the Nationalists
no longer insisted upon Stresemann’s resignation as German foreign minister

106
Report by Geisler, “Die bayerischen Vorgänge und die vaterländischen Verbände,” at the
VVVD delegate conference in Berlin, 17 Nov. 1923, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, VN 42.
107
See Helfferich to Westarp, 19 Nov. 1923, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, II/9, as well as the
entry in Gallwitz’s diary, 20 Nov. 1923, BA MA Freiburg, NL Gallwitz, 39.
108
DNVP Parteivorstand, “Darstellung der Mitwirkung der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei
bei den Verhandlungen zur Neubildung der Reichsregierung in der Woche von 23. 30.
November 1923,” BA Berlin, R 8005, 9/59 79, esp. 59 63.
109
Hergt to Ebert, n.d., BA Berlin, R 8005, 9/88.
  –   ? 

as a precondition for their cooperation in forming a new government, they

nevertheless demanded specific guarantees regarding the character and polit-
ical course of a Stegerwald cabinet in return for their party’s participation and
showed little inclination to commit themselves either to the Weimar Consti-
tution or to the binding character of the international obligations Germany
had assumed since the end of the war.110 When the Nationalists’ demand for a
reorganization of the Prussian government was summarily rejected by the
three parties represented in the Coalition of the Constitutional Middle, the
Nationalists refused to reconsider their negotiating posture. At this point
Stegerwald announced that his efforts to reach an understanding with the
DNVP had failed and withdrew as a candidate for the chancellorship.111
At this point Ebert had become so frustrated with the DNVP’s negotiating
tactics that he turned to the only remaining option, a bourgeois minority
government supported by the parties of Coalition of the Constitutional Middle
and promptly entrusted Wilhelm Marx, the Center Party national chairman
and a strong supporter of Stresemann’s domestic and foreign policies, with the
task of forming such a government. After assuring himself of Stresemann’s
willingness to serve in his cabinet, Marx proceeded to organize a government
that was virtually identical to the cabinet that the Nationalists, Social
Democrats, and right-wing racists groups had so unceremoniously voted out
of office a week earlier.112 At the same time, Marx had not abandoned hope
that the Nationalists might be persuaded to support his government and
approached Martin Schiele, a prominent DNVP Reichstag deputy and an
influential figure in the leadership of the National Rural League, with an
invitation to join his cabinet as minister of agriculture. Following Schiele’s
initial rebuff, Marx tried to sweeten his offer by agreeing to appoint another
Nationalist to the ministry of transportation if Schiele would join his cabinet.
After consulting with his party’s Reichstag delegation on 30 November, Schiele
withdrew his name from further consideration, thus putting an end to Marx’s
efforts to secure the DNVP’s support.113 In explaining his party’s decision
before the Reichstag several days later, Hergt cited the refusal of the middle
parties to undertake a reorganization of the Prussian government as the
principal reason for the failure of Marx’s efforts to bring the DNVP into the
national government. As a result, Hergt continued, the DNVP would not be

110
DNVP Parteivorstand, “Darstellung der Mitwirkung der DNVP . . .,” BA Berlin, R 8005,
9/64 79. See also Philipp, Von Stresemann zu Marx, 23 32.
111
Forster, Stegerwald, 344 49.
112
Ulrich von Hehl, Wilhelm Marx 1963 1946. Eine politische Biographie (Mainz, 1987),
249 55. See also the introduction by Günter Abramowski in Die Akten der Reichskanzlei:
Die Kabinette Marx I und II. 30. November 1923 bis 3. Juni 1924. 3. Juni 1924 bis 15.
Januar 1925, ed. Günter Abramowski, 2 vols. (Boppard am Rhein, 1973), 1:vii xi.
113
Schiele to Marx, 29 and 30 Nov. 1923, in Der Nachlaß des Reichskanzlers Wilhelm Marx,
ed. Hugo Stehkämper, 4 vols. (Cologne, 1968), 1:324.
   , –

able to support the government in the use of presidential emergency authority

to solve the myriad problems that currently confronted the German people.114
Throughout the negotiations Hergt, Schiele, and the leaders of the DNVP
Reichstag delegation were hamstrung by the vociferous opposition of local
party leaders, particularly in the east, to any accommodation with the govern-
ment that did not grant the DNVP everything that it had hoped to accomplish.
This was clearly the intent of the resolution the DNVP district organization in
Potsdam II adopted on 27 November.115 By the same token, Hans Schlange-
Schöningen, a landowner from Pomerania, conceded that the DNVP had
become the hostage of its own rhetoric but expressed more than just a silent
sigh of relief when the negotiations at the end of November 1923 failed to
produce a break in the deadlock that had developed in relations between the
government and the DNVP.116 For most party members, their visceral dislike
of Stresemann and their reluctance to be part of a government in which he
held a prominent post were so great that an accommodation with Marx
without Stresemann’s removal would be seen as a betrayal of the DNVP’s
most fundamental principles and sense of mission. The Nationalists were also
determined to use their leverage at the national level to force a change of
government in Prussia and to replace the “Great Coalition” with a right-wing
coalition. This, of course, encountered strong opposition from Marx and the
leaders of the Prussian Center Party and ultimately became the issue that led
to the collapse of cabinet negotiations in late November 1923.117 At the same
time, however, it was imperative for the Nationalists to join the national
government at the earliest possible opportunity in order to influence the shape
of Germany’s fiscal and economic stabilization and to make certain that the
various constituencies that composed their party’s electoral base did not have
to accept an inordinate share of the social cost of stabilization. The DNVP
party leadership did not expect the existing state of affairs in Berlin to last for
long and fully anticipated another cabinet crisis at the end of January 1924 with
new elections later that spring.118 By that time the DNVP would presumably
be in a stronger position to press its bid for power.
In the meantime, the various organizations on Germany’s patriotic Right
had also begun to ponder the implications of the failed putsch in Munich. To
the leaders of the patriotic movement, as well as to most of those at the helm of
the DNVP, it seemed that the events of the fall of 1923 added up to a lost
opportunity. At no point in the early history of the Weimar Republic had the
conditions for a right-wing seizure of power been more propitious than in the

114
Philipp, Von Stresemann zu Marx, 35 36.
115
Steinhoff to Westarp, 28 Nov. 1923, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, VN 37.
116
Schlange Schöningen to Hergt, 3 Dec. 1923, BA Berlin, R 8005, 9/85.
117
Hehl, Marx, 251 52.
118
Brauer to Heydebrand, 11 Dec. 1923, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, II/84.
  –   ? 

early fall of 1923. The Weimar regime had thoroughly compromised itself, if
not by its inability to stem the fall of the mark, then certainly by its weakness
vis-by the French in the Ruhr and its passivity in the face of the Marxist Left in
Saxony and Thuringia and the secessionists in Bavaria. The Reich seemed
threatened with nothing less than total dissolution, and only firm, decisive
action by the forces of the German Right – or so they claimed – could rescue
the nation from the increasingly desperate situation in which it found itself.
But when the dust had settled, the Right had little to show for itself. By the end
of 1923 the Weimar regime seemed well on its way to restoring order. The
first, tentative steps toward stabilization of the mark had been taken, the threat
of Marxism in central Germany had been met, and the collapse of the Hitler-
Ludendorff putsch had made it all that much easier for the federal government
in Berlin to dispel the specter of Bavarian separatism and normalize relations
with Munich.
What, from the perspective of the German Right, had gone wrong? Why
had the German Right failed to take advantage of the rare confluence of events
in the summer and early fall of 1923 to overthrow the Weimar regime and
replace it with a more authoritarian system of government, military or civil-
ian? In answering these questions, pundits on the Right had more than enough
blame to spread around. A favorite target was the Reichswehr’s Hans von
Seeckt, who was criticized not just for having failed to take a decisive stand
against Stresemann, Ebert, and the policies of the “Great Coalition” in the
critical period leading up to abortive Hitler-Ludendorff putsch but also for his
reluctance to use the special emergency powers he had received after the
putsch to execute a coup against the government and to undertake a funda-
mental change in Germany’s political system.119 Even then, however, criticism
of Seeckt was generally tempered by a recognition of his role in suppressing
the Marxist regimes in Saxony and Thuringia and his success in preserving the
integrity of the Reichswehr as an instrument of national power during a
troubled and turbulent time.120 In the case of Kahr, however, sentiment was
not so generous. Gottfried Traub, a prominent Nationalist who had been
unceremoniously dispatched to Bavaria after his involvement in the 1920 Kapp
putsch to assume editorship of the Münchner-Augsburger Abendzeitung,
denounced Kahr for having betrayed the patriotic leagues “with the handshake
of Judas” by failing to act in the decisive days of November 1923 and
demanded that he step aside so that the patriotic movement could rise to
prominence once again.121 But the harshest words by far were reserved for
Adolf Hitler. Speaking at a delegate assembly of the United Patriotic Leagues

119
For example, see Scheibe to Ludendorff, 12 Apr. 1924, BA MA Freiburg, NL Tirpitz,
171/77 81.
120
Geisler, “Die bayerischen Vorgänge . . .,” 17 Nov. 1923, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, VN 42.
121
Traub to Kahr, 6 Dec. 1923, BA Koblenz, NL Traub, 64/37.
   , –

of Germany on 17 November 1923, VVVD chairman Fritz Geisler bitterly

denounced the Nazi party leader for having carelessly destroyed months of
hard work and preparation with his ill-advised and hastily organized coup on
the night of 8 November. Not only had Hitler’s impetuosity prolonged Stre-
semann’s tenure in office, but the Nazi party leader was oblivious to the deep
rift his action would leave within the ranks of those upon whom the rebirth of
Germany ultimately depended. From Geisler’s perspective, Hitler’s abortive
putsch was a national tragedy whose implications had yet to be fully
comprehended.122

Most of those on the German Right recognized that the defeat of the Munich
putsch in November 1923 represented a decisive turning point in the history
of the Weimar Republic. But the lessons they drew from the failure of
1923 varied greatly. For all but the most intractable opponents of the hated
Weimar system, the events of 1923 had a sobering effect that led them to
realize just how close Germany had come to the abyss. Had Hitler succeeded
with his coup in Munich and then proceeded with his “March on Berlin,” this
could very easily have brought Germany to the brink of civil war with
disastrous consequences for survival of the Reich itself. Now that Germany
had survived the crisis and seemed on its way to political and economic
recovery, Germany’s conservative leaders now faced the question of how they
would respond to the challenges of working within a system of government to
which many of them remained irreconciliably opposed but that had received a
new breath of life from having survived the ordeal of 1923.

122
Geisler, “Die bayerischen Vorgänge . . .,” 17 Nov. 1923, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, VN 42.
 7

From Triumph to Schism

As the year 1923 drew to a close, an uneasy calm settled over Germany’s
political landscape. The inflation was over – or so it seemed for the moment –
although precisely how the social cost of the inflation was to be distributed
throughout German society as a whole was yet to be determined. At the same
time, the abortive Hitler-Ludendorff putsch had thoroughly discredited the
idea of a military coup among all but the most obtuse of Weimar’s right-wing
enemies. All of this would require a strategic adjustment on the part of the
German Right. Now that the inflation was over and the social cost of the
inflation was to be allocated among the different sectors of German society, it
was imperative for the Nationalists to gain access to the corridors of power in
order to influence the shape of Germany’s stabilization program and make
certain that the various constituencies that constituted their party’s material
base were not forced to accept an inordinate share of the social cost of
stabilization. The failure of the Munich putsch and the resultant stabilization
of Germany’s parliamentary system left the Nationalists with no choice but to
strike an accommodation with the non-socialist parties that supported the
Weimar Republic. Yet it was clear from the DNVP’s posture in the negoti-
ations that led to the formation of the Marx cabinet at the end of 1923 that the
party was not yet quite prepared to take such a step or share the burden of
governmental responsibility on terms other than those it itself dictated. The
winds of change were nevertheless slowly, but surely, at work on the
German Right.

The Politics of Stabilization

When the Marx cabinet assumed office in early December 1923, its most
pressing task was to bring the process of stabilizing the mark to a successful
conclusion and to prevent another wave of inflation from wreaking havoc
upon Germany’s fragile economy.1 The initial step toward stabilizing the mark

1
Gerald D. Feldman, “The Politics of Stabilization in Weimar Germany,” Tel Aviver
Jahrbuch für Deutsche Geschichte 17 (1988): 19 42.


   , –

had been taken by the Stresemann cabinet with the termination of passive
resistance in the Ruhr. Further measures to strengthen the mark had been
stymied by a bitter conflict within the Stresemann cabinet between Finance
Minister Rudolf Hilferding, a Social Democrat who believed that the solution
to Germany’s fiscal and economic crisis lay in reducing the amount of money
in circulation through tight controls over domestic and foreign currencies, and
Agricultural Minister Hans Luther, who subscribed to Helfferich’s thesis that
fiscal stability could be accomplished only through the creation of a new
currency tied to the value of “real assets” such as rye.2 After the reorganization
of the Stresemann cabinet in early October 1923 responsibility for drafting the
legislation to stabilize the currency shifted to Luther, now serving as the new
finance minister. An unaffiliated politician who stood to the right of center on
most of the major political issues, Luther was certainly far more acceptable to
Germany’s industrial and agricultural elites than his Social Democratic prede-
cessor. Moreover, the fundamental premise of Luther’s strategy for fiscal and
economic recovery was that the industrial and agricultural sectors had already
been taxed to the full extent of their capacity to pay and that the national
budget could be balanced only through a sharp reduction in the general level
of government spending and a modest increase in taxation for those sectors of
society that had escaped the inflation more or less unharmed.3 The net effect
of Luther’s tax policy would be to shift the social cost of stabilizing the mark
from industry and agriculture to the German middle classes.
Luther proceeded to incorporate elements of Helfferich’s plan for stabilizing
the mark into the government’s currency reforms, with the result that the
government’s stabilization program took on an increasingly conservative
character. On 13 October 1923 the Reichstag passed an enabling act that gave
the Stresemann cabinet emergency authorization to implement the measures it
deemed necessary to stabilize the mark. The cabinet used this authorization on
27 October to issue a “Decree for the Reduction of Public Personnel” that
initiated a dramatic reduction in the size of Germany’s civil administration
and implemented far-reaching cuts in civil service pensions.4 This was accom-
panied by the introduction of new taxes on the consumption of such items as
sugar, salt, and Zündwaren such as playing cards and tobacco. By far the most
important step Stresemann and his cabinet took to stabilize the mark, how-
ever, was the creation of a new currency known as the Rentenmark, a currency

2
Reichert’s notes on a meeting between representatives of the government and DNVP, 18
Aug. 1923, in the records of the Association of German Iron and Steel Industrialists
(Verein Deutscher Eisen und Stahlindustrieller), BA Berlin, Bestand R 13, 278/204 07.
For further details, see Feldman, Great Disorder, 708 36.
3
Hans Luther, Feste Mark Solide Wirtschaft. Rückblick auf die Arbeit der Regierung
während der Wintermonate 1923/24 (Berlin, 1924), 5 13.
4
Feldman, Great Disorder, 750 60.
     

that was not based, as Helfferich had wished, on the value of rye but created
from the proceeds of a compulsory mortgage, or Zwangshypothek, on all
landed property, agricultural as well as industrial. The establishment of the
Rentenbank on 15 November 1923 and the issuance of a new currency with an
exchange rate of one Rentenmark for one trillion paper marks represented the
decisive event in ending the inflation and restoring at least a modicum of
public confidence in the value of German money.5
As finance minister in the Marx cabinet, Luther’s primary responsibility was
to ensure that the measures the Stresemann government had taken to stabilize
the mark would not be jeopardized by a return to the deficit spending that had
plagued government finances in the first years of the Weimar Republic.
Luther’s stabilization program from the winter of 1923–24 imposed new
and, in many cases, unexpected economic hardships upon the German middle
strata. Not only was the size of the German civil service significantly reduced
in order to curtail the general level of government spending, but new and
onerous taxes had been imposed upon the more traditional elements of
Germany’s middle-class economy. Even farmers, who had used the inflation
to liquidate approximately 80 percent of Germany’s agricultural indebtedness,
were hurt by a stipulation requiring them to pay their taxes, as well as the
compulsory mortgages that had been levied against their property to finance
the creation of the Rentenmark, in the new currency despite the fact that
virtually all of their harvest from the summer and fall of 1923 had been sold
for paper marks that were now all but worthless.6 Nor was the worker spared
the burden of stabilization, for he was obliged to accept the terms of an
agreement the government had reached with representatives from manage-
ment and labor on 13–14 December 1923 to reintroduce the ten-hour work-
day and the two-shift system in all areas where they had been in effect before
the war.7 Yet for all of the consternation this aroused among those who
regarded the eight-hour day as the greatest accomplishment of the November
Revolution, the most controversial feature of the government’s stabilization
program pertained to the revalorization of those paper mark assets that had
been destroyed by the inflation. In response to a ruling by the German
Supreme Court on 28 November 1923 that opened up the possibility that
every single revaluation dispute could be taken to court where it would be

5
Ibid., 780 802. For Helfferich’s influence on the government’s stabilization program, see
Williamson, Helfferich, 383 94.
6
Robert G. Moeller, “Winners as Losers in the German Inflation: Peasant Protest over the
Controlled Economy, 1920 1923,” in Die deutsche Inflation: Eine Zwischenbilanz/The
German Inflation Reconsidered, ed. Gerald D. Feldman, Carl Ludwig Holtfrerich, Gerhard
A. Ritter, and Peter Christian Witt (Berlin, 1982), 255 88.
7
Gerald D. Feldman and Irmgard Steinisch, “Die Weimarer Republik zwischen Sozial und
Wirtschaftsstaat. Die Entscheidung gegen den Achtstundentag,” Archiv für Sozialge
schichte 18 (1978): 353 439.
   , –

adjudicated according to its individual merits and the debtor’s ability to make
financial restitution,8 Luther drafted a special provision for the Third Emer-
gency Tax Decree that limited the revalorization of mortgages and other
private debts to 15 percent of their gold mark value while exempting all
government debts, including war bonds, from revaluation until after a final
settlement of the reparations question.9 To middle-class investors who had
traditionally set aside as much as a sixth of their income in one form of
investment or another, this amounted to nothing less than an act of betrayal
by the very government in which they had been asked to place their trust.10
Whatever damage the antisocial character of the government’s stabilization
program had done to public confidence in Germany’s republican institutions
was only compounded by the manner in which the program was enacted into
law. From the outset, the architects of Germany’s fiscal stabilization were
convinced that the government’s inability to command the support of a
majority in the Reichstag left them with no alternative but to circumvent
parliament in implementing the measures they deemed necessary to stabilize
the mark. This was presumably necessary not only because of the hardships
that stabilization entailed for politically influential sectors of German society
but also because the kind of quick and decisive action necessary to restore
governmental authority precluded the slow and measured procedures of
conventional parliamentary rule. In return for their support of the enabling
act that the Reichstag passed on 8 December 1923, the Social Democrats had
insisted that measures protecting the prerogatives of parliament be incorpor-
ated into the language of the bill. This led to the creation of a special fifteen-
member committee consisting of representatives from all of Germany’s major
political parties that was supposed to advise the government in formulating its
stabilization program and to review the specific executive decrees by which
this program was enacted into law. In practice, however, this committee
exercised little influence over the actual course of governmental deliberations
and never fulfilled any of the expectations that had accompanied its creation.
As a result, both the Reichstag and the various political parties that belonged
to it were effectively excluded from any sort of meaningful role in determining
just how the mark was to be stabilized or how its effect upon the different

8
For further details, see David Southern, “The Impact of the Inflation: Inflation, the
Courts, and Revaluation,” in Social Change and Political Development in Weimar Ger
many, ed. Richard Bessel and E. J. Feuchtwanger (London, 1981), 55 76.
9
Luther, Feste Mark Solide Wirtschaft, 37 48. See also Hans Luther, Politiker ohne Partei.
Erinnerungen (Stuttgart, 1960), 229 33.
10
For example, see Reinhard Wüst, Das Aufwertungsproblem und die 3. Steuernotverord
nung. Eine gemeinverständliche Betrachtung (Halle, 1924). See also Larry Eugene Jones,
“Inflation, Revaluation, and the Crisis of Middle Class Politics: A Study in the Disso
lution of the Weimar Party System, 1923 28,” Central European History 12 (1979):
143 68, esp. 149 53.
     

sectors of German society might be ameliorated. The legitimacy of Germany’s

parliamentary institutions, therefore, was severely compromised not only by
the antisocial character of the government’s stabilization program but also by
the authoritarian manner in which this program had become law.11

Stabilization under Fire

All of this helped create a situation ripe for exploitation by Germany’s anti-
republican Right. For the right-wing DNVP, the situation was doubly fortuit-
ous. On the one hand, Helfferich’s participation in the deliberations of both
the Cuno and Stresemann cabinets over how the mark was to be stabilized
made it possible for the Nationalists to claim a major share of the credit for the
introduction of the Rentenmark and the subsequent stabilization of the
German currency. On the other hand, the fact that the Stresemann cabinet
had replaced a currency based on rye with one capitalized through a compul-
sory mortgage on industrial and agricultural assets provided the Nationalists
with a convenient pretext for rejecting the currency reforms of November
1923 as a retreat from what Helfferich had originally counseled. By the same
token, the Nationalists were able to claim that stabilization would have taken
place much earlier and with much less economic hardship had Stresemann not
been fettered by his ties to the Social Democrats.12 This ploy made it possible
for the Nationalists to dissociate themselves from the antisocial consequences
of the government’s stabilization program at the same time they portrayed
their party as the last hope of the German middle classes. To underscore this
claim, the DNVP Reichstag delegation boycotted parliamentary chambers on
8 December in an attempt to deprive the newly installed Marx government of
the two-thirds quorum it needed to secure passage of the enabling act that
would enact the tax reforms necessary to complete the stabilization process.
This, the Nationalists hoped, would then force the chancellor into dissolving
the Reichstag and calling for new elections.13 When this failed, the Nationalists
were still in a position to dissociate themselves from all the Draconian
measures that were to follow, including the severe and extremely unpopular
provisions of the Third Emergency Tax Decree.

11
Larry Eugene Jones, “In the Shadow of Stabilization: German Liberalism and the Legit
imacy Crisis of the Weimar Party System, 1924 30,” in Die Nachwirkungen der Inflation
auf die deutsche Geschichte 1924 1933, ed. Gerald D. Feldman (Munich, 1985), 21 41.
12
Die Wahrheit über die Rentenmark, Deutschnationale Flugschrift, no. 164 (Berlin, 1924).
See also Helfferich’s Reichstag speech, 9 Oct. 1923, in Karl Helfferich, Reichstagsreden
1922 1924, ed. J. W. Reichert (Berlin, 1925), 177 96.
13
Albrecht Philipp, Von Stresemann zu Marx. Sechs Monate deutschnationaler Politik
(August 1923 Januar 1924), Deutschnationale Flugschrift, no. 146 (Berlin, 1924), 35 41.
   , –

In the six months since the formation of the Stresemann cabinet, the
Nationalists had consistently walked a thin line between the politics of respon-
sibility and the politics of demagogy. If, on the one hand, Helfferich and other
DNVP party leaders had supported the government in its efforts to stabilize
the mark, they went to great pains to dissociate themselves from the more
unpopular aspects of the stabilization process and frequently resorted to
demagogic flourishes to put distance between themselves and those who were
responsible for Germany’s fiscal stabilization. This position was all the more
remarkable in light of the fact that the terms upon which the mark had been
stabilized were effectively dictated by conservative economic interests that had
generally supported the DNVP.14 Athough Helfferich failed to have the value
of the new currency tied to Germany’s rye production in a move that would
have greatly enhanced the status and political influence of the landowning
aristocracy, neither agriculture nor industry could complain about the way in
which the economic burden of stabilizing the mark had been shifted from
them to the German middle class. The irony of the DNVP’s role in Germany’s
fiscal stabilization in the winter of 1923–24, therefore, was that it continued to
portray itself as the champion of those who had been hurt by the government’s
stabilization program at the same time that those interests that were most
closely tied to the DNVP party leadership – namely, large landed agriculture
and heavy industry – had emerged from the stabilization process with their
social and economic position significantly strengthened.
When the government’s emergency powers expired on 15 February 1924,
the Nationalists joined the Social Democrats, Communists, and racists on the
radical Right in refusing to renew or extend the enabling act. Marx promptly
ordered the dissolution of the Reichstag and scheduled new elections for the
first week of May. The campaign opened amidst a mood of increasing uneasi-
ness on the part of Germany’s middle-class electorate. Although many middle-
class voters could derive a measure of consolation from the fact that the
inflation had indeed ended, there was lingering uncertainty as to whether or
not the measures the government had taken to end the inflation would succeed
in permanently stabilizing the value of the mark. These fears were com-
pounded by a general feeling within middle-class circles that the mark had
been stabilized at their expense and that their chief antagonists in the struggle
over how the social cost of the lost war was to be allocated – namely, big
business and organized labor – were among the principal beneficiaries of the
great inflation. Moreover, the highly authoritarian manner in which the mark
had been stabilized undermined the legitimacy of Germany’s parliamentary
institutions and severely compromised the integrity of those political parties

14
Claus Dieter Krohn, “Helfferich contra Hilferding. Konservative Geldpolitik und die
sozialen Folgen der deutschen Inflation 1918 1923,” Vierteljahresschrift für Sozial und
Wirtschaftsgeschichte 66 (1975): 62 92
     

most closely identified with the republican system of government. Germany’s

more moderate bourgeois parties were hurt both by the fact that they had
abdicated responsibility for the formulation and implementation of the gov-
ernment’s stabilization program and by their failure to protect middle-class
economic interests during the inflation and the stabilization process.15
From the outset, the Nationalists conducted the campaign as a referendum
on the government’s stabilization program in an attempt to transform middle-
class resentment over the way in which the mark had been stabilized into a
mandate for radical political change. Quick to dissociate themselves from the
antisocial consequences of the government’s stabilization program, the
Nationalists not only denounced the steps the government had taken to reduce
the size of the German civil service,16 but criticized the revaluation provisions
of the Third Emergency Tax Decree as a betrayal of the German middle class
and made vague promises of a “full and equitable” restoration of those paper
mark assets that had been destroyed by the inflation.17 At the same time, the
Nationalists appealed for the support of the German farmer by denouncing the
failure to dismantle the system of price controls and mandatory delivery
quotas that had been imposed during the war as evidence of governmental
discrimination against Germany’s agricultural producers.18 All of this, they
argued, only underscored the need for a radical change in the existing political
system if the German farmer was ever to escape the grip of those who, behind
the facade of popular sovereignty, celebrated the disenfranchisement of the
German people with the use of presidential emergency powers.19

The National Liberal Revolt

The leaders of Germany’s more moderate bourgeois parties came under heavy
attack for their failure to protect Germany’s rural and urban middle classes

15
Jones, “In the Shadow of Stabilization,” 27 30. On the general climate in which the
elections took place, see Maier, Recasting Bourgeois Europe, 440 50, and Thomas Child
ers, The Nazi Voter: The Social Foundations of Fascism in Germany, 1919 1933 (Chapel
Hill, NC, and London, 1983), 50 64.
16
Kurt Deglert, Wider den Beamtenabbau. Rede, gehalten im Reichstage am 10. März 1924,
Deutschnationale Flugschrift, no. 154 (Berlin, 1924).
17
“Aufwertungsfrage und Deutschnationale Volkspartei,” DNVP Werbeblatt, no. 287, BA
Koblenz, NL Weilnböck, 34.
18
Josef Kaufhold, Die politischen Parteien und die Landwirtschaft, Deutschnationale Flug
schrift, no. 158 (Berlin, 1924), 11 27.
19
Reinhold Dieckmann, Wen soll der Landwirt wählen? Entwurf eines Vortrags vor länd
lichen Wählern, Deutschnationale Flugschrift, no. 155 (Berlin, 1924), 21 22. In a similar
vein, see Martin Schiele, Deutschnationale Volkspartei und Landwirtschaft, Deutschna
tionales Rüstzeug, no. 9 (Berlin, 1924).
   , –

against the ravages of inflation and stabilization.20 No one, however, came in

for more abuse than Gustav Stresemann, Germany’s foreign minister and
DVP party chairman. Stresemann was attacked not only for sharing govern-
mental responsibility with the Social Democrats but, more importantly, for the
collapse of the struggle in the Ruhr and on the occupied west bank of the
Rhine. These attacks coincided with a determined attempt on the part of
Hugenberg and his associates to drive a wedge between Stresemann and the
right wing of his own party. Relations between Stresemann and the leaders of
his party’s right wing had become increasingly strained ever since his appoint-
ment as chancellor at the end of the previous summer.21 In hopes that this
might develop into a full-fledged secession on the DVP’s right wing,
Hugenberg and Helfferich met with Hugo Stinnes and Reinhold Quaatz from
the DVP Reichstag delegation in the third week of February to enlist their help
in the campaign to undercut Stresemann’s political position.22 The founding
of the National Liberal State Party of Bavaria (Nationalliberale Landespartei
Bayern) on 17 February 1924 by a group of dissidents from the DVP’s
Bavarian organization only underscored the depth of anti-Stresemann senti-
ment within the party at large and evoked the specter of a general secession on
the DVP’s right wing.23
On 12 March 1924 the leaders of the DVP’s right wing tried to force the
issue by announcing the founding of the National Liberal Association of the
German People’s Party (Nationalliberale Vereinigung der Deutschen Volks-
partei or NLV) at a small gathering in Berlin’s Hotel Esplanade.24 Although
poor health and a desire not to antagonize Stresemann kept Stinnes from
taking part in the NLV’s founding ceremonies, the fact that both Quaatz and
Albert Vögler, another Stinnes protégé who sat in the DVP Reichstag delega-
tion, played prominent roles in launching the new organization bore ample
testimony to his influence behind the scenes.25 Moreover, the vast majority of

20
For further details, see Larry Eugene Jones, “Democracy and Liberalism in the German
Inflation: The Crisis of a Political Movement, 1918 1924,” in Konsequenzen der Inflation/
Consequences of Inflation, ed. Gerald D. Feldman, Carl Ludwig Holtfrerich, Gerhard
A. Ritter, and Peter Christian Witt (Berlin, 1989), 3 43, esp. 36 42.
21
For further details, see Jones, German Liberalism, 195 207, 213 16, as well as Richter,
Deutsche Volkspartei, 273 302, and Wright, Stresemann, 217 59.
22
Entry in Quaatz’s diary, 21 Feb. 1924, BA Koblenz, Nachlass Reinhold Quaatz, 16.
23
“Wahlprogramm der Nationalliberalen Partei Bayern (Beschlossen vom Ersten ‘Landes
vertretertag’ in Nürnberg am 17. Februar 1924),” BHStA Munich, Abt. V, Flugblätter
Sammlung, F84.
24
Report on the NLV’s founding, 2 Mar. 1924, PA AA Berlin, NL Stresemann, 89/
171762 63. See also the entries in Quaatz’s diary, 12 13 Mar. 1924, BA Koblenz, NL
Quaatz, 16.
25
On Vögler and the NLV, see Manfred Rasch, “Über Albert Vögler und sein Verhältnis zur
Politik,” Mitteilungsblatt des Instituts für soziale Bewegungen. Forschungen und For
schungsberichte 28 (2003): 127 56, esp. 133 35.
     

whose who affiliated themselves with the NLV, including no less than twenty
of the twenty-five participants in the NLV’s official founding, were either
directly or indirectly tied to the Ruhr industrial establishment.26 Only the
presence of two prominent DVP agrarians, Karl Hepp from Hesse-Nassau and
Friedrich Döbrich from Thuringia, disturbed the NLV’s predominantly indus-
trial profile. Yet with the exception of a small clique around Quaatz and Oskar
Maretzky, few of those involved in the founding of the NLP sought or desired
a break with the DVP.27 In outlining the NLV’s goals at its first public
demonstration on 26 March, DVP Reichstag deputy Alfred Gildemeister
stressed that the NLV did not seek to hurt or split the DVP but only to return
it to the principles upon which it had been founded. Its ultimate objective,
Gildemeister continued, was to lay the foundation for the creation of a broad
bourgeois front in the upcoming Reichstag elections and to prepare the way
for the formation of a new national government that would no longer require
the support or cooperation of the socialist Left. And this, he concluded, could
only be achieved by working within the DVP to bring about its political
reorientation to the right.28
Despite Gildemeister’s assurances that the NLV had no intention of recon-
stituting itself as a new political party, Stresemann moved quickly to counter
what he perceived as a direct threat to his control of the party. On 13 March
the DVP party executive committee condemned the existence of a separate
organization within the party as incompatible with its solidarity and political
effectiveness and instructed all party members who belonged to the NLV to
resign or face the threat of disciplinary action.29 This action left the dissidents
around Gildemeister and Quaatz with no choice but to leave the NLV or face
expulsion from the party. While Gildemeister and his associates promptly
resigned from the NLV as part of a reconciliation agreement with the DVP
Reichstag delegation,30 Quaatz and the more irascible of Stresemann’s critics
opposed any accommodation with the DVP party leadership and called for a
general secession on the DVP’s right wing behind the slogan “Heraus aus der

26
Report on the NLV’s founding, 12 Mar. 1924, PA AA Berlin, NL Stresemann, 89/
171762 63. For further details, see Richter, Deutsche Volkspartei, 303 22, as well as
Roland Thimme, Stresemann und die Deutsche Volkspartei 1923 25 (Lübeck and Ham
burg, 1961), 50 55, and Horst Romeyk, “Die Deutsche Volkspartei in Rheinland und
Westfalen,” Rheinische Vierteljahrsblätter 39 (1975): 189 236, here 229. On Stinnes’s role,
see Feldman, Stinnes, 912 22.
27
Gildemeister to Stresemann, 14 Mar. 1924, PA AA Berlin, NL Stresemann, 88/171714 15.
28
Alfred Gildemeister, Was wir wollen! Rede auf der Tagung der Nationalliberalen Verei
nigung der Deutschen Volkspartei am Mittwoch, den 26. März 1924 (Berlin, n.d. [1924]),
3 9. See also the report in the Berliner Börsen Zeitung, 26 Mar. 1924, no. 146. See also
Quaatz, “Die nationalliberale Vereinigung der D.V.P.,” Der Tag, 15 Mar. 1924, no. 65.
29
Nationalliberale Correspondenz, 17 Mar. 1924, no. 30.
30
Undated memorandum from the spring of 1924, BA Koblenz, R 45 II, 339/41 42.
   , –

Stresemann-Partei.”31 Quaatz was in close contact with both Stinnes and

Hugenberg throughout this period,32 and there can be little doubt that his call
for a secession on the DVP’s right wing carried their stamp of approval.33 But
Stinnes’s death on 10 April 1924 dealt the NLV a blow from which it never
recovered. Although the NLV proceeded to field its own slate of candidates in
Berlin and several other parts of the country in the upcoming Reichstag
elections,34 its fate as an independent political force was effectively sealed
when Quaatz and Moritz Klönne, an influential Ruhr industrialist who had
also belonged to the DVP, accepted Hugenberg’s offer of secure candidacies on
the DNVP’s national ticket.35 Those who remained with the NLV proceeded
to conclude an electoral alliance with regional farm organizations in Thurin-
gia, Hesse, Baden, and Württemburg that assigned any Reststimmen – votes
these organizations could not count toward the election of their own candi-
dates at the district level – to a national slate of candidates headed by the
NLV’s Oskar Maretzky and Baron Kurt von Lersner.36

Playing the Racist Card

In the meantime, the Nationalists moved to shore up their defenses with
regard to what many party leaders saw as the most serious single obstacle to
a Nationalist victory at the polls, namely, the radical racists who had broken
away from the DNVP in the fall of 1922 and who were now attacking it from
the extreme right. Following the collapse of the Munich “Beer Hall Putsch”
and Hitler’s subsequent incarceration, Albrecht von Graefe-Goldebee and the
leaders of the German-Racist Freedom Party moved quickly to unite their
followers with the remnants of the NSDAP in northern and central Germany
under the umbrella of an organization calling itself the Racist-Social Bloc

31
Entry in Quaatz’s diary, 2 Apr. 1924, BA Koblenz, NL Quaatz, 16. See also “Betreff:
Geheimrat Dr. Quaatz,” n.d. [Feb. Mar. 1924], PA AA Berlin, NL Stresemann, 267/
147061 68.
32
Entries in Quaatz’s diary, 27 Mar. 2 Apr. 1924, BA Koblenz, NL Quaatz, 16.
33
See Wulf, Stinnes, 524 26, and Holzbach, Das “System Hugenberg,” 172 74.
34
Circular from Maretzky on behalf of the National Liberal Campaign Committee (Natio
nalliberaler Wahlausschuß), 16 Apr. 1924, PA AA Berlin, NL Stresemann, 89/171873 74.
See also “Ade, Deutsche Volkspartei!” n.d. [Apr. 1924]; NLV, “Entschließung!” 9
Apr. 1924; “Wir klagen die Deutsche Volkspartei an,” n.d. [Apr. 1924], Geheimes
Staatsarchiv Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin Dahlem (hereafter cited as GStA Berlin
Dahlem), ZSg. XIII/IV, no. 153.
35
Entry in Quaatz’s diary, 15 Apr. 1924, BA Koblenz, NL Quaatz, 16.
36
RLB, Parlamentsabteilung, to Helmot (Hessischer Bauernbund), Mackeldey (Thüringer
Landbund), and Füller (Badischer Landbund), 12 Apr. 1924, BA Berlin, R 8034 I, 116/
15 16.
     

(Völkisch-Sozialer Block or VSB).37 Although Graefe ultimately failed to unite

Nazi and non-Nazi racists into a single political party, the leaders of the two
factions signed an agreement on 24 February 1924 providing for closer
cooperation between their respective organizations at the district and provin-
cial levels.38 This, in turn, served as the basis of a cooperative effort between
the DVFP and what remained of the NSDAP in the upcoming Reichstag
elections under the auspices of an electoral alliance known as the National
Socialist Freedom Party (Nationalsozialistische Freiheitspartei or NSFP).39
Like the DNVP and the various splinter parties that had surfaced since the
last national election, the racists assailed the government’s stabilization pro-
gram as a betrayal of the German middle class and denounced the policy of
fulfillment as a conspiracy to perpetuate the enslavement of the German
people. These charges were invariably combined with general broadsides
against the twin shibboleths of Marxism and finance capital and supplemented
by specific recommendations aimed at breaking the power of international
Jewry over German economic life.40 At the same time, the racists denounced
the DNVP as an elitist party that lacked the ideological commitment and
grass-root support necessary to transform the struggle for racial purity into a
revolutionary movement of the people. Only a revolutionary racism rooted in
the heart and soul of the Volk could ever free Germany from the grip of the
Jew at home and abroad.41
The leaders of the DNVP recognized the racist challenge as a clear threat to
their own party’s hopes for victory in the May 1924 Reichstag elections,
particularly after the racists’ strong performance in the Mecklenburg and
Thuringian state elections earlier in the year.42 From the outset the leaders

37
For further details, see Jeremy Noakes, The Nazi Party in Lower Saxony, 1921 1933
(Oxford, 1971), 41 44.
38
Text of the agreement between the DVFP and NSDAP, 22 Feb. 1924, NSDAP Haupt
archiv, BA Berlin, Bestand NS 26, 843. See also David Jablonsky, The Nazi Party in
Dissolution: Hitler and the Verbotzeit, 1923 1925 (London, 1989), 54 63.
39
For further details, see Reimer Wulff, “Die Deutschvölkische Freiheitspartei 1922 1928”
(Ph.D. diss., Universität Marburg, 1968), 38 40, and Stephanie Schrader, “Vom Partner
zum Widerpart. Die Deutschvölkische Freiheitspartei und ihr Wahlbündnis mit der
NSDAP,” in Wegbereiter des Nationalsozialismus. Personen, Organizationen und Netz
werke der extremen Rechten zwischen 1918 und 1933, ed. Daniel Schmidt, Michael Sturm,
and Massimiliano Livi (Essen, 2015), 55 69, esp. 56 60.
40
See “Wahlaufruf der DFVP (Völkisch Sozialer Block),” n.d. [Apr. 1924], GStA Berlin
Dahlem, ZSg XII/IV, no. 212, and “Was will der völkisch sozialer Block?” n.d.
[Apr. 1924], BA Koblenz, ZSg. 1 45/13. See also Childers, Nazi Voter, 53 55, 66 69,
and Wulff, “Die deutschvölkische Freiheitspartei,” pp. 40 42.
41
For example, see Joachim Haupt, Völkisch oder national? Eine grundlegende Auseinan
dersetzung mit der deutschen “nationalen” Oberschicht, Völkisches Rüstzeug, no. 4
(Munich, n.d. [1924]), 20 32.
42
Brauer to Heydebrand, 23 Feb. 1924, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, II/84.
   , –

of the DNVP’s National Racist Committee were determined to move the issues
of race and anti-Semitism to the forefront of the Nationalist campaign not just
to counter the challenge of the racist Right but for the sake of the issue itself.43
In this respect, the DNVP racists benefited from an apparent change of heart
by DNVP party chairman Oskar Hergt. Having previously opposed efforts to
tie the party too closely to a racist agenda, Hergt announced his full and
unequivocal support for the aspirations of the party’s racist wing at a meeting
of the DNVP’s National Racist Committee in Berlin on 17 February 1924.44
With the encouragement of Hergt and the DNVP party leadership, the leaders
of the DNVP’s National Racist Committee proceeded to to draft a set of
guidelines, or Leitsätze, on the völkisch principle and its place in the party’s
public profile.45 Although the original draft was too radical for Hergt and
underwent further revision at the hands of the party’s national leaders,46 it
nevertheless served as the basis for the position the DNVP took on racism and
antisemitism for the duration of the campaign. This position was rooted in a
biological racism that stressed not just the unique properties of the German
national character but also the need to preserve the purity of the nordic-
German blood that flowed through the veins of the German nation as the
foremost responsibility of the state. This was to be accomplished by purifying
the German national community of all alien elements from the bottom up,
that is, from the family to the clan, from the clan to the tribe, from the tribe to
the state, and from the state to the empire. Through a program of racial
hygiene, those of alien racial stock were to be segregated from the nation as
a whole and rendered morally harmless. This, would be accompanied by the
introduction of a new educational curriculum with the five-fold objective of
strengthening the Christian foundations of Germany’s national culture,
developing a greater understanding of the history of the German race and its
place in the history of the world, fostering a greater appreciation of the
German language and its impact upon the cultures of other races, promoting
a German sense of beauty in the fine arts, and instructing the German nation

43
Westarp to Wedell, 19 Mar. 1924, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, VN 49. For the broader
context, see Jones, “Conservative Antisemitism,” 85 88, as well as Jackisch, Pan German
Leauge, 96 100, and Hofmeister, “Between Monarchy and Dictatorship, 273 79.
44
Hergt’s opening statement in the minutes of the DNVP’s National Racist Committee, 17
Feb. 1924, BA Berlin, R 8048, 223/41. See also Brauer to Heydebrand, 19 Feb. 1924, NL
Westarp, Gärtringen, II/84.
45
For the original draft of this statement, see “Leitsätze der völkischen Welt und Staats
auffassung,” n.d., appended to the meeting announcement from Graef, 2 Feb. 1924, BA
Berlin, R 8048, 223/32 37. See also the minutes of the DNVP’s National Racist Commit
tee, 17 Feb. 1924, ibid., 41 45.
46
Brauer to Heydebrand, 16 Mar. 1924, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, II/84. See also the critique
of the “Leitsätze” in Pfannkuche to the DNVP National Racist Committee, 12 Feb. 1924,
BA Berlin, R 8048, 223/36 40.
     

in the sciences of biology and racial hygiene. But to accomplish this it would
first be necessary to liberate the state from the grip of those currently in power
and to create a genuine German people’s state, or Volksstaat, free from the
insidious influence of alien elements.47
On 21 February 1924 the DNVP tried to steal the racists’ political thunder
by introducing a resolution in the Prussian Landtag that would have required
all Jews who had entered Prussia since 1 August 1914 to register with the
police by 15 April in preparation for their removal from the state by 1 July.
Those Jews who did not comply with this ordinance would be subject to
confinement in detention camps prior to their expulsion from Prussian terri-
tory.48 While this was an obvious ploy to capitalize upon the resentment many
Germans felt over the large-scale influx of East European Jews into Germany
after the end of World War I, Nationalist propagandists were anxious to meet
the racist Right on the latter’s own terms and stressed their party’s commit-
ment to the völkisch principle at every conceivable opportunity.49 Speaking at
a party rally in Stettin, estate owner Hans Schlange-Schöningen lapsed into
demagogy that was scarcely discernible from that of the racist Right. “Jewry,”
Schlange-Schöningen exclaimed, “not only brought us the war and delivered
us into slavery but it keeps us in this deplorable situation because it serves its
oldest purposes . . . In the final analysis it was not France, not England, not
even America but the international Jewish stock market that was the true
victor in the war.”50 Even relative moderates like Lindeiner-Wildau, a member
of the DNVP delegation to the Prussian Landtag campaigning for a seat in the
Reichstag, cloaked his critique of the modern democratic state and his defense
of the conservative conception of the state in the language of the racist
antisemite.51 Yet for all of the passion with which they embraced the racist
cause and exposed the clandestine machinations of international and German
Jewry, the Nationalists drew a crucial distinction between their brand of
antisemitism and that of the racists to their right. The Nationalists were

47
“Die völkischen Ziele der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei,” n.d. [Apr. 1924], DNVP
Werbeblatt, no. 217, BA Koblenz, NL Weilnböck, 5b. See also Bayerische Mittelpartei,”
Positive völkische Arbeit,” n.d. [Apr. 1924], DNVP Werbeblatt, no. 212, NL Westarp,
Gärtringen, VN 49.
48
Georg Negenborn, Die jüdische Gefahr, Deutschnationale Flugschrift, no. 153 (Berlin,
1924), 2 3.
49
For example, see [Deutschnationale Volkspartei], Der völkisch nationale Gedanke im
Kampfe mit der Republik (Vier Jahre deutschnatl. Reichstagsarbeit), Deutschnationale
Flugschrift, no. 147 (Berlin, 1924).
50
Hans Schlange Schöningen, Wir Völkischen! Rede in Stettin 1924, Deutschnationale
Flugschrift, no. 142 (Berlin, n.d. [1924]), 9 10.
51
Hans Erdmann von Lindeiner Wildau, Aufgaben völkischer Politik. Vortrag vor dem Amt
für staatspolitische Bildung der Studentenschaft der Universität Berlin am 27. Februar
1924, Deutschnationale Flugschrift, no. 148 (Berlin, 1924), 10 14.
   , –

particularly critical, for example, of the hostility the leaders of the racist parties
manifested towards religion, the monarchy, and the capitalist economic
system. At the same time, there was a plebeian quality to racist agitation
against the Jews and their place in German economic life that the leaders of
the Nationalist party found difficult to accept.52
Nowhere did the racist Right pose a more serious threat to the DNVP’s
electoral prospects than in Bavaria, where the situation was complicated by the
fact that state elections were scheduled to take place a month or so earlier than
the national elections. The Bavarian Middle Party, as the DNVP’s Bavarian
chapter was generally known, was still recoiling from the racist crisis at the end
of 1922 and the desertion of Rudolf von Xylander, Rudolf Buttmann, and
other outspoken racists to the rival German-Racist Freedom Party.53 At the
same time, a serious strain had developed in relations between the BMP and
the Bavarian Rural League, which had affiliated itself with the BMP in the
aftermath of the November Revolution and had worked closely with the party
in the 1919 and 1920 parliamentary elections.54 But the abortive Hitler-
Ludendorff putsch at the end of 1923 had sent shock waves through the ranks
of Bavaria’s conservative establishment and afforded the BMP an opportunity
to repair its relationship with the BLB before new state and national elections
took place the following spring. Here the initial impulse came not from the
BMP but from the leaders of the Bavarian Rural League, who in January
1924 proposed an alliance of all right-wing forces for the upcoming state
elections.55 Ideally this alliance would include the racists, but should they
refuse to cooperate, the fall-back position would be an alliance of all other
right-wing groups including the BMP, the DVP, the National Liberal seces-
sion, and several lesser-known monarchist and conservative organizations.56
But the unexpectedly heavy losses the BMP suffered in the Bavarian Landtag
elections on 6 April 1924 caused a virtual panic within the DNVP party
organization.57 To shore up their party’s position in Bavaria, the DNVP’s

52
See Schwarzer, “Das Ziel der Wahl,” Der Tag, 9 Mar. 1924, no. 60, as well as Walther von
Graef Anklam, Völkische Mittel oder deutschnationale Rechtspartei?, Deutschnationale
Flugschrift, no. 150 (Berlin, 1924), and [Deutschnationale Volkspartei], Die Deutschvölk
ische Freiheitspartei, Deutschnationales Rüstzeug, no. 1 (Berlin, 1924).
53
Minutes of the expanded BMP executive committee, 20 Dec. 1922, BA R 8005, 26/46 49.
54
For example, see Hopp to Weilnböck, 3 Jan. and 12 Sept. 1923, BA Koblenz, NL
Weilnböck, 4a. See also Kittel, “Zwischen völkischem Fundamentalismus und gouvren
mentaler Taktik, 849 901.
55
Hilpert to Weilnböck, 12 Jan. 1924, as well as the minutes of the BLB executive
committee, 29 Nov. 1923, BA Koblenz, NL Weilnböck, 5b.
56
Bayerische Mittelpartei, “Positive deutschvölkische Arbeit,” n.d., appended to Otto to
Westarp, 26 April 1924, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, VN 49.
57
On the BMP’s losses in the 1924 Bavarian state elections, see Elina Kiiskinen, DNVP in
Bayern, 244 48.
     

national leadership intervened in the nomination of candidates for the upcom-

ing Reichstag elections on behalf of retired admiral Alfred von Tirpitz in the
hope that a man of his stature could unite the splintered forces of the Bavarian
Right and help the DNVP win back the votes it had lost to the radical racists.58

A “Second Versailles”
At issue in all of this was not so much the question of racism itself as whether
the struggle against the domination of German and international Jewry could
be waged more effectively by single-issue parties like the DVFP or by larger,
more inclusive parties like the BMP and its national affiliate, the DNVP. But
this and the other domestic issues that dominated the early stages of the
campaign for the May 1924 Reichstag elections quickly receded into the
background when on 9 April 1924 an international commission headed by
the American banker Charles G. Dawes presented its recommendations for a
solution to Germany’s reparations problem. The central feature of the Dawes
report was a schedule for the payment of reparations structured in such a
fashion that it would not overwhelm Germany’s admittedly limited capacity to
pay. Annual payments would rise from one billion marks in 1925–26 to a
maximum of 2.5 billion marks by 1928–29, although the Germany could,
given suitable economic conditions, make supplemental payments over and
above what the plan stipulated. In return for accepting the plan, the German
government would receive an international loan of 800 million marks that
would be used by the Reichsbank to reimburse German producers for the
payment of reparations in kind and to inject badly needed capital into the
German economy. A further inducement to accepting the plan was the belief
that this would clear the way for the reestablishment of German economic
sovereignty in the Ruhr and Rhine basins and that implementation of the plan
would be followed by the evacuation of Allied troops from the occupied
territories east of the Rhine River within a year of acceptance.59
The national government headed by Centrist Wilhelm Marx was anxious to
take advantage of the new plan’s economic benefits and indicated its willing-
ness to accept the Dawes committee recommendations as the basis for a
provisional solution of the reparations problem on 14 April 1924. From this
point on, the controversy over acceptance or rejection of the Dawes committee
recommendations almost totally eclipsed the domestic issues that had figured
so prominently in the early stages of the campaign. At an extraordinary party

58
Hergt to the members of the DNVP executive committee, 8 Apr. 1924, NL Westarp,
Gärtringen, VN 44. On the Tirpitz candidacy, see Scheck, Tirpitz, 144 50.
59
For further details, see Jon Jacobson, “The Reparations Settlement of 1924,” in Konse
quenzen der Inflation/Consequences of Inflation, ed. Gerald D. Feldman, Carl Ludwig
Holtfrerich, Gerhard A. Ritter, and Peter Christian Witt (Berlin, 1989), 79 108.
   , –

congress in Hamburg at the end of March and beginning of April, Hergt and
the DNVP party leadership had taken a strong and unequivocal stand against
acceptance of the committee’s recommendations.60 The government’s
announcement two weeks later that it was prepared to accept the Dawes
recommendations as the basis of renewed negotiations with the Allies trig-
gered a storm of protest throughout the Nationalist party organization. The
tone was set by Helfferich, who on 12 April publicly denounced the new plan
as a “Second Versailles” and dismissed the benefits the government hoped to
reap from its implementation as illusory.
Not only did Helfferich argue that the material burden of meeting the
payment schedule outlined in the new plan exceeded Germany’s capacity to
pay even under the most favorable economic conditions, but he insisted that
whatever benefits Germany was to receive from its adoption were more than
offset by the controls it imposed upon the German economy. Helfferich was
particularly critical of the proposal to reorganize the German railway system as
a private corporation under the control of an international holding company
whose dividends were to be counted towards the payment of reparations. By
the same token, Helfferich attacked the plan because it failed to specify a
timetable for the evacuation of foreign troops from the Ruhr and the other
parts of Germany that were still under Allied occupation. In conclusion,
Helfferich argued:
Responsibility for the rejection of the experts report is every bit as great as
it was for the rejection of the Versailles dictate. By the same token,
responsibility for the acceptance of the experts report is as great as it
was for the acceptance of Versailles. The curse of accepting unfulfillable
conditions and the curse of the sins against the spirit of national self
affirmation have oppressed Germany for five long years and have led the
German people to the brink of collapse. The German people is lost
without salvation if it saddles itself with this curse once again.61
When Helfferich was killed in a railway accident in northern Italy twelve days
later, this became the legacy his party carried into the campaign for the May
1924 Reichstag elections.62

60
Oskar Hergt, Wege zur Rettung. Rede auf dem außerordentlichen Reichsparteitage in
Hamburg am Bismarcktage 1924, Deutschnationale Flugschrift, no. 160 (Berlin, 1924),
9 16. For the official proceedings of the Hamburg party congress, 30 Mar. 1 Apr. 1924,
see Korrespondenz der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei, 2 Apr. 1924, no. 40.
61
Karl Helfferich, “Das zweite Versailles,” in Karl Helfferich and Jakob Wilhelm Reichert,
Das zweite Versailles. Das Reparationsgutachten der allierten Experten, Deutschnationale
Flugschrift, no. 175 (Berlin, 1924), 3 11.
62
For example, see Westarp, “Helfferich und sein letztes Vermächtnis,” Korrespondenz der
Deutschnationalen Volkspartei, 26 Apr. 1924, no. 57.
     

Figure 6. “Frei von Versailles!” DNVP campaign placard designed by an unidentified

graphic artist for the May 1924 Reichstag elections. Reproduced with permission from
the Bundesarchiv Berlin, Plakat, 002 029 039
   , –

By stigmatizing the recommendations of the Dawes committee as a “Second

Versailles,” the Nationalists sought to mobilize popular sentiment against
those parties that continued to support Stresemann’s efforts to reach a diplo-
matic understanding with the Allies. This tactic, however, backfired against the
DNVP in two important respects. In the first place, it shifted the focus of
the campaign away from the domestic arena where the DNVP could play upon
the anxiety and anger of those who had been hurt by the government’s
stabilization program to that of foreign policy where the material conse-
quences of accepting or rejecting the Dawes Plan were far less clearly defined.
As a result, the government parties were able to regain the offensive by
attacking the DNVP for its unprincipled demagogy and unreliability in
matters of Germany’s national interest.63 Secondly, the DNVP’s highly emo-
tional and unconditional condemnation of the Dawes Plan produced a severe
strain in its relations with those sectors of the German industrial establishment
that stood to benefit from the implementation of the Dawes committee
recommendations. On 24 April 1924 the presidium and executive committee
of the National Federation of German Industry adopted a resolution recogniz-
ing the recommendations of the Dawes committee as “a suitable basis for the
solution of the reparations problem” and approving the use of these recom-
mendations as the point of departure for the government’s negotiations with
the Allies.64 This action constituted a direct rebuff to the DNVP party leader-
ship and prompted a sharp rebuke from Hugenberg, who in his capacity as
chairman of the Committee of German National Industrialists issued a tersely
worded statement dissociating himself from the RDI’s resolution and rejecting
the notion that it reflected the sentiments of German industry as a whole.65
All of this was symptomatic of a much deeper split within the German
industrial establishment between those who were prepared to work within the
existing system of government in order to achieve specific social, economic,
and political objectives and those who remained categorically opposed to any
form of collaboration with Germany’s republican institutions. In the immedi-
ate context, however, this split had virtually no effect upon the extent of
industrial support for the DNVP in the May 1924 Reichstag elections. In fact,
industry’s willingness to support the DNVP was much greater in light of the
strain that had developed in relations between Ruhr heavy industry and the
DVP party leadership. Not only had Stresemann’s decision to terminate
passive resistance in the fall of 1923 prompted at least one prominent Ruhr

63
See Stresemann, “Politische Ostern,” in Die Zeit, [ca. 20 April 1924], in Stresemann,
Vermächtnis. ed. Bernhard, 1:391 95.
64
Geschäftliche Mitteilungen für die Mitglieder des Reichsverbandes der Deutschen Industrie
6, no. 10 (1 May 1924): 72, BA Koblenz, ZSg 1 14/2. For further details, see Weisbrod,
Schwerindustrie in der Weimarer Republik, 273 76.
65
Holzbach, Das “System Hugenberg,” 171 72.
     

industrialist – Paul Reusch from the Gutehoffnungshütte – to resign from the

DVP in protest,66 but the Stinnes concern moved to terminate its support of
the party in the spring of 1924.67 Moreover, the special fund that Vögler had
created for Ruhr heavy industry in March 1924 for the purpose of supporting
candidates who could be expected to represent industrial interests in the new
Reichstag68 was much more sympathetically disposed to the DNVP than to the
DVP and routinely diverted funds earmarked for the DVP to candidates
running on the National Liberal ticket in Berlin and other parts of the
country.69 Relations between Germany’s industrial leadership and the DVP
were further strained by that fact that the party no longer accorded prominent
industrialists such as RDI president Kurt Sorge preferential treatment in the
placement of candidates for the upcoming Reichstag elections and thereby
weakened their chances of being returned to parliament.70 The net effect of
these developments was to solidify the DNVP’s position as the party
of preference for an increasingly large sector of the Ruhr industrial
establishment.
A similar shift in support could be detected in the behavior of the patriotic
and paramilitary Right. The most ambitious of the patriotic associations that
stood on the German Right in the spring of 1924 was the United Patriotic
Leagues of Germany under the leadership of former DVP Reichstag deputy
Fritz Geisler. Following the collapse of the Munich “Beer Hall Putsch” in the
fall of 1923, the United Patriotic Leagues of Germany had intensified its efforts
to consolidate the patriotic and conservative forces that were currently scat-
tered among a number of different parties and organizations into a united
German Right.71 Its ultimate objectives, however, were still the overthrow of
the Weimar Constitution, the establishment of some form of right-wing
dictatorship, and the eradication of Marxism from Germany’s national life.72
Though ostensibly neutral with respect to Germany’s non-Marxist parties, the
VVVD understood neutrality in a very selective way and was interested only in
cultivating closer ties with the parties of the bourgeois Right. In the campaign

66
Reusch to Blumberg, 26 Sept. 1923, RWWA Cologne, Abt. 130, NL Reusch, 30019393/0.
67
Edmund Stinnes to Büxenstein, Thomas, Lehmann, Schliewen, Hoffmann, Osius, and
Hilpert, 7 Apr. 1924, ACDP Sankt Augustin, NL Stinnes, I 220/002/7.
68
Circular from Wiskott (Bergbau Verein), 18 Mar. 1924, RWWA Cologne, Abt. 130,
Allgemeine Verwaltung der GHH, 400106/83.
69
Raumer to Vögler, 29 Apr. 1924, BA Koblenz, NL Kardorff, 14/19 22.
70
Bücher to Stresemann, 7 Apr. 1924, PA AA Berlin, NL Stresemann, 89/171829. On the
fate of Sorge’s candidacy, see Richter, Deutsche Volkspartei, 326.
71
Report by Geisler at the VVVD delegate conference, 16 Feb. 1924, BHStA Munich, Abt.
IV, EWB, 10/2. See also Diehl, “Von der ‘Vaterlandspartei’ zur ‘Nationalen Revolution’,”
623 25.
72
“Richtlinien der Vereinigten vaterländischen Verbände Deutschlands,” Feb. 1924, BHStA
Munich, Abt. IV, EWB, 10/2.
   , –

for the May 1924 Reichstag elections, the leaders of the VVVD called for the
unification of all those parties that were unequivocally committed to cleaning
up the “Marxist system” that had presumably ruled Germany since November
1918 but were stymied by the refusal of the DVFP and other radical racist
groups to participate in any such alliance.73 Whereas the DVP had severely
compromised its political pedigree by sharing governmental responsibility
with the Social Democrats, the Nationalists made a concerted effort to win
the support of Germany’s paramilitary associations and praised them for their
role in the resurgence of German national awareness within the younger
generation.74 Like the DNVP, the VVVD was adamantly opposed to the
Dawes committee recommendations and joined the Nationalists in denoun-
cing the new plan as a “Second Versailles.”75 Of all of major Germany’s
political parties, only the German National People’s Party received the
VVVD’s unqualified support. Carefully crafted in the vocabulary of Überpar-
teilichkeit, this and similar endorsements from other paramilitary associations
clearly helped legitimate the DNVP as the party of “national opposition” to
Weimar, Versailles, and the Dawes committee recommendations.

From Victory to Frustration

All of these factors – the increasingly desperate plight of Germany’s urban and
rural middle classes, the emotionally charged crusade against acceptance of the
Dawes Plan, industrial disaffection from the DVP, and the tacit support of
Germany’s patriotic and paramilitary Right – combined to provide the
German National People’s Party with a stunning victory in the May
1924 Reichstag elections. In the four years since the last national elections,
the DNVP had increased its electorate by nearly two million votes and could
now claim the support of 19.5 percent of the total popular vote as opposed to
15.1 percent in 1920. The DNVP was now entitled to ninety-six seats in the
Reichstag in contrast to the sixty-six seats it had received in 1920. Multivariate
regression analysis of the June 1920 and May 1924 election results reveals that
Nationalist gains seem to have been strongest in the agrarian sector, where the

73
Report by Goltz at the VVVD delegate conference, 5 Apr. 1924, BHStA Munich, Abt. IV,
EWB, 10/2.
74
Otto Schmidt Hannover, Die vaterländische Bewegung und die Deutschnationale Volks
partei. Vortrag, gehalten in Berlin am 28. März 1924, Deutschnationale Flugschrift,
no. 167 (Berlin, 1924). See also Schlange Schöningen’s speech at the DNVP party
congress in Hamburg, 30 Mar. 1 Apr. 1924, in Korrespondenz der Deutschnationale
Volkspartei, 2 Apr. 1924, no. 40.
75
For example, see Fritz Geisler, Die falsche Front. Klassenkampf und Landesverrat. “Reichs
banner Nollet.” Rede in der Reichs Vertreterversammlung der Vereinigten vaterländischen
Verbände Deutschlands am 30. Juni 1924 zu Berlin, ed. Reichsgeschäftsstelle der Verei
nigten Vaterländischen Verbände Deutschlands (Berlin, n.d. [1924]), 7 8.
     

retention of wartime controls over agricultural prices and production and a

discriminatory tax policy had done much to turn small and middle-sized
family farmers against the republic and those parties most closely identified
with it.76 These gains came almost exclusively at the expense of the two liberal
parties, which in 1919–20 had experienced considerable success in attracting
the support of rural voters in the central and western parts of the country.77
Another group that rallied behind the Nationalist banner in the May
1924 Reichstag elections was the professional civil service, which had become
increasingly disaffected from the republic first as a result of the material losses
it had suffered during the runaway inflation of the early 1920s and then more
recently by virtue of the layoffs that the Stresemann and Marx governments
had ordered as part of their efforts to stabilize the mark.78 By the same token,
the DNVP was also able to capitalize upon the sense of betrayal that Ger-
many’s small investors felt towards the government as a result of its refusal to
consider a full and equitable restoration of those paper marks assets that had
been destroyed by the inflation.79 Germany’s white-collar employees, on the
other hand, tended to support the DNVP with about the same degree of
enthusiasm they had demonstrated in 1920, while the so-called old middle
class of artisans, shopkeepers, and small-scale entrepreneurs had already
begun to abandon the party in favor of the more radical groups that stood
to the right of the Nationalists.80
Only the fact that the coalition of Nazi and non-Nazi racists known as the
National Socialist Freedom Party scored significant gains of its own kept the
Nationalist victory in the May 1924 Reichstag elections from being even more
impressive than it actually was. In fact, many of those from the urban “old
middle class” who had supported the DNVP in 1920 voted for the racist
coalition four years later. Despite a conspicuous lack of success in the coun-
tryside, the racists received 1.9 million votes – or 6.5 percent of the popular
vote – and elected thirty-two deputies to the new Reichstag.81 The National
Liberal Association, on the other hand, failed to elect so much as a single
deputy, although the alliance it had concluded with conservative farm

76
Childers, Nazi Voter, 72 76. For the raw data, see Falter, Lindenberg, and Schumann,
Wahlen und Abstimmungen, 68 69.
77
See the lament by the DVP’s Otto Hugo before the DVP central executive committee,
6 July 1924, BA Koblenz, R 45 II, 339/345 51.
78
Childers, Nazi Voter, 98 102. See also Andreas Kunz, Civil Servants and the Politics of
Inflation in Germany 1914 1924 (Berlin and New York, 1986), 366 82, and Rainer
Fattmann, Bildungsbürger in der Defensive. Die akademische Beamtenschaft und der
“Reichsbund höherer Beamten” in der Weimarer Republik (Göttingen, 2001), 113 29.
79
Jones, “Inflation, Revaluation, and the Crisis of Middle Class Politics,” 152 56.
80
Childers, Nazi Voter, 69 71, 87 92.
81
See Wulff, “Die deutschvölkische Freiheitspartei,” 42 43, and Jablonsky, Nazi Party in
Dissolution, 85.
   , –

organizations in Hesse, Thuringia, Baden, and Württemberg polled nearly

600,000 votes and captured ten seats in the newly elected Reichstag. In the
meantime, Germany’s two liberal parties registered heavy losses of their own.
The Democrats, for example, lost 29.1 percent of their popular vote from the
1920 Reichstag elections and saw their parliamentary representation slip from
thirty-nine to twenty-five deputies. The People’s Party, by comparison, lost
31.3 percent of its 1920 vote along with twenty of its sixty-five parliamentary
mandates. Between them, the two liberal parties lost nearly two million votes
in the May 1924 Reichstag elections and saw their share of the national
electorate decline from 22.9 percent in 1919 and 22.2 percent in 1920 to a
disappointing 14.9 percent in 1924.82 By no means, however, did all of those
who abandoned the liberal parties in the May 1924 Reichstag elections switch
their allegiance to the DNVP. Many chose instead to vote instead for the
Business Party of the German Middle Class (Wirtschaftspartei des deutschen
Mittelstandes or WP) or one of the other special-interest or regional splinter
parties that had surfaced in Germany since the last national elections. All told,
special-interest and regional parties accounted for nearly 10 percent of the
national vote in the May 1924 elections in what was essentially another
symptom of the structural instability that plagued the German party system
in the early and middle years of the Weimar Republic.83
The outcome of the May 1924 Reichstag elections left the German National
People’s Party in a commanding political position. With the addition of ten
deputies who had won election as candidates of regional farm organizations,
the DNVP was now the strongest party in the Reichstag and could claim the
support of 106 deputies in parliament. Only the Social Democrats with their
100 parliamentary mandates were in a position to challenge the DNVP for
political supremacy. But the SPD was still nursing its wounds from its partici-
pation in Stresemann’s Great Coalition and showed little inclination to trade
the advantages of opposition for the burden of governmental responsibility. In
the meantime, the DNVP found itself caught on the horns of its own cam-
paign rhetoric. After all, how could the DNVP, as the party that had branded
the Dawes Plan a second Versailles, participate in a government whose first
item of business would be the implementation of its recommendations for a

82
Jones, German Liberalism, 220 22.
83
In this respect, see Thomas Childers, “Inflation, Stabilization, and Political Realignment
in Germany, 1924 1928,” in Die deutsche Inflation eine Zwischenbilanz/The German
Inflation Reconsidered A Preliminary Balance, ed. Gerald D. Feldman, Carl Ludwig
Holtfrerich, Gerhard A. Ritter, and Peter Christian Witt (Berlin and New York, 1982),
409 31, and Thomas Childers, “Interest and Ideology: Anti System Politics in the Era of
Stabilization, 1924 1928,” in Die Nachwirkungen der Inflation auf die deutsche Geschichte
1924 1933, ed. Gerald D. Feldman (Munich, 1985), 1 20. On the WP, see Martin
Schumacher, Mittelstandsfront und Republik. Die Wirtschaftspartei Reichspartei des
deutschen Mittelstandes 1919 1933 (Düsseldorf, 1972), 80 86, 89 107.
     

solution to the reparations problem? Or, in more fundamental terms, how

could the DNVP enter a government that derived its legitimation from the
Weimar Constitution without compromising its integrity as a party of
“national opposition”?84 As long as these questions remained unanswered,
Nationalist hopes of translating their success at the polls into a lasting political
advantage would remain unfulfilled. For Germany’s republican leadership, the
critical question was one of bringing the Nationalists into the government,
particularly in light of its newly discovered political muscle, without com-
promising the integrity of Germany’s republican institutions. This was a
situation fraught with risk for Nationalists and republicans alike.
The Nationalist response to this situation was anything but encouraging.
Given the fact that the four parties supporting the Marx government com-
manded less than a third of the seats in the Reichstag, there were compelling
reasons for an extension of the existing governmental coalition to the right.
For his own part, Stresemann was optimistic that the DNVP’s recent electoral
success would bring with it a greater sense of responsibility on the part of the
Nationalist party leadership and a more positive attitude towards the Dawes
committee recommendations.85 But the government’s efforts to secure a
positive commitment from the DNVP regarding the future course of German
foreign policy were frustrated by the lack of any sort of coherent position on
the part of the Nationalist leadership.86 The resolution released by the DNVP
Reichstag delegation on 7 May 1924 indicated the party’s willingness to share
the burden of governmental responsibility but failed to clarify its position on
acceptance or rejection of the Dawes committee recommendations.87 Nor did
the Nationalists help their cause when in their first meeting with representa-
tives from the four government parties on 21 May they insisted that the task of
forming a new government should be placed in the hands of the former head
of the German navy, Great Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz.88 Given Tirpitz’s
political past and outspoken hostility toward the republican system of

84
In this respect, see the confidential memorandum prepared by Schlange Schöningen for
Hugenberg, 19 May 1924, BA Koblenz, NL Hugenberg, 28/134 37, as well as Axel von
Freytagh Loringhoven, Nationale Opposition (Munich, 1924).
85
Stresemann to Jarres, 9 May 1924, PA AA Berlin, NL Stresemann, 90/171964 69. See also
Larry Eugene Jones, “Stabilisierung von Rechts: Gustav Stresemann und das Streben nach
politischer Stabilität 1923 1929,” in Politiker und Bürger. Gustav Stresemann und seine
Zeit, ed. Karl Heinrich Pohl (Göttingen, 1992), 162 93.
86
Stresemann to Hembeck, 13 May 1924, PA AA Berlin, NL Stresemann, 90/171986 88.
87
Resolution of the DNVP Reichstag delegation, 7 May 1924, NL Westarp, Gärtringen,
VN 50.
88
Protocol of a conversation between representatives from the DNVP and the German
middle parties, 21 May 1924, BA Koblenz, Nachlass Anton Erkelenz, 136. For the
Nationalist position, see Hans Erdmann von Lindeiner Wildau, “Die Deutschnationalen
und die Regierungskrise,” n.d. [June 1924], DNVP Werbeblatt, no. 255, NL Westarp,
Gärtringen, VN 45.
   , –

government, the Nationalist proposal was hardly credible and did little to
reassure the leaders of the more moderate bourgeois parties of the sincerity of
Nationalist intentions.89 When Hergt and the Nationalist leaders failed at a
second meeting two days later to commitment themselves to a foreign policy
based upon acceptance of the Dawes committee recommendations,90 Marx
concluded that the DNVP was not seriously interested in joining his govern-
ment and tendered his cabinet’s resignation on 26 May 1924.91
It is unlikely the Nationalists ever thought that Tirpitz would be given an
opportunity to form a new government.92 In all likelihood, his nomination
was little more than a ploy that sought to reassure the more militantly
antirepublican elements on the DNVP’s right wing that if the party did enter
the government, it would be on terms they could easily accept. Since there was
little reason to believe the more moderate bourgeois parties would ever accept
Tirpitz as chancellor, his candidacy had the further advantage of delaying
serious discussion of a Nationalist entry into the cabinet until after the Dawes
committee recommendations had been formally accepted. The Nationalists
would thus be able to join the government and influence the distribution of the
benefits accruing from the implementation of the Dawes Plan without ever
being tainted by the odium of acceptance. Whatever hopes the Nationalists
might have had that DNVP party chairman Hergt would be chosen to form a
new cabinet following the collapse of the Marx government were quickly
dispelled when on 28 May Reich President Ebert reappointed Marx to the
task of organizing a new government. This led to a new round of negotiations
in which the Nationalists dropped their demands for a Tirpitz chancellorship
but still made their willingness to join the cabinet contingent upon Strese-
mann’s resignation as foreign minister, a fundamental change in the direction
of German foreign policy, and an end to the “Great Coalition” in Prussia.93
When Marx rejected these conditions as unacceptable, the Nationalists
announced the collapse of efforts to form a new government on the evening

89
Remarks by Marx at a ministerial conference, 24 May 1924, in Akten der Reichskanzlei:
Die Kabinette Marx I und II. 30. November 1924 bis 3. Juni 1924. 3. Juni 1924 bis 15.
Januar 1925, edited by Günter Abramowski, 2 vols. (Boppard am Rhein, 1973), 1: 659 60.
90
Protocol of a conversation between representatives from the DNVP and the German
middle parties, 23 May 1924, BA Koblenz, NL Erkelenz, 136. See also Hergt to Schulz,
24 May 1924, BA Berlin, R 8005, 9/17 18.
91
Marx’s report at a ministerial conference, 31 May 1924, in Die Kabinette Marx I und II,
ed. Abramowski, 1:671 73. For further details, see Michael Stürmer, Koalition und
Opposition in der Weimarer Republik 1924 1928 (Düsseldorf, 1967), 41 49, and Robert
P. Gratwohl, Stresemann and the DNVP: Reconciliation or Revenge in German Foreign
Policy, 1924 1928 (Lawrence, KS, 1980), 21 30.
92
Freytagh Loringhoven to Goldacker, 12 Sept. 1924, BA Koblenz, Nachlass Otto Schmidt
Hannover, 34.
93
Hergt to Scholz, 2 June 1924, BA Berlin, R 8005, 9/4 5.
     

of 30 May. Following one last effort to reach an understanding with the

Nationalists, Marx informed Ebert that further negotiations had no purpose,
whereupon the Reich President promptly accepted Marx’s suggestion that the
previous cabinet be reinstated in office.94

The Dawes Crisis

Although the Nationalists had temporarily avoided the odium of having to
serve in a government whose first item of business would have been the
ratification and implementation of the Dawes committee recommendations,
the dilemma in which the Nationalist party leadership found itself refused to
go away. Over the next several months, Stresemann and his associates in the
national government finalized the details of the Dawes Plan in a series of
extended negotiations with Allied representatives in London. In the course of
these negotiations, Stresemann and the German delegation were able to secure
a number of essential improvements in the terms of the proposed treaty, not
the least of which was the provision that the military evacuation of the Ruhr
was to begin within a year of ratification. Moreover, the German delegation
was able to nail down the financial commitments from British and American
bankers that were essential for Germany’s economic recovery.95 Whether or
not all of this would be sufficient to win Nationalist acceptance – or, at least,
Nationalist acquiescence – in the Reichstag remained to be seen.96 Such
support was essential in light of the fact that a constitutional amendment
requiring a two-thirds majority in the Reichstag was necessary to transfer
ownership of the German railway system from the public to the private sector.
Without Nationalist support or large-scale Nationalist defections, the London
Treaty stood no chance of securing the two-thirds majority necessary for
ratification.
On 16 July the Allies reconvened in London to put the finishing touches on
a treaty implementing the recommendations of the Dawes committee. In the
meantime, the situation within the DNVP became increasingly confused as
three distinct positions on the acceptance or rejection of the London Treaty
had begun to emerge. In the first place, there were the Pan-German and
militantly anti-republican elements on the DNVP’s extreme right wing that
demanded a policy of absolute and unconditional opposition. This faction was
irreconcilably opposed to the new plan and insisted that the German Right

94
For further details, see Stürmer, Koalition und Opposition, 45 49, and Hehl, Marx,
286 87.
95
Krüger, Außenpolitik, 243 47.
96
See Westarp’s reservations in a meeting with Stresemann and other party leaders, 4 July
1924, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, VN 50.
   , –

should not compromise itself by taking part in the voluntary enslavement of

the German people and that the DNVP could not afford to betray those voters
who had rallied behind its call for the rejection of the Dawes Plan in the recent
Reichstag elections.97 The second faction consisted of those who enjoyed close
ties to outside economic interests and who described themselves as political
pragmatists anxious to protect the German economy against the convulsions
they feared might result from rejection of the plan.98 Between these two
factions stood the DNVP party leadership, which was prepared to provide
the government with the votes necessay to secure ratification of the controver-
sial treaty if this would pave the way for the DNVP’s entry into the national
government on terms that would assure it of a lasting influence upon Ger-
many’s political future.99
At the urging of Tirpitz and other party leaders, Hergt decided to take
advantage of the temporary lull in the domestic political scene to convene a
special session of the DNVP Reichstag delegation from 17 to 22 July. With
Reinhold Quaatz and Martin Spahn leading the way, the delegation began to
harden its position against acceptance of the so-called Dawes Plan.100 Even
Hergt, who was still hoping that it might be possible to leverage Nationalist
support for acceptance of the Dawes committee recommendations into an
invitation for the DNVP to join the government on terms commensurate with
its recent success at the polls, capitulated to the passions of the moment. At a
joint meeting of the Reichstag delegation and representatives of the party’s
state and regional organizations on 22 July, the Nationalist party chairman
outlined seven demands with respect to the Dawes committee recommenda-
tions that would have to be met before the DNVP could support the plan in
parliament. Among other things, these demands stipulated that the Allies
must begin the immediate withdrawal from the military and economic control
of the so-called sanction areas, that German sovereignty must be fully and
immediately restored in the Rhineland, that the Allies give assurances that no

97
Schmidt Hannover to Ritgen, 23 Aug. 1924, BA Koblenz, NL Schmidt Hannover, 32.
98
Baerwolff to Tirpitz, 7 June 1924, BA MA Freiburg, NL Tirpitz, 60/61 63. In this
respect, see also Stresemann’s appeal for the support of German industry in a speech
before the Iron and Steel Goods Industrial Association (Eisen und Stahlwaren
Industriebund) in Elberfeld, 10 July 1924, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, VN 47.
99
Hergt to the DNVP district organization in West Prussia, 9 Sept. 1924, BA MA Freiburg,
NL Tirpitz, 60/386 92. On the mood at the upper echelons of the DNVP party
leadership, see Westarp to Hergt, 17 July 1924, NL Westarp, II/13.
100
For further details, see the entry in Quaatz’s diary, 27 July 1924, BA Koblenz, NL Quaatz,
16, as well as Freytagh Loringhoven to Goldacker, 12 Sept. 1924, BA Koblenz, NL
Schmidt Hannover, 34, and Keudell to Tirpitz, 27 July 1924, BA MA Freiburg, NL
Tirpitz, 278/6 7. See also Reinhold Quaatz and Martin Spahn, Deutschland unter
Militär , Finanz und Wirtschaftskontrolle (Berlin, 1925), esp. 74 121.
     

further sanctions will be imposed in the future, and that the Allies disavow the
war-guilt clause of the Versailles Peace Treaty.101
In the meantime, outside pressure on the DNVP Reichstag delegation for
acceptance of the Dawes Plan continued to mount from three different direc-
tions. On 2 July 1924 the executive committee of the National Federation of
German Industry voted overwhelmingly to reaffirm the position it had taken
on 24 April in support of the Dawes committee recommendations.102 This
action, which ran into strong opposition from Hugenberg and a small contin-
gent of his supporters from the Ruhr industrial establishment,103 placed those
DNVP Reichstag deputies with close ties to German industry under increas-
ingly heavy pressure to vote for acceptance of the plan when it came before
parliament for ratification in the fourth week of August. Agents for the Krupp
Steel Works, for example, were particularly active in pressuring Nationalist
deputies like Jakob Wilhelm Reichert from the Association of German Iron
and Steel Industrialists into voting for the plan.104 Similarly, organized agri-
culture seemed no less intent upon using the conflict over acceptance or
rejection of the Dawes Plan as a lever to extract important concessions from
the government on the future direction of German trade policy. Anticipating
the moment when Germany would regain full tariff autonomy on 1 January
1925, the leaders of the National Rural League and other agricultural interest
organizations had already begun to press the government for a return to the
agricultural protectionism of the prewar period.105 At the same time, Krupp’s

101
“Die sieben Forderungen der Deutschnationalen,” Korrespondenz der Deutschnationalen
Volkspartei, 23 July 1924, no. 104. For a defense of the DNVP’s position, see Otto
Hoetzsch, Die Deutschnationalen und das Dawes Gutachten. Reichstagsrede am 26. Juli
1924, Deutschnationale Flugschrift, no. 178 (Berlin, 1924). On the situation within the
DNVP Reichstag delegation, see the entry in Quaatz’s diary, 27 July 1924, BA Koblenz,
NL Quaatz, 16.
102
Geschäftliche Mitteilungen für die Mitglieder des Reichsverbandes der Deutschen Industrie
6, no. 16 (15 July 1924): 113 15, BA Berlin, ZSg 1 14/2. For further details, see
Weisbrod, Schwerindustrie in der Weimarer Republik, 273 80, and Stephanie Wolff
Rohé, Der Reichsverband der Deutschen Industrie 1919 1924/25 (Frankfurt am Main,
2001), 355 87.
103
Hugenberg’s remarks at the meeting of the RDI main committee (Hauptausschuß),
2 July 1924, BA Koblenz, NL Silverberg, 355/84 93. See also the entry in Quaatz’s diary
for 3 July 1924, BA Koblenz, NL Quaatz, 16.
104
See the exchange of telegrams between Krupp and Haniel, 24 25 Aug. 1924, Historisches
Archiv Krupp, Essen (hereafter cited as HA Krupp Essen), Bestand FAH, IV E 789. On
Reichert, see his letter to Cuno, 13 Aug. 1924, StA Hamburg, Hapag Rederei, Handakten
Cuno, 1489. For Reichert’s defense of the pact, see J. W. Reichert, Zur deutschnationalen
Wirtschaftspolitik, Deutschnationale Flugschrift, no. 193 (Berlin, 1924), 14 23.
105
Karl Hepp and Eberhard von Kalckreuth, Wege zur Aktivierung der deutschen
Wirtschaftsbilanz. Die Vorschläge des Reichs Landbundes (Berlin, 1925). See also the
memorandum from Hepp and Kalckreuth of the RLB to the national government,
21 June 1924, in Kabinette Marx I und II, ed. Abramowski, 2:729 30.
   , –

allies in the German agricultural community – most notably his brother-in-

law and RLB official Baron Tilo von Wilmowsky – sought to break down the
RLB’s opposition to the Dawes Plan by pointing out the benefits that accept-
ance of the plan held for German agriculture.106 Under these circumstances,
the RLB leadership became convinced that a return to agrarian protectionism
would be possible only if the Nationalists were represented in the government.
As RLB president Eberhard von Kalckreuth expressed it to Westarp in a
conversation less than a week before the decisive vote in the Reichstag, “if this
required accepting the plan, then so be it.”107 The third source of outside
pressure on the DNVP Reichstag delegation for acceptance of the Dawes
recommendations came from the German Trade-Union Federation and
its associates in the Christian labor movement. The leaders of the DGB
looked upon the Dawes Plan as a means of attracting the foreign capital
necessary to recover from the massive unemployment that had accompanied
Germany’s return to economic and fiscal stability in the winter of 1923–24.
Consequently, the leaders of the DNVP’s Christian-social labor wing found
themselves under increasingly heavy pressure from the DGB and its affiliated
unions to support the controversial report when it came before the Reichstag
for a final vote.108
Under these circumstances, the unity of the Nationalist delegation to the
Reichstag began to crack.109 As it became increasingly clear by the second or
third week of August that the government had no intention of meeting the
seven demands the DNVP Reichstag delegation had announced on 22 July, the
Nationalist party leadership became more and more uncertain in its handling
of the crisis. On 21 August the DNVP Reichstag delegation reaffirmed the
position it had taken against ratification of the London accords a month earlier
and insisted upon complete fulfillment of its seven demands before any change
in its current stance could be considered.110 But Nationalist hopes of main-
taining a united front against ratification of the London Treaty received a

106
Wilmowsky to Krupp, 13 May 1924, HA Krupp, FAH 23/500/235 36. See also Wolfgang
Zollitsch, “Das Scheitern der ‘gouvernementalen’ Rechten. Tilo von Wilmowsky und die
organisierten Interessen in der Staatskrise von Weimar,” in Demokratie in Deutschland.
Chancen und Gefährdungen im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert. Historische Essays, ed. Wolther
von Kieseritzky and Klaus Peter Sick (Munich, 1999), 254 74.
107
Westarp’s report of his conversation with Klackreuth in a letter to his wife, 23 Aug. 1924,
NL Westarp, NL Gärtringen.
108
Roder, Gewerkschaftsbund, 405 06.
109
For an insightful analysis of the dilemma in which Hergt and the DNVP party leadership
found themselves, see Philipp Nielsen, “Verantwortung und Kompromiss. Die Deutsch
nationalen auf der Suche nach einer konservativen Demokratie,” in Normalität und
Fragilität. Demokratie nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg, ed. Tim B. Müller and Adam Tooze
(Hamburg, 2015), 294 314, here 303 13.
110
Neue Preußische (Kreuz )Zeitung, 22 Aug. 1924, no. 393.
     

severe blow when the National Rural League issued a deliberately ambiguous
statement that reaffirmed its opposition to acceptance of the Dawes committee
recommendations and its call for a reorganization of the national government
but fell short of instructing its representatives in the DNVP and other political
parties to vote against the recommendations in the upcoming Reichstag
vote.111 The language of the RLB statement might very well have been even
more forthright in its support of the plan had it not been for the tireless efforts
of Quaatz, who met with Kalckreuth and members of the DNVP Reichstag
delegation with close ties to the RLB – Hans von Goldacker, Prätorius von
Richthofen-Boguslawitz, and Walther von Keudell – in an attempt to stiffen
thier opposition to the plan’s acceptance and to minimize the damage caused
by the ambiguity of the RLB’s statement.112 Given the fact that as many as
52 of the DNVP’s 106 deputies belonged to the RLB, the RLB’s announcement
greatly increased the threat of an open split within DNVP party ranks.
At this point, the Nationalist party leadership tried to salvage whatever they
could out of what was quickly becoming an impossible situation by approach-
ing Stresemann and the leaders of the DVP on the evening of 23 August with
an offer to provide the government with the votes it needed for ratification of
the London accords if the DVP would reciprocate by issuing a statement
committing it to a reorganization of the national government when the
Reichstag reconvened in October.113 By making such an offer, Hergt and the
leaders of the DNVP Reichstag delegation were trying not only to extract
maximum political advantage from the likelihood that Nationalist deputies
might vote for the Dawes recommendations despite instructions to the con-
trary but also to minimize the extent of such defections by insisting that party
unity was an essential precondition for the success of its negotiations with the
government.114 It was a risky ploy that met with little enthusiasm from the
leaders of the DNVP’s right wing,115 but under the circumstances it was about
the only strategic option open to Hergt and the DNVP party leadership.
Although Stresemann agreed to present the Nationalist offer to the chancellor,
his initial inclination was to reject it and let the Nationalists suffer the

111
“Stellungnahme des Präsidiums des Reichs Landbundes zur gegenwärtigen politischen
Lage,” n.d. [Aug. 1924], appended to Kalckreuth to Westarp, 23 Aug. 1924, NL Westarp,
Gärtringen, VN 46.
112
Entry in Quaatz’s diary, 22 Aug. 1924, BA Koblenz, NL Quaatz, 16. See also to Krupp, 31
Aug. 1924, HA Krupp Essen, FAH 23/500/283 86.
113
Stresemann’s memorandum of a conversation with Curtius and Zapf from the DVP
Reichstag delegation, 24 Aug. 1924, PA AA Berlin, NL Stresemann, 15/156931 32. See
also Wright, Stresemann, 290 92, and Richter, Deutsche Volkspartei, 343 45.
114
For Hergt’s strategy, see his letter to the DNVP district organization in East Prussia, 9
Sept. 1924, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, II/13.
115
Entry in Quaatz’s diary, 23 Aug. 1924, BA Koblenz, NL Quaatz, 16.
   , –

consequences of their own demagogy.116 For even if Stresemann may not have
felt that he had the votes necessary for ratification of the London accords, he
clearly looked forward to the prospect of new national elections at a time when
the Nationalists were badly divided and very much on the defensive.
In the meantime, confusion continued to reign within the ranks of the
DNVP. Hergt’s Reichstag speech of 25 August did little to clarify the situation
and consisted of little more than a restatement of the DNVP’s previous
position, though with sufficient ambivalence to suggest his party’s willingness
to support the controversial legislation if it received the necessary concessions
from the government.117 Over the course of the next several days pressure on
the DNVP Reichstag delegation continued to mount as even the German chief
of command, General Hans von Seeckt, began to counsel moderation on the
part of the DNVP.118 But entreaties of this sort had little effect upon the
determination of the DNVP’s extreme right wing. On 26 August Hugenberg
interrupted his convalescence from a mild heart attack he had suffered the
night before to fire off an impassioned letter imploring the DNVP party
chairman to remain firm in his resolve to block ratification of the London
accords.119 Hergt and the leaders of the DNVP Reichstag delegation, on the
other hand, continued to vacillate between declarations of unconditional
opposition to the London accords and suggestions that they might vote for
acceptance if certain demands, such as the revocation of the war guilt clause
and a postponement in the treaty’s implementation until the evacuation of the
Ruhr, were met. This did little to inspire confidence in Hergt’s ability to lead
the party.120
Throughout all of this, the situation in the DNVP continued to deteriorate.
At a meeting of the DNVP Reichstag delegation on the afternoon of 27 August,
twenty-two Nationalist deputies indicated that they were prepared to vote for
acceptance of the Dawes recommendation despite the almost unanimous
opposition to such a step fact that the leaders of the party’s district organiza-
tions had voiced at a caucus with the delegation earlier that morning. Those
deputies inclined to vote for acceptance had begun to coalesce behind the
leadership of Max Wallraf and included such party stalwarts as Otto Hoetzsch,
Gottfried von Dryander, and Count Prätorius von Richthofen-Boguslawitz

116
Stresemann’s memorandum of a conversation with Curtius and Zapf, 24 Aug. 1924, PA
AA Berlin, NL Stresemann, 15/156931 32.
117
Freytagh Loringhoven to Goldacker, 12 Sept. 1924, BA Koblenz, NL Schmidt Hannover,
34. For the text of Hergt’s speech, see Oskar Hergt, Der Weg zur einer richtigen
Regierungspolitik. Reichstagsrede am 25. August 1924, Deutschnationale Flugschrift,
no. 181 (Berlin, 1924).
118
Hans Meier Welcker, Seeckt (Frankfurt am Main, 1967), 446 47.
119
Alfred Hugenberg, Streiflichter aus Vergangenheit und Gegenwart (Berlin, 1927), 96 97.
120
Freytagh Loringhoven to Goldacker, 12 Sept. 1924, BA Koblenz, NL Schmidt
Hannover, 34.
     

from the Silesian Rural League (Schlesischer Landbund).121 Their position was
influenced in no small measure by the fact that the DVP Reichstag delegation
had tried to break the impasse by sending the DNVP a letter in which it
promised to join the Nationalists in forming a new government if they
provided the votes necessary for ratification of the London accords.122 Hergt,
who was still hopeful of preventing a schism within the DNVP Reichstag
delegation,123 met with representatives from the Center and DVP on 28 August
but was unable to secure terms for the DNVP’s entry into the government that
would have been acceptable to all the factions in the DNVP Reichstag delega-
tion. Most importantly, the government parties were no longer willing to
consider Nationalist demands for the chancellorship or for a change in the
leadership of the German foreign office.124
Within hours of the final and decisive vote in the Reichstag, Hergt met with
the chancellor in the early hours of 29 August to determine to the extent to
which the DVP’s action actually signaled a change in the government’s
position. But this meeting produced still another deadlock when Hergt made
his party’s support in the upcoming Reichstag vote conditional not only upon
the formation of a new government with Westarp at its head but also upon the
transfer of the Prussian minister presidency and the Prussian ministry of
interior into Nationalist hands. Citing the opposition of his own party and
the negative reaction that such a step would almost certainly encounter
abroad, Marx rejected the Nationalist demands and broke off further negoti-
ations.125 At this point Hergt returned to the DNVP Reichstag delegation and,
with the full support of Westarp, called upon his colleagues to reject the
London accords along with all the legislation necessary for their implementa-
tion.126 By now, however, it was too late to salvage the unity of the delegation.
The two factions had met separately that morning, and there was no longer
any reason to believe, as Hergt apparently did, that the delegation would
unanimously reject acceptance of the London accords if its demands for the
revocation of the war guilt clause and other modifications in the terms of the
treaty were not met. Hergt’s assumption that the delegation would remain
united against the accords if its demands were not met received a rude shock
when Wilhelm Bazille, a Nationalist deputy from Württemberg, announced on

121
Ibid. See also Bachmann to Weilnböck, 27 Aug. 1924, BA Koblenz, NL Weilnböck, 5a.
122
Nationalliberale Correspondenz, 1 Sept. 1924, no. 145.
123
Hergt to the DNVP district organization in East Prussia, 9 Sept. 1924, NL Westarp,
Gärtringen, II/13.
124
Freytagh Loringhoven to Goldacker, 12 Sept. 1924, BA Koblenz, NL Schmidt
Hannover, 34.
125
Undated memorandum by Hergt on the negotiations of 28 29 Aug. 1924, NL Westarp,
Gärtringen, II/12. See also Hergt to Zapf, 29 Aug. 1924, BA Berlin, R 8005, 10/117 18.
126
Hergt to the DNVP district organization in East Prussia, 9 Sept. 1924, NL Westarp,
Gärtringen, II/13.
   , –

behalf of those who favored acceptance of the Dawes recommendations that

they would vote for the treaty’s ratification when it came before the Reichstag
later that afternoon.127
Much to the dismay of those who stood on the party’s right wing, Hergt
seemed resigned to a split in the delegation and made little attempt to use his
authority as DNVP party chairman to force those who had coalesced behind
Hoetzsch, Wallraf, and Bazille into going along with the rest of the delega-
tion.128 The indecisiveness of the DNVP party leadership combined with
pressure from the National Federation of German Industry, the National Rural
League, and other outside economic interests to produce widespread confu-
sion and uncertainty within the ranks of the party’s Reichstag delegation. The
fate of the Ruhr and Rhineland in the event that the London accords were not
accepted, the specter of a new round of credit restrictions by the finance
ministry and German National Bank, and warnings from the ministry of
agriculture about the dire consequences of the treaty’s rejection for Germany’s
small and middle-sized farmers all played a major role in undermining
Nationalist resolve to fight ratification of the treaty.129 As a result, the unity
of the delegation completely collapsed in the voting on the Dawes Plan on the
afternoon of 29 August. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the fateful
vote on the Federal Railway Law (Reichsbahngesetz). For, as in the case of all
other votes on the various pieces of legislation related to the implementation
of the Dawes Plan, the Nationalist delegation split right down the middle,
thereby providing the government with the two-thirds majority necessary for
the controversial railway bill to take effect. Of the hundred Nationalist dep-
uties who voted on the bill, forty-eight voted for acceptance and fifty-two for
rejection. Nationalist unity was now in shambles.130
Party leaders moved quickly to contain the damage caused by the split in the
Nationalist vote on the railway bill by sending a circular to district and
precinct party leaders that stressed the gravity of the situation in which the
fateful vote had taken place and urged the party faithful not to attack the
integrity of those who had voted one way or the other.131 To the leaders of
the DNVP’s right wing, however, the collapse in party unity in the fateful vote
on 29 August 1924 was a source of deep embarrassment. In their eyes, the split
in the Nationalist vote constituted nothing less than a betrayal of the “national

127
Freytagh Loringhoven to Goldacker, 12 Sept. 1924, BA Koblenz, NL Schmidt
Hannover, 34.
128
Ibid.
129
Schmidt Hannover to Ritgen, 17 Oct. 1924, BA Koblenz, NL Schmidt Hannover, 32.
130
Hans Erdmann von Lindeiner Wildau, Nach der Entscheidung, Deutschnationale Flug
schrift, no. 182 (Berlin, 1924).
131
Circular from Lindeiner Wildau to the DNVP district and precinct organizations, 29
Aug. 1924, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, II/12.
     

opposition” and served as a classic example of the way in which special

economic interests were able to subvert the will of the party and subordinate
it to their own specific agenda.132 At the same time, how one had voted on
29 August 1924 became a litmus test of one’s commitment to Germany’s
struggle for national liberation. The individual deputies who had voted for
acceptance of the London accords were stigmatized as Ja-Sager who had
placed the welfare of special economic interests before that of the nation as
a whole. But the most vicious attacks were reserved for Hergt. Not even the
fact that Hergt himself had voted against acceptance could shield him from the
wrath of his party’s right wing. Hergt now became a symbol of the vacillation
and indecisiveness that had led to the split in the first place, and he was under
mounting pressure from the Pan-German League and the more militantly
antirepublican elements on the DNVP’s right wing to resign from the party
chairmanship as an act of public penance for his failure to preserve party
unity. Such sentiment was particularly strong at the local and regional levels of
the Nationalist party organization, where the Pan-Germans and old-line
conservatives not only demanded Hergt’s resignation but insisted that those
deputies who had voted for the Dawes recommendations be summarily
purged from the Reichstag delegation.133 The split in the vote on the Dawes
Plan threatened to erupt into a major crisis within the party as a whole.

The events of 29 August 1924 and the recriminations that reverberated

throughout the Nationalist party organization were indicative of a much
deeper schism within the ranks of the German Right. From 1919 to 1924 the
German Right had been united in its opposition to the symbols and insti-
tutions of Germany’s new republican order. Governmental conservatives and
radical nationalists stood together in their rejection of the sweeping changes
that had taken place in Germany’s constitutional system as a result of the
November Revolution. But as Germany reemerged from the abyss of 1923 and
began to take the first tentative steps towards political and economic stability,
the “unity of the no” began to lose much of its integrative potential. For many
of those on the German Right, opposition became a luxury they could no
longer afford. This was particularly true of large and influential economic
interest organizations like the National Federation of German Industry, the
National Rural League, and the German National Union of Commercial
Employees. For as much as the leaders of these organizations may have
distrusted the republican form of government, they had no choice but to work

132
Freytagh Loringhoven, Deutschnationale Volkspartei, 24 26.
133
For example, see Arnim Boitzenburg to Westarp, 30 Aug. 1924, NL Westarp, Gärtrin
gen, VN 43, as well as the letter from the DNVP Harburg to Schmidt Hannover, 28 Sept.
1924, BA Koblenz, NL Schmidt Hannover, 34.
   , –

within the framework of the constitutional arrangements that had been estab-
lished at Weimar to defend and represent the vested interests of their respect-
ive constituencies. This, in turn, placed them on a collision course with those
elements on the German Right that remained irreconcilably opposed to any
form of collaboration with the Weimar Republic.
 8

Stabilization from the Right?

The ratification of the London accords and the implementation of the Dawes
committee recommendations represented an important step towards the pol-
itical and economic stabilization of the Weimar Republic. It also represented a
vindication of the strategy that Stresemann and other government officials had
adopted with respect to the German Right following its impressive gains in the
May 1924 Reichstag elections. From the height of the Dawes crisis in the
summer of 1924 through the end of 1925, Stresemann and his associates
pursued a deliberate policy of trying to stabilize the republic from the right
by coopting the support of influential economic interest organizations like the
National Federation of German Industry and the National Rural League in the
hope that this would force the DNVP party leadership into adopting a more
constructive attitude towards Germany’s republican system of government. If
successful, this strategy would oblige the Nationalists to foreswear the dema-
gogy that had served them so well in the most recent Reichstag elections and to
square their rhetoric with the hard realities of Germany’s political and eco-
nomic situation.1 The extent to which this strategy would work depended not
merely upon the effectiveness with which the various interest groups in the
DNVP were able to press their case at the upper echelons of the Nationalist
party leadership but, more importantly, upon the specific benefits that the
DNVP’s participation in the national government would bring to its various
constituencies. Whether or not this would be possible under the restrictive
conditions of Germany’s economic stabilization remained to be seen.

1
For the general outlines of Stresemann’s strategy with respect to the DNVP, see Gustav
Stresemann, Nationale Realpolitik. Rede auf dem 6. Parteitag der Deutschen Volkspartei in
Dortmund am 14. November 1924, Flugschriften der Deutschen Volkspartei, no. 56
(Berlin, 1924), 32 34, as well as the manuscript of his article, “Zur Regierungskrise,” Ham
burger Fremdenblatt, 25 Dec. 1924, PA AA Berlin, NL Stresemann, 18/157792 806. See
also Larry Eugene Jones, “Stabilisierung von Rechts: Gustav Stresemann und das Streben
nach politischer Stabilität 1923 1929,” in Politiker und Bürger. Gustav Stresemann und
seine Zeit, ed. Karl Heinrich Pohl (Göttingen, 2002), 162 93. For a somewhat different
reading of Stresemann’s political strategy, see Wright, Stresemann, 296 301.


   , –

Stalemate in Berlin
Efforts to bring the DNVP into the government received new life after the
Nationalists had helped it to secure ratification of the London accords and
begin implementation of the Dawes committee recommendations.2 But the
position of DNVP party chairman Oskar Hergt had been severely weakened
by his failure to maintain party unity in the decisive vote on the Dawes Plan.
Hergt accepted responsibility for the split in the vote on the Dawes Plan and
was fully prepared to step down as party chairman. Only the fact that the
DNVP was about to enter into exploratory negotiations with the DVP and
Center that could conceivably lead to its entry into the national government
kept Hergt from going ahead with this decision.3 Nevertheless, the DNVP
remained bitterly divided as opponents of the Dawes Plan tried to mobilize the
party’s rank-and-file membership against those deputies who had supported
the controversial bill in the Reichstag.4 All of this made Stresemann increas-
ingly skeptical as to whether or not the Nationalists would be able to assume a
responsible and constructive role in a new governmental coalition.5 The
leaders of the DVP Reichstag delegation, on the other hand, remained firmly
committed to an extension of the existing governmental coalition to the right
and entered into exploratory negotiations with the Nationalist party leadership
in the second week of September.6 But the leaders of the DNVP responded to
DVP’s overtures with little enthusiasm, if for no other reason than the simple
fact that their ability to influence the composition and policies of the national
cabinet had been severely compromised by the DNVP’s ambiguous role in the
passage of the Dawes Plan.7 Still, when the DVP Reichstag delegation publicly
reaffirmed its pledge to support the DNVP’s entry into the national govern-
ment in return for the role it had played in the ratification of the London
accords,8 the DNVP party leadership responded positively to the DVP’s
overture and agreed to take part in negotiations aimed at an extension of the
government to the right as long as their party’s representation in a reorganized

2
For further details, see Stürmer, Koalition und Opposition, 73 78; Richter, Deutsche
Volkspartei, 334 49, and Ohnezeit, Zwischen “schärfster Opposition,” 272 77.
3
Report by Brauer (Central Association of German Conservatives), 2 Oct. 1924, Branden
burgisches Landeshauptstaatsarchiv, Potsdam (hereafter cited as BLHA Potsdam)
Nachlass Count Dietlof von Arnim Boitzenburg, Rep. 37, 4426/89 90.
4
Brauer to Westarp, 9 and 19 Sept. 1924, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, VN 46. See also the
entry in Gallwitz’s diary, 10 Sept. 1924, BA MA Freiburg, NL Gallwitz, 39.
5
Stresemann to Campe, 8 Sept. 1924, PA AA Berlin, NL Stresemann, 157093 96.
6
Scholz’s report at a meeting of the executive committee of the DVP Reichstag delegation,
24 Sept. 1924, BA Koblenz, R 45 II, 366/22 23.
7
See the correspondence between Hergt and Westarp, 15 18, 1924, BA Berlin, R 8005, 10/
96 103, and Westarp to Lindeiner Wildau, 25 Sept. 1924, ibid., 10/88 89.
8
Deutsche Volkspartei, Reichsgeschäftsstelle, ed., Nachtrag zum Wahlhandbuch 1924
(Berlin, 1924).
    ? 

Marx cabinet be commensurate with the strength it had demonstrated by its

recent victory at the polls.9
For his own part, Marx had little interest in a one-sided extension of his
cabinet to the right and immediately tried to dampen the effect of the DVP’s
overtures to the DNVP by inviting the Social Democrats to participate in a
reorganization of his cabinet. Hergt promptly denounced Marx’s overtures to
the Social Democrats at a meeting of the DNVP Reichstag delegation on
8 October as a breach of the promise the chancellor had made to the DNVP
at the time of the Dawes vote.10 By then, a small but vociferous minority that
strongly opposed the DNVP’s entry into a reorganized Marx cabinet had
begun to crystallize within the DNVP Reichstag delegation around the person
of Count Westarp.11 The Nationalists then proceeded to torpedo Marx’s
overtures to the SPD by attaching three conditions to their participation in a
reorganization of his cabinet. Specifically, the Nationalists demanded that the
government parties accept Christianity as the basis of German political life,
reject the notion of class conflict in favor of a commitment to the principle of
the Volksgemeinschaft, and disavow Germany’s alleged responsibility for the
outbreak of World War I.12 The first and second of these demands were clearly
directed at the Social Democrats and sought to exclude them from future
cabinet negotiations. Even after the Social Democrats expressed disinterest in a
reorganization of the Marx cabinet, efforts to extend the existing governmental
coalition to the right became bogged down in disagreements over the future
conduct of German foreign policy.13 When the Center made the participation
of the German Democratic Party a precondition of its willingness to go along

9
Korrespondenz der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei, 7, no. 164 (1 Oct. 1924). See also
Westarp’s report to the executive committee of the Central Association of German
Conservatives, 11 Oct. 1924, reported by Brauer, 14 Oct. 1924, BLHA Potsdam, NL
Arnim Boitzenburg, 4426/87 88, as well as the entries in Quaatz’s diary, 29 30
Sept. 1924, BA Koblenz, NL Quaatz, 16, and Keudell to Tirpitz, 2 Oct. 1924, BA MA
Freiburg, NL Tirpitz, 60/178 82. For the official party account of these negotiations, see
Regierungskrise und Reichstagsauflösung (August bis Oktober 1924), Deutschnationale
Flugschrift, no. 185 (Berlin, 1924), 3 4.
10
Hergt at a meeting of the DNVP Reichstag delegation, 8 Oct. 1924, BA Koblenz, NL
Quaatz, 16.
11
Westarp’s report to the executive committee of the Central Association of German
Conservatives, 11 Oct. 1924, cited above, no. 9.
12
Resolution of the DNVP Reichstag delegation, 8 Oct. 1924, in Korrespondenz der
Deutschnationalen Volkspartei, 9 Oct. 1924, no. 171. See also Regierungskrise und
Reichstagsauflösung, 5.
13
Protocol of a meeting between representatives of the government and a four man
delegation from the DNVP, 10 Oct. 1924, in Kabinette Marx I und II, ed. Abramowski,
2:1105 06. See also the memorandum on this meeting by an unidentified DNVP partici
pant, 10 Oct. 1924, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, II/12. For the Nationalist version of these
negotiations, see Regierungskrise und Reichstagsauflösung, 6 8.
   , –

with an extension of the existing cabinet to the right, the DVP Reichstag
delegation signalled its frustration with the deadlock that had developed in the
government’s negotiations with the Nationalists by issuing a declaration later
in the afternoon that effectively terminated its support of the existing cab-
inet.14 When the DDP reiterated its refusal to serve in a government in which
the Nationalists were also represented at a meeting of its executive committee
on 20 October,15 Marx declared his efforts to form a new government at an
end and petitioned the Reich President to dissolve the Reichstag and call for
new elections.16
The outcome of the cabinet negotiations in October 1924 represented a
stinging rebuff to the DNVP party leadership and its efforts to translate its
victory in the May elections into a decisive political advantage. Anxious to
avoid a leadership crisis in the midst of a national election campaign, Hergt
tendered his resignation as DNVP party chairman on 23 October, thus
fulfilling a promise he had made at the start of the cabinet negotiations.17
His successor, chosen on a provisional basis until an official election could be
conducted, was Friedrich Winckler, chairman of the DNVP delegation to the
Prussian Landtag and president of the Lutheran General Synod. In a parallel
move, Tirpitz was chosen to serve at Winckler’s side with responsibility for
restoring and maintaining the unity of the DNVP party organization.18 None
of this, however, signaled an abrupt turn to either the left or the right on the
part of the DNVP national leadership. In fact, Winckler’s principal qualifica-
tion for the party chairmanship was that he had had no part in the conflicts
that had torn the DNVP apart since the summer of 1924 and that he could not
be identified with either of the two factions that were vying for control of the
party. Moreover, Winckler’s election tended to reaffirm the conservative social
and religious values that lay at the heart of the DNVP’s political Weltanschau-
ung and upon which all elements of the party could comfortably agree. In the
matter of coalition politics, Winckler’s position was scarcely distinguishable
from that of his predecessor. Speaking before the party executive committee
and representatives of the DNVP party organization in Berlin on 4 November,
Winckler reiterated his party’s willingness to accept responsibility for the
formulation and conduct of national policy but warned that this could not

14
DVP, Reichsgeschäftsstelle, ed., Nachtrag zum Wahlhandbuch 1924, 99 100. See also
Julius Curtius, “Politische Umschau: Der Kampf um eine Mehrheitsregierung,” Deutsche
Stimmen 36, no. 21 (5 Nov. 1924): 339 46.
15
Report by Koch Weser at a meeting of the DDP executive committee, 21 Oct. 1924, in
Linksliberalismus in der Weimarer Republik. Die Führungsgremien der Deutschen Demo
kratischen Partei und der Deutschen Staatspartei 1918 1933, ed. Lothar Albertin and
Konstanze Wegner (Düsseldorf, 1980), 330 31.
16
Hehl, Marx, 314 16.
17
Entry in Gallwitz’s diary, 24 Oct. 1924, BA MA Freiburg, NL Gallwitz, 39.
18
Entry in Quaatz’s diary, 22 Oct. 1924, BA Koblenz, NL Quaatz, 16.
    ? 

take place at the expense of its principles or on terms inconsistent with its
recently demonstrated strength at the polls. At the same time, Winckler
criticized the more moderate bourgeois parties for trying to exclude the DNVP
from the government and for refusing to accord it the role and influence to
which it was rightfully entitled.19 While Winckler’s speech may have reassured
the party’s moderates, it revealed a lack of direction to those who stood on the
DNVP’s right wing and promised little relief from the confusion that had
plagued party affairs since the May elections.20

Back to the Polls

The campaign for the December 1924 Reichstag elections was conducted along
essentially the same lines as that of the previous spring. From beginning to
end, the campaign was dominated by the issue of the Dawes Plan, as the more
moderate bourgeois parties tried to capitalize upon the DNVP’s split in the
Reichstag vote of 29 August 1924 as a sign of its unreliability on matters of
foreign policy. The Center ridiculed the DNVP as the “party of the faltering
banner” and attributed its inability to pursue a consistent course of action to a
fatal disparity between its “hunger for cabinet posts” and a legacy of antirepu-
blican demagogy.21 In a similar vein, Stresemann structured the DVP’s cam-
paign around a vigorous defense of the foreign policy he had pursued since
assuming office and chided the Nationalists for not knowing whether they
were a party of opposition or one of responsible and constructive cooper-
ation.22 The collapse of the cabinet negotiations in the fall of 1924, however,
had done much to repair the damage that the Dawes crisis had done to
relations between the DNVP party leadership and the party’s right wing and
to defuse the possibility of a new right-wing party that the more recalcitrant
elements in the Central Association of German Conservatives were
threatening to launch as a protest against the DNVP’s move to the middle.23
At the same time, the Nationalists benefitted from an electoral truce the

19
Friedrich Winckler, Rede des Parteivorsitzenden vor dem Parteivorstande und Vertretern
der Parteiorganisation am 4. November 1924 in Berlin, Deutschnationale Flugschrift,
no. 188 (Berlin, 1924).
20
Entry in Quaatz’s diary, 27 Oct. 1924, BA Koblenz, NL Quaatz, 16.
21
See Die Anderen und wir, ed. Deutsche Zentrumspartei, Reichsgeneralsekretariat (Berlin,
n.d. [1924]), 3 22.
22
Gustav Stresemann, Nationale Realpolitik. Rede auf dem 6. Parteitag der Deutschen
Volkspartei in Dortmund am 14. November 1924, Flugschriften der Deutschen Volkspar
tei, no. 56 (Berlin, 1924), 32 34.
23
On the threat of a new party, see Arnim Boitzenburg to Westarp, 30 Aug. 1924, NL
Westarp, Gärtringen, VN 43, as well as Westarp’s report before the executive committee
of the Central Association of German Conservatives, 16. Nov. 1924, BLHA Potsdam, NL
Arnim Boitzenburg, 4426/72 80.
   , –

United Patriotic Leagues of Germany had brokered between the DNVP, DVP,
and other “national parties” in hopes that this would lead to the creation of a
united German Right once the elections were over.24 This arrangement did
much to temper the tone of the DVP’s campaign against the DNVP at the
same time that it allowed the Nationalists to concentrate the bulk of their
efforts on the racist elements that stood to the DNVP’s immediate right.
Throughout the campaign, the Nationalists tried desperately to shift voter
attention away from those foreign policy issues that had proven so divisive in
the struggle over the Dawes Plan to questions of domestic social and economic
policy on which there was more in the way of fundamental agreement within
the ranks of the party. No issue served the Nationalists better in this regard
than that of revaluation.25 The leaders of the DNVP were anxious to exploit
the fact that efforts to redress the inequities of the revaluation provisions of the
Third Emergency Tax Decree had broken down as a result of the parliamen-
tary stalemate created by the outcome of the May 1924 Reichstag elections. In
the meantime, Germany’s small investors had begun to organize themselves
into their own political parties. In an effort to prevent a further splintering of
the revaluation movement, the Protective Association of Mortgagees and
Savers for the German Reich (Hypotheken-Gläubiger- und Sparer-
Schutzverband für das Deutsche Reich) approached the leaders of the various
nonsocialist parties to determine which, if any, warranted its endorsement in
the upcoming national elections. Of the parties contacted, only the Center, the
DNVP, and the newly constituted National Socialist German Freedom Party
(Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Freiheitspartei or NSDFP) were deemed
worthy of endorsement.26 The Nationalists went one step further in their
efforts to win the support of Germany’s small investors by offering a secure
candidacy to Georg Best, a prominent Darmstadt jurist who had played a
major role in the early stages of the revaluation struggle and an honorary
chairman of the Mortgagees and Savers’ Protective Association.27 Best’s can-
didacy did much to enhance the DNVP’s visibility in the revaluation issue and

24
Flyer circulated by the VVVD‘s Geisler under the title “Überparteilicher Vaterländischer
Wahldienst der Vereinigten vaterländischen Verbände Deutschlands,” 15 Nov. 1924,
BHStA Munich, Abt. IV, EWB, 10/1. See also Weiss to Westarp, 6, Dec. 1924, NL
Westarp, Gärtringen, VN 44.
25
For example, see “Aufwertungsfrage und Deutschnationale Volkspartei,” n.d. [Oct. Nov.
1924], BA Koblenz, NL Weilnböck, 34. For further details, see Larry Eugene Jones,
“Inflation, Revaluation, and the Crisis of Middle Class Politics,” 155 57.
26
“Richtlinien zur Wahl,” in Die Aufwertung. Offizielles Organ des Hypotheken Gläubiger
und Sparer Schutzverbandes 1, no. 24 (7 Nov. 1924): 185 86. See also the report of the
meeting of the central executive committee of the Mortgagees and Savers’ Protective
Association, 26 Oct. 1924, ibid., 187 88.
27
On the details of this arrangement, see Meyer to Best, 20 May 1925, in Der Kampf um die
Aufwertung, Deutschnationale Flugschrift, no. 215 (Berlin, 1925), 30 31.
    ? 

greatly helped the Nationalists attract the support of those who felt they had
been victimized by the revaluation provisions of the Third Emergency Tax
Decree.
The DNVP was no less committed to winning the support of the German
farmer. The German farmer had been one of the principal beneficiaries of the
runaway inflation of the early 1920s. Credit was easy, and farmers were able
to liquidate the debt that had accumulated against their property with a
currency that was worth far less than the currency in which those debts had
originally been contracted. But all of that had come to a crashing halt with
the stabilization of the mark in late 1923 and the insolvency of the agricul-
tural credit institutions through which the farmer had traditionally secured
the credit he needed to purchase grain seed and farm equipment. As a result,
the farmer now had to compete for credit in the much more expensive credit
market that had been organized for big business and industry.28 All of this
placed an increasingly heavy strain on relations between organized agricul-
ture, the government, and the political parties that had traditionally mediated
between the two. Count Gerhard von Kanitz, minister of agriculture in the
first Marx cabinet, had come under heavy fire from organized agricultural
interests despite impeccable conservative credentials.29 As the largest of
Germany’s agricultural interest organizations, the National Rural League
was statuatorily prevented from identifying itself with any particular political
party, while its regional affiliates were free to support any candidates or
parties they deemed acceptable. In the May 1924 Reichstag elections RLB
affiliates in Baden, Hesse, Württemburg, and Thuringia had endorsed candi-
dates from both the DNVP and the renegade National Liberal Association
that had broken away from the German People’s Party in protest against
Stresemann’s alliance with the Social Democrats.30 By the fall of 1924,
however, the National Liberal Association was no longer a factor as its
principal spokesmen had either gone over to the DNVP, made their peace
with the DVP, or withdrawn from partisan politics altogether. In the cam-
paign for the December elections, RLB affiliates in Thuringia, Württemberg,
Baden, and Hesse concluded a series of alliances with state DNVP leaders
that guaranteed first that the deputies elected on their own state tickets
would affiliate themselves with the DNVP Reichstag delegation and second
that all votes not needed for the election of farm candidates at the state level

28
Lothar Meyer, Die deutsche Landwirtschaft während der Inflation und zu Beginn der
Deflation (Tübingen, 1924), 23 32.
29
See Kanitz to Winckler, 8 Nov. 1924, appended to Kanitz to Schleicher, 17 Nov. 1924,
BA MA Freiburg, Nachlass Kurt von Schleicher, 29/43 48.
30
RLB, Parlamentsabteilung, to Helmot, Mackeldey, and Füller, 12 Apr. 1924, BA Berlin,
R 8034 I, 115/15 16.
   , –

would be transferred to the DNVP national ticket.31 In Bavaria and Saxony,

on the other hand, the RLB affiliates decided not to run a spearate slate of
candidates and allied themselves directly with the DNVP.32 At the same time,
the RLB presented the DNVP with a short list of prospective candidates
whom they would like to have seen nominated to secure candidacies on the
DNVP ticket.33 The alliance between the DNVP and the RLB could not have
been firmer.
On a different front, the DNVP greatly intensified its efforts to secure a
breakthrough into the ranks of Germany’s Catholic electorate in Bavaria and
elsewhere. The leaders of the DNVP’s Reich Catholic Committee had become
increasingly frustrated by the fact that Germany’s Catholic episcopacy had
apparently reconciled itself to the changes that had taken place in Germany’s
political system since the summer of 1917 and continued to support the
Center as the political representative of German Catholicism. In the spring
of 1924 the Fulda Bishops’ Conference (Fuldaer Bischofskonferenz), the
assembly of German bishops from outside Bavaria that convened twice a year
under the presidency of Cardinal Adolf von Bertram from Breslau to clarify
and formulate positions on issues of importance to the church, had declared
that Catholics who wished to remain in good standing with the church should
not join or become otherwise involved in the activities of right-wing paramili-
tary organizations like the Stahlhelm and Young German Order.34 In the eyes
of the DNVP Catholics, this betrayed a bias against the German Right they
hoped to correct by petitioning the Catholic bishops to reconsider their
support of the Center and their indifference, if not outright opposition, to
the aspirations of the nationalist Right. Dispatched in July 1924, this petition
carried the signatures of twenty-one members of the DNVP Reich Catholic
Committee and began by reminding the episcopacy that for every four Cath-
olics who belonged to the Center there was another who belonged to the
DNVP. The petition complained about the partisanship of the Catholic clergy
and protested against the way in which their own credentials as Catholics had
been maligned because of their refusal to support the Center. To correct this
situation, the petition demanded the withdrawal of the clergy from political
life, the “depoliticization” of Catholic institutions throughout the country, and

31
Kalckreuth to the DNVP party leadership, 7 Nov. 1924, BA Berlin, R 8034 I, 116/91 92.
See also the letter from the RLB, Parlamentsabteilung, to the Mittelrheinischer Landbund,
5 Dec. 1924, ibid., 116/127 28,
32
On arrangements in Bavaria, see Weilnböck, “Zu den Reichstagswahlen Dezember 1924,”
n.d. [Oct. 1924]. BA Koblenz, NL Weilnböck, 5a. For Saxony, see Alvin Domsch and
Albrecht Philipp, Sächsische Landwirtschaft und Reichstagswahl 1924. Ein Rückblick und
Ausblick, Schriften der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei in Sachsen (Arbeitsgemeinschaft),
no. 6 (Dresden, 1924).
33
Kalckreuth to the DNVP party leadership, 1 Nov. 1924, BA Berlin, R 8034 I, 116/85 86.
34
Vogel, Kirche und Kampfverbände, 34 55.
    ? 

the creation of a non-partisan parliamentary coalition, or Arbeitsgemeinschaft,

of Catholics for the more effective representation of their religious and cultural
interests. This and only this, the petition concluded, would end discrimination
against Catholics who had broken with the Center and church efforts to
salvage “Catholic peace through the rape of a party [aus der Vergewaltigung
einer Partei].”35
The fact that the Fulda Bishops’ Conference dismissed the petition of the
DNVP Reich Catholic Committee without so much as a formal debate and
never issued an official response came as no surprise to most of its sponsors
and only confirmed their assertion of bias on the part of Germany’s Catholic
episcopacy.36 In the meantime, DNVP Catholics continued to make signifi-
cant gains within their own party. The leaders of the DNVP Reich Catholic
Committee were gratified by the special consideration that Catholics had
received in the selection of candidates for the Nationalist ticket in the May
1924 Reichstag elections37 and expressed great satisfaction that no fewer
than ten of the 107 Nationalist deputies who entered the new Reichstag were
practicing Catholics.38 DNVP Catholics were similarly pleased with the
placement of Catholic candidates on the Nationalist ticket for the December
1924 Reichstag elections and looked forward to consolidating their position
within the DNVP Reichstag delegation.39 In return, the leaders of DNVP
National Catholic Committee waged an energetic and hard-hitting cam-
paign against the Center in which they not only disputed the exclusive
claims the Center made with respect to the representation of Germany’s
Catholic interests but also documented the party’s dramatic swing to the left
since the summer of 1917 and the deep gulf this had created between the
party and an increasingly large sector of Germany’s Catholic population. At
the same time, they took issue with efforts by the Center to discredit the
DNVP’s credentials as a Christian party by lumping it together with the
racist Right.40

35
“Eingabe an die in Fulda sich versammelnden Hochwürdigsten Erzbischöfe und Bischöfe
Deutschlands,” July 1924, BA Koblenz, NL Spahn, 177. See also the entry in Gallwitz’s
diary, 2 Apr. 1924, BA MA Freiburg, NL Gallwitz, 41.
36
For further details, see Vogel, Kirche und Kampfverbände, 109 10, n. 22. See also
Landsberg’s report at a meeting of the DNVP’s Reich Catholic Committee, 13
Mar. 1925, VWA Münster, NL Landsberg, E1.
37
Lejeune Jung to Buchner, 13 Mar. 1924, BA Koblenz, Nachlass Max Buchner, 18.
38
Lejeune Jung to Buchner, 26 May 1924, ibid.
39
Lejeune Jung to Fischer, 5 Nov. 1924, StA Paderborn, “Dokumentation Lejeune Jung,”
S2/125/258 61.
40
See Johannes Pritze, Das Zentrum, Deutschnationales Rüstzeug, no. 3 (Berlin, 1924), esp.
11 20. The target of Pritze’s pamphlet was a brochure by Friedrich Grebe, Zentrum und
die deutschnationalen Katholiken, Flugschriften der Deutschen Zentrumspartei 1924
(Berlin, 1924).
   , –

Perhaps the most suprising aspect of the DNVP’s campaign for the December
1924 Reichstag elections was the greatly diminished role of the racist and
antisemitic rhetoric that had played such a prominent role the previous spring.
Even though antisemitism was never totally absent from the Nationalist
campaign,41 it no longer figured as prominently in the architecture of the
DNVP’s campaign for the December elections as it had in previous campaigns.
Two factors accounted for the DNVP’s strategic turn-about. First, the state
of almost total disarray in which the racist elements on the extreme right of
Germany’s political spectrum found themselves in the summer and fall of
1924 greatly reduced the threat they posed to the DNVP’s electoral pro-
spects,42 with the result that party leaders may no longer have felt obliged to
compete with the racists on their own terrain. To be sure, the leaders of the
racist Right assailed the DNVP for its role in the acceptance of the Dawes Plan
as an act of high treason that sacrificed Germany’s national honor on the altar
of international finance,43 but the Nationalists were quick to counter by
portraying their party as a party of “constructive opposition” that alone
possessed the potential to bring about a genuine change in the existing
political system. Second, the exigencies of coalition politics and the fact that
the leaders of the DNVP were actively seeking a place for their party in a new
national government required that it make itself more palatable to potential
coalition partners by disentangling it as discreetly as possible from the racist
Right. Although this may not have sat well with the more militantly racist
elements on the DNVP’s right wing,44 the party’s national leaders proceeded
to mute the antisemitism that had served the party so well in the campaign for
the May elections in favor of a more general appeal that called upon Ger-
many’s propertied classes to unite in the DNVP as their only reliable bulwark
against the parties of the Marxist Left.
The results of the December 1924 Reichstag elections were particularly
difficult for the leaders of the DNVP to interpret. For whereas the parties that
had supported ratification of the Dawes Plan – from the Social Democrats to
the DDP, DVP, and Center – all emerged from the campaign significantly
strengthened, it was the DNVP that produced the greatest surprise of the
election by posting a remarkable 9.0 percent gain over the number of votes it
had received in May. This, in turn, increased the size of its parliamentary

41
For example, see Hieb und Stichwaffen für den Wahlkampf, 28 Nov. 1924, no. 8, in BA
Koblenz, NL Weilnböck, 34.
42
For further details, see Jablonsky, Nazi Party in Dissolution, 129 47.
43
Christian Mergenthaler, Das Dawes Gutachten und der Deutschnationale Volksverrat.
Nach einem Vortrag gehalten in Stuttgart in September 1924 (Leipzig, Berlin, and Stutt
gart, n.d. [1924]), esp. 21 25.
44
Correspondence between Kriping and the Pan German leadership, 19 29 Oct. 1924, BA
Berlin, R 8048, 210/94 95, 107. See also Vietinghoff Scheel to Gebsattel, 20 Oct. 1924,
ibid., 210/97, and Claß to Mündler, 1 Nov. 1924, ibid., 210/110.
    ? 

delegation from 95 to 103 seats – or 111 seats, if one includes the eight
deputies who were elected on regional agrarian tickets and subsequently
affiliated themselves with the DNVP Reichstag delegation. Only the fact that
the Social Democrats improved upon its performance in the May elections by
a dramatic 31.2 percent and now held 131 parliamentary mandates prevented
the DNVP from reclaiming its place as the largest party in the Reichstag. The
DDP and DVP, in the meantime, increased their share of the popular vote by
16.1 and 13.2 percent respectively and now claimed a total of 83 seats in the
Reichstag, while the Center received 5.0 percent more votes in December than
it had received the previous May. For the most part, the gains of the Social
Democrats and more moderate bourgeois parties could be attributed not only
to a record voter turnout in the December 1924 elections but also to cross-over
votes from the radical parties at both ends of the political spectrum. The
Communists lost 26.6 percent of their May vote, while the Nazi-racist coali-
tion campaigning as the National Socialist Freedom Movement of Greater
Germany (Nationalsozialistische Freiheitsbewegung Großdeutschlands) lost
52.7 percent of what its predecessor had received in May.45 What this revealed
was a clear trend away from the more extremist parties in favor of those that
articulated a more measured respone to the myriad problems that confronted
Germany in the second half of the 1920s.
The DNVP’s success in the December 1924 Reichstag elections stemmed
from three factors. By far the most important was the disarray of the racist
elements on the extreme right and their inability to mount a coherent and
effective campaign, with the result that many of those who had supported the
National Socialist Freedom Party in May 1924 either stayed at home or
switched their support to the DNVP.46 A second factor was the DNVP’s
success in mobilizing the support of Catholic conservatives who had become
disillusioned with the Center’s move to the left since the last years of World
War I. One contemporary analysis concluded that approximately 11.9 percent
of the popular vote the DNVP received in the December 1924 elections had
been cast by Catholics. Although this represented just 8.7 percent of all
Catholic voters taking part in the election and 19.5 percent of those Catholic
voters who supported neither of the two Catholic parties, Catholics neverthe-
less constituted a significant component of the Nationalist electorate and
accounted for as many as a dozen of its seats in the Reichstag.47 Third, the
DNVP continued to receive a disproportionate share of the support of women

45
These calculations are based upon statistics from Falter, Lindenberger, and Schumann,
Wahlen und Abstimmungen, 41. See also Thomas Childers, The Nazi Voter, 50 118.
46
Jablonsky, Nazi Party in Dissolution, 150 51.
47
Johannes Schauff, Das Wahlverhalten der deutschen Katholiken im Kaiserreich und in der
Weimarer Republik. Untersuchungen aus dem Jahre 1928, ed. Rudolf Morsey (Mainz,
1975), 129 33.
   , –

voters despite the disappointment of the DNVP’s National Women’s Com-

mittee over what its leaders perceived as “the obvious exclusion of female
candidates from the party’s electoral slates” and a lack of appreciation at the
local levels of the DNVP’s national organization for the contribution that
women had made to the party’s organizational life.48 By August 1922 the
DNVP’s National Women’s Committee had established thirty-eight provincial
affiliates, or Landesfrauenausschüsse, throughout the country with nearly two
thousand local chapters and another 2,700 confidants, or Vertrauensfrauen,
performing the tasks of a local chapter in areas where none existed.49 In the
two 1924 elections the DNVP’s National Women’s Committee launched a full-
scale campaign to mobilize its supporters with an appeal that affirmed, as it
had in 1919 and 1920, a traditional image of women that stood in sharp
contrast to the more emancipatory impulses generally associated with Weimar
culture.50 The way this resonated among women voters was reflected in the
fact that the DNVP continued to receive more of its votes from women than
from men. In December 1924 approximately 54 percent of all the DNVP’s
votes came from women voters. Only the Center and Bavarian People’s Party
received a higher percentage of its votes from women in the two 1924 elections
than the DNVP.51

Compromise at Last
The disarray of the racists no doubt helped to insulate the DNVP against
losses that might otherwise have turned its performance in the December
1924 Reichstag elections from a positive to a negative balance. The leaders of
the DNVP, however, failed to recognize the true nature of their party’s good
fortune and immediately interpreted its strong performance at the polls as a
mandate to continue the course they had pursued since the May Reichstag
elections.52 Moreover, the DNVP’s success at the polls had greatly thinned the
ranks of those within the DNVP Reichstag delegation who were still prepared
to fight the party’s entry into the national government. According to one
informed party source, no more than six Nationalist deputies continued to
oppose such an eventuality.53 While all of this augured well for a more
constructive Nationalist response to a resumption of efforts aimed at bringing

48
Lehmann to Westarp, 28 June 1924, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, VN 48.
49
“Deutschnationale Frauenarbeit im Lande,” Frauenkorrespondenz der Deutschnationalen
Volkspartei 3, no. 23 (23 Aug. 1922).
50
Sneeringer, Winning Women’s Votes, 110 15.
51
Joachim Hofmann Götig, Emanzipation mit dem Stimmzettel. 70 Jahre Frauenwahlrecht
in Deutschland (Bonn, 1986), 32.
52
Confidential circular on the cabinet negotiations, 16 Jan. 1925, BA Berlin, NL Mumm,
279/467 74.
53
Axel von Freytagh Loringhoven, Deutschnationale Volkspartei (Berlin, 1931), 27.
    ? 

the DNVP into the government, it was Stresemann who brought matters to a
head by announcing at a ministerial conference on 10 December 1924 that his
party could no longer support the present cabinet and that it would therefore
work for the creation of a bourgeois government with the DNVP, Center, and
other nonsocialist parties.54 On the following day Marx tendered his resigna-
tion so that efforts to form a new government with the support of a parlia-
mentary majority could begin in earnest. Negotiations with the Nationalists
extended over the course of the next week but failed to dispel the reservations
of the Center and DDP about serving in a coalition with the DNVP. Frustrated
by the lack of progress towards a coalition with the DNVP, the leaders of the
DVP Reichstag delegation announced on 17 December that their party was
leaving the governmental coalition, thereby depriving the Marx cabinet of its
mandate to govern.55
This marked the second of four successive “Christmas crises” that Ger-
many’s parliamentary institutions would experience from 1923 to 1926. The
stalemate in efforts to form a new government persisted through the remain-
der of December and was only broken when Stresemann suggested on 9 Janu-
ary 1925 that the task be handed over to Hans Luther, a politically unaffiliated
municipal politician who had served as minister of finance under both Stre-
semann and Marx. Luther, who enjoyed close ties to Ruhr heavy industry and
enjoyed the confidence of influential conservative circles, was committed to
the formation of a cabinet that was free of formal ties to the individual political
parties that were prepared to support it. In this sense, Luther embodied the
highest principles of conservative nonpartisanship, or Überparteilichkeit.56
Moreover, Luther’s notion of a cabinet of experts free of formal commitments
to the parties that supported it corresponded in large measure to what the
Nationalists themselves had advocated for the better part of a year, a fact that
made it that much easier for him to reach an understanding with the DNVP
party leadership.57
The Nationalist representative in the cabinet negotiations was Martin
Schiele, a highly respected farm leader who had assumed the chairmanship
of the DNVP Reichstag delegation on 17 December 1924.58 Schiele had

54
Minutes of a ministerial conference, 10 Dec. 1924, in Kabinette Marx I und II, ed.
Abramowski, 2:1219 20. See also the manuscript of Stresemann’s article, “Zur Regie
rungskrise,” Hamburger Fremdenblatt, 25 Dec. 1924, PA AA Berlin, NL Stresemann, 18/
157792 806.
55
Protocol of two conversations between Marx and a DVP delegation, 18 Dec. 1924, in
Kabinette Marx I und II, ed. Abramowski, 2:1227 31. For further details, see Stürmer,
Koalition und Opposition, 78 83, and Richter, Deutsche Volkspartei, 359 65.
56
Hans Luther, Politiker ohne Partei (Stuttgart, 1960), 316 17.
57
Freytagh Loringhoven, Deutschnationale Volkspartei, 32 36.
58
On Schiele’s election as chairman of the DNVP Reichstag delegation, see the letter from
Westarp’s wife to their daughter, 18 Dec. 1924, NL Westarp, Gärtringen.
   , –

originally belonged to that group of Nationalist deputies who opposed ratifi-

cation of the Dawes Plan, but he had since come to the conclusion that the
DNVP would have to join the government in order to protect the vital
interests of the social constituencies upon which it was politically dependent.
In an attempt to expedite a resolution of the current cabinet crisis, Schiele and
Luther agreed that formal commitments between the government and the
parties that supported it should be replaced with an arrangement whereby
each of the government parties would be represented in the cabinet by a
special liaison, or Vertrauensmann. The remaining cabinet posts would then
be occupied by ostensibly nonpolitical specialists, or Fachmänner, who were to
be chosen not for their party affiliation but for the professional qualifications
they brought to the post they held.59 The irony of this arrangement was that it
weakened the role of the political parties in the governmental process – thus
fulfilling one of the DNVP’s professed campaign objectives – at the precise
moment the DNVP chose to enter the government.
When the new government assumed office on 15 January 1925, the Nation-
alists were represented by Schiele as the party’s liaison with the cabinet and
three nonpolitical experts in finance minister Otto von Schlieben, economics
minister Albert Neuhaus, and agricultural minister Count Gerhard von
Kanitz.60 While Nationalist participation in the Luther cabinet provided
conservative moderates who had been impressed by the republic’s recovery
from the collapse of 1923 with an opportunity to work for a reform of the
existing governmental system from within the system itself,61 many National-
ists remained profoundly ambivalent about their party’s entry into the
national government and openly criticized Schiele and other party leaders
for having failed to secure more in return for the DNVP’s surrender of
principle. The Nationalists were particularly concerned about becoming too
closely identified with Stresemann’s foreign policy and sought to avoid a
public airing of Germany’s military and security situation for fear that this
might expose the weakness of their current position.62 Even then, the DNVP’s
defense of its decision to work within the framework of a governmental
system to which it remained fundamentally and ideologically opposed was

59
Luther, Politiker ohne Partei, 316.
60
On the composition of the first Luther cabinet, see Akten der Reichskanzlei: Die Kabinette
Luther I und II. 15. Januar 1925 bis 20. Januar 1926. 20. Januar 1926 bis 17. Mai 1926, ed.
Karl Heinz Minuth, 2 vols. (Boppard am Rhein, 1977), 1:xxiii xxiv. On the DNVP’s role
in the formation of the Luther cabinet, see Albrecht Philipp, “Mein Weg: Rückschau eines
Siebzigjährigen auf allerlei Geschenisse und Menschen,” Dritte Teil: “Abgeordnetenjahre
in der Weimarer Republik (1919 1930),” SHStA Dresden, NL Philipp, 4/157 59.
61
See Franz Behrens, Die Deutschnationalen zur Sozialpolitik. Reichstagsrede am 22. Januar
1925, Deutschnationale Flugschrift, no. 203 (Berlin, 1925).
62
For example, see Keudell to Tirpitz, 5 Feb. 1925, BA MA Freiburg, NL Tirpitz, 278/
18 21.
    ? 

particularly tortured and did little to insulate it against charges of opportunism

and unreliability.63 But for Stresemann and the DVP, the DNVP’s decision to
join the Luther cabinet represented an unequivocal triumph for their strategy
of “stabilization from the right” and was, they hoped, the harbinger of a new
era in Germany’s postwar political development.

The Struggle for the Presidency

The DNVP’s entry into the Luther government was soon followed by a
development that was to have even more profound implications for the
success of Stresemann’s strategy, namely, the sudden and unexpected death
of Reich President Friedrich Ebert and the opportunity to elect a successor
more amenable to the various factions on the German Right. Even before
Ebert’s death, elements on the German Right had already been hard at work
laying the groundwork for the election of a new Reich President more sympa-
thetic to their own political agenda. Here the initial impetus came from two
principal directions. Following the split in the DNVP Reichstag delegation in
the August 1924 vote on the Dawes Plan, Germany’s paramilitary Right had
begun to coalesce behind Baron Wilhelm von Gayl, a Nationalist deputy in the
Prussian State Council (Preußischer Staatsrat), in hopes of restoring the unity
of the German Right. As their first practical goal, Gayl and his associates
hoped to unify Germany’s paramilitary combat leagues and conservative
economic interest organizations behind a single candidate in the presidential
elections that were scheduled to take place sometime in the summer of 1925.64
This effort paralleled a no less ambitious undertaking by the National Citizens’
Council (Reichsbürgerrat), an ostensibly nonpartisan but aggressively middle-
class and antisocialist forum for constitutional and political reform that had
been founded in the immediate aftermath of the November Revolution.65 The
leaders of the National Citizens’ Council were critical of the way in which the
German party system had developed since the founding of the Weimar
Republic and sought a remedy for the “tyranny of political parties” in a
constitutional reform that would create a second legislative chamber consist-
ing of corporate, state, and legislative appointees and expand the powers of the

63
See Kuno von Westarp, Die Deutschnationalen zur Regierungspolitik. Reichstagsrede vom
20. Januar 1925 Deutschnationale Flugschrift, no. 202 (Berlin, 1925), esp. 3 5, 14 16.
64
Eight page handwritten note by Gayl, n.d., BA Koblenz, Nachlass Baron Wilhelm von
Gayl, 23. For a more detailed account of Gayl’s relationship with the paramilitary Right,
see ibid., 4/17 29.
65
On the Reich Citizens’ Council, see Verhandlungsbericht über die Ersttagung des Reichs
bürgerrats im Preußischen Abgeordnetenhause zu Berlin am 5. Januar 1919 (n.p. [Berlin],
n.d. [1919]), 26 41, 110 14.
   , –

Reich presidency at the expense of the Reichstag and national cabinet.66 To

implement such a reform, however, it was first necessary to elect a new Reich
president who, free from the petty party politics of his day, would use the
powers of his office to effect a fundamental transformation in the fabric of
German public life.67
The recommendations of the National Citizens’ Council for a reform of the
Weimar Constitution implied tacit recognition of the fact that the conservative
cause could no longer be effectively served either by remaining in opposition until
the Right had finally achieved a majority in the Reichstag or by conspiring to
overthrow the republic in the fashion of Kapp and Hitler. The upcoming presi-
dential campaign, on the other hand, afforded the German Right a rare opportun-
ity to correct Germany’s political course by electing a conservative activist who
would expand the powers of the Reich presidency and use them to undertake a
fundamental revision of the Weimar Constitution. It was with this in mind that
Friedrich Wilhelm Loebell, a former Prussian minister of interior who had recently
assumed leadership of the National Citizens’ Council, scheduled a series of
meetings in December 1924 with the leaders of the various nonsocialists parties
as well as with representatives of Germany’s most influential economic interest
organizations and patriotic associations.68 Of the various organizations that Loe-
bell consulted, only the DDP rejected his proposal out of hand. Encouraged by an
otherwise positive response, Loebell scheduled a meeting of those who had
expressed interest in his project for 12 February 1925,69 at which time the idea
of a bourgeois Sammelkandidatur received strong support from all of the
attending organizations with the exception of the Center.70
When Ebert’s unexpected death at the end of February accelerated the
timetable for new presidential elections, the Loebell Committee held three

66
See the series of articles by Loebell, “Der Kampf um den Staat,” Der Deutschen Spiegel.
Politische Wochenschrift 1, no. 1 (1 Sept. 1924): 12 15; no. 3 (19 Sept. 1924):  ;
no. 12 (21 Nov. 1924): 30 32; and no. 13 (28 Nov. 1924): 26 29, as well as Kriegk, “Der
Weg zur Staatspolitik,” ibid., 1, no. 12 (21 Nov. 1924): 8 23.
67
Loebell, “Die Reichspräsidentenwahl,” Der Deutschen Spiegel 1, no. 15 (12 Dec. 1924):
13 19. For further details, see Noel D. Cary, “The Making of the Reich President, 1925:
German Conservatism and the Nomination of Paul von Hindenburg,” Central European
History 23 (1990): 179 204.
68
See Loebell to Hepp, 29 Dec. 1924, BA Berlin, Nachlass Karl Hepp, BA Berlin, 2/128, and
Loebell to Bredt, 29 Dec. 1924, Stadtarchiv Wuppertal, Nachlass Johann Victor Bredt,
Bestand NDS 263, 59. On Loebell, see the recent biography by Peter Winzen, Friedrich
Wilhelm von Leobell (1885 1931). Ein Leben gegen den Strom der Zeit (Vienna, Cologne,
and Weimar, 2019), esp. 340 46.
69
Loebell to Hepp, 2 Feb. 1925, BA Berlin, NL Hepp, 2/129 30.
70
Minutes of the first meeting of the ad hoc committee for the presidential election in the offices
of the Reich Citizens’ Council, 12 Feb. 1925, StA Hamburg, Hapag Lloyd Reederei, Handak
ten Cuno, 1503. See also Zapf’s memorandum for Stresemann, 12 Feb. 1925, appended to Zapf
to Stresemann, 13 Feb. 1925, PA AA Berlin, NL Stresemann, 20/158154 56.
    ? 

meetings in the first week of March to determine whom it would support for
the presidency.71 With the first meeting on 3 March devoted exclusively to
organizational matters, it was not until the second meeting two days later that
the committee turned its attention to the selection of a candidate. Of the
politicians whose names surfaced in the course of the deliberations, only the
DVP’s Karl Jarres, the former Reich minister of interior and the lord mayor of
Duisburg, met with the approval of all the participating organizations with the
exception of the Democrats.72 Loebell informed Jarres on 9 March that he had
been selected as his committee’s candidate,73 but postponed announcing
Jarres’s nomination when the leaders of the Bavarian People’s Party asked
for additional time to respond to the idea of a Jarres candidacy. In the
meantime, the leaders of the German Democratic Party indicated that they
too might be interested in cooperating with the Loebell Committee in its
search for a candidate who could command the support of all sectors of the
German people. This, along with persistent doubts as to whether or not Jarres
could be elected on the first ballot, prompted Loebell and his associates to turn
their attention to Otto Gessler, a member of the DDP’s right wing who had
served as minister of defense since 1920. Not only was Gessler an experienced
and capable politician who, like Loebell and the leaders of the National
Citizens’ Council, recognized the need for a reform of the Weimar Consti-
tution,74 but as a Bavarian, a Catholic, and a Democrat he appealed to sectors
of the German population whose support was essential for the ultimate success
of Loebell’s strategy.75 Gessler’s candidacy, however, ran into stiff opposition
from both the Nationalists and Stresemann – the former because of his party
affiliation and the latter out of concern for what his election might mean for
his foreign policy76 – with the result that on 12 March he was dropped in favor

71
For further details, see Friedrich von Loebell, “Die Verhandlungen des Loebell
Ausschusses. Eine objective Darstellung,” Der Deutschen Spiegel 2, no. 13 (27
Mar. 1925): 581 87.
72
Hepp’s handwritten notes on the meeting of the Loebell committee, 6 Mar. 1925, BA
Berlin, NL Hepp, 2/140. For the Nationalist perspective, see Westarp to Tirpitz, 7
Mar. 1925, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, VN 98.
73
Loebell to Jarres, 9 Mar. 1925, BA Koblenz, Nachlass Karl Jarres, 23. See also Loebell,
“Warum Jarres,” n.d., BA Koblenz, NL Gayl, 23. On the Jarres candidacy with excerpts
and facsimiles of much of the relevant documentation, see Jürgen D. Kruse Jarres, Karl
Jarres. Ein bewegtes Politikerleben vom Kaiserreich zur Bundesrepublik (Munich, 2006),
162 90.
74
Gessler’s remarks at a ministerial conference, 19 Dec. 1924, BA Koblenz, Nachlass Otto
Gessler, 50/60 63.
75
Heiner Möllers, Reichswehrminister Otto Geßler. Eine Studie zu “unpolitischer” Militär
macht in der Weimarer Republik (Frankfurt a.M. and New York, 1998), 289 306.
76
Stresemann to Gessler, 11 Mar. 1925, BA Koblenz, NL Gessler, 9/62 64. See also Henry
A. Turner, Stresemann and the Politics of the Weimar Republic (Princeton, NJ, 1963),
193 95, and Wright, Stresemann, 307 10.
   , –

of Jarres, a politician whose conservative credentials were impeccable but who

lacked Gessler’s impressive profile.77
Although both the DVP and DNVP were quick to declare their support for
the Jarres candidacy,78 Jarres stood little chance of securing the absolute
majority that was necessary for election on the first ballot. Jarres, in turn,
seemed almost apologetic about having been chosen to run for the presidency
and would have willingly stepped aside if the Loebell committee could have
settled on a more suitable candidate.79 The Center and DDP both refused to
endorse his candidacy and proceeded to field candidates of their own, as did
the Bavarian People’s Party in an ostensible protest against the allegedly
sectarian character of Jarres’s candidacy.80 Even the Nationalists, who tried
to portray Jarres as a conservative activist who was every bit as committed to a
fundamental change in the existing political system as they themselves,81 were
lukewarm in their support of his candidacy, in large part because they feared it
would help consolidate Stresemann’s political influence. At the same time,
Jarres’s nomination encountered strong opposition from the Young German
Order, which withheld its endorsement until the last week of March in hopes
that the Loebell Committee might reconsider its decision and nominate the
commander-in-chief of the Reichswehr, General Hans von Seeckt.82 All in all,
the Jarres candidacy failed to generate the popular enthusiasm for which the
leaders of the Reich Bloc (Reichsblock) – as the Loebell Committee had
reconstituted itself on 12 March – had been hoping. For although Jarres
received 38.8 percent of the popular vote in the first trip to the polls on
29 March 1925 and thus outdrew his rivals by a substantial margin, he still
fell considerably short of an absolute majority. Moreover, the fact that the
three candidates representing the parties of the Weimar coalition – Otto Braun
from the SPD, Marx from the Center, and Willy Hugo Hellpach from the
DDP – received 49.2 percent of the popular vote meant that Jarres stood
virtually no chance of being elected if the three parties were to unite behind a
single candidate in the runoff elections scheduled for 26 April.83

77
Loebell, “Verhandlungen des Loebell Ausschusses,” 581 87.
78
Mitteilungsblatt des Reichsblocks zur Durchführung des Reichspräsidentenwahl, 17
Mar. 1925, no. 2, and 19 Mar. 1925, no. 3.
79
See Jarres to Gayl, 17 Mar. 1925, BA Koblenz, NL Gayl, 23, and Cuno, 18 Mar. 1925, StA
Hamburg, Hapag Reederei, Handakten Cuno, 1503.
80
Hauss, Volkswahl, 65 72.
81
For example, see Westarp, “Jarres,” Mitteilungsblatt des Reichsblocks zur Durchführung
der Reichspräsidentenwahl, 17 Mar. 1925, no. 2.
82
See the correspondence between Mahraun and Gayl, 13 28 Mar. 1925, as well excerpts
from the protocol of a meeting of the paramilitary combat leagues held under Gayl’s
chairmanship, 13 Mar. 1925, both in BA Koblenz, NL Gayl, 23.
83
Hauss, Volkswahl, 72 77.
    ? 

The Second Round

Five days after the first round of voting, the parties of the Weimar coalition
coalesced to form the People’s Bloc (Volksblock) and announced that they
would support the Center’s Wilhelm Marx in the run-off election for the
presidency.84 Since the candidates of these three parties had received nearly
fifty percent of the popular vote in the first ballot, it was clear to Jarres’s
supporters and detractors alike that he stood little chance of defeating Marx,
with the result that the Nationalists began to press their case for another
candidate who in their eyes stood a better chance of winning.85 The person to
whom the Nationalists immediately turned was retired war hero Paul von
Hindenburg. Hindenburg’s name had surfaced in the initial round of deliber-
ations but had been dropped for several reasons. In the first place, Hindenburg
was an unreconstructed monarchist whose disdain for the world of practical
politics and uncompromising hostility to the Weimar Republic hardly recom-
mended him to Loebell and his associates as a man capable of carrying out the
vigorous reform program they expected of the new Reich president. Secondly,
Hindenburg’s deep-seated opposition to the policy of fulfillment and his close
identification with the Prussian military establishment posed precisely the
same sort of problems that had led Stresemann to oppose Gessler’s nomin-
ation in the initial stages of the search for a bourgeois unity candidate. Thirdly,
there was the question of Hindenburg’s age and his willingness to take on the
burdens of political office. By 1925 Hindenburg was already seventy-seven
years old, and it was by no means certain that he would accept the nomination
even if it were offered him. At the same time, however, Hindenburg personi-
fied the traditions that were associated with Germany’s rise to greatness in the
previous century and that, in Nationalist eyes, now held the key to redresssing
the horrible shame that Germany had suffered with the defeat and collapse of
November 1918.86
In their pursuit of Hindenburg, the Nationalists faced two major problems.
First, they had to convince the other members of the Reich Bloc that Hinden-
burg stood a better chance of winning against Marx than Jarres and that his
election would be consistent with the general goals for which the Loebell
Committee had been constituted. Here the Nationalists would have to out-
maneuver the DVP and coopt its leaders into supporting a candidate for

84
Ibid., 77 84. See also Hehl, Marx, 335 41.
85
Rheinbaben to Bredt, 25 Mar. 1925, in Johann Victor Bredt, Erinnerungen und Doku
mente von Joh. Victor Bredt 1914 bis 1933, ed. Martin Schumacher (Düsseldorf, 1970),
347 49. See also Sorge to Jarres, 3 Apr. 1925, BA Koblenz, NL Jarres, 23.
86
Weiß to Westarp, 4 Mar. 1925, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, VN 55. On Hindenburg’s career
before 1932, see Larry Eugene Jones, Hitler versus Hindenburg: The 1932 Presidential
Elections and the End of the Weimar Republic (Cambridge, 2016), 16 42, as well as the
authoritative biography by Pyta, Hindenburg, esp. 381 458.
   , –

whom they felt little genuine enthusiasm. Second, the Nationalists would have
to persuade Hindenburg that it was in Germany’s national interest for him to
run for the presidency. Hindenburg’s position, as expressed in a series of
meetings with different DNVP delegations at the end of March, was that he
was “not disinclined” to run for the presidency but would do so only if the
Reich Bloc was united behind his candidacy and if Jarres agreed to go along
with his nomination.87 This stipulation, however, made it awkward for the
Nationalists to press their case for his candidacy with the other members of
the Reich Bloc. Neither the DVP nor the patriotic associations that had
coalesced behind Gayl’s leadership were particularly supportive when the
DNVP Reichstag delegation voted on 2 April to intensify its efforts on behalf
of a Hindenburg candidacy and dispatched DNVP Reichstag deputy Otto
Schmidt-Hannover to meet with the retired war hero in hopes of persuading
him to run for the presidency.88 In fact, efforts to draft Hindenburg as a
candidate for the Reich Presidency would very likely have collapsed had it not
been for a group of deputies from the Bavarian People’s Party who declared
that they were prepared to support Hindenburg against Marx and that they
would use their influence within the BVP to secure its endorsement for the
retired war hero should he agree to stand for election.89 Given the fact that the
BVP had balked at supporting Jarres in the preliminary elections on 29 March,
this announcement was of enormous significance and immediately prompted
a new round of negotiations between the DNVP, the Reich Bloc, and Hinden-
burg’s entourage.
Throughout all of this, the Nationalists were driven by their desire to secure
the nomination of a candidate whose election would not help Stresemann in
consolidating his domestic political position.90 Hindenburg, on the other
hand, continued to pledge his support of Jarres and disclaimed any interest

87
On Nationalist negotiations with Hindenburg, see Dieter von der Schulenburg, Welt um
Hindenburg. Hundert Gespräche mit Berufenen (Berlin, 1935), 57 70, and Hans
Schlange Schöningen, Am Tage danach (Hamburg, 1946), 30. On Hindenburg’s reluc
tance to run for the presidency, see his letter to Cramon, 27 Mar. 1925, BA MA Freiburg,
Nachlass August von Cramon, 24/14.
88
Otto Schmidt Hannover, Umdenken oder Anarchie. Männer Schicksäle Lehren (Göt
tingen, 1959), 185 91.
89
Hauss, Volkswahl, 92 95. See also Klaus Schönhoven, Die Bayerische Volkspartei
1924 1932 (Düsseldorf, 1972), 122 31.
90
On the Nationalist strategy, see Westarp to Tirpitz, n.d. [Apr. 1925], BA MA Freiburg,
NL Tirpitz, 176. See also the entries for 7 8 Apr. 1925, in a handwritten memorandum by
Westarp for the period from 20 Mar. to 9 Apr. 1925, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, VN 121.
For further information, see Ohnezeit, Zwischen “schärfster Opposition,” 310 19, as well
as Raffael Scheck, “Höfische Intriqe als Machtstrategie in der Weimarer Republik. Paul
v. Hindenburgs Kandidatur zur Reichspräsidentschaft 1925, “in Adel und Moderne.
Deutschland im europäischen Vergleich im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Eckart Conze
and Monika Weinfort (Cologne, Weimar, and Vienna, 2004), 107 18.
    ? 

in the nomination as long as Stresemann and the DVP remained opposed to

his candidacy. Hindenburg thus informed Loebell on 7 April that in light of
his advanced age he wished to have his name withdrawn from further consid-
eration and reiterated his support for Jarres.91 When a statement to this effect
appeared against Hindenburg’s explicit instructions in the German press later
that afternoon, the Nationalists dispatched another delegation, this time
headed by the venerable Tirpitz, to his home in Hanover in hopes of persuad-
ing him to rescind his decision. Whereas other Nationalist delegations had
failed to overcome Hindenburg’s reservations, Tirpitz’s intervention seems to
have been decisive. Not only did Tirpitz appeal to Hindenburg’s patriotism
and underscore the importance of his candidacy to the strategic objectives of
the German Right, but he pointed to the strong support the retired war hero
enjoyed among conservative Catholics who were almost certain to choose him
over Marx if he stood for election. Impressed by the force of Tirpitz’s logic,
Hindenburg agreed to retract his decision but only if the Reich Bloc was no
longer prepared to support Jarres.92
For his own part, Jarres was fully prepared to step down as a candidate for
the Reich presidency if it appeared that the German Right could be united
behind another candidate whose chances of defeating Marx were better than
his.93 Increasingly annoyed by Nationalist intrigues on Hindenburg’s behalf,
Jarres informed Loebell on the evening of 7 April that he would withdraw as
a candidate if his nomination encountered difficulties at the meeting of the
Reich Bloc that was scheduled for the following day. Although spokesmen for
the DVP, the patriotic associations, and Germany’s industrial leadership
reaffirmed their support for Jarres at the outset of the meeting of the Reich
Bloc on 8 April, the Nationalists pressed their case for Hindenburg’s nomin-
ation and announced that they had succeeded in persuading Hindenburg to
retract the decision he had communicated to Loebell the day before. At this
point, Loebell read the communication from Jarres announcing his with-
drawal as a candidate. Fearful that his committee might be left without a
candidate to oppose Marx, Loebell then placed a telephone call to Hinden-
burg, in which he prevailed upon the retired war hero to accept the Reich
Bloc’s nomination and stand for election. After a further exchange of tele-
phone calls in which Jarres and Hindenburg agreed upon the precise wording
of a statement confirming the former’s withdrawal from the race, the Reich

91
Schulenburg, Welt um Hindenburg, 64 65.
92
Ibid., 66. See also Keudell, “Mit Tirpitz in Hannover bei Hindenburg,” from 1968, BA
Koblenz, Nachlass Walther von Keudell, 102, as well as Schmidt Hannover to Spahn, 11
Apr. 1925, BA Koblenz, NL Schmidt Hannover, 73. See also Scheck, Tirpitz, 194 202.
93
Jarres to Sorge, 6 Apr. 1925, BA Koblenz, NL Jarres, 23.
   , –

Bloc concluded its deliberations by formally endorsing Hindenburg for the

presidency.94
The Reich Bloc’s nomination of Hindenburg as its candidate for the Reich
presidency represented a clear and unequivocal triumph for the German
National People’s Party and its new chairman, Friedrich Winckler. The
indefatigable Winckler had worked long and hard behind the scenes first to
persuade Hindenburg to stand for election and then to prevent the Reich Bloc
from renominating Jarres.95 To Loebell, Gayl, and the leaders of the National
Citizens’ Council, on the other hand, Hindenburg’s nomination came as
something of a disappointment. For although they could console themselves
with the argument that Hindenburg’s nomination represented a triumph of
Staatspolitik over Parteipolitik,96 both Loebell and Gayl harbored lingering
resentment over the way in which the DNVP had monopolized their overtures
on behalf of a truly nonpartisan candidacy.97 Their reservations over the
wisdom of a Hindenburg candidacy only mounted when the grizzled war hero
let it be known that he had no intention of taking an active part in the Reich
Bloc’s campaign on his behalf and left the management of his campaign in the
hands of a special committee in Hanover under the direction of his adjutant,
retired Lieutenant Colonel Otto von Feldmann.98 Aside from his annual Easter
Address on 11 April, Hindenburg confined his activity during the campaign to
a speech and press conference in Hanover and a radio address to the nation.
The tone of these statements was remarkably moderate, particularly in light of
the more extreme expectations that had attached themselves to Hindenburg’s
candidacy. Speaking in Hanover, Hindenburg took special pains to underscore
the nonpartisan character of his candidacy and surprised his critics by express-
ing a commitment to excercise the powers of the presidency “on the basis of
the existing constitutional foundation and Germany’s present situation in the
world.” What ultimately mattered, Hindenburg contended, was “not the form
of government but the spirit that animated the form of government.”99

94
Meeting of the Reich Bloc, 8 Apr. 1925, BA Koblenz, R 45 II, 311/217 25. See also the
account by Baltrusch, “Geschichtliches zur Wahl Hindenburgs,” BA Koblenz, Nachlass
Fritz Baltrusch, 11, as well as “Bericht über Sitzungen des Loebell Ausschusses,” 31
Mar. 7 May 1925, in Bredt, Erinnerungen und Dokumente, ed. Schumacher, 349 51.
95
Schulenburg, Welt um Hindenburg, 70.
96
Kriegk, “Hindenburg,” Der Deutschen Spiegel 2, no. 16 (17 Apr. 1925): 726 30.
97
Handwritten note by Gayl, n.d., BA Koblenz, NL Gayl, 23.
98
Memorandum of a conversation with Hindenburg, 9 Apr. 1925, BA Koblenz, NL Gayl,
23. See also Otto von Feldmann, Turkei, Weimar, Hitler. Lebenserinnerungen eines
preußischen Offiziers und deutschnationalen Politikers, ed. Peter von Feldmann (Bosdorf,
2013), 259 74.
99
[Paul von Hindenburg], Hindenburg: Briefe, Reden, Berichte, ed. Fritz Endres (Munich,
1934), 144 45.
    ? 

Over the course of the next several days, virtually all of the organizations
that belonged to the Reich Bloc rallied to Hindenburg’s support. Even the
Stahlhelm, which continued to express a preference for Jarres right up until the
eve of Hindenburg’s nomination, overcame the severe strain that had
developed in its relations with the Young German Order as a result of the
latter’s behavior during the nominating process and joined the rest of the
patriotic movement in supporting Hindenburg’s bid for the presidency.100 By
the same token, the Bavarian People’s Party officially joined the Reich Bloc
and called upon its followers to vote for Hindenburg after having refused to
support Jarres in the initial ballot.101 Of the various organizations that had
supported Jarres’s presidential campaign, only the DVP remained aloof from
the excitement that greeted the news of Hindenburg’s candidacy. While
Stresemann was no doubt concerned about foreign reaction to Hindenburg’s
election, he was also embarrassed by the way in which the DNVP tried to
transform the campaign into a referendum on Germany’s form of government
and withheld his personal endorsement until the last week of the campaign.102
The Nationalists, in the meantime, hailed Hindenburg as the “savior of the
German people” whose election would mark the beginning of Germany’s
national recovery at home and abroad. Those who voted for Marx, on the
other hand, were stigmatized as “reactionaries” responsible for perpeutating a
“rotten and corrupt system” of government.103
At the same time that Nationalist hyperbole reflected the tremendous
importance the DNVP attached to Hindenburg’s election, it also had the effect
of greatly increasing the political stakes involved in the outcome of the
election. If, for example, Hindenburg were to be defeated, this would be a
great victory for Germany’s republican forces and an unmitigated defeat for
those who continued to oppose the principles enshrined in the Weimar
Constitution, in all likelihood a defeat from which the German Right might
never have recovered. Consequently, the leaders of the DNVP – and particu-
larly Winckler, Westarp, and those governmental conservatives who were in
control of the party – committed themselves and the resources at their disposal
without any reservation whatsoever to the task of securing Hindenburg’s
election. At the same time, the leaders of the Stahlhelm, the Young German
Order, and other elements on the paramilitary Right were able to set aside

100
Circular from Seldte to the leaders of the Stahlhelm local organizations, 10 Apr. 1925,
BA Koblenz, NL Gayl, 23.
101
Hauss, Volkswahl, 103 24. On the BVP, see Cuno to Jarres, 15 Apr. 1925, BA Koblenz,
NL Jarres, 23, as well as Schönhoven, Bayerische Volkspartei, 123 28.
102
Stresemann, “Deutsche Volkspartei und Reichspräsidentenwahl,” Die Zeit, 19 Apr. 1925,
no. 160. See also Turner, Stresemann, 191 200.
103
Manfred Dörr, “Die Deutschnationale Volkspartei 1925 bis 1928” (Ph.D. diss., Univer
sität Marburg, 1964), 126 28.
   , –

their deep-seated antipathy towards the world of Weimar party politics to

provide massive logistic support for the Hindenburg campaign. These efforts
were rewarded when on 26 April 1925 Hindenburg captured more than 14.6
million votes – or 48.3 percent of the total popular vote – and defeated Marx
by slightly more than 900,000 votes. The secret to Hindenburg’s victory lay not
only in his ability to attract the support of many of those who had stayed at
home on 29 March – approximately three million more voters went to the
polls in April than the month before – but also in his popularity with Bavarian
Catholics who may have shared Marx’s religion but not his ties to the Social
Democrats.104

Organized Interests and Stabilization

Although Hindenburg’s election was doubtlessly a major triumph for the
German Right, its immediate impact on German political life was ambiguous
and difficult for contemporaries to assess. The confusion here stemmed in no
small measure from the fact that Hindenburg took special pains to defuse fears
of a new assault against the social and political legacy of the November
Revolution by reaffirming his commitment to exercise the powers of his office
within the framework of the existing constitutional order.105 But if Hinden-
burg’s remarks helped reassure the defenders of the Weimar Republic that his
election did not signal an immediate swing to the right in domestic and foreign
policy, they found little favor with the more irrascible elements on the DNVP’s
extreme right wing. Even before the conclusion of the campaign, many
Nationalists had expressed private fears that the election of a man of Hinden-
burg’s mythic stature as president of the German republic would only expedite
its political legitimation and thus make its replacement by a more authoritar-
ian political system all the more difficult.106 Not only did Hindenburg’s oath of
loyalty to the Weimar Constitution tend to confirm such fears, but Hinden-
burg’s election demonstrated to influential elements within Germany’s con-
servative establishment just how much one could accomplish by working
within rather than outside the existing political system. In the words of the
DNVP’s Martin Schiele, Hindenburg’s election “greatly strengthened the
structure of German state power” at the same time that it demonstrated

104
On this point, see John K. Zeender, “The German Catholics and the Presidential Election
of 1925,” Journal of Modern History 35 (1963): 366 81, and Karl Holl, “Konfessionalität,
Konfessionalismus und demokratische Republik zu einigen Aspekten der Reichsprä
sidentenwahl von 1925,” Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 17 (1969): 254 75.
105
[Hindenburg], Briefe, Reden, Berichte, ed. Endres, 150 51.
106
For example, see Martin Spahn, “Die Wahl zum Reichspräsidenten: Das Amt und der
Mann,” in Friedrich Wilhelm Loebell, ed., Hindenburg. Was er uns Deutschen ist. Eine
Festgabe zum 80. Geburtstag (Berlin, 1927), 113.
    ? 

“support for the state [Staatsbejahung]” and “a sense of national feeling” that
“offers the strongest guarantee for the strength and permanence of our state
system.”107
The immediate effect of Hindenburg’s election was thus to encourage the
reconciliation of the more moderate elements within the DNVP to Germany’s
new republican order and to isolate those on the party’s right wing who
remained irreconciliably opposed to any form of collaboration with the
existing political system. Coming on the heels of the split in the Nationalist
vote on the ratification of the Dawes Plan and the DNVP’s entry into the
Luther cabinet, Hindenburg’s election represented another step in the gradual
accommodation of Germany’s conservative establishment to the possibility
of pursuing its social and political objectives within the existing system of
government and bore dramatic testimony – though not without a touch of irony
in light of his opposition to Hindenburg’s candidacy – to the success of
Stresemann’s strategy of stabilizing the republic from the Right. The success
of Stresemann’s strategy could also be seen in the changes in the leadership of
Germany’s two most influential nonsocialist special-interest organizations, the
National Federation of German Industry and the National Rural League. In
the early years of the Weimar Republic, both organizations had been under the
control of elements that were strongly opposed, if not openly hostile, to the
changes that had taken place in Germany’s political system since the collapse
of November 1918. In the summer of 1924, however, both the RDI and the
RLB had played an important role in securing the ratification of the Dawes
Plan, in the first case to gain access to international capital markets and in the
latter case to gain a measure of influence over the formulation of German
trade policy. Now, in deference to Weimar’s apparent stabilization, both the
RDI and RLB began to make tactical adjustments to what they perceived as the
changed realities of Germany’s domestic political situation.
By and large, the German industrial community was one of the principal
beneficiaries of Germany’s political and economic stabilization. If nothing else,
the adoption of the Dawes Plan provided German industry with access to
international capital markets and enabled it to compensate for the acute
capital shortage that had resulted from the runaway inflation of the early
1920s. Still, Germany’s industrial leadership was far from united in its support
of Stresemann’s domestic and foreign policies. Not only had Ruhr heavy
industry backed the short-lived National Liberal Association in its efforts to
undermine Stresemann’s position as DVP party chairman,108 but influential
Ruhr industrialists such as Paul Reusch, Fritz Thyssen, and Albert Vögler had
strongly opposed ratification of the Dawes Plan for fear that this would place

107
Martin Schiele, “Innere Politik,” in Politische Praxis 1926, ed. Walther Lambach (Ham
burg, n.d. [1926]), 48 57.
108
Rasch, “Über Albert Vögler,” 134.
   , –

German heavy industry at a permanent competitive disadvantage in future

international trade.109 All of this, in turn, tended to threaten the unity of the
National Federation of German Industry, which in April 1924 had given its
tentative approval to the Dawes committee recommendations as “a suitable
basis for the solution of the reparations problem.”110 The most direct threat to
the RDI’s unity came in the form of the German Industrialists’ Association
(Deutsche Industriellen-Vereinigung or DIV), which Hugenberg’s associates
in the German industrial community founded in Berlin’s Hotel Esplanade on
14 May 1924 under the leadership of Paul Bang and Eduard Stadtler. The DIV
was militantly opposed to the tone and substance of the Dawes committee
recommendations and sought to block their implementation not only by
mobilizing industrial opposition to Stresemann’s stabilization strategy but also
by fomenting a rebellion within the RDI against Hermann Bücher and those
officials it held responsible for the RDI’s disastrous political course.111
Although the German Industrialists’ Association remained a splinter organ-
ization that never established itself as a serious rival to the RDI, its founding
bore dramatic testimony to the sharp cleavage that had developed between
Ruhr heavy industry and the more moderate elements of the German indus-
trial establishment. Much of the RDI’s internal discord was attributed to the
ineffective leadership of Kurt Sorge, president of the RDI since its founding in
1919. Sorge, who had served as a member of the DVP Reichstag delegation
until earning Stresemann’s ire for his involvement in the NLV, was in the
process of divesting himself of his positions within the German industrial
establishment and asked to be relieved of his responsibilities as RDI president
in the early fall of 1924.112 The search for a successor who could command the
respect of both Ruhr heavy industry and the other branches of German
industry continued throughout the remainder of the year before the RDI
finally settled upon Carl Duisberg, chairman of the board of directors of one
of Germany’s largest chemical firms.113 Duisberg’s subsequent election as RDI

109
For further details, see Weisbrod, Schwerindustrie in der Weimarer Republik, 273 82.
110
Geschäftliche Mitteilungen für die Mitglieder des Reichsverbandes der Deutschen Industrie
6, no. 10 (1 May 1924): 72, BA Koblenz, ZSg 1 142.
111
On the DIV, see Eduard Stadtler, “Reichsverband der Deutschen Industrie” und
“Deutsche Industriellen Vereinigung” (Berlin, n.d. [1924]), esp. 15 29. See also Bang to
Claß, 25 May 1924, BA Potsdam, ADV, 287/233 34.
112
Sorge to the members of the RDI presidium, 20 Sept. 1924, Bayer Archiv Leverkusen,
RDI Akten, 62/10.2.
113
Geschäftliche Mitteilungen für die Mitglieder des Reichsverbandes der Deutschen Industrie
7, no. 1 (21 Jan. 1925): 1, BA Koblenz, ZSg 1 14/2. On Duisberg’s election, see
Weisbrod, Schwerindustrie in der Weimarer Republik, 217 45, as well as Stephanie
Wolff Rohé, Der Reichsverband der Deutschen Industrie 1919 1924/25 (Frankfurt am
Main, 2001), 387 95, and Werner Plumpe, Carl Duisberg 1861 1935. Anatomie eines
Industriellen (Munich, 2016), 721 27.
    ? 

president in January 1925 represented a clear triumph for the more moderate
elements within the organization. For although Duisberg may have taken pride
in being temperamentally unsuited for politics and took great pains to reaffirm
the RDI’s essentially nonpartisan character,114 he was at the same time one of
Stresemann’s strongest supporters within the German industrial community
and a severe critic of the policies Ruhr heavy industry had pursued during the
1923 crisis.115 Moreover, Duisberg was strongly committed to improving
industry’s effectiveness in its relations with the Reichstag and took immediate
steps upon his election as RDI president to establish a parliamentary advisory
council (Beirat) that would facilitate the flow of information between industry
and parliament.116 Notwithstanding the fact that German heavy industry
continued to exercise an unofficial veto over the policies of the RDI and could
still block any initiative by the RDI leadership that might jeopardize its own
interests,117 Duisberg’s election to the RDI presidency and his willingness to
promote industry’s welfare within the framework of the existing political
system validated the significance of Stresemann’s efforts at stabilizing the
German republic from the Right.118
Developments within the RDI’s principal agrarian counterpart, the National
Rural League, were more difficult to interpret. Despite an arrangement that
granted small and middle-sized family farmers in southern and western
Germany the semblance of parity, the RLB’s policies ever since its founding
in 1921 had been effectively dictated by the large landowning interests from
east of the Elbe River.119 Under the leadership of Gustav Roesicke, the RLB
had allied itself with the DNVP, where it took its place among those elements
most resolutely opposed to any sort of accommodation with Germany’s new
republican system.120 In the fall of 1923 the RLB had sympathized with the
efforts to replace Germany’s republican order with a more authoritarian
system of government and had even established contact with Seeckt in the

114
Remarks by Duisberg at a press conference, 17 June 1925, in Carl Duisberg, Abhandlun
gen, Vorträge und Reden aus den Jahren 1922 1933 (Berlin, 1933), 13.
115
Duisberg to Weinberg, 24 Sept. 1923, Bayer Archiv Leverkusen, I.G. Farben Vorakten,
4B/20.
116
Duisberg to Kalle, 17 Jan. 1925, Bayer Archiv Leverkusen, RDI Akten, 62/10.2. See also
Duisberg to Siemens, 13 Mar. 1925, SHI Berlin, NL Siemens, 4/Lf 665, and Duisberg to
Silverberg, 13 Mar. 1925, BA Koblenz, NL Silverberg, 259/13 18, as well as Plumpe,
Duisberg, 728 29.
117
Bernd Weisbrod, “Economic Power and Political Stability Reconsidered: Heavy Industry
in Weimar Germany,” Social History 4 (19):  .
118
Wolfram Pyta, “Vernunftrepublikanismus in den Spitzenverbänden der deutschen
Industrie,” in Vernunftrepublikanismus in der Weimarer Republik. Politik, Literatur,
Wissenschaft, ed. Andreas Wirsching and Jürgen Eder (Stuttgart, 2008), 87 108.
119
Flemming, Landwirtschaftliche Interessen und Demokratie, 252 322.
120
For example, see Kriegsheim to Ziemke, 21 Jan. 1924, BA Berlin, R 72, 263/54.
   , –

hope that he might take the initiative in bringing this about.121 All of this,
however, began to change during the Dawes crisis in the summer of 1924. The
threat of a new credit restrictions by the German National Bank placed the
leaders of the German agricultural community under heavy pressure to sup-
port acceptance of the Dawes commitee recommendations. Moreover, the
leaders of the RLB were anxious to influence the general contours of German
trade policy after Germany regained full tariff autonomy at the beginning of
1925 and were determined to make certain that agricultural interests would be
shielded as much as possible from the new taxes that would result from
implementation of the Dawes Plan.122 None of this would be possible if the
DNVP continued to disqualify itself as a potential coalition partner by
blocking acceptance of the Dawes committee recommendations. Under these
circumstances, the more moderate elements around the DVP’s Karl Hepp
managed to gain the upper hand over Roesicke and his supporters from the
RLB’s East Elbian affiliates to force a critical change in the RLB’s position on
the Dawes Plan. In late August the RLB executive committee formally released
its representatives in the Reichstag to vote according to their conscience,
thereby helping to clear the way for acceptance of the controversial plan.123
The moderate tendency within the RLB was greatly strengthened not only
by the appointment of one of their own, the DNVP’s Martin Schiele, as the
new minister of agriculture in January 1925 but also by Hindenburg’s election
as Reich president three months later. Not only did these developments
demonstrate the possibility, if not the wisdom, of working within the existing
political system, but they were accompanied by an important change in the
RLB’s national leadership.124 With Roesicke’s death in February 1925 and that
of his long-time friend and associate Conrad von Wangenheim fifteen months
later, the RLB lost the two men whose politics and reputation most closely
identified it with the prewar Agrarian League. Their departure from the scene
cleared the way for the ascendancy of a new generation of agrarian politicians,
the most important of whom were Schiele, Hepp, Count Eberhard von Kalck-
reuth, and Arno Kriegsheim. Hepp, who had languished in Roesicke’s shadow
as part of an arrangement that had the two men share presidential authority,
became increasingly assertive in setting the course for the RLB after 1925,
while Kalckreuth, an East Elbian aristocrat chosen as Roesicke’s successor in
the two-man RLB presidium, tended to defer to Hepp in most political matters

121
Wangenheim to Roesicke, 15 Dec. 1923, BA Berlin, NL Wangenheim, 17/34.
122
Wege zur Aktivierung der deutschen Wirtschaftsbilanz. Die Vorschläge des Reichs Land
bundes (Berlin, 1925).
123
“Stellungnahme des Präsidiums des Reichs Landbundes zur gegenwärtigen politischen
Lage,” n.d. [ca. 22 23 Aug. 1924], appended to Kalckreuth to Westarp, 23 Aug. 1924, NL
Westarp, Gärtringen, VN 46.
124
Flemming, Landwirtschaftliche Interessen und Demokratie, 241 45.
    ? 

so that he could concentrate his efforts on rescuing the organization’s numer-

ous economic institutions from fiscal collapse.125 The person who did more
than anybody else to set the tone at the helm of the RLB was Kriegsheim.
Having come to the RLB by way of the German Rural League, Kriegsheim was
the consummate Verbandstaktiker who placed the corporate welfare of the
German agricultural community ahead of all other political considerations.126
Although he himself belonged to the DNVP, Kriegsheim had flirted with the
idea of a new agrarian party in the summer of 1924 and sought to relax the
RLB’s close ties to the DNVP so that it might pursue a more independent
course of action in the defense of agricultural economic interests.127

The change of leadership both here and at the National Federation of German
Industry represented part of a more general accommodation on the part of
Germany’s conservative economic elites to the realities of Weimar’s political
and economic stabilization after 1924. This becomes even more apparent when
these developments are placed in the context of the August 1924 split in the
Nationalist vote on the Dawes Plan, the DNVP’s entry into the Luther cabinet
in January 1925, and Hindenburg’s election as president of the German repub-
lic the following April. Taken together, these developments foreshadowed a
new era in the history of the Weimar Republic, one in which the more moderate
elements on the German Right could be persuaded through an appeal to their
economic self-interest to work within the framework of a political system they
continued to reject on ideological grounds. To be sure, this was anything but an
ideal solution to the problem of Weimar’s political stability. In the first place, it
rested upon the assumption that the special-economic interests willing to
collaborate with the existing system of government would be rewarded for their
sacrifice of political principle with tangible benefits in the field of social and
economic policy. Whether or not this condition would hold, particularly in
light of the harsh realities of Germany’s economic stabilization in the second
half of the 1920s, remained to be seen. Secondly, any move in the direction of an
accommodation with the Weimar Republic was almost certain to provoke a
fierce reaction from those on the extreme Right who refused to countenance
any sort of collaboration with the existing political system. All of this suggests
that the efforts to stabilize the republic from the right rested upon extremely
fragile premises and that the success of this gambit was far from certain.

125
In this respect, see Hugenberg to Kalckreuth, 22 Dec. 1925, BA Koblenz, NL Schmidt
Hannover, 73.
126
In this respect, see Arno Kriegsheim, “Die politische Bedeutung des Reichs Land
bundes,” in Politische Praxis 1926, ed. Walther Lambach (Hamburg, 1926), 295 303,
and Arno Kriegsheim, “Die politische Sendung der Berufsstände,” Politische Wochen
schrift 3, no. 12 (24 Mar. 1927): 246 48.
127
Entry in Quaatz’s diary, 5 July 1924, BA Koblenz, NL Quaatz, 16.
 9

Paladins of the Right

With the political and economic stabilization of the Weimar Republic in

the middle of the 1920s and the split that this produced within the ranks of
Germany’s conservative elites, the mobilization of culture in the war against
democracy became more important than ever before. From beginning to
end, the Weimar Republic was the scene of a pitched battle for cultural
hegemony, though one waged not so much between different social classes
as one waged within Germany’s bourgeois intelligentsia between those who
believed in cooperation across class lines on the basis of parliamentary
democracy and those who categorically rejected the social and political
compromises upon which the Weimar Republic had been founded.1 No
group in the Weimar Republic attached greater significance to winning the
struggle for cultural and intellectual hegemony than Germany’s conserva-
tive intelligentsia. To the paladins of the Right, the immediate task was to
challenge whatever legitimacy the newly founded Weimar Republic enjoyed
in the eyes of the German bourgeoisie and to lay the foundation for what
they embraced as the “conservative revolution.” The term conservative
revolution was first introduced into Weimar’s political vocabulary by the
Austrian poet and dramatist Hugo von Hofmannstahl in a speech at the
University of Munich in January 1927. Against the fragmentation of
German social and political life Hofmannstahl sought to invoke the healing
power of German culture. Here he called for a conservative revolution that
could overcome the estrangement of spirit (Geist) from life and create
“a new German reality in which the entire nation could take part.”2 In its

1
For overviews of Weimar culture, see Peter Gay, Weimar Culture: The Insider as Outsider
(New York, 1968), and Walter Laqueur, Weimar: A Cultural History (New York, 1974), as
well as the relevant chapters in Eric D. Weitz, Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy
(Princeton, NJ, and Oxford, 2007), 169 330. For more nuanced readings of the paradoxes
of Weimar culture, see the essays in Moritz Föllmer and Rüdiger Graf, eds., Die ‘Krise’ der
Weimarer Republik. Zur Kritik eines Deutungsmusters (Frankfurt a.M. and New York,
2005), as well as Benjamin Ziemann, “Weimar was Weimar: Politics, Culture, and the
Emplotment of the German Republic,” German History 28 (2010): 542 71.
2
Hugo von Hofmannstahl, Das Schriftum als geistiger Raum der Nation (n.p. [Munich], n.d.
[1927]), 31.


     

more blatant manifestations, the doctrine of the conservative revolution

was directed not merely against the individualistic and materialistic trap-
pings of modern mass democracy but also against the reactionary social
vision of old-line conservatives such as those who were in control of the
DNVP. In a broader sense, the conservative revolution defined itself in
essentially moral and spiritual terms and sought nothing less than the
rebirth of the human spirit.3
At the forefront of this crusade stood a small group of conservative intel-
lectuals who alternately called themselves “young” or “revolutionary” conser-
vatives as a way of distinguishing themselves from that the prewar
conservative establishment. This particular mode of conservative thought
had surfaced in the late nineteenth-century as a rival to both the governmental
and radical nationalist strains of Wilhelmine conservatism. It drew much of its
inspiration from Nietzsche’s ruthless dissection of European cultural deca-
dence and was characterized by a degree of cultural pessimism that was
conspicuously absent from the more influential and established forms of
German conservatism.4 Similarly, the young conservatives felt a certain affin-
ity for the apocalyptic impulse that had manifested itself so vividly in the
German expressionist movement at the beginning of the twentieth century.
Like the expressionists, the young conservatives longed for some sort of
apocalyptic breakthrough, or Durchbruch, out of a decadent and moribund
society into a new world of the spirit. For the young conservatives, however,
this breakthrough into the new world of the spirit was to be accompanied by
the creation of a new political order in which the historic separation of Staat
and Volk would dissolve in a celebration of national unity. The young conser-
vatives thus appropriated the millenarian and apocalyptic imagery of German
expressionism and harnessed it to their own political aspirations. For many of
those in the vanguard of modernist culture, World War I would be the catalyst
that would set in motion the series of events that would presumably culminate

3
The classic study of the “conservative revolution” is Armin Mohler, Die konservative
Revolution in Deutschland. Grundriß ihrer Weltanschauungen (Stuttgart, 1950). See also
Keith Bullivant, “The Conservative Revolution,” in The Weimar Dilemma: Intellectuals in
the Weimar Republic, ed., Anthony Phelan (Manchester, 1985), 47 70, as well as Stefan
Breuer, Anatomie der konservativen Revolution (Darmstadt, 1993), and Roger Woods, The
Conservative Revolution in the Weimar Republic (London and New York, 1996).
4
In this respect, see Fritz Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study in the Rise of the
Germanic Ideology (Berkeley, CA, and Los Angeles, 1961). Nietzsche’s relationship to the
conservative revolution is the focus of a collection of essays that recently appeared under
the title Nietzsche und die Konservative Revolution, ed. Sebastian Kaufmann and Andreas
Urs Sommer (Berlin, 2018). In particular, see the editors’ introduction, “Nietzsche und die
Konservative Revolution: Zur Einführung,” 1 12.
   , –

in the realization of their highest hopes for the spiritual, cultural, and political
rebirth of the German nation.5

The June Club

By far the most important center of young conservative activity in the early
Weimar Republic was the June Club (Juniklub). The June Club was founded
on 28 June 1919 through the merger of two other young conservative organ-
izations, the Association for National and Social Solidarity (Vereinigung für
nationale und soziale Solidarität) under the leadership of Heinrich von
Gleichen-Russwurm and the League for the Defense of German Culture (Liga
zum Schutz der deutschen Kultur), more commonly known as the Anti-
Bolshevist League (Antibolschewistische Liga), under the leadership of Eduard
Stadtler. Founded as a symbolic protest against Germany’s acceptance of the
Versailles Peace Treaty, the June Club was a relatively small organization that
never numbered more than 150 active members.6 Its membership was
recruited exclusively from the ranks of Germany’s conservative elite and
included not only prominent politicians such as Hans Erdmann von
Lindeiner-Wildau and Otto Hoetzsch from the DNVP, Reinhold Quaatz
from the DVP, and Martin Spahn, Heinrich Brüning, and occasionally Adam
Stegerwald from the Center but also influential conservative publicists such as
Walther Schotte from the Preußische Jahrbücher, Rudolf Pechel from the
Deutsche Rundschau, Paul Fechter from the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung,
and Franz Röhr from the Deutsche Arbeit, the leading journal of the
Christian-national labor movement. Meeting weekly at the club’s Berlin fash-
ionable headquarters at Motzstraße 22, club members would discuss topics of
both political and literary interest in what was part of a conscious effort to
bring the leading conservative intellectuals of the day into closer contact with
the men whose policies would ultimately shape the direction of political
conservatism in the Weimar Republic.7 As a forum that provided young
conservative intellectuals with informal, yet direct, access to Germany’s eco-
nomic and political elites, the June Club quickly assumed a significance that
greatly exceeded the size of its membership.8

5
For example, see Frederick S. Levine, The Apocalyptic Vision: The Art of Franz Marc as
German Expressionism (New York, 1979): 138 69.
6
An undated membership list in BA Koblenz, Nachlass Rudolf Pechel, 144, indicates that
the June Club had ninety members with full voting rights and another forty five extraor
dinary members without voting rights.
7
For the club’s goals, see Juni Klub, “Die dreiunddreissig Sätze,” n.d., BA Koblenz, NL
Pechel, 144.
8
For further details, see Manfred Schoeps, “Der Deutsche Herrenklub. Ein Beitrag zur
Geschichte des Jungkonservativismus in der Weimarer Republik” (Ph.D. diss., Universität
Erlangen Nürnberg, 1974), 11 34; and Joachim Petzold, Wegbereiter des deutschen Faschismus.
     

From the outset, the driving intellectual force in the June Club was Arthur
Moeller van den Bruck, a young conservative intellectual who went on to earn
more than his share of posthumous notoriety for his book Das dritte Reich.
Born in 1876, Moeller belonged to that generation of Germans who had been
born in the first decade after the founding of the Second Empire and who
reached political maturity around the turn of the century. Unlike the vast
majority of those in his cohort group, however, Moeller felt little attachment to
the symbols and institutions of imperial Germany and remained profoundly
alienated from what he perceived as the decadence of Wilhelmine culture.
A literary and cultural critic who had earned a measure of distinction for his
comprehensive survey of German literature after Nietzsche and for his
authoritative German edition of Dosteoevsky’s collected writings, Moeller
viewed the world through a prism that refracted the underlying disenchant-
ment of an entire generation of German intellectuals with the materialism,
philistinism, and facile nationalism of Wilhelmine Germany. In his self-
imposed exile from 1902 until the outbreak of World War I, Moeller
developed increasingly close ties to leading representatives of the expressionist
movement – Edvard Munch and Ernst Barlach in particular – and came to
share their longing for some sort of apocalyptic resolution to the crisis of
modern culture.9 In the meantime, Moeller reserved his most scathing
remarks for liberalism, which, with its promise of equality and freedom for
all, was both source and symptom of the decay and dissolution of European
cultural life. At the core of Moeller’s rejection of liberalism lay a deeply
pessimistic view of human nature and a profound lack of faith in the powers
of human reason. Nor did conservatism, the movement to which Moeller felt
the greatest emotional attachment, escape his scorn. For not only was conser-
vatism guilty of failing to address the problems of the modern age but it had
degenerated into the preserve of a privileged caste. Of the political movements
of his day, only Social Democracy evoked a positive response from Moeller,

Die Jungkonservativen in der Weimarer Republik (Cologne, 1978), 99 106, as well as two more
recent studies by Berthold Petzinna, Erziehung zum deutschen Lebensstil. Ursprung und
Entwicklung des jungkonservativen “Ring” Kreises 1918 1933 (Berlin, 2000), 118 42, and
André Postert, Von der Kritik der Parteien zur außerparlamentarischen Opposition. Die
Jungkonservative Klub Bewegung in der Weimarer Republik und ihre Auflösung im National
sozialismus (Baden Baden, 2014), 107 43.
9
On Moeller’s early development, see Stern, Politics of Cultural Despair, 231 55, and
Hans Joachim Schwierskott, Arthur Moeller van den Bruck und der revolutionäre Natio
nalismus in der Weimarer Republik (Göttingen, 1962), 13 36, as well as the more recent
studies by André Schlüter, Moeller van den Bruck. Leben und Werk (Cologne, Weimar,
and Vienna, 2010), 29 86; Volker Weiß, Moderne Antimoderne. Arthur Moeller van den
Bruck und der Wandel des Konservatismus (Paderborn, 2012), 102 211; and Claudia
Kemper, Das “Gewissen” 1919 1925. Kommunikation und Vernetzung der Jungkonserva
tiven (Munich, 2011), 61 106.
   , –

though not so much for its commitment to the social and political equality of
the worker as for its Prussian discipline and sense of duty.10
Throughout all of this, Moeller retained the esthete’s disdain for the world
of practical politics. Politics, Moeller suggested, was nothing more than the
constant wrangling of different political parties for the material benefit of the
special economic interests they represented. Politics in the modern state had
thus surrendered the welfare of the nation as a whole to a parliamentary
marketplace in which interests, not ideas, drove the course of events. With
the outbreak of World War I and Germany’s military collapse four years later,
Moeller overcame his aversion to politics and began to stake out a position for
himself and those who were prepared to follow him. Moeller and his associates
remained deeply indebted to what they called “the ideas of 1914.” By this they
meant first and foremost the deep and abiding sense of national unity that had
surfaced almost inexplicably in the first days of the war, a sense of unity, as
Moeller was quick to point out, that did not stop with the propertied classes
but embraced the worker as well. This sense of national unity, with its
concomitant emphasis upon the essential equality of all of those who belonged
to the German nation, stood in naked contrast to the partisan bickering of
Wilhelmine political life and provided the young conservatives who had rallied
behind Moeller’s banner with their distinctive vision of Germany’s political
future.11 By the same token, Moeller and his associates were profoundly
touched by the events of November 1918. If old-line conservatives were deeply
shaken by the collapse of the monarchy and the triumph of Social Democracy,
the young conservatives rejoiced at the death of a corrupt and moribund
political order and welcomed the November Revolution as an opportunity to
translate “the ideas of 1914” into practice.12
The heady euphoria that the young conservatives felt at the collapse of the
old order lasted for precisely eight months, that is, until Germany yielded to
the threat of dismemberment and signed the Versailles Peace Treaty. To the
young conservatives, Versailles became a symbol of Germany’s national
humiliation without whose total and unconditional repudiation the task of
national regeneration could never begin. From this point on, Moeller and his
followers became unrelenting opponents not only of Versailles but also of the
political system they held responsible for its acceptance, the Weimar Republic.

10
On Moeller’s political ideas, see Schwierskott, Moeller van den Bruck, 88 141; Schlüter,
Moeller van den Bruck, 115 73; and Weiß, Moderne Antimoderne, 73 77, 80 86, 94 101.
11
On the “ideas of 1914,” see Jeffrey Verhey, The Spirit of 1914: Militarism, Myth, and
Mobilization in Germany (Cambridge, 2000).
12
Peter Fritzsche, “Breakdown or Breakthrough? Conservatives and the November Revolu
tion of 1918,” in Between Reform, Reaction, and Resistance: Studies on the History of
German Conservatism from 1789 to 1945, ed. Larry Eugene Jones and James N. Retallack
(Oxford and New York, 1993), 299 328.
     

All that Moeller had had to say about liberalism in the prewar period took on
new intensity in the wake of Versailles. Nowhere was this more apparent than
in a famous essay entitled “An Liberalismus gehen die Völker zugrunde” that
Moeller wrote for Die neue Front, the collective manifesto that thirty-eight
members of the June Club issued in 1922. Here Moeller not only reiterated his
more theoretical arguments against the liberal concepts of man, state, and
society, but applied them to the specific conditions that existed in Germany
after the end of the war. While Moeller continued to equate liberalism with the
decadence and leveling of contemporary German culture, he also decried the
way in which the ideas of 1914 and the revolution of 1918 had been betrayed
by the forces of liberalism at home and abroad. To rectify this situation,
Moeller called upon his followers to complete the revolution that the liberal
architects of Germany’s new constitutional order had done their best to
subvert and to lay the foundation for a new German Reich through the
consolidation of all who were prepared to sacrifice their own self-interest for
the sake of Germany’s national destiny.13
By no means did Moeller’s disciples confine their work to Berlin. In
1919 and 1920 representatives of the June Club held colloquia and workshops
throughout Germany in an effort to educate a broader public about the club’s
goals and to recruit new followers to its crusade for a rebirth of German
cultural and political life. At the same time, club members established contact
not just with like-minded intellectuals from other parts of the country but also
with representatives of Germany’s industrial and agricultural elites. But its
primary focus remained the younger generation, the generation that had
served so valiantly at the front during the recent war and that was now trying
to make its way back into civilian life. As Max Hildebert Boehm, one of the
June Club’s most committed activists, wrote in 1920, the task of rescuing the
German nation from the nihilistic despair, crass materialism, and relentless
mechanization of the postwar period had fallen to that generation that had
proven its mettle in the trenches of the great war and that was now being
called upon to forge a new Volksgemeinschaft out of the universal misery that
had befallen the German people.14 It was in this spirit that Boehm sent
Westarp, Stresemann, and other leaders of the bourgeois Right a memoran-
dum extolling the virtues of the soldiers’ and worker’s councils that had
sprung up first in the Russian revolution of 1917 and then more recently in
the much pilloried November Revolution, praising them as an alternative to
the moribund system of bourgeois parliamentarism that Germany had

13
Moeller van den Bruck, “An Liberalismus gehen die Völker zugrunde,” in Die neue Front,
ed. Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, Heinrich von Gleichen Rußwurm, and Max Hildebert
Boehm (Berlin, 1922), 5 34. On Moeller’s involvement in the June Club, see Schlüter,
Moeller van den Bruck, 289 318, and Weiß, Moderne Antimoderne, 225 31.
14
Boehm, “Die Front der Jungen,” Süddeutsche Monatshefte 8, no. 1 (1920 21): 8 12.
   , –

inherited from the nineteenth century. Denouncing parliamentarism as “the

legitimate off-spring of the mechanist-atomist western theory of the state,”
Boehm called upon the parties of the German Right to embrace the younger
generation and its search for new forms of social and political organization
that would enable the German people to translate the “ideas of 1914” into
concrete reality.15
Of the conservative intellectuals who suddenly rose to prominence after the
collapse of 1918, only Oswald Spengler rivaled Moeller van den Bruck in
influence and popularity. Spengler’s fame stemmed from his authorship of
Der Untergang des Abendlandes, an ambitious and highly speculative exercise
in universal history that captured the sense of despair that gripped Germany
in the aftermath of World War I as powerfully as any book of its time.16
Spengler, however, was anything but a clear thinker, and there was always an
unresolved tension between the implicit pessimism of his universal history
and his passionate espousal of right-wing political causes.17 As a political
thinker, Spengler was best known for a book he published in 1919 under
the title of Preußentum und Sozialismus. Here Spengler argued that conser-
vatism and socialism were not irreconcilable opposites but elements of a
new political synthesis that would enable Germany to overcome the fragmen-
tation of western parliamentary democracy and the individualistic ethos of
nineteenth-century liberalism. Rejecting the Marxist doctrine of class conflict
along with Social Democratic demands for the expropriation of the rich and
economically powerful, Spengler called upon conservatives and workers to
recognize their common commitment to the creation of a new political order
in which service to the state as a whole replaced economic self-aggrandizement
as the basis upon which Germany’s national regeneration would take place.18
Superficial differences aside, these ideas had much in common with Moeller’s

15
Boehm, “Die Rechtsparteien und das Rätesystem,” n.d., appended to his letter to Westarp,
17 Feb. 1919, BA Berlin, NL Westarp, 33/64 73, reprinted in Max Hildebert Boehm, Ruf
der Jungen. Eine Stimme aus dem Kreise um Moeller van den Bruck (Freiburg im Breisgau,
1933), 66 73. See also Ulrich Prehn, Max Hildebert Boehm. Radikales Ordnungsdenken
vom Ersten Weltkrieg bis in die Bundesrepublik (Göttingen, 2013), 134 81.
16
On Spengler, see Clemens Vollnhals, “Praeceptor Germaniae. Spenglers politische Pub
lizistik,” in Völkische Bewegung Konservative Revolution Nationalsozialismus. Aspekte
einer politisierten Kultur, ed. Walter Schmitz and Clemens Vollnhals (Dresden, 2005),
117 37.
17
For Spengler’s attempt to rescue his faith in the efficacy of human agency from the
fatalism of his philosophy of world history, see Oswald Spengler, Pessimismus? (Berlin,
1922). In this respect, see Felix Schönherr, “Zum Menschenbild des ‘Pessimismus der
Stärke’: Nietzsche, Spengler und die Konservative Revolution,” in Nietzsche und die
Konservative Revolution, ed. Kaufmann and Sommer, 218 30.
18
Oswald Spengler, Preußentum und Sozialismus (Munich, 1922), esp. 97 99. On Spen
gler’s political ideas, see Klemens von Klemperer, Germany’s New Conservatism: Its
History and Dilemma in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, NJ, 1957), 170 79, and
     

appeal for the creation of a distinctly German socialism. But Moeller rejected
the underlying pessimism of Spengler’s magnum opus and criticized its author
for the almost casual way in which he had linked Germany’s fate to that of the
West as a whole.19 At the heart of this dispute lay not only the personal rivalry
of two extremely self-centered and ambitious men but also the fact that
Moeller retained a much greater faith in the redemptive power of the “ideas
of 1914” and a much greater attachment to the millenarian ethos of modernist
culture than the more prosaic Spengler. Although a week-long meeting
between the two men in the summer of 1920 failed to overcome the differences
that separated Spengler from the June Club and its peculiar brand of revolu-
tionary conservatism, the two parted on good terms with Spengler returning to
southern Germany to function as the club’s Munich liaison.20
For all intents and purposes, Spengler remained outside the immediate orbit
of the June Club and would over the course of the next several years drift
further and further away from the circle of Berlin-based intellectuals around
Moeller van den Bruck. In Munich Spengler cultivated close ties to a wide
range of right-wing intellectuals and politicians and became actively involved
in the affairs of Bavaria’s counter-revolutionary Right. Not only did he play an
active role in the affairs of the Joint Committee (Gaä-Gesellschaft or Gaä) that
Paul Nikolaus Coßmann and his associates had founded in late 1922 with
massive support from Paul Reusch, Karl Haniel, and the Ruhr industrial
establishment,21 but he championed the cause of Georg Escherich, the onetime
leader of the Bavarian civilian defense leagues, in his struggle with rivals on
Bavaria’s paramilitary Right.22 In all of these endeavors Spengler was able to
count upon strong financial and moral support from benefactors in the Ruhr,
the most influential of whom was the Gutehoffnungshütte’s Paul Reusch.
Reusch was arguably the most politically active of the Ruhr industrial mag-
nates, and in 1922 he formed a close relationship with Spengler that was to last
until the latter’s death in 1936.23 As the relationship with Reusch and the Ruhr

Walter Struve, Elites against Democracy: Leadership Ideals in Bourgeois Political Thought
in Germany, 1890 1933 (Princeton, NJ, 1973), 232 73.
19
Stern, Politics of Cultural Despair, 293 95.
20
On the meeting between Moeller and Spengler, see Ringleb to Schwierskott, n.d., in
Schwierskott, Moeller van den Bruck, 163 65, and Detlev Felken, Oswald Spengler.
Konservativer Denker zwischen Kaiserreich und Diktatur (Munich, 1988), 135 36.
21
Vollnhals, “Praeceptor Germaniae,” 124. Karl Alexander von Müller recalls in his
memoirs that Spengler delivered the main address at the Gaä’s second congress in early
September 1923. See Karl Alexander von Müller, Im Wandel einer Welt. Erinnerungen
1919 1932, ed. Otto Alexander von Müller (Munich, 1966), 120 23.
22
On Spengler’s Munich activities in the early 1920s, see Felken, Spengler, 134 56.
23
For further information, see Bodo Herzog, “Die Freundschaft zwischen Oswald Spengler
und Paul Reusch,” in Spengler Studien. Festgabe für Manfred Schröter zum 65. Geburtstag,
ed. Anton Koktanek (Munich, 1965), 77 97.
   , –

industrial elite became more and more intimate, the gulf that separated him
from Moeller van den Bruck and the revolutionary conservatism of the June
Club became ever more pronounced.

The Ring Movement

If Moeller van den Bruck was the driving intellectual force behind the June
Club, its most effective organizer was Heinrich von Gleichen. For all of his
intellectual prowess, Moeller was temperamentally unsuited to take on the
responsibility of organizing the young conservatives and was perfectly content
to leave this to the younger Gleichen. During the last years of the war,
Gleichen had served at Rathenau’s recommendation as secretary of the Asso-
ciation of German Academics and Artists (Bund deutscher Gelehrter und
Künstler), an agency created for the purpose of mobilizing Germany’s intel-
lectual elite in support of the war effort.24 The contacts that Gleichen
developed in this capacity were to prove invaluable once he turned his
attention after the end of the war to the task of organizing Germany’s young
conservative intelligentsia. Gleichen’s principal contribution in this regard was
the creation of what came to be known as the Ring Movement (Ring-
Bewegung). Whereas the purpose of the June Club was to forge strong and
lasting ties between men of conservative political persuasion, the Ring Move-
ment sought to extend young conservative ideas into all parts of the country
and to consolidate national-minded Germans on the broadest possible basis.
With the ring as a symbol of the unity it sought to forge throughout the nation
as a whole, the Ring Movement aimed for a much wider audience than the
June Club was ever able to reach and placed particular emphasis upon winning
the support of the younger generation.25 To enhance its public effectiveness,
the Ring-Movement founded its own journal, Das Gewissen, in April 1919. As
its name suggested, this journal functioned as the self-proclaimed “conscience
of the German Right,” a function it fulfilled by repeatedly remonstrating the
leaders of Germany’s conservative parties whenever they deviated from the
young conservatives’ political agenda.26

24
Schoeps, “Herrenklub,” 14 22.
25
On the Ring Movement and its relationship to the June Club, see Moeller van den Bruck
to Grimm, 10 Oct. 1919, Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach (hereafter cited as DLA
Marbach), Nachlass Hans Grimm, A17b. See also Petzinna, Erziehung zum deutschen
Lebensstil, 77 107, and Volker Mauersberger, Rudolf Pechel und die “Deutsche
Rundschau.” Eine Studie zur konservativ revolutionären Publizistik in der Weimarer
Republik (1919 1933) (Bremen, 1971), 46 54.
26
For further details, see Hans Joachim Schwierskott, “‘Das Gewissen’. Ereignisse und
Probleme aus den ersten Jahren der Weimarer Republik im Spiegel einer politischen
Zeitschrift,” in Lebendiger Geist. Hans Joachim Schoeps zum 50. Geburtstag von Schülern
dargebracht, ed. Hellmut Diwald (Leiden and Cologne, 1959), 161 76. On its relationship
     

From the outset, the Ring Movement proved remarkably successful in

attracting the support of Catholic conservatives who, for the most part, had
stood well outside the orbit of prewar German conservatism. None of these was
more important than Eduard Stadtler, a Catholic conservative who spent his
entire life in the service of one right-wing cause after another.27 First as a
Russian prisoner of war and then as an official at the German embassy in
St. Petersburg, Stadtler had witnessed the collapse of the Russian Empire and the
Bolshevik seizure of power at first hand. Profoundly shaken by the magnitude of
these events, Stadtler was convinced that the triumph of Bolshevism in Russia
marked the beginning of a world revolution that threatened to sweep the
western world and its distinctly Christian culture into what Marx and Engels
had disparagingly called the dustbin of history. The revolutionary wave that had
begun in Russia was now at the doorsteps of the German people, whom it
threatened with the same fate that had befallen Imperial Russia. All of this – and
this was the underlying premise of Stadtler’s subsequent political career –
underscored the obsolescence of the German party system as it had evolved
since the last years of the Second Empire just as it dramatized the need “to unite
the productive, hard-working and intellectually vibrant elements of the entire
German nation behind a leadership that has boldly broken with the old party
schema in search of new political paths consistent with the spirit of the times.”28
As editor of Das Gewissen from 1920 until its demise in 1925 and as one of the
Ring Movement’s most effective public speakers, Stadtler took his appeal for the
creation of a national leadership free from ties to an obsolete and ossified party
system to all corners of the country and, in doing so, articulated a theme that by
the end of the Weimar Republic would occupy a prominent place in the
intellectual arsenal of the radical Right.29 At the same time, Stadtler was
instrumental in recruiting the support of Hugo Stinnes, Albert Vögler, and
other influential industrialists for the ideals of Ring Movement and in mobiliz-
ing their economic resources for its various projects.30

to the June Club, see Karlheinz Weißmann, “Das ‘Gewissen’ und der ‘Ring’ Entstehung
und Entwicklung des jungkonservativen ‘Zentralorgans’ der Weimarer Republik,” in
Konservative Zeitschriften zwischen Kaiserreich und Diktatur. Fünf Fallstudien, ed.
Hans Christof Kraus (Berlin, 2003), 115 54, as well as Kemper, Das “Gewissen,” 61 169.
27
Rüdiger Stutz, “Stetigkeit und Wandlungen in der politischen Karriere eines Rechtsex
tremisten. Zur Entwicklung Eduard Stadtlers von der Novemberrevolution bis 1933,”
Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft 34 (1986): 796 806. For further details, see Kemper,
Das “Gewissen,” 121 30, 245 84.
28
Eduard Stadtler, Die Revolution und das alte Parteiwesen, Revolutions Streitfragen, no. 6
(Berlin, n.d. [1919]), 15. On Stadtler’s hostility to the German party system, see Stadlter to
Spahn, 27 June 1919, BA Koblenz, NL Spahn, 3, as well as Eduard Stadtler, Volkswille und
Parteiwesen (Leipzig, 1920).
29
On Stadtler’s activities on behalf of the June Club, see his letters to Spahn, 6 and 21
Oct. 1920, BA Koblenz, NL Spahn, 3.
30
See Stadtler to Spahn, 2 and 12 Aug. 1920, BA Koblenz, NL Spahn, 3.
   , –

No less passionate in his commitment to the ideals of the Ring Movement

was another Catholic intellectual, Heinz Brauweiler. A member of the Center
Party before and during World War I, Brauweiler had become increasingly
disenchanted with the party’s sharp swing to the left following the passage of
the Peace Resolution in the summer of 1917. Here he worked closely with
Martin Spahn and members of the Rhenish-Westphalian aristocracy in a futile
effort to return the Center to the tried and true principles that had served it so
well since its founding in the 1870s.31 By the end of 1919 Brauweiler had
become convinced that the situation within the Center was indeed hopeless
and that there was no realistic prospect of reversing the party’s drift to the left.
Over the course of the next several years Brauweiler would take part in a
number of different attempts to create a new political home for Catholic
conservatives like himself who found it difficult to countenance the direction
in which the Center was headed.32 In the spring of 1920 Brauweiler joined
forces with Baron Hermann von Lüninck and Baron Clemens von Loë-
Bergerhausen, two prominent Catholic aristocrats with extensive ties to organ-
ized agriculture in the Rhineland and Westphalia, in founding the Christian
People’s Party as an alternative for right-wing Catholics who had become
disenchanted with the Center.33 After a promising debut in the 1920 Reichstag
elections, the CVP failed to sustain its momentum in the 1921 Prussian
Landtag elections and subsequently disappeared from the political stage.
Brauweiler then cooperated with Hermann von Lüninck’s older brother
Ferdinand in establishing the Ketteler League (Ketteler-Bund) in early May
1921 as a non-partisan association of Catholic men committed to promoting
the social and political teachings of the Catholic faith through the concerted
action of all those who, regardless of party affiliation, embraced these teach-
ings as the heart and soul of their political credo.34 Then, in the spring of 1922,
Brauweiler founded the Society for Corporatist Reform (Gesellschaft für
berufsständischen Aufbau) in hopes of creating a public forum for the discus-
sion and dissemination of ideas related to Germany’s search for a third way

31
Brauweiler, “Vor dem Reichsparteitag,” 28 Sept. 5 Oct. 1919, StA Mönchen Gladbach,
NL Brauweiler, 120. For further information on Brauweiler’s activities in the early and
mid 1920s, see Simon, “Brauweiler,” 78 157.
32
Brauweiler’s memorandum to the members of the coordinating committee of the West
German Publishers’ Trust Company (Westdeutsche Verlags und Treuhandgesellschaft),
31 Dec. 1920, VWA Münster, NL Lüninck, 709.
33
In this respect, see Hermann von Lüninck to Count Hermann zu Stolberg Stolberg, 26
Feb. 1920, VWA Münster, NL Hermann zu Stolberg Stolberg, 167, and to Josef Stolberg
zu Stolberg, 12 Apr. 1920, VWA Münster, NL Josef Stolberg zu Stolberg, 330.
34
Minutes of the founding ceremonies of the Ketteler League, 3 May 1921, StA Mönchen
Gladbach, NL Brauweiler, 133. See also “Aufruf des Ketteler Bundes,” Görres Korrespon
denz für Zentrumswähler und Zentrumspresse, June 1921, nos. 29 30. For its objectives,
see Ferdinand von Lüninck, “Zur Einführung,” Görres Korrespondenz, July 1921, no. 1.
     

between the equally idolatrous doctrines of laissez-faire capitalism and Marxist

socialism.35
All of these projects were driven by Brauweiler’s deep-seated antipathy
toward the capitalist economic system and the parliamentary democracy that
Germany had inherited from the November Revolution.36 Brauweiler’s pro-
jects received strong support from the more conservative elements of Ger-
many’s Catholic aristocracy, particularly in the Rhineland and Westphalia.
Not only had the two Lüninck brothers played an important role in helping to
found the Christian People’s Party and the Ketteler League, but even those
Catholic nobles like Baron Engelbert Kerckerinck zur Borg who had remained
loyal to the Center sympathized with Brauweiler’s efforts to define a new sense
of mission for Catholic conservatives who no longer felt comfortable in the
postwar Center.37 Brauweiler’s efforts paralleled those of another prominent
Catholic conservative, Martin Spahn, whose defection from the Center to the
DNVP in October 1921 created something of a political sensation. Spahn was
a highly respected Catholic intellectual whose appointment to a chair of
history at the newly founded University of Cologne in 1920 provided him
with credentials that few in the young conservative movement could match.38
From his new post in Cologne Spahn assiduously cultivated the support of the
Rhenish-Westphalian aristocracy for his efforts first to reverse the direction in
which the Center was headed and then, once that no longer seemed feasible, to
provide those German Catholics who were no longer willing to follow the
course of Erzberger and Wirth with a new sense of political mission.39 In April
1923 Spahn was invited to speak on the problems of German foreign policy at
the first of four conferences the Rhenish-Westphalian aristocracy held over the

35
Minutes of the constitutive meeting of the Society for Corporatist Reform, 19 Apr. 1922,
StA Mönchen Gladbach, NL Brauweiler, 134. On agricultural and industrial support for
this undertaking, see Brauweiler to Schorlemer, 26 Oct. 1921, as well as the minutes of the
meeting of the Coordinating Committee of Rhenish Westphalian Vocational Estates
(Arbeitsausschuß der rheinisch westfälischen Berufsstände), 30 Dec. 1921, StA Mön
chen Gladbach, NL Brauweiler, 120.
36
For example, see Heinz Brauweiler, Die ständische Bewegung und die Landwirtschaft.
Vortrag gehalten in der Versammlung des Bezirkverbandes Düsseldorf 2 des Rheinischen
Bauernvereins (Cleve, n.d. [1921]), and Heinz Brauweiler, Berufsstand und Staat. Betrach
tungen über eine neuständische Verfassung des deutschen Staates (Berlin, 1925).
37
Kerckerinck zur Borg to Brauweiler, 25 Dec. 1921, StA Mönchen Gladbach, NL Brau
weiler, 125. For further details, see Jones, “Catholic Conservatives in the Weimar Repub
lic,” 64 68.
38
Rudolf Morsey, “Martin Spahn (1875 1945),” in Zeitgeschichte in Lebensbildern. Aus dem
deutschen Katholizismus des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts, ed. Jürgen Aretz, Rudolf Morsey,
and Anton Rauscher, vol. 4 (Mainz, 1980), 143 58.
39
In this respect, see Spahn’s correspondence with Kerckerinck zur Borg, 28 Feb. 1920 17
Mar. 1921, BA Koblenz, NL Spahn, 88.
   , –

course of the next two years in an effort to clarify its position on a wide range
of issues confronting German Catholics.40 At the same time, Spahn functioned
as a liaison linking the Catholic conservatives in the Rhineland and Westphalia
to the June Club and the young conservatives in Berlin who had come together
in the Ring Movement. No doubt this played a major role in the selection of
Spahn as director of the Ring Movement’s most important project, the Polit-
ical College (Politisches Kolleg).

The Political College

The Political College for National Political Training and Pedagogy was
launched in November 1920 as a conservative response to the German Acad-
emy for Politics (Deutsche Hochschule für Politik) that had been founded the
preceding August under ostensibly liberal auspices by Ernst Jäckh.41 From the
outset the Political College received massive support from a consortium of
conservative industrialists who had originally hoped to take over the German
Academy for Politics but were thwarted by the refusal of Jäckh and his
associates to accept the conditions upon which they had made financing
contingent. Most of the funding for the Political College came through
contacts that Stadtler had cultivated with Germany’s industrial elite in the
early years of the June Club’s existence.42 Led by an informal triumvirate
consisting of Stinnes, Vögler, and Hugenberg, the consortium raised enough
money to fund at first five and then later seven full-time positions at the
Political College.43 In the meantime, Hugenberg and his associates prevailed

40
For a summary of Spahn’s speech, see the official protocol of the National Political
Course for the Rhenish Westphalian Aristocracy in Willebadessen, 23 25 Apr. 1923,
VWA Münster, Nachlass Max Heereman von Zuydtwyck, Haus Surenburg, 494/37 38.
An abridged version of this protocol, including Spahn’s speech on foreign policy, can be
found in BA Koblenz, NL Spahn, 177. Speeches from the four conferences were published
in Katholische Politik. Eine Sammlung von Vorträgen, gehalten bei Zusammenkünften des
rheinisch westfälischen Adels, 3 vols. (Cologne, 1924 25).
41
On the founding of the Political College, see Moeller van den Bruck to Grimm, 6
Oct. 1920, DLA Marbach, NL Grimm, A17b. On its history, see Klaus Peter Hoepke,
“Das ‘Politische Kolleg’,” Mitteilungen der Technischen Universität Carlo Wilhelmina zu
Braunschweig 11 (1976), no. 2, 20 25, and Berthold Petzinna, “Das Politische Kolleg.
Konzept, Politik und Praxis einer konservativen Bildungsstätte in der Weimarer Repub
lik,” in “‘Die Erziehung zum deutschen Menschen.” Völkische und nationalkonservative
Erwachsenbildung in der Weimarer Republik, ed. Paul Ciupke et al. (Essen, 2007), 101 18.
42
On Stadtler’s contacts with Stinnes and other Ruhr industrialists, see Stadtler to Spahn,
2 and 12 Aug. 1920, BA Koblenz, NL Spahn, 3.
43
On Hugenberg’s interest in the project, see Gleichen to Spahn, 21 Oct. 1919, BA Koblenz,
NL Spahn, 80. For further information, see Holzbach, Das “System Hugenberg,” 154 66.
On Vögler’s support, see Freundt to Spahn, 7 Oct. 1920, BA Koblenz, NL Spahn, 194.
     

upon the Prussian Ministry of Culture to appoint Spahn its academic di-
rector.44 The choice of Spahn was particularly fortuitous for a number of
reasons. In the first place, the fact that Spahn was a Catholic and – for the
moment at least – a member of the German Center Party lent at least a
modicum of credibility to the college’s claims of political nonpartisanship.
Secondly, Moeller van den Bruck and the leaders of the young conservative
movement readily accepted Spahn as an intellectual whose political convic-
tions were not all that different from their own and as a man with whom they
could easily cooperate.45 Spahn’s appointment as the Political College’s aca-
demic director was therefore certain to enhance its legitimacy in the eyes of
those in the younger generation in whom the leaders of the Ring Movement
had placed their hopes. And lastly, Spahn enjoyed Hugenberg’s personal
confidence and was a person upon whose loyalty he felt he could count in
moments of political difficulty.46 All of this no doubt reassured Hugenberg
and his associates that the Political College would remain a reliable vehicle for
the intellectual legitimation of the conservative and nationalist point of view.
The goal of the Political College, as Gleichen explained in an article
written for the Deutsche Rundschau in the spring of 1921, was to forge a
new political will within that generation into whose hands history had placed
the fate of the German nation. Molded by the cardinal lessons of war,
collapse, and deprivation, this will stood in sharp contrast to the “impotent
intellectualism” that had found such pathetic expression in the fragmentation
of the German party system and the resultant dissipation of the nation’s
political energies. The Political College sought to overcome the spirit of
partisanship that had already wrought so much havoc upon the German
people by creating a new political elite emboldened by a reawakened sense of
community and a heightened awareness of its responsibilities to the welfare
of the nation as a whole.47 The college’s claims of nonpartisanship, however,
were disingenuous and conveniently ignored the role that Hugenberg and
other politicians with close ties to the right-wing DNVP had played in
its establishment. To foster this sense of nonpartisanship, Spahn and his
associates organized a series of courses, lectures, and seminars on a variety
of topics ranging from foreign policy and the problem of German national-
ities abroad to corporatism, labor unions, and the German party system.48
The college’s salaried faculty represented an impressive cross-section of

44
On the circumstances of Spahn’s appointment, see Grimm to Hugenberg, 16 Juli 1921,
BA Koblenz, NL Hugenberg, 14/176 77.
45
Moeller van den Bruck to Grimm, 10 Oct. 1919, DLA Marbach, NL Grimm, A17b.
46
Clemens, Spahn, 151 55.
47
Gleichen, “Das Politische Kolleg,” Deutsche Rundschau 187, no. 7 (Apr. 1921): 104 09.
48
Spahn, “Bericht über das Politische Kolleg, sein Amt und Tätigkeit,” Mitteilungen des
Politischen Kollegs 1, no. 2 (Dec. 1925): 14 20. See also Petzold, Wegbereiter, 123 24.
   , –

Germany’s young conservative intelligentsia that included the likes of Glei-

chen and Moeller van den Bruck as well as lesser known figures such as
Brauweiler, Boehm, and Heinrich Herrfahrdt. The college also afforded
political activists like Stadtler or parliamentarians like the DVP’s Reinhold
Quaatz and the DNVP’s Otto Hoetzsch an opportunity to offer their own
courses on topics of current political interest.49 Even the future chancellor
Heinrich Brüning, at that time Stegerwald’s right-hand man in the German
Trade-Union Federation and co-author of the “Essen Program” for a reform
and reorganization of the German party system, was an occasional partici-
pant in the Political College’s activities before discreetly dissociating himself
from the organization in the fall of 1923.
That Christian labor leaders like Stegerwald and Brüning might take part in
the institute’s activities was not surprising given the importance that Spahn
himself attached to winning the support of the German working class. For
Spahn the German working class represented the “keystone for the recon-
struction of the German fatherland” if only it could be rescued from the
spiritual poverty of Marxist socialism and capitalist materialism.50 In the
1920 Reichstag elections Stegerwald had vigorously supported Spahn’s bid
for a place on the Center’s Westphalian ticket only to meet with a cold
response from the party’s district leaders.51 Brüning too cultivated close ties
to Spahn in the early years of the Weimar Republic and had warned Spahn
against becoming too closely allied with political reactionaries like the two
Lüninck brothers for fear that he might become a pariah in the eyes of the
Christian labor movement.52 Spahn’s failure to heed Brüning’s warning, how-
ever, did not prevent the latter from frequenting the June Club’s familiar
haunts on the Motzstraße53 or from incorporating its ideas on the German
party system into the “Essen Program” that Stegerwald proclaimed with such
great fanfare at the Essen congress of the Christian labor unions in the fall of
1920.54 With the founding of the Political College that November, the leaders

49
For example, see the Vorlesungsverzeichnis für das Politische Kolleg e.V./Hochschule für
nationale Politik from 13 Nov. 1922 18 May 1923, records of the Politisches Kolleg, BA
Koblenz, Bestand R 118, 42/27 32, and from 5 Nov. 1923 31 May 1924, ibid., 42/20 25.
50
Martin Spahn, Die deutsche Arbeiterschaft und der Aufbau, Ring Flugschriften, no. 3
(Berlin, n.d., [1920 21]), 23 24.
51
Correspondence between Stegerwald and Brand from the Westphalian Center Party, 29
Apr. 11 May 1920, ACDP Sankt Augustin, NL Stegerwald, I 206, 014/1 2. See also
Brüning to Spahn, 30 Apr. 1920, BA Koblenz, NL Spahn, 22.
52
Brüning to Spahn, 16 July 1920, BA Koblenz, NL Spahn, 22.
53
For example, see Gleichen to Spahn, 11 Dec. 1920 and 10 Feb. 1921, BA Koblenz, NL
Spahn, 80.
54
Brüning’s contacts with the Ring Movement and the role that its ideas played in the
concept of the “Essen Program” have not received the attention they deserve. For
example, see Willam L. Patch, Jr., Heinrich Brüning and the Dissolution of the Weimar
     

of the Ring Movement made a concerted effort to reach out to the leaders of
the German Trade-Union Federation – and in particular to Brüning – in an
attempt to determine just how far to the left they might be able to extend their
movement.55 In the summer of 1921 Gleichen worked closely with Brüning
and Franz Behrens from the Central Association of Farm Laborers to put the
final touches on plans for special colloquium on corporatism that the DGB
was scheduled to hold the following September.56 But relations between the
Ring Movement and the DGB soured when Spahn’s defection from the Center
to the DNVP in early September 1921 severely compromised the movement’s
pretense of nonpartisanship.57 A contributing factor may also have been
Hugenberg’s decision to pass over Behrens in favor of DNVP ideologue
Friedrich Brunstäd as head of the Evangelical-Social Academy (Evangelisch-
soziale Hochschule) that provided the Political College with the use of its
physical facilities in Spandau.58 Relations between the Ring Movement and the
DGB were never again as good as they had been in the spring and summer of
1921 and continued to deteriorate over the next two years as Brüning began to
distance himself from the movement’s activities.59
In November 1922 the Political College reconstituted itself as the Academy
for National Politics (Hochschule für nationale Politik) and was accorded legal
status as an institute of higher learning by the German and Prussian govern-
ments. As in the case of the Political College, the Academy for National
Politics continued to receive virtually all of its funding through a consortium
that stood under Hugenberg’s personal control. In addition to Hugenberg and
Spahn, the consortium included Vögler, Quaatz, and industrialist Ernst von
Borsig as well as two representatives of the Prussian DNVP – Friedrich von
Winterfeld and Baron Wilhelm von Gayl – and two East Elbian landowners
with close ties to the National Rural League.60 The college’s dependence upon

Republic (Cambridge, 1998), 24 38, and Herbert Hömig, Brüning. Kanzler in der Krise
der Republik. Eine Weimarer Biographie (Paderborn, 2000), 72 76.
55
Gleichen to Spahn, 2 Oct. 1920, BA Koblenz, NL Spahn, 80.
56
Gleichen to Spahn, 27 June 1921, ibid., 80.
57
Evers to Pechel, 10 Sept. 1921, BA Koblenz, NL Pechel, 57.
58
On the plans for the academy, see Gleichen to Spahn, 16 July 1921, BA Koblenz, NL
Spahn, 80, and Gleichen to Hugenberg, 16 July 1921, BA Koblenz, NL Hugenberg, 14/
176 77, as well as Hugenberg to Vögler, 11 Oct. 1921, ibid., 49/3. On the negotiations
with Behrens, see Gleichen to Hugenberg, 16 July 1921, ibid., 14/176 77, and Gleichen to
Spahn, 25 Aug. 1921, BA Koblenz, NL Spahn, 80.
59
See the correspondence between Gleichen and Brüning, 19 28 Oct. 1922, BA Koblenz,
R 118, 10/32 33, as well as Brüning to Gleichen, 20 Oct. 1923, ibid., 10/31.
60
Details on the finances of the Political College are vague. On sources of its support, see
Brocker to Spahn, 22 June 1922, BA Koblenz, R 118, 35/152, and Hugenberg to Spahn, 25
Sept. 4 Oct. 1922, ibid., 36/53 56. On the involvement of Stinnes, see Moeller van den
Bruck to Grimm, 6 Oct. 1920, DLA Marbach, NL Grimm, A17b. For further information,
see Petzold, Wegbereiter, 119 23.
   , –

the financial largesse of Hugenberg and his associates, however, posed a

serious threat to its integrity. Many young conservatives saw a fundamental
contradiction between the revolutionary vision of those who had launched the
June Club back in 1919 and the fact that not only Hugenberg but the vast
majority of those who served on the consortium overseeing the Political
College’s financing were so-called old conservatives with close ties to vested
economic interests. Many of those within the young conservative movement
became increasingly concerned over the way in which representatives of
established economic elites were using their control over the movement’s
finances to subvert the revolutionary elan of the June Club and the organiza-
tions it had spawned under the auspices of the Ring Movement. As much as
Moeller van den Bruck liked to praise the newly discovered national feeling of
Germany’s industrial elite,61 his movement’s dependence upon Hugenberg
and his associates produced a severe strain not only in relations between the
June Club and the Political College but within the June Club itself.

The Fichte Society

By no means was the June Club the only center of young conservative activity
in the early years of the Weimar Republic. Another organization with similar
objectives but a different base of operations was the Fichte Society of 1914
(Fichte-Gesellschaft von 1914). Founded in Hamburg on 10 May 1916 by
young conservative activists with close ties to the German National Union of
Commercial Employees,62 the society was conceived in the spirit of Johann
Gottlieb Fichte, whose impassioned call for Germany’s national rebirth during
the darkest days of the Napoleonic occupation served as a model for national
liberation that all Germans, regardless of social class or political affiliation,
should emulate in their nation’s struggle against the Allies a hundred years
later.63 Although the founders of the Fichte Society rivaled Moeller van den
Bruck and the ideologues of the June Club both in the vehemence of their
attacks against the bourgeois liberal order and in the intensity of their

61
Moeller van den Bruck to Ziegler, 21 Jan. 1924, BA Koblenz, R 118, 34/32 33.
62
Aufruf zur Bildung der Fichte Gesellschaft von 1914, Flugblätter der Fichte Gesellschaft
von 1914, no. 1 (Hamburg, 1916). On the history of the Fichte Society, see Nelson
Edmondson, “The Fichte Society: A Chapter in Germany’s Conservative Revolution”
(Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1963), as well as the summary of his dissertation under
the same title in the Journal of Modern History 38 (1966): 161 80. References to
Edmondson’s work are to the dissertation. Edmundson’s work has since been superceded
by Postert, Von der Kritik der Parteien, 283 332.
63
Bruno Bauch, Fichte und der deutsche Gedanke, Flugschriften der Fichte Gesellschaft von
1914, no. 4 (Hamburg, 1917). See also Edmondson, “Fichte Society,” 37 53.
     

commitment to the cultural renewal of the German nation,64 there were a

number of subtle differences between the two movements, not the least of
which was the way in which they each related to Germany’s conservative
economic elites. For whereas the June Club and the various organizations that
had been established under the aegis of the Ring Movement were heavily
dependent upon the financial largesse of Hugenberg and German heavy
industry, the Fichte Society received the bulk of its financial and organizational
support from the German National Union of Commercial Employees and
frequently evinced an antipathy toward capitalism that in the case of the Ring
Movement had been muted by its dependence upon capitalistic economic
interests.65 Secondly, the Fichte Society was much more firmly rooted in the
tradition of Christian and racial, or völkisch, nationalism than the June Club
and espoused a species of antisemitism that had been conspicuously absent
from the theoretical pronouncements of Moeller van den Bruck and his
associates. Although the Fichte Society did not explicitly bar Jews from
membership, its appeal for the creation of a distinctly völkisch German culture
held implications for the status of German Jewry that required little
elaboration.66
By far and away the most important intellectual associated with the Fichte
Society was Wilhelm Stapel. A prolific neo-conservative publicist perhaps best
known for his book Der christliche Staatsmann from 1932,67 Stapel assumed
editorship of Deutsches Volkstum in December 1918 and worked closely with
the DHV’s Max Habermann in putting together a comprehensive program of
political pedagogy for the Fichte Society and its affiliated organizations.68 Born
in 1882 and raised in a conservative Lutheran tradition, Stapel belonged to that
generation of young conservatives who believed that revolution was necessary
to cleanse Germany of the stigma of military defeat but rejected the November
revolution of 1918 as a pseudo-revolution alien to the spirit of the German

64
Hans Gerber, “Das Wesen und die Ziele der Fichte Gesellschaft,” in Deutsche Volkserzie
hung. Zwei Vorträge über das Wollen und Wirken der Fichte Gesellschaft (Hamburg, n.d.
[1920]), 4 23.
65
On the DHV’s social and economic philosophy, see Max Habermann, Die neue Ordnung
von Kapital und Arbeit. Vortrag gehalten auf der Tagung des Ausschusses des Deutschen
Handlungsgehilfentages am 22. Mai 1921 (Hamburg, 1921), esp. 52 54. On the DHV and
the founding of the Fichte Society, see Edmondson, “Fichte Society,” 59 63, 92 95, and
Hamel, Völkischer Verband, 125 35.
66
Edmondson, “Fichte Society,” 58. See also Louis Dupeux, “Der Kulturantisemitismus von
Wilhelm Stapel,” in Protestantismus und Antisemitismus in der Weimarer Republik, ed.
Kurt Nowak and Gérard Raulet (Frankfurt a.M., and New York, 1998), 167 76.
67
Wilhelm Stapel, Der christliche Staatsmann. Eine Theologie des Nationalismus
(Hamburg, 1932).
68
See Heinrich Kessler, Wilhelm Stapel als politischer Pubilizist. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte
des konservativen Nationalismus zwischen den beiden Weltkriegen (Nuremburg, 1967),
37 83.
   , –

people. Stapel categorically rejected any revolution that was based upon
political concepts imported from abroad and insisted that any genuine revo-
lution in Germany required a reaffirmation of those conservative values that
were inseparable from the essence of the German Volk.69 Such a revolution,
Stapel reminded Germany’s conservative elites, was not synonymous with the
simple restoration of the social, economic, and political relationships that had
existed in Germany before the war but involved nothing less than the spiritual
rebirth of the German nation through the offices of an entirely new leadership
cadre that had emancipated itself from the narrow perspective of political
parties and organized economic interests.70 It was the task of the Fichte Society
to provide this new generation of political leaders with a program of political
education that emphasized both the intellectual and moral components of
genuine political leadership. And this, Stapel argued in a book entitled Volks-
bürgerliche Erziehung that was published with the society’s imprimatur in
1920, meant restoring that vital link between the state and Volk that the
liberalism, secularism and materialism of the nineteenth century had done
so much to destroy.71
The Fichte Society regarded the regeneration of Germany’s national culture
as an essential prerequisite for the nation’s recovery from the twin calamities
of military defeat and social revolution. The society hoped to serve as the
catalyst for Germany’s cultural and national rejuvenation by endowing a new
generation of conservative politicians with the moral and intellectual resources
it needed to lead Germany out of the morass in which it found itself following
the dual collapse of 1918. The task of educating this cadre of future conserva-
tive leaders fell to the Fichte Academy (Fichte-Hochschule), an evening school
the Fichte Society had founded with the DHV’s assistance in the fall of
1917 for the purpose of providing Hamburg’s politically minded adults with
a “scientific” approach to the study of Germany’s national culture.72 Similarly,
the Fichte Society also promoted the appreciation of German classics by
Goethe, Schiller, and others through the establishment of the Association for
a German Stage (Verein Deutsche Bühne) in 1920.73 In the same year the
DHV also founded the Hanseatic Publishing Institute (Hanseatische Verlags-
Anstalt) as a vehicle for the dissemination of the neo-conservative ideology.
Not only did a close working relationship develop between the Hanseatic

69
St. [Stapel], “Wohin geht die Fahrt?” Deutsches Volkstum 21, no. 1 (Jan. 1919): 1 3.
70
Stapel, “Volk und Volkstum,” in Die neue Front, ed. Moeller van den Bruck et al., 80 89.
71
Wilhelm Stapel, Volksbürgerliche Erziehung, 2nd ed. (Hamburg, n.d. [1920]), esp. 37 109.
72
For further details, see Emil Engelhardt, Die Fichte Hochschule in Hamburg. Aufbau,
Verwaltung und Arbeit 1917 bis 1919, Beiträge zur Gestaltung der Deutschen Volks
hochschule, no. 2 (Hamburg, n.d. [1919]), esp. 7 35.
73
Gerber, “Die praktische Arbeit der Fichte Gesellschaft,” in Deutsche Volkserziehung,
34 53.
     

Publishing Institute and Stapel’s Deutsches Volkstum, but the institute also
provided established neo-conservative publicists such as Hans Blüher, Ernst
Jünger, and August Winnig as well as Hans Grimm, author of the enormously
popular Volk ohne Raum, with the resources they needed to reach the largest
possible audience.74
The leaders of the Fichte Society – and behind them those of the DHV as
well – were also involved in helping Otto de le Chevallerie launch a new
political academy for university students and young academics with the official
name of Hochschulring deutscher Art but more commonly referred to as the
German University Ring (Deutscher Hochschulring or DHR). The DHR had
been founded in the summer of 1920 when student government leaders from
eighteen German universities came together in Göttingen to stress the need for
a reform of the German university system and to voice their opposition to the
deplorable conditions in which the German fatherland found itself after World
War I.75 The DHR’s purpose, as de la Chevallerie explained in his introductory
remarks at a special training week for an estimated eighty DHR activists at
Schloß Elgersburg in Thuringia in April 1921, was to counter the fragmenta-
tion and lack of direction of Germany’s national life by forging new ties
between the most promising of Germany’s young academics in the hope that
this would spark Germany’s national rebirth and the creation of a genuine
Volksgemeinschaft that transcended the social, economic, and political div-
isions within the German nation.76 De la Chevallerie was joined on the
podium by two activists from the Fichte Society, Hans Gerber and Karl
Bernhard Ritter. German youth, Gerber argued, must not be drawn into the
partisan political conflicts of the day and could fulfill its mission as the agent of
Germany’s national rebirth only by maintaining its complete independence
from the existing party system.77 Ritter, on the other hand, exhorted the new
generation of German students to look past the historic divide between
bourgeois and proletarian and devote itself to the creation of a Volksge-
meinschaft that brought all segments of German society together in a

74
Gary D. Stark, Entrepreneurs of Ideology: Neoconservative Publishers in Germany,
1890 1933 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1981), 22 32.
75
For a brief history of the DHR, see Harald Lönnecker, “Deutsche Akademikerschaft,” in
Handbuch der völkischen Wissenschaften. Akteure, Netzwerke, Forschungsprogramme, ed.
Michael Fahlbusch, Ingo Haar, and Alexander Pinwinkler, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (Berlin, 2017),
2:1775 83.
76
Otto de la Chevallerie, “Ziele und Gedanken des Deutschen Hochschulrings,” in Um
deutsche Volksgemeinschaft. Die Schulungswoche des deutschen Hochschulrings auf Schloß
Elgersburg in Thüringen vom 3. 9. April 1921, ed. Kanzlei des Deutschen Hochschulrings
and Deutscher Hochschulring Nachrichtenblatt, no. 4 (Erlangen, 1921), 6 9. See also
Hans Ellenbeck, Student, Volk und Staat, Schriftenreihe des Deutschen Hochschulringes,
no. 1 (n.p. [Berlin], 1926).
77
Gerber, “Hochschulringbewegung und Jugend,” in Um deutsche Volksgemeinschaft, 9 11.
   , –

celebration of national unity inspired by the idealism and sacrifice of German

youth.78 While the DHR professed complete neutrality toward the various
parties that dotted the political landscape of the Weimar Republic, its attitude
toward the German party system was actually more one of disdain than
neutrality. To the leaders of the DHR, political parties were simply manifest-
ations of the increasingly powerful role that the masses had come to play in the
life of the modern state and stood in sharp contrast to the elitism that was part
and parcel of its political identity.79
Like the DHR, the Fichte Society remained committed to the political
education of a new German elite and to preparing it for the political and
intellectual leadership of the German nation. It was with this in mind that
Gerber and a fellow Fichte Society activist Frank Glatzel drafted an elaborate
proposal for the creation of a new institute tentatively entitled the Leadership
Academy for German Politics (Führer-Schule für deutsche Politik) for the
education of Germany’s political elite. Like Gerber, Glatzel had been active in
the German youth movement before the war, and they joined forces with
Stapel to launch the Young German League (Jungdeutscher Bund) under the
auspices of the Fichte Society at Burg Lauenstein in August 1919.80 But while
Glatzel belonged to the DNVP and in fact addressed the party’s Hanover
national party congress in October 1920 on the task of winning the support of
the younger generation,81 Gerber warned against becoming too closely associ-
ated with any political party and advocated instead the creation of a national
community that embraced the best elements of all the parties from the
Democrats to the Nationalists.82 Whatever differences that might have separ-
ated them on this particular issue, however, were completely overshadowed by
their shared antipathy toward the capitalistic economic system and their
concern about the effects that the unrestrained pursuit of profit had upon
the social and moral fabric of Germany’s national character. In their proposal
for the establishment of a Leadership Academy for German Politics, Gerber
and Glatzel stressed the need for a new cadre of political leaders uncorrupted

78
Ritter, “Die Not unserer Zeit und unsere Aufgaben,” ibid., 11 15.
79
Lölhöffel, “Politisches Parteiwesen,” ibid., 22 26.
80
See Frank Glatzel, “Der Jungdeutsche Bund,” and Hans Gerber, “Nationale Pflichten,” in
Jungdeutsches Wollen. Vorträge gehalten auf der Gründungstagung des Jungdeutschen
Bundes auf Burg Lauenstein vom 9. 12. August 1919, ed. Bundesamt des Jungdeutschen
Bundes (Hamburg, 1920), 11 55. See also Glatzel, “Die deutsche Jugendbewegung,” in
Deutsche Volkserziehung, 23 34. For further details, see Edmondson, “Fichte Society,”
130 43, and Postert, Von der Kritik der Parteien, 324 27.
81
Speech by Glatzel at the DNVP Hanover party congress, 25 Oct. 1920, BA Berlin, R 8005,
53/332 34.
82
Hans Gerber, “Nationale Sozialpolitik” (June 1920), in idem, Auf dem Wege zum neuen
Reiche. Eine Sammlung politischer Vorträge und Aufsätze aus deutscher Notzeit
1919 1931 (Stuttgart and Berlin, 1934), 26 36.
     

by the partisanship, factionalism, and materialistic pursuit of self-interest that

had come to define modern political life. To accomplish this, it was necessary
not only to educate this elite in the techniques of modern politics but, more
importantly, to instill in it the selflessness, love of nation, and devotion to the
Volksgemeinschaft embodied in the social and political teachings of the Fichte
Society.83
Given the similarity in their goals and ideological orientation, the leaders of
the June Club moved quickly to establish a cooperative relationship with the
Fichte Society so as to avoid competing with each other for funding and
resources. Gerber and Glatzel met with representatives from the June Club
on at least two occasions in the winter of 1920–21, but were fearful that the
latter might be falling too heavily under the influence of social reactionaries in
the DNVP and chose to keep their distance.84 Eventually Gleichen succeeded
in forging a loose tie between the two groups through the appointment of the
Ring Movement’s Johann Wilhelm Mannhardt as a liaison to the inner
councils of both the June Club and the Fichte Society.85 Even then, the Fichte
Society’s plans for a special leadership academy cut across those that the
leaders of the Ring Movement had for the future of the Political College, with
the result that the two organizations were frequently competing with each
other for the limited resources that Germany’s industrial establishment had
available for projects of this nature.86 As Rudolf Blohm, the director of the
Blohm and Voß ship construction firm who had agreed to take on the
responsibility of raising funds for the proposed political academy, soon dis-
covered, it was not uncommon for prospective benefactors to decline to take
part in funding the Fichte Society’s Leadership Academy for German Politics
on the grounds that their resources were already committed elsewhere.87 As it
became increasingly clear toward the end of 1921 that Blohm and Gerber had
not been able to develop the resources necessary to secure the financial
independence of the proposed leadership academy in Hamburg,88 the Fichte
Society severed all legal ties to the project and entered into an arrangement
with the German Bourse in Marburg (Deutsche Burse zu Marburg) whereby

83
Gerber and Glatzel, “Denkschrift über die Errichtung einer Führer Schule für deutsche
Politik durch die Fichte Stiftung in Hamburg,” n.d. [1921], StA Hamburg, Blohm und
Voß GmbH, 1206.
84
Gleichen to Spahn, 11 Dec. 1920, BA Koblenz, NL Spahn, 80, and Stadtler to Spahn, 26
Feb. 1921, ibid., 3.
85
Petzinna, Erziehung zum deutschen Lebensstil, 156.
86
Sorge to Blohm, 6 Oct. 1921, StA Hamburg, Blohm und Voß GmbH, 1206.
87
For example, see Hugenberg to Blohm, 25 Aug. 1921, and Duisberg to Blohm, 29
Aug. 1921, both in StA Hamburg, Blohm und Voß GmbH, 1206. On the sources of this
support, see Blohm to Gerber, 8 Oct. and 10 Dec. 1921, ibid.
88
Blohm’s report of a conversation with Hugenberg in his letter to Gerber, 22 Nov. 1921,
StA Hamburg, Blohm and Voß GmbH, 1206.
   , –

the latter would house the academy in its Marburg facilities with Gerber
serving as its director.89
The move to Marburg removed the Leadership Academy for German
Politics from the immediate proximity and influence of the Fichte Society
and thus provided it with easier access to the resources of conservative
industrialists like the Gutehoffnungshütte’s Paul Resuch.90 Although this
represented something of a setback to the leaders of the Fichte Society, they
continued to support the academy and covered approximately 20 percent of
the academy’s operating budget for 1922.91 In the meantime, Habermann and
the leaders of the DHV continued to stress their commitment to the principle
of political pedagogy as emphatically as possible.92 From their perspective, the
major problem plaguing the German Right in the postwar era was the lack of
ideological clarity within the ranks of Germany’s conservative elite. To help
rectify this situation, the Fichte Society convened the first Conference for
German National Education (Tagung für Deutsche Nationalerziehung) in
Hamburg in the first week of October 1924.93 Devoted to the topic of “Volks-
tum and state,” the conference sought, as Stapel himself stressed, not just to
give form and substance to a specifically German concept of the state derived
from the teachings of Luther, Fichte, Kant, and Hegel, but also to explore the
ways in which this concept might be translated into practical reality as a
corrective to “a monstrous German formlessness” that left him deeply pessim-
istic about Germany’s political future.94 Two years later the society convened
its second Conference on German National Education, this time on the theme
of Christianity and national education with keynote addresses and commen-
tary by prominent representatives of both the Catholic and Lutheran faiths as
a first step toward healing the confessional cleavages that had become so
deeply embedded in the fabric of Germany’s national life.95

89
Gerber to Blohm, 11 Jan. 1922, StA Hamburg, Blohm und Voß GmbH, 1206.
90
See the correspondence between Reusch and Hugenberg, 24 26 July 1922, RWWA
Cologne, Abt. 130, NL Reusch, 30019390/17.
91
Fichte Schule (Marburg), “Bericht über das 1. Geschäftsjahr 1922,” 2 Jan. 1923, StA
Hamburg, Blohm und Voß GmbH, 1206.
92
For example, see Max Habermann, Die Erziehung zum deutschen Menschen. Einführung
in die Bildungsarbeit des Deutschnationalen Handlungsgehilfen Verbandes. Vortrag gehal
ten auf dessen 19. Verbandstag am 28. Juni 1924 in Königsberg (Hamburg, 1924).
93
Georg Kleibömer, “Erste Tagung für deutsche Nationalerziehung,” Mitteilungsblatt der
Fichte Gesellschaft e.V., Nov. 1924 (Hamburg, n.d. [1924]), 1 3.
94
Wilhelm Stapel, “Deutsche Nationalerziehung,” in Volkstum und Staat. Die Verhandlun
gen der Ersten Tagung für deutsche Nationalerziehung, veranstaltet von der Fichte
Gesellschaft in Hamburg vom 3. bis 5. Oktober 1924 (Hamburg, n.d. [1924]), 27 31, 37.
For further details, see Edmondson, “Fichte Society,” 118 30.
95
See in particular the lectures by Ritter, Getzeny, and Althaus, in Christentum und National
erziehung. Vorträge und Aussprache der 2. Tagung für deutsche Nationalerziehung, von der
     

The Great Caesura: 1923

As the Fichte Society braced itself for a sustained assault against the Weimar
state in the second half of the 1920s, the situation within the June Club
continued to deteriorate throughout the course of 1923.96 At no point was
the internal dissolution of the June Club more apparent than in the events
surrounding the infamous Munich beer hall putsch at the beginning of
November. As the authority of the Reich began to crumble with the occupa-
tion of the Ruhr and the collapse of the German currency, Gleichen traveled to
Munich in the spring of 1923, where he met with Escherich and the leaders of
the Bavarian patriotic movement in an attempt to lay the foundation for a
right-wing putsch that, if successful in Munich, would be followed by a similar
strike in Berlin.97 When these plans failed to materialize, Stadtler traveled to
Munich in the fall of 1923 to meet with Spengler, the nominal leader of the
local June Club whose fame in right-wing circles was exceeded only by that of
Moeller van den Bruck. Stadtler had come to plead his case for the creation of
a three-man dictatorship consisting of Escherich in Munich, Seeckt in Berlin,
and Stinnes in the Ruhr, but his initiative evoked little enthusiasm on the part
of those whom he had hoped to impress.98 As self-appointed emissaries from
the Berlin June Club, Gleichen and Stadtler did their best to encourage the
counterrevolutionary fantasies of some of the most reactionary elements in
Bavarian political life.
At the heart of the counterrevolutionary cabal in Munich stood Oswald
Spengler. Not only had Spengler developed close ties with Escherich and
Bavaria’s paramilitary Right,99 but he actively supported the efforts of the
Gutehoffnungshütte’s Paul Reusch and other conservative industrialists to
gain a controlling interest over Bavaria’s right-wing press through the creation
of the Joint Committee in late 1922.100 As the crisis in Reich-Bavarian rela-
tions drew to a climax in the fall of 1923, Spengler admonished Reusch to
mobilize the opposition of German industry to Stresemann and his policy of

Fichte Gesellschaft veranstaltet in Halle am 5. und 6. März 1926 (Hamburg, n.d. [1926]),
7 51.
96
See Pechel to Stolberg, 27 Oct. 1923, BA Koblenz, NL Pechel, 144. For further details, see
Petzinna, Erziehung zum deutschen Menschen, 138 42.
97
Spengler to Pechel, 7. Oct 1923, BA Koblenz, NL Pechel, 144. For further details, see
Petzold, Wegbereiter, 140 49; Postert, Von der Kritik der Parteien, 134 40; and Mau
rensberger, Pechel und die “Deutsche Rundschau,” 40 41.
98
See Pechel’s account of these developments in an undated memorandum attached to his
letter to Spengler, 12 Sept. 1923, BA Koblenz, NL Pechel, 144.
99
Correspondence between Spengler and Escherich, 21 Sept. 30 Oct. 1922, in Oswald
Spengler, Briefe 1913 1936, ed. Anton Koktanek (Munich, 1963), 214 23.
100
Fur further details, see Paul Hoser, “Ein Philosoph im Irrgarten der Politik. Oswald
Spenglers Pläne für eine geheime Lenkung der nationalen Presse,” Vierteljahrshefte für
Zeitgeschichte 38 (1990): 435 58.
   , –

weakness and compromise.101 At the same time, he implored the DVP’s

Quaatz to do everything in his power to bring about the fall of the Stresemann
cabinet for fear that otherwise Kahr and his supporters would not be able to
stave off the radicals around Hitler and Ludendorff.102 But Spengler quickly
found himself swept up in the events of the day without a viable response to
the crisis unfolding before his very eyes. Originally he had supported the
creation of a national dictatorship under Seeckt but had become increasingly
critical of the general’s lack of resolve and had lost faith in his ability to lead
Germany out of the crisis in which it found itself trapped.103
Spengler and the leaders of the Munich June Club were caught off-guard by
the events of 8–9 November 1923. For even though the June Club’s most
resolute opponents of Germany’s republican system were quick to dissociate
themselves from Hitler’s Munich folly,104 it was also clear that whatever hopes
they may have had for the overthrow of the existing political system had been
irrevocably shattered. The effect of these developments on the June Club was
disastrous. Not only did Gleichen and Stadtler come under heavy fire for their
involvement in the series of events that had led up to Hitler’s abortive coup,105
but Rudolf Pechel, editor of the influential Deutsche Rundschau and former
chairman of the Berlin June Club, was so embarrassed by the disrepute into
which Gleichen and Stadtler had brought the young conservative movement
that he and a number of his associates resigned from the club.106 But the
greatest casualty was Spengler himself. For although Spengler tried to salvage
his reputation with a speech before student sympathizers in Würzburg in
which he rejected a politics of intoxication and called upon his audience to
substitute the hard study of politics for the “colors and insignia, the music and
parades, the theatrical vows and amateurish appeals and theories” of the so-
called national movement,107 he had so thoroughly discredited himself by his
antics in the summer and fall of 1923 that he could no longer be taken
seriously as an agent of the political Right.108 By the same token, Moeller
van den Bruck tried to rehabilitate the June Club’s political reputation by
dissociating himself from Hitler’s dilettantism, though without disclaiming

101
Spengler to Reusch, 17 Aug. 1923, in Spengler, Briefe, ed. Koktanek, 260.
102
Spengler to Quaatz, 30 Oct. 1923, ibid., 282 83.
103
For further details, see Felken, Spengler, 141 52. For a defense of his role in these
developments, see Spengler to Cossmann, 1 Dec. 1923, BHStA Munich, Abt. V, Nachlass
Paul Nicholas Cossmann, 6.
104
Moeller van den Bruck to Grimm, 10 Mar. 1924, DLA Marbach, NL Grimm, A17b.
105
Pechel to Stolberg Wernigerode, 27 Oct. 1923, BA Koblenz, NL Pechel, 144.
106
Pechel to Spengler, 19 Nov. 1923, BA Koblenz, NL Pechel, 144. For further details, see
Mauersberger, Pechel und die “Deutsche Rundschau,” 39 41.
107
Oswald Spengler, Politische Pflichten der deutschen Jugend. Rede gehalten am 26. Februar
vor dem Hochschulring deutscher Art in Würzburg (Munich, 1924), 21 25.
108
Felken, Spengler, 152 56.
     

authorship of much of what the Nazis supposedly stood for.109 But Moeller,
whose own animus toward Hitler stemmed in no small measure from his fear
that the Nazi party leader might appropriate the title of the book he had
published on the eve of the Munich putsch – Das Dritte Reich – for his own
political purposes, was a sick and exhausted man whose energy and emotional
reserves were quickly running dry.110 In the fall of 1924 Moeller suffered a
nervous breakdown, and the following May he committed suicide at a sanitar-
ium in the outskirts of Berlin where, it was hoped, he might recover from the
deep depression that had descended upon him. For a man who had supposedly
once said that he would rather commit suicide than see Hitler abuse his
concept of the Third Reich,111 Moeller’s death had a peculiarly prophetic
quality to it.
By the time that Moeller van den Bruck died in the spring of 1925, the June
Club had ceased to exist. Not only had the collapse of the Munich putsch done
much to exacerbate divisions at the upper echelons of the club’s leadership, but
the despair and emotional turmoil that afflicted Moeller in the aftermath of the
Munich fiasco robbed the club of its most dynamic and highly regarded
intellectual spokesman. The club’s isolation was compounded by the resent-
ment that many of its members – and particularly those who stressed the
nonpartisan character of their movement – felt about the way in which Spahn
and Hugenberg had supposedly transformed the Political College into an
instrument of the Germany’s economic elites.112 In the meantime, the move-
ment’s financial backers had begun to cut back on their subsidies to the
Political College and the Ring Publishing House (Ring-Verlag) as a result of
the economic difficulties they had experienced in the wake of Germany’s fiscal
and economic stabilization.113 All of this placed the future of the June Club in
such serious doubt that an emergency meeting of the club’s national member-
ship to determine whether or not the club should be dissolved was set for

109
For Moeller’s response to these developments, see his letter to Grimm, 27 Nov. 1923,
DLA Marbach, NL Grimm, 17b.
110
For conflicting interpretations of Moeller’s assessment of Hitler in the aftermath of the
Munich putsch, see Schwierskott, Moeller van den Bruck, 145 46, and Petzold, Wegbe
reiter, 160 61.
111
Klemperer, Germany’s New Conservatism, 193 94. At Gleichen’s invitation, Moeller and
several other members of the June Club apparently met with Hitler in June 1921. See
Gleichen to Stadtler, Boehm, Moeller van den Bruck, and Evers, 30 May 1921, BA
Koblenz, NL Pechel, 144. According to Pechel, Moeller was impressed neither by Hitler’s
tirades against the existing political system nor by his praise for the June Club’s political
and intellectual format. The meeting has been generally dismissed as a failure by all of
those who have left any record of it. See also Rudolf Pechel, Deutscher Widerstand
(Erlenbach Zurich), 277 80.
112
For example, see Spahn’s reaction to this line of criticism in his letter to Schürholz, 21
Jan. 1924, BA Koblenz, R 118, 34/32.
113
For example, see Spahn to Gleichen, 25 June 1924, BA Koblenz, R 118, 35/92.
   , –

23 April 1924.114 The meeting generated a heated and indeed embittered

debate over the future of the young conservative movement but produced
no consensus as to what the club should do.115 Much of the uncertainty
surrounding the club’s fate was related to plans on the part of Gleichen and
Walther Schotte to transform it into a sort of gentlemen’s salon that would
serve as a meeting place for Germany’s social and economic elites.116 These
plans encountered strong resistance not only from Moeller, who argued that
this would deliver the young conservative movement into the hands of Ger-
many’s prewar conservative elites,117 but also from Spahn, who complained
that he and his colleagues at the Political College would have a difficult time
defending their involvement with such a costly and socially ostentatious club
at a time of general economic distress.118 The June Club languished on the
periphery of Germany’s conservative establishment without any clear idea of
where it was headed until it quietly disappeared from the political scene in the
summer of 1924.

The German Gentlemen’s Club

Neither the demise of the June Club nor the criticism of Moeller van den
Bruck and Spahn could deter Gleichen and Schotte from their plans for the
creation of a salon that would serve as a place where representatives of
Germany’s highest social strata could meet on a regular and informal basis.
After extensive negotiations with potential financial backers in the late spring
and summer of 1924,119 Gleichen and his associates capped their efforts with
the official founding of the German Gentlemen’s Club (Deutscher Herrenklub
or DHK) in Berlin’s fashionable Hotel Bristol on 12 December 1924.120
Although the Gentlemen’s Club regarded itself as the heir to the young
conservative legacy of the June Club, it differed from its predecessor in both
its ideological profile and social composition. For whereas the June Club had
been founded by avowed conservative revolutionaries who sought to translate
the egalitarian spirit of August 1914 into political reality, the Gentlemen’s

114
Invitation of 15 Apr. 1924 to an extraordinary meeting of the June Club membership on
23 Apr. 1924, BA Koblenz, R 118, 12/29.
115
Memorandum to the members of the June Club, 2 May 1924, BA Koblenz, NL
Pechel, 144.
116
Gleichen to Spahn, 16 and 30 Apr. 1924, BA Koblenz, R 118, 35/102, 98 99.
117
Schwierskott, Moeller van den Bruck, 72.
118
Spahn to Gleichen, 14 Apr. 1924, BA Koblenz, R 118, 35/103.
119
See Gleichen’s memorandum for Spahn, 30 Apr. 1924, BA Koblenz, R 118, 35/98 99.
120
On the DHK, see Schoeps, “Herrenklub,” as well as Petzold, Wegbereiter, 175 82;
Petzinna, Erziehung zum deutschen Lebensstil, 220 30; Yuji Ishida, Jungkonservative in
der Weimarer Republik. Der Ring Kreis 1928 1933 (Frankfurt am Main, 1988), 55 77;
and Postert, Von der Kritik der Parteien, 144 88.
     

Club became the preserve of political reactionaries who sought to reestablish

the social and political hegemony of Germany’s prewar conservative elites. The
demise of the June Club and the founding of the Gentlemen’s Club thus
revealed a fundamental shift from the revolutionary to the restorative strain
of German conservatism.121 This shift in emphasis was further reflected in the
differences between the social composition of the two organizations. For if the
June Club had recruited the bulk of its members from the ranks of Germany’s
young conservative intelligentsia without regard for their social pedigree, the
Gentlemen’s Club restricted its membership to socially and politically influen-
tial representatives of Germany’s conservative elites and served in particular as
a magnet for disaffected aristocrats determined to rid Germany of the hated
Weimar regime and, in so far as it was still possible, to restore the hegemonic
relations of the old imperial order.122
In a larger sense, the dissolution of the June Club and the eclipse of its
peculiar brand of revolutionary conservatism corresponded to a fundamental
change in Germany’s political environment that obliged Germany’s conserva-
tive elites to develop new strategies in their bid for political power. If nothing
else, the collapse of the Munich putsch meant that attempts to gain power by
revolutionary means stood little, if any, chance of success. Moreover, the
defeat of the insurrection in Munich was part of a process of political and
economic stabilization that was to continue in Germany until the outbreak of
the world economic crisis at the very end of the 1920s. While all of this may
have recommended a more accommodationist strategy on the part of Ger-
many’s conservative elites, Gleichen and the leaders of the Gentlemen’s Club
remained implacably opposed to the democratic ethos of the Weimar Republic
and worked in close concert with those in the DNVP who sought to return the
party to the path of unconditional opposition. The Gentlemen’s Club saw itself
as a forum where representatives of Germany’s conservative elites in govern-
ment, industry, agriculture, and academe could meet on a purely social basis
and thus forge a sense of social solidarity that overrode the material concerns
that frequently divided them. Its professed goal remained the rebirth of the
German nation through a return to tried and true conservative principles and

121
See the bitter criticism of this development in Grimm to Gleichen, 12 Jan. 1925, as well
as Gleichen’s response to Grimm, 3 Mar. 1925, both in DLA Marbach, NL
Grimm, A17b.
122
For examples of the DHK’s unabashed elitism, see Heinrich von Gleichen, “Adel eine
politische Forderung,” Preußische Jahrbücher 197, no. 2 (July Sept. 1924): 131 45, and
Heinrich von Gleichen, “Oberschicht und Nation,” in Die Einheit der Nationalen Politik,
ed. Alfred Bozi and Alfred Niemann (Stuttgart, 1925), 233 49. See also Stephan Mali
nowski, “‘Führertum’ und ‘neuer Adel’. Die Deutsche Adelsgenossenschaft und der
Deutsche Herrenklub in der Weimarer Republik,” in Adel und Bürgertum in Deutsch
land II. Entwicklungslinien und Wendepunkte im 20. Jahrhundert (Berlin, 2001),
173 211, esp. 197 211.
   , –

to promote this objective not by holding demonstrations or taking public

stands on the issues of the day but by facilitating closer social contacts between
those who, regardless of social background or party affiliation, subscribed to a
conservative philosophy of the state.123 At the same time, the DHK and its
affiliated organizations waged an unrelenting struggle against the terms upon
which Germany’s economic and political stabilization in the second half of the
1920s had taken place. The young conservatives were united in their contempt
for the political system that Germany had inherited from the November
Revolution and in their determination to free the state from the grip of those
party bosses who had handed it over to special economic interests, most
notably organized labor.

The young conservatives from Moeller van den Bruck, Brauweiler, and Stapel
to Gleichen, Stadtler, and Spahn played a decisive role in depriving the
Weimar system of the moral and intellectual legitimacy it needed to transform
the political and economic stabilization of the mid-1920s into a permanent
state of affairs. In the war of position that characterized German political life
in the second half of the 1920s, the “treason of the clerks” – to use the famous
phrase of Julian Benda – not only dealt a critical blow to Weimar’s chances of
survival but sowed the seeds of something ultimately far more ominous. Yet
for all of the success they may have enjoyed in delegitimizing Germany’s
experiment in democracy at that point in time when it seemed that the
Weimar Republic had recovered from the trauma of its birth and was on its
way to achieving some measure of stability, the young conservatives proved
incapable of translating their vision of the German future into political reality.
At the heart of their problem lay not just their unabashed elitism but also their
refusal to recognize the political concomitants of the social, economic, and
cultural modernization that Germany had experienced since the middle of the
previous century. In this respect, the young conservatives remained something
of a curious anachronism that mirrored the longings of all too many Germans
but whose grasp of practical politics was too limited for them to give form and
content to those longings.

123
“Richtlinien für den Deutschherrenklub,” 11 Nov. 1924, BA Koblenz, R 118, 35/62.
 10

A Resurgent Nationalism

The eighteen months between the collapse of the Munich beer hall putsch and
Hindenburg’s election as Reich president had a profound impact upon the
organizations that formed the backbone of Germany’s patriotic and paramili-
tary movement. Most of these organizations had been severely compromised if
not by their actual involvement in the preparations for the putsch, then
certainly by their sympathy for the aspirations of the putschists. The leaders
of Germany’s three largest patriotic organizations – the Stahlhelm, the Young
German Order, and the United Patriotic Leagues – all seemed disoriented by
this turn of events and were slow to formulate a strategy for dealing with the
new political realities created by Weimar’s economic and political stabiliza-
tion. To the more prescient of Germany’s paramilitary leaders, it seemed not
only that they had squandered a rare opportunity to overthrow the hated
Weimar system but also that the revolutionary tide that had descended upon
Germany after the end of the great war had crested and entered a second and
less violent phase in which the forces of bourgeois capitalism had supplanted
the revolutionary Left as the dominant force in German political life.1
Germany’s patriotic and paramilitary Right would demonstrate remarkable
resilience in rebounding from the malaise that gripped it in the immediate
aftermath of the Munich fiasco. The revival of the so-called national move-
ment in the second half of the 1920s was directed in large part against the role
that conservative economic interests had played in the economic and political
stabilization of the Weimar Republic. The architects of this revival sought not
only to free the German state from the tyranny of special economic interests
but also to reassert the primacy of the political and national moment in
German public life over the purely economic. In this respect, they drew much
of their inspiration from the revolutionary conservatism of the early 1920s and
articulated their political strategy in the idiom of what Ernst Jünger and other
right-wing intellectuals hailed as the “new nationalism.” This strain of nation-
alist thought stood in sharp contrast to the crass materialism of the liberal

1
See the particularly revealing analysis from the Stahlhelm’s Franke to Tirpitz, 4 June 1924,
appended to Franke to Stresemann, 25 June 1924, PA AA Berlin, NL Stresemann, 10/
156049 64.


   , –

epoch and sought to supplant the alliance that had developed between liberal-
ism and nationalism in the nineteenth century with a new alliance between
nationalism and revolutionary conservatism. In doing so, the champions of
the new nationalism sought to invoke a sense of national feeling so powerful in
terms of its emotional appeal that it would override the social, political, and
economic cleavages that had become so deeply entrenched within the German
nation.2

The Quest for Right-Wing Unity

Of all the problems that faced the leaders of the patriotic Right in the second
half of the 1920s, none was more pressing than that of restoring the unity of
the patriotic movement. Not only had the Munich fiasco produced widespread
confusion within the ranks of the patriotic movement, but the struggle over
the Dawes Plan had driven a wedge between those who belonged to the DVP
and tacitly supported the basic principles of Stresemann’s foreign policy and
those who belonged to the DNVP and remained irreconcilably opposed to any
form of collaboration with the existing system of government. In an attempt to
heal these divisions and repair the damage the Nationalist split on the Dawes
Plan had done to the unity of the German Right, Baron Wilhelm von Gayl
from the DNVP invited representatives from the Stahlhelm, Young German
Order, and United Patriotic Leagues to a series of meetings in the fall and
winter of 1924.3 These negotiations drew to a preliminary climax on 28 January
1925, when the leaders of the Stahlhelm, the Young German Order, the
National Federation of German Professional Unions (Nationalverband
Deutscher Berufsverbände or NDB), and a handful of delegates supposedly
representing the Christian labor movement formed an alliance known simply
as the National Committee (Nationalausschuß) with a central office in Berlin
under the direction of the NBD’s Fritz Geisler. By uniting Germany’s two
largest paramilitary organizations and the “yellow” labor unions under the
aegis of the National Committee, Geisler hoped to provide the United Patriotic
Leagues, an organization he had headed since its establishment in 1922, with
the mass following it needed if it was ever to have a measurable effect upon the
course of developments in Berlin.4

2
For a brief overview, see Stefan Breuer, “Neuer Nationalismus in Deutschland,” in
Rechtsextreme Ideologien in Geschichte und Gegenwart, ed. Uwe Backes (Cologne,
Weimar, and Vienna, 2003), 53 72.
3
Gayl’s handwritten memoir on his relations with the paramilitary combat leagues from the
spring of 1923 to the 1925 presidential elections, n.d., BA Koblenz, NL Gayl, 4/17 29.
4
Geisler to the patriotic leagues and their supporters, 4 Feb. 1925, BA Koblenz, NL Pechel,
144, also in BHStA Munich, EWB, 10/2.
    

Geisler’s experiment in right-wing unity proved short-lived for several

reasons. First of all, the leaders of the United Patriotic Leagues were suspicious
of Geisler’s intentions and criticized the way in which he had identified the
VVVD with the agenda of the “yellow” labor movement. As a result, Geisler
was obliged to resign from the VVVD presidium – he had already stepped
down as the organization’s national chairman – after a particularly heated
meeting of VVVD representatives from throughout the country on 12 Febru-
ary.5 With the subsequent election of former army officer Count Rüdiger von
der Goltz as Geisler’s successor, the VVVD fell under the influence of unre-
constructed reactionaries with close ties to the Prussian military, East Elbian
aristocracy, and the Hohenzollern court. In so far as they had a program of
their own, those now in control of the VVVD were committed to little more
than restoring things to the way they had been before the war. This, along with
the VVVD’s close ties to the Pan-German League and “yellow” trade-union
movement, did much discredit the VVVD in the eyes of both the Stahlhelm
and Young German Order and blocked any further movement in the direction
of closer cooperation between the three organizations.6 In point of fact, the
VVVD remained little more than a loose federation of organizations repre-
senting a very narrow stratum of German society and commanding little in the
way of direct popular support. Although the occupation of the Ruhr and the
crisis of Germany’s republican institutions throughout the course of 1923 had
done much to enhance the VVVD’s political profile, the niche that it had
hoped to carve out for itself on the German Right was ultimately usurped by
an entirely new type of political organization, the paramilitary combat league
or Kampfbund. Unable to match the dynamism of numerically stronger and
more tightly organized paramilitary combat leagues like the Stahlhelm and
Young German Order, the VVVD found itself relegated more and more to the
periphery of the German Right and entered a period of relative eclipse that was
to continue for the remainder of the decade.7
In a parallel effort, the leaders of the Ring Movement also tried to foster a
greater sense of unity among the various organizations on the German Right.
Less than a month after the fateful split in the Nationalist vote on the Dawes
Plan, more than forty representatives of various right-wing organizations,

5
For Geisler’s account of these developments, see his letter to the VVVD presidium, 19
Feb. 1925, BA Koblenz, NL Jarres, 36/51 55. See also the circular from the VVVD to the
patriotic leagues and sympathizers, 14 Feb. 1925, BHStA Munich, Abt. IV, EWB, 10/2, as
well as the police report on the VVVD, n.d., appended to Geisler to Westarp, 19 Jan. 1925,
NL Westarp, Gärtringen, VN 97.
6
Frank Glatzel, “Wehrverbände und Politik,” in Politische Praxis 1926, ed. Walther Lam
bach (Hamburg, n.d. [1926]), 322. See also Laudahn, “V.V.V.D.,” Der Meister. Jung
deutsche Monatsschrift für Führer und denkende Brüder 1, no. 9 (July 1926): 19 22.
7
For further details, see Weiß to Westarp, 6 Dec. 1924, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, VN 44. See
also Diehl, “Von der ‘Vaterlandspartei’ zur ‘nationalen Revolution’,” 617 39.
   , –

including the VVVD and the German Industrial Association, met in Berlin’s
Hotel Continental at the invitation of the Stahlhelm’s Theodor Duesterberg,
the Ring Movement’s Bodo von Alvensleben, and the DNVP’s Friedrich von
Zitzewitz-Kottow. The purpose of the meeting was to map out a strategy that
would enable the right wing of the DNVP to regain control of the party and
return it to the path of unconditional opposition to the Weimar Republic that
had served it so well in the period before 1924. The meeting concluded with
the formation of a political action committee that sought to reverse the
direction in which the DNVP was currently headed by bringing members of
the DNVP Reichstag delegation and other influential party leaders together
with representatives of the patriotic leagues, the Ring Movement, the German
Industrial Association, and the prewar German Conservative Party.8 This
committee met for the first time on 7 October 1924 and was immediately
expanded to twenty-five members, including a seven-man contingent from
the DNVP Reichstag delegation headed by Westarp. While the ostensible
purpose of this committee was to help the DNVP’s right wing regain control
of the party,9 the task of developing a broader base of support for conservative
principles outside the DNVP was assigned to Heinrich von Gleichen and the
leaders of the Ring Movement.10 It was in this spirit that Gleichen and
the leaders of the German Gentlemen’s Club staged a rally in Berlin on 21–22
February 1925 for members and associates of the various organizations that
were affiliated with the Ring Movement.11 The principal speakers – Heinz
Brauweiler, Gustav Roethe, Walther Schotte, Martin Spahn, and Eduard
Stadtler – all came from the ranks of Germany’s young conservative intelli-
gentsia and made a concerted effort to articulate the ideological foundations
upon which the unification of the German Right should take place with
lectures on such topics as the national movement, constitutional reform, and
the struggle for the state.12
Neither the creation of the National Committee nor the Ring Movement’s
rally in Berlin succeeded in generating the emotional elan it would have taken

8
Circular from the Mittelstelle des Ringes, 17 Sept. 1924, appended to the letter from
Gleichen to Schmidt Hannover, 17 Sept. 1924, BA Koblenz, NL Schmidt Hannover, 33.
See also Brauer to Westarp, 19 Sept. 1924, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, VN 46.
9
This was implicit in the circular from the Mittelstelle des Ringes, 28 Jan. 1925, NL
Westarp, Gärtringen, VN 97.
10
Circular from the Mittelstelle des Ringes, 14 Oct. 1924, BA Koblenz, NL Schmidt
Hannover, 33. See also Gleichen to Spahn, 10 Oct. 1924, BA Koblenz, R 118, 35/76.
11
Rosenberger, invitation to the Ring Tagung, Feb. 1925, BA Berlin, NL Hepp, 4/80.
12
On the rally in Berlin, see “Bericht über die Ring Tagung 21. und 22. Februar 1925 im
Herrenhaus in Berlin,” in the circular from the Mittelstelle des Ringes, 3 Mar. 1925, NL
Westarp, Gärtringen, VN 97. See also the report in the Deutsche Arbeitgeberzeitung, 1
Mar. 1925, no. 9, in BA Koblenz, R 118/40, as well as Gleichen to Grimm, 3 Mar. 1925,
DLA Marbach, NL Grimm, A17b. For further details, see Simon, “Brauweiler,” 203 08.
    

to overcome the deep-seated divisions that had developed within the ranks of
the patriotic movement. At no point was this more apparent than during the
course of the 1925 presidential campaign. Initially the Young German Order,
the Stahlhelm, and other right-wing organizations that had coalesced behind
Gayl in the fall and winter of 1924 supported the nomination of Reichswehr
commander-in-chief Hans von Seeckt as a unity candidate whose election
would keep the parties of the Weimar coalition from retaining control of the
Reich presidency.13 Seeckt’s candidacy, however, ran into strong opposition
from members of the Loebell Committee who doubted that he was sufficiently
popular to win the election, with the result that he was passed over in favor of
the DVP’s Karl Jarres for the first round of voting on 29 March 1925. While
the Stahlhelm and the other paramilitary organizations represented by Gayl
quickly rallied to the support of Jarres’s candidacy, Artur Mahraun and the
Young Germans continued to press the case for Seeckt’s nomination, even
going so far as to attack Gayl for his failure to adequately represent the
paramilitary Right in his dealings with the Loebell committee.14
In an attempt to minimize the damage the Young Germans had done to the
Jarres candidacy, Seeckt dissociated himself from efforts to enlist him as a
presidential candidate and declared his support for Jarres.15 Although the
Young Germans ultimately joined the Stahlhelm and other paramilitary
organizations in supporting Jarres’s bid for the presidency,16 a new conflict
erupted in the preparations for the runoff election on 26 April when the
Young Germans chastised both Gayl and the Stahlhelm for their lack of
enthusiasm for a Hindenburg candidacy and denounced Gayl as an agent of
capitalistic economic interests intent upon perpetuating their control of the
existing political system by supporting Jarres.17 At the heart of the conflict
between the Stahlhelm and the Young German Order lay not merely the fact
that both were jockeying for position in the struggle for leadership of the
patriotic movement but a far more fundamental dispute over the strategy the
patriotic Right should pursue in the quest for a change in the existing political
system. Whereas the Young Germans regarded Hindenburg’s election as an
opportunity to heal the wounds that so badly divided the German body politic

13
Statement by Sodenstern from the National Association of German Officers (National
verband deutscher Offiziere) in an excerpt from the protocol of the meeting of the
patriotic organizations on 13 Mar. 1925, BA Koblenz, NL Gayl, 23.
14
Mahraun to Gayl, 13 Mar. 1925, BA Koblenz, NL Gayl, 23. See also Loebell, “Die
Verhandlungen des Loebell Ausschusses: Eine objektive Darstellung,” Der Deutschen
Spiegel 2, no. 13 (Mar. 27, 1925): 583.
15
Hans Meier Welcker, Seeckt (Frankfurt am Main, 1967), 463 66.
16
Jarres to Gayl, 17 Mar. 1925, BA Koblenz, NL Gayl, 23. See also Gayl to Mahraun, 28
Mar. 1925, ibid.
17
Handwritten notes by Gayl on the 1925 presidential campaign, n.d., BA Koblenz, NL
Gayl, 23.
   , –

and to put an end to the conflict over the form of government,18 the leaders of
the Stahlhelm were fearful that the election of someone of Hindenburg’s
stature would have precisely that effect and thereby facilitate the republic’s
legitimation in the eyes of those who were already seeking some sort of
accommodation with the existing system of government.19 But these differ-
ences would become moot once Hindenburg had been elected. The Stahlhem
immediately hailed Hindenburg’s election as the beginning of a new era in
German history in which it and the thousands of front soliders allied with it
would serve as one of the “firmest cornerstones in the reconstruction of the
state and Reich” in the struggle for the “liberation of the fatherland from
infamy and bondage.”20

Aristocratic Offensive
Nowhere was the role the DNVP had played in the economic and political
stabilization of the Weimar Republic more deeply resented than within the
ranks of Germany’s landowning and military aristocracy. For the most part,
the aristocracy had been relegated to the margins of German political life
during the first years of the Weimar Republic. To be sure, Westarp had
succeeded in carving out a niche for the Prussian aristocracy in the DNVP,
but the Central Association of German Conservatives had maintained little
more than a shadow existence in the early years of the Weimar Republic and
exercised little direct influence over the affairs of the party. But with the eclipse
of putschism and the stabilization of the republic in 1923–24 the German
aristocracy began to show signs of renewed vigor as it positioned itself for a
new and more sustained assault against the social and political legacy of the
November Revolution. The founding of the German Gentlemen’s Club as a
forum where representatives of Germany’s bourgeois and feudal elites could
meet on a purely social basis and Goltz’s election as the new chairman of the
United Patriotic Leagues of Germany were simply two aspects of a resurgence
of aristocratic politics in the wake of Germany’s economic and political
stabilization in the middle years of the Weimar Republic.
The German aristocracy was anything but a cohesive and monolithic force
in Germany’s national life. The German aristocracy was deeply fragmented
along regional, confessional, and socio-economic lines and never enjoyed the
degree of social and political homogeneity that has been popularly associated

18
Artur Mahraun, Gegen getarnte Gewalten. Wege und Kampf einer Volksbewegung (Berlin,
1928), 199 200.
19
Circular from Ausfeld and Seldte to the leaders of the Stahlhelm’s local chapters, 10
Apr. 1925, BA Koblenz, NL Gayl, 23.
20
H. Ludwig, “Die Gegenwartsaufgaben des ‘Stahlhelm’,” Apr. 1925, BA Berlin, R 72, 32/
297.
    

with it. The founding of the German Nobles’ Association (Deutsche Adels-
genossenschaft or DAG) by East Elbian landowners in February 1874 repre-
sented the first significant attempt to unite the German aristocracy into a
single organization. But the DAG, which had a membership of approximately
2,400 by the end of World War I, appealed primarily to those elements of the
aristocracy that had been marginalized by the course of German economic
development and manifested a strong antipathy toward the wealthier and
more politically influential magnates from east of the Elbe.21 At the same
time, the DAG never succeeded in bridging the confessional divide that
separated it from the Catholic nobles in west Prussia or southern and south-
west Germany who in 1869 had founded the Association of Catholic Nobles of
Germany (Verein katholischer Edelleute Deutschlands or VKE) in an effort to
forge a sense of common purpose at the height of Prussia’s Kulturkampf
against the Catholic Church.22 These divisions persisted well into the Weimar
Republic, where the elitism, religious piety, and strong sense confessional
solidarity that defined the self-image of Germany’s Catholic aristocracy
hampered the establishment of closer organizational ties with the DAG despite
their shared hostility toward the social and political legacy of the November
Revolution.23 In the meantime, the membership of the predominantly Prot-
estant DAG had swelled to nearly 17,000 as a result of the increasingly
desperate situation in which more and more nobles found themselves after
the political collapse of 1918.24
The loss of political privilege combined with economic marginalization to
radicalize increasingly large sectors of the German aristocracy in the early and

21
On the DAG, see Georg H. Kleine, “Adelsgenossenschaft und Nationalsozialismus,”
Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 26 (1978): 100 43, and Stefan Malinowski, “‘Führer
tum’ und ‘Neuer Adel.’ Die Deutsche Adelsgenossenschaft und der Deutsche Herrenklub
in der Weimarer Republik,” in Adel und Bürgertum in Deutschland II. Entwicklungslinien
und Wendepunkte im 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Heinz Reif (Berlin, 2001), 173 211. On the
impoverishment of the lesser nobility, see Stefan Malinowski, “‘Wer schenkt uns wieder
Kartoffeln?’ Deutscher Adel nach 1918 eine Elite?” in Deutscher Adel im 19. und 20.
Jahrhundert. Büdinger Forschungen zur Sozialgeschichte 2002 und 2003, ed. Günther
Schulz and Markus A. Denzel (St. Katharinen, 2004), 503 37.
22
On the VKE, see Klemens von Oer, Der Verein katholischer Edelleute Deutschlands. Eine
ÜberFblick über seine Entstehungsgeschichte und Entwicklung 1869 1919, als Handschrift
gedruckt (Münster, 1919), as well as Horst Conrad, “Stand und Konfession. Der Verein
der katholischen Edelleute. Teil 1: Die Jahre 1857 1918,” Westfälische Zeitschrift 158
(2008): 125 86.
23
Malinowski, Vom König zum Führer, 358 67. For the sense of mission of the Catholic
aristocracy, see Franz von Galen, Ritterlichkeit in alter und neuer Zeit. Vortrag gehalten in
der Generalversammlung des Vereins katholischer Edelleute, Abt. Münster, am 1. Septem
ber 1921 (Warendorf i.W., n.d. [1921]).
24
See Kleine, “Adelsgenossenschaft und Nationalsozialismus,” 105, and Malinowski, Vom
König zum Führer, 321 22.
   , –

middle 1920s.25 This could be seen first and foremost in the development of
the German Nobles’ Association, which not only adopted a position of
uncompromising hostility toward Germany’s fledgling republican order but
fell more and more under the influence of the racist Right. Although anti-
semitism had been a distinctive feature of Germany’s aristocratic culture long
before the collapse of 1918, it would become even more prominent with the
dramatic spread of anti-Semitic and racist thought in the first years of the
Weimar Republic.26 In December 1920 the DAG not only amended its statutes
to make racial purity a prerequisite for membership, but it introduced the
Eisernes Buch deutschen Adels deutscher Art, more commonly known by the
shorter designation EDDA, to certify the racial pedigree of those who claimed
noble heritage.27 Antisemitic prejudice had perhaps an even longer history
within Germany’s Catholic aristocracy, but here it had less to do with race
than with religion. Even if anti-Semitism retained much of its potency within
the Catholic aristocracy in the immediate postwar period,28 neither the Cen-
tral Association of Catholic Nobles (Hauptverein katholischer Edelleute
Deutschlands) – as the VKE had renamed itself in February 1918 – nor the
Association of Catholic Nobles in Bavaria (Genossenschaft katholischer Edel-
leute in Bayern or GKE) was willing to make racial purity a prerequisite for
membership.29
Germany’s Catholic aristocracy was far more divided than the predomin-
antly Protestant DAG on a wide range of strategic and tactical issues. While
the Rhenish-Westphalian aristocracy had become progressively disenchanted

25
Malinowski, Vom König zum Führer, 260 82. See also Zollitsch, “Erosion des traditio
nellen Konservativismus,” 162 82.
26
Stefan Malinowski, “Vom blauen zum reinen Blut. Antisemitischer Adelskritik und
adliger Antisemitismus 1871 1944,” Jahrbuch für Antisemitismusforschung 12 (2003):
147 68.
27
See section one paragraph three of Satzung der Deutschen Adelsgenossenschaft (2
Dec. 1920), 4, and Überblick über die Entwicklung der Adelsschutzeinrichtung, Potsdam
1921, both in VWA Münster, NL Lüninck, 815.
28
For example, see Count Hermann zu Stolberg Stolberg, Judengeist und Judenziele. Als
Aufsatz in einem im Verein katholischer Edelleute zu Münster i.W. am 22. August
1919 gehaltenen Vortrage ausgearbeitet (Paderborn, 1919), as well as Count Josef zu
Stolberg Stolberg’s remarks in Protokoll der außerordentlichen General Versammlung
des Hauptvereins katholischer Edelleute Deutschlands Abteilung Münster am 1. September
1921 in Münster (Münster, 1921), 5 9, records of the Genossenschaft katholischer
Edelleute in Bayern, BHStA Munich, Abteilung V, GKE, 7/2, and idem, “Freimauerei,
Judentum und Presse” in “Bericht über den nationalpolitischen Kursus für den rheinisch
westfälischen Adel in Willibadessen 23. 25. April 1923,” BA Koblenz, NL Spahn, 177.
29
Malinowski, Vom König zum Führer, 340. On the contours of Catholic antisemitism, see
Olaf Blaschke, “Wider die ‘Herrschaft des modernen jüdischen Geistes.’ Der Katholizis
mus zwischen traditionellen Antijudaismus und modernem Antisemitismus,” in
Deutscher Katholizismus im Umbruch zur Moderne, ed. Wilfried Loth (Stuttgart, Berlin,
and Cologne, 1991), 236 61.
    

with the German Center Party since the summer of 1917 and publicly disputed
its commitment to restoring the primacy of Christian values in Germany’s
national life on the eve of the 1920 Reichstag elections,30 the GKE enjoyed
much closer ties to the Center’s more conservative Bavarian counterpart,
the Bavarian People’s Party, and was thus insulated against the full effect
of the radicalization that had taken place within the Catholic aristocracy
in the Rhineland and Westphalia.31 The differences between the Rhenish-
Westphalian and Bavarian branches of Germany’s Catholic aristocracy proved
in fact so great that in the spring of 1922 the Central Association of Catholic
Nobles divided itself into five regional associations that remained only loosely
affiliated with each other under the umbrella of the Central Committee of
Catholic German Noble Associations (Hauptausschuß katholischer Deutscher
Adelsgenossenschaften).32 Of these, by far the most influential and the most
radical was the Rhenish-Westphalian Association of Catholic Nobles (Rhe-
nisch-Westfälischer Verein katholischer Edelleute) with its headquarters in
Münster. Even here, however, there was discernible tension between those like
Baron Engelbert Kerckerinck zur Borg and his protégé Franz von Papen who
had remained loyal to the Center and those like the two Lüninck brothers
Ferdinand and Hermann who were moving more and more into the orbit of
the radical Right. At the heart of this tension, as Kerckerinck zur Borg
explained at a meeting of the Rhenish-Westphalian Association of Catholic
Nobles in August 1922, lay the question as to whether it would be more
effective to pursue opposition from the outside through a party like the
DNVP or from the inside by defending the aristocratic point of view in a
party that supported the government.33

30
“Eine Kundgebung des katholischen Adels,” 24 Feb. 1920, in Protokoll der ordentlichen
Generalversammlung des Vereins katholischer Edelleute Deutschlands in 1920 (Münster,
1920), 6 7, in VWA Münster, NL Lüninck, 807. See also Ferdinand von Lüninck,
“Gedanken zur Zentrumspolitik,” 20 June 1920, BA Koblenz, NL Spahn, 93.
31
See the attempt to soften the tone of the VKE’s statement of 24 Feb. 1920, in Löwenstein,
“Der katholische Adel Deutschlands und die Politik,” Allgemeine Rundschau 17, no. 14 (3
Apr. 1920): 184 86.
32
See the two letters from Stolberg to Löwenstein, 7 Mar. 1922, VWA Münster, NL
Hermann zu Stolberg Stolberg, 246. See also Löwenstein to the Central Association of
Catholic Nobles of Germany, 9 May 1921, BHStA Munich, Abt. V, GKE, 7/2, as well as
Protokoll der außerordentlichen General Versammlung des Hauptvereins katholischer
Edelleute Deutschlands am 2. März 1922 in Münster in Westfalen i.W. (Münster, 1922),
3 4, VWA Münster, NL Hermann zu Stolberg Stolberg, 245.
33
Remarks by Kerckerinck zur Borg in Protokoll der außerordentlichen General
Versammlung des Rheinisch Westfälischen Vereins kath. Edelleute am 12. August
1922 in Münster (Münster, 1922), 6 7, archives of the Verein katholischer Edelleute
Deutschlands, VWA Münster, 19. For further details, see Horst Conrad, “Stand und
Konfession. Der Verein der katholischen Edelleute. Teil 2: Die Jahre 1918 1949,” West
fälische Zeitschrift 159 (2009): 91 154.
   , –

In the early years of the Weimar Republic the German aristocracy, whether
Catholic or Protestant, found itself relegated to the periphery of German
political life. Only in Bavaria did the aristocracy enjoy access to the corridors
of power, and then only as a consequence of an accommodation with the
Bavarian People’s Party that did not extend to all sectors of the Bavarian
nobility.34 But all of this began to change with the relative stabilization of the
Weimar Republic in the middle of the 1920s. Stresemann’s efforts to stabilize
the republic from the Right effectively redefined Weimar’s political landscape
in the second half of the decade and created an entirely new set of strategic and
tactical priorities for the German Right. For the German aristocracy, this did
little to soften its hostility toward the existing political order and only added to
the sense of urgency it felt about Germany’s political future. Nowhere was this
expressed more forcefully than in a letter that Ferdinand von Lüninck wrote to
an unknown recipient in late January 1924:
After as everyone today readily concedes the great moment at the end
of last October was allowed to slip away, the disastrous [heillose] Munich
affair has resulted in such far reaching fragmentation and apathy that
virtually the entire patriotic movement has been neutralized by its internal
conflicts . . . From where I stand, the most important thing is for leader
ship to recognize that since last fall the lines of combat have dramatically
changed. For all intents and purposes socialism and Marxism are finished.
Now a new and more ominous enemy threatens the national concept, i.e.,
the threat of enslavement to international capital as represented by the
firm of Schacht and Stresemann, the collapse of our national economy,
and with it our absolute dependence upon international Jewry. That this
takes place under the mantle of democracy changes nothing whatsoever
about the essence of the existing situation.35

The collapse of putschism and the subsequent stabilization of the Weimar

Republic under conservative auspices marked the beginning of a new and
more militant phase in the aristocracy’s struggle against the hated Weimar
system. Over the course of the next several years, conservative aristocrats who
refused to accept the changes that had taken place in Germany’s political order
at the end of World War I would intensify their efforts to subvert the terms
upon which Weimar’s political stabilization had taken place and to rally
Germany’s conservative forces for a new assault against the symbols and
institutions of Weimar democracy. For the large landowners from the east of
the Elbe, the immediate and indeed most pressing task was to return the
DNVP to the course of unconditional opposition to the existing system of
government. The DNVP’s split in the vote on the Dawes Plan and its

34
Malinowski, Vom König zum Führer, 367 85.
35
Letter from Lüninck, 26 Jan. 1924, VWA Münster, NL Lüninck, 822.
    

subsequent entry into the Luther cabinet only fueled the fears of the East
Elbian aristocracy that the party had betrayed the principles that had inspired
its founding.36 To reverse the direction in which they saw the party headed,
the East Elbian nobles worked through the Central Association of German
Conservatives and its chairman Count Ernst Julius von Seidlitz-Sandreczki.37
Seidlitz had taken part in the strategy sessions that Gleichen and the leaders of
the Ring Movement had organized in the late fall of 1924 and vigorously
supported their efforts to return the DNVP to a path of unconditional
opposition to the Weimar Republic.38 The DNVP’s decision to enter the first
Luther cabinet had met with strong opposition from Seidlitz and his allies in
the Ring Movement and only strengthened their resolve to assert themselves
more forcefully within the party.39
Within the Catholic aristocracy a different set of strategic and tactical
objectives existed. The more conservative elements of Germany’s Catholic
aristocracy were every bit as strongly opposed to the postwar political system
as their East Elbian counterparts. Speaking to the Association of Catholic
Nobles in Bavaria in the summer of 1925, Lüninck categorically rejected the
principle of popular sovereignty as enshrined in Article I, Paragraph 2, of the
Weimar Constitution and denounced the modern democratic state as a Zah-
lendemokratie that did little more than tally up the votes of atomized individ-
uals. Lüninck maintained that all power, including temporal power, was
derived from the majesty of God and that no secular institution – and
particularly not a parliament that derived its legitimacy from the will of the
people – could lay claim to the sovereign powers of the Lord or usurp the
rights of those whom He had ordained to rule in His stead. At the same time,
Lüninck subscribed to an organic theory of the state and society in which the
rights and privileges of the individual were limited by the welfare of the whole
and in which the illusory equality of the democratic age would be replaced by
respect for the authority of God’s moral law. It was the task of Germany’s
Catholic nobility, Lüninck insisted, to take the lead in the struggle for Chris-
tian and conservative values in an age of increasing democratization and
secularization. And this, he concluded, had nothing to do with the party to
which one belonged but was a mission that presupposed a unity of purpose
and a commitment to action that transcended all party lines.40

36
Flemming, “Konservativismus als ‘nationalrevolutionäre Bewegung’,” 295 331. See also
Rainer Pomp, “Brandenburgischer Landadel,” 186 218.
37
Memorandum of 14 Oct. 1924 on a meeting of the executive committee of the Central
Association of German Conservatives, 11 Oct. 1924, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, VN 50.
38
Circular from the Mittelstelle des Ringes, 14 Oct. 1924, BA Koblenz, NL Schmidt
Hannover, 33.
39
Circular from the Mittelstelle des Ringes, 28 Jan. 1925, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, VN 97.
40
Ferdinand von Lüninck, “Der moderne Staat und die Stellung des Adels zu ihm,” in
Genossenschaft katholischer Edelleute in Bayern, ed., Sozialpolitischer Kurse zu
   , –

Lüninck’s speech represented a virtual declaration of war against the

Weimar state at a time when moderate conservatives in the DNVP, the
National Federation of German Industry, the National Rural League, and even
the Stahlhelm were all seeking an accommodation with the Weimar Republic
as part of the general realignment of political forces that had begun in
1923–24. For Lüninck and his associates, the immediate objective was not so
much to drive the DNVP out of the governmental coalition in Berlin as to
replace the alliance that had developed between the Center and the parties of
the political Left with a new alliance between the Center and the German
Right. Catholic conservatives hoped to leverage the DNVP’s impressive show-
ing in the December 1924 Reichstag elections into a far-reaching realignment
of political forces in the Reich and Prussia that would put a definitive end to
the domination of Social Democracy and the Weimar Coalition.41 The key
player in all of this was Franz von Papen, a former diplomat and army officer
who had been elected to the Prussian Landtag in 1921 as a liaison between
the Westphalian Peasants’ League and the German Center Party.42 While
Papen shared Lüninck’s deep-seated antipathy toward the political system
that Germany had inherited from the November Revolution, he also insisted
that a Christian and conservative regeneration of the German state could take
place only on the basis of the existing constitutional order and rejected the
putschist proclivities of the radical Right.43 At the same time, Papen exhorted
his peers in the Catholic aristocracy to take a more active role in “the
systematic concentration [planmäßige Sammlung]” of the “conservative elem-
ents of the Catholic Volk” into a united front capable of freeing Germany from
the liberal-democratic morass in which it was currently entrapped.44

Kleinheubach 15. 17. Juni 1925 (n.p, n.d. [1925]), 3 11, BHStA Munich, Abt. V, GKE, 13.
For further details, see Jones, “Catholic Conservatives in the Weimar Republic,” 68 70.
On Lüninck, see Ekkehard Klausa, “Vom Bündnispartner zum ‘Hochverräter.’ Der Weg
des konservativen Widerstandskämpfer Ferdinand von Lüninck,” Westfälische Forschun
gen 43 (1993): 530 71, and Peter Möhring, “Ferdinand Freiherr von Lüninck,” Westfä
lische Lebensbilder 17 (2005): 60 102.
41
In this respect, see Ferdinand von Lüninck to his brother Hermann, 21 Jan. 1925, as well
as his letters to Schley, 21 Jan. 1925, and Bornemann (Young German Order), 29
Jan. 1925, VWA Münster, NL Lüninck, 838.
42
On Papen’s career prior to his appointment as chancellor in the summer of 1932, see
Joachim Petzold, Franz von Papen. Ein deutsche Verhängnis (Munich and Berlin, 1995),
15 62.
43
Papen to Escherich, 2 June 1926, BHStA Munich, Abt. IV, EWB, 7/2.
44
Papen, “Der Staat von heute und der Einsatz der konservativen Kräfte des katholischen
Volkes,” in Wechselburger Tagung 1927, ed. Hauptausschuß der katholischen Adelsge
nossenschaften Deutschlands (Munich, n.d. [1927]), 6 11, VWA Münster, NL Lüninck,
811. For further details, see Larry Eugene Jones, “Franz von Papen, the German Center
Party, and the Failure of Catholic Conservatism in the Weimar Republic,” Central
European History 38 (2005): 191 217.
    

In January 1925 Papen used his influence as a member of the Center

delegation to the Prussian Landtag to sabotage the appointment of Center
party chairman Wilhelm Marx as Prussian minister president in hopes that
this would clear the way for the creation of a cabinet of civil servants, or
Beamtenkabinett, without formal ties to the parties that supported it.45 Papen
further infuriated the Center’s national leadership when he circulated a peti-
tion in the Westphalian Center Party endorsing not Marx but Hindenburg in
the presidential elections later that spring.46 While this did not provide
Hindenburg with the votes he needed to defeat Marx, Papen was nevertheless
pleased with the outcome of the election and its implications for Germany’s
political future.47 For the most part, however, Papen remained isolated within
the Center and never succeeded in reconciling the differences that separated it
from his peers in the Rhenish-Westphalian aristocracy. His appeals, most
notably after a highly publicized meeting of the Center’s executive committee
and party council in Erfurt in 1926, for a Christian-conservative reorientation
of the Center evoked little in the way of a positive response from the party
leadership and only reinforced his sense of isolation within the party.48 Still,
Papen’s exhortations to Germany’s Catholic nobility to assume a more active
role in the crusade for a Christian and conservative reconstruction of the
German state served as important barometers of an aristocratic resurgence
that would contribute in no small measure to reshaping Weimar’s political
landscape over the course of the next decade.

The Burden of Power

The increased assertiveness of the German nobility in the wake of Weimar’s
economic and political stabilization came at a time when the leaders of the
DNVP were still wrestling with the implications of their party’s entry into the
national cabinet. One of the many ironies of the DNVP’s victory in the May
and December 1924 Reichstag elections was that at the very moment the party
commanded the parliamentary strength to force its way into the national
government, the position of those elements in the DNVP Reichstag delegation

45
For further details, see Papen to Kerckerinck zur Borg, 8 Jan. 1925, as well as his reports
on the meetings of the Center delegation to the Prussian Landtag, 7 and 10 Feb. 1925,
VWA Münster, NL Kerckerinck zur Borg, 145. See also Ruppert, Im Dienst von Weimar,
101 08.
46
This appeal appeared until the title “Zentrum und Sozialdemokratie. Ein Mahnruf
rheinisch westfälischer Katholiken,” Kölnische Zeitung, 20 Apr. 1925. For the rationale
behind this action, see Kerckerinck zur Borg to Marx, 19 Apr. 1925, VWA Münster, NL
Kerckerinck zur Borg, 145.
47
Papen to v. Löe, 17 June 1925, VWA Münster, NL Kerckerinck zur Borg, 145.
48
Papen, “Erfurt und der konservative Gedanke,” Allgemeine Rundschau 24, no. 1 (8
Jan. 1927): 3 4.
   , –

that opposed the party’s experiment at governmental participation had been

greatly strengthened by the influx of new deputies with an aristocratic pedi-
gree. Of the 106 Nationalists who had been elected to the Reichstag in May
1924, no less than thirteen belonged to the titled nobility.49 In the December
elections the number of Nationalist deputies with a noble pedigree had risen to
fifteen.50 By the same token, the number of Nationalist deputies who were
either landowners or otherwise had close ties to organized agriculture had
increased significantly since 1920. One estimate placed no less than forty of
those who had been elected to the DNVP Reichstag delegation in May 1924 in
this category. Moreover, the new generation of agrarian spokesmen who had
been elected to the Reichstag for the first time in 1924 – Johann-Georg von
Dewitz from the Pomeranian Rural League (Pommerscher Landbund), Count
Botho-Wendt zu Eulenburg from Gallingen in East Prussia, Hans von
Goldacker from Weberstedt in Thuringia, and Baron Prätorius von Richtho-
fen-Boguslawitz from Silesia – were far more aggressive and confrontational in
their political style than the older generation of farm leaders represented by
Roesicke and Schiele.51 The enhanced status of large landed agriculture in the
DNVP Reichstag delegation could also be seen in the election of Count Kuno
von Westarp in early February 1925 to succeed Schiele as delegation chairman
after his resignation to accept a position in the Luther cabinet.52 Though not a
landowner himself, Westarp had played a critical role in helping the East
Elbian aristocracy secure a place for itself within the DNVP. The composition
of the newly elected DNVP Reichstag delegation – and in particular the
increased leverage that Germany’s landed aristocracy enjoyed within the
delegation – did not augur well for the success of the party’s first experiment
in sharing government responsibility.
The DNVP’s decision to join the Luther cabinet in January 1925 was
predicated upon the assumption that this would result in more effective
representation for the special-economic interests that constituted the the
party’s material base.53 In this respect, however, two issues proved particularly
vexing: revaluation and trade policy. The revaluation issue was especially
agonizing to the leaders of the DNVP. Not only had the anger of Germany’s

49
Germany, Bureau des Reichstags, ed., Reichstags Handbuch. II. Periode 1924 (Berlin,
1924), 351 52.
50
Germany, Bureau des Reichstags, ed., Reichstags Handbuch. III. Periode 1924 (Berlin,
1925), 172 73.
51
On the composition of the Nationalist delegation, see Albrecht Philipp, “Mein Weg:
Rückschau eines Siebzigjährigen auf allerlei Geschenisse und Menschen,” Dritte Teil:
“Abgeordnetenjahre in der Weimarer Republik (1919 1930),” SHStA Dresden, NL
Philipp, 4/134 42.
52
Ibid., 4/159.
53
Gottfried R. Treviranus, Deutschnationale Innenpolitik im Reichstag, Deutschnationale
Flugschrift, no. 223 (Berlin, 1925).
    

middle-class investors over the revaluation provisions of the Third Emergency

Tax Decree played a major role in the DNVP’s success at the polls in the May
and December 1924 Reichstag elections, but once in power the Nationalists
quickly discovered that there was no way they could possibly satisfy investors’
demands for a full and equitable revaluation of the paper mark assets that had
been destroyed during the runaway inflation of the early 1920s.54 If nothing
else, the desperate state of German finances in 1925 precluded a revaluation of
worthless paper mark assets on a scale and magnitude sufficient to satisfy the
expectations of the savers’ organizations that had rallied to the DNVP’s
support in the 1924 Reichstag elections.55 Moreover, the leaders of the revalu-
ation movement found themselves blocked within the DNVP by a powerful
coalition of agricultural and industrial interests that was opposed to any
settlement of the revaluation question that might prejudice the gains they
had recorded as a result of the inflation.56 Unable to follow through on their
campaign promises from the previous year, the Nationalists came under
increasingly heavy attack not just from the opposition parties but also from
the various revaluation groups that had sprung up throughout the country
since the end of 1922.57
In March 1925 the Nationalist party leadership tried to assuage the anger of
Germany’s small investors by agreeing to a revision of the revaluation provi-
sions of the Third Emergency Tax Decree that increased the revalorization rate
for mortgages and other forms of private indebtedness from fifteen to twenty-
five percent of their original gold mark value. At the same time, the agreement
established revalorization rates of fifteen percent for industrial obligations and
five percent – a figure later reduced to two-and-a-half percent for assets that
had changed hands since 1 July 1920 – for war bonds and other forms of

54
Much of the following is taken from Jones, “Inflation, Revaluation, and the Crisis of
Middle Class Politics,” 152 61. See also Michael Hughes, Paying for the German Inflation
(Chapel Hill, NC, 1988), 102 58, as well as Ohnezeit, Zwischen “schärfster Opposition,”
290 96, and Dörr, “Deutschnationale Volkspartei,” 325 33.
55
Remarks by the German finance minister, Hans August von Schlieben, at a meeting of the
Reichstag’s budget committee, 28 Jan. 1925, BA Koblenz, Nachlass Hermann Dietrich,
295/365 71.
56
See the report of the meeting of the DNVP Reichstag delegation, 10 Feb. 1925, in Reichert
to Meyer, Reusch, and Blohm, 12 Feb. 1925, along with the enclosure, “Zur Aufwertungs
frage: Drei Ministerreden in der deutschnationalen Fraktion am 10.II.25,” RWWA
Cologne, Abt. 130, NL Reusch, 400101295/16.
57
See Hirsch to Westarp, 18 Jan. 1925, and the letter from the Revaluation and Recon
struction Party (Aufwertungs und Aufbau Partei) to Westarp, 4 Mar. 1925, both in NL
Westarp, Gärtringen, II/17, as well as the petition from the Osnabrück district organiza
tion of the Mortgagees and Savers’ Protective Association (Hypothekengläubiger und
Sparerschutzverband, Bezirk Osnabrück) to the DNVP executive committee, 17
Mar. 1925, Niedersächsisches Staatsarchiv Osnabrück, records of the DNVP, Landesver
band Osnabück (hereafter cited as NSSA Osnabrück), Bestand C1, 90/9.
   , –

public indebtedness. This represented a compromise between government

parties anxious to escape the wrath of those who had been dispossessed by
the inflation and a government determined to limit the scope of revaluation so
as not to aggravate Germany’s already desperate fiscal situation.58 Even then,
the leaders of the National Rural League criticized the revaluation compromise
on the grounds that it, along with other proposed taxes, constituted an
intolerable burden for German farmers and seriously jeopardized their
chances of full recovery in Germany’s post-inflation economy.59 Large land-
owners like Reichstag deputy Hans von Goldacker criticized the striking
discrepancy in the revaluation compromise between the revalorization rates
for government and private debts and warned party leaders that agriculture’s
bitterness over the terms of the revaluation settlement would come back to
haunt them if they did not pay more attention to the welfare of the German
farmer.60 By the same token, the Coordinating Committee of German
National Industrialists expressed grave concern about the fiscal implications
of the revaluation bill and warned against additional concessions to the
revaluation movement that might adversely affect the private sector’s ability
to raise the capital necessary for economic expansion.61
Given the strong opposition of organized agricultural and industrial inter-
ests to the revaluation bill, there was little likelihood of further concessions
that might have made it more palatable to the leaders of the revaluation
movement. The compromise of March 1925 fell far short of the movement’s
demands for a full and equitable restoration of those paper mark assets that
had been destroyed by the inflation and provoked a storm of protest from
savers’ organizations from throughout the country when its terms were made
public in early May. Much of this anger was directed against the DNVP, where
Georg Best, a prominent Darmstadt jurist elected to the Reichstag in Decem-
ber 1924 as the party’s liaison to the revaluation movement, refused to go
along with the compromise bill and vowed to oppose it when it came before
the Reichstag’s revaluation committee. The conflict drew to a dramatic head
on 13–14 May 1925 when Best announced his resignation from the DNVP

58
Minutes of a meeting between representatives of the government and the leadership of
the government parties, 18 Mar. 1925, in Akten der Reichskanzlei: Die Kabinette Luther
I u. II. 15. Januar 1925 bis 20. Januar 1926. 20. Januar 1926 bis 17. Mai 1926, edited by
Karl Heinz Minuth, 2 vols. (Boppard am Rhein, 1977), 1:185 97.
59
Kalckreuth and Hepp (RLB) to the executive committee of the DNVP Reichstag delega
tion, 11 May 1925, BA Berlin, NL Hepp, 4/145 46. See also Reichs Landbund e.V.,
Landbund und Aufwertungsgesetz, Vortrags Material für Landbundführer und Redner,
no. 4 (Berlin, 1926).
60
Goldacker to Westarp, 2 June 1925, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, VN 55.
61
“Stellungnahme des Arbeitsausschusses Deutschnationaler Industrieller zur Aufwer
tungsfrage,” 4 June 1925, NSSA Osnabrück, C1, 90/34 36.
    

Reichstag delegation after it had voted to accept the revaluation compromise

that had been hammered out with the other government parties.62 To Best, the
DNVP’s support of this compromise represented a breach of faith with the
revaluation movement that he, as a man of his word, could no longer coun-
tenance.63 To those in the DNVP organization with their fingers on the pulse
of the party’s grass-roots support, the disaffection of Best and his supporters
was a cause for great concern.64
The revaluation issue was to haunt the leaders of the DNVP over the course
of the next three years and left their party exposed to charges of duplicity and
electoral opportunism. For their own part, the Nationalists continued to
maintain that they had done everything in their power to meet the demands
of the revaluation movement and that without the party’s constant pressure no
revision of the revaluation provisions of the Third Emergency Tax Decree
would have taken place.65 Though disingenuous at best, these claims held true
for at least one prominent Nationalist, former party chairman Oskar Hergt
who, as minister of justice in the Luther cabinet, had worked tirelessly on
behalf of what he thought to be a fair and equitable settlement of the revalu-
ation question.66 And, as fate would have it, the unpleasant task of defending
the DNVP’s role in the adoption of the revaluation compromise fell to none
other than Hergt. Speaking before the Reichstag on 10 July, Hergt insisted that
the bill under consideration was the best that one could expect in view of
Germany’s economic situation and denounced Social Democratic charges that
the DNVP had abandoned the small investor to the avarice of big business and
large-scale agriculture as pure and simple demagogy. At the same time, Hergt
argued that if anything stood in the way of an equitable settlement of the
revaluation question, it was the financial burden Germany had incurred with
the acceptance of the Dawes Plan. Accordingly, it was this, and not a lack of
commitment on the part of the government or the DNVP, that had made it
impossible to do more for the German saver than what the current bill had to
offer.67 Six days later the DNVP joined the other government parties in voting

62
Best to the DNVP executive committee, 14 May 1925, reprinted along with the party’s
response and other correspondence in Der Kampf um die Aufwertung, Deutschnationale
Flugschrift, no. 215 (Berlin, 1925), 29 30.
63
Best, “Das Kompromiß in der Aufwertungsfrage und seine Väter,” Die Aufwertung 2,
no. 23 (12 July 1925): 197 99.
64
For example, see Vogt to Westarp, 17 May 1925, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, II/13.
65
For example, see Ohne Deutschnationale keine Aufwertung! Was jeder von der Aufwer
tung wissen muß, Deutschnationale Flugschrift, no. 219 (Berlin, 1925).
66
Oskar Hergt, Zur Aufwertungsfrage. Reichstagsrede am 7. März 1925, Deutschnationale
Flugschrift, no. 206 (Berlin, 1925).
67
Oskar Hergt, Der Endkampf um die Aufwertung. Reichstagsrede am 10. Juli 1925,
Deutschnationale Flugschrift, no. 217 (Berlin, 1925).
   , –

for the controversial revaluation bill ad it came to the Reichstag for a final vote
on 16 July 1925.68
The DNVP’s failure to live up to the promises it had made to the
revaluation movement during the 1924 election campaigns highlighted the
increasingly prominent role that organized economic interests had come to
play not just in the DNVP’s internal affairs but in German political life as a
whole. This could also be seen in the way the DNVP responded to organized
agriculture’s demands for tariff protection against foreign agricultural
imports. Landowners who had originally benefited from the runaway infla-
tion of the early 1920s now found themselves confronted with a whole new
set of problems that adversely affected their ability to operate at a profit. Not
only had many farmers sold their 1923 harvests for paper marks that were
subsequently rendered all but worthless by the introduction of the Renten-
mark in November 1923, but the inflation had also destroyed the capital
reserves of the private credit cooperatives through which the German farmer
had traditionally obtained the inexpensive, short-term loans he needed for
the purchase of seed, fertilizer, and farm machinery. This coincided with the
virtual collapse of agricultural prices on the world market and the specter of
massive agricultural imports from the United States, Canada, and eastern
Europe.69 If German agriculture was to survive the deepening crisis left in the
wake of Weimar’s fiscal and economic stabilization, argued conservative farm
leaders like RLB president Count Eberhard von Kalckreuth and DNVP
Reichstag deputy Prätorius von Richthofen-Boguslawitz, it was absolutely
imperative to provide the German farmer with effective tariff protection
against the sheer volume of foreign agricultural products that would soon
flood the domestic market.70
The DNVP’s decision to join the Luther cabinet at the beginning of the year
was driven in large part by the desire of its agrarian wing to have a hand in
formulating German trade policy after Germany regained full tariff autonomy
in January 1925.71 Luther’s minister of agriculture, Count Gerhard von Kanitz,
recognized the danger that the threat of foreign agricultural imports posed to
the stability of Germany’s agricultural economy and readily conceded the need

68
Paul Moldenhauer, Die Regelung der Aufwertungsfrage (Cologne, 1925).
69
On the plight of German agriculture, see Franz Schenk von Stauffenberg, Bauernnot! Ein
Mahnruf, Wirtschaftsfragen der Zeit, nos. 4 5 (Berlin, n.d. [1925]).
70
See Eberhard von Kalckreuth, Ernährung und Schutzzoll, Wirtschaftsfragen der Zeit,
no. 3 (Berlin, 1925), and Prätorius von Richthofen Boguslawitz, Zur Zollfrage (Schweib
nitz, 1925), esp. 10 11.
71
Martin Schiele, “Die Agrarpolitik der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei in den Jahren 1925/
1928,” in Max Weiß, ed., Der Nationale Wille. Werden und Wirken der Deutschnationa
len Volkspartei 1918 1928 (Essen, 1928), 291 306.
    

for tariff protection for large landowner and small farmer alike.72 Under Kanitz’s
guidance, the Luther government began to work with representatives from the
DVP and DNVP on formulating the general guidelines of a new tariff policy
aimed at reconciling the interests of industry and agriculture. This was to be
achieved by establishing minimum tariffs for a wide range of agricultural
products at the same time that the domestic market for industrial goods was
to be protected against “unnecessary” foreign competition. The situation within
the DNVP was far from unanimous, and it was only after Westarp went through
the motions of resigning the delegation chairmanship in late May that the
delegation finally agreed on the terms of the bill that he had negotiated with
the leaders of the other government parties.73 As expected, the proposed bill
encountered strong opposition from the two working-class parties on the Left as
well as from a solid majority within the DDP Reichstag delegation. In the final
analysis, however, it was the leaders of the DNVP’s Christian-national labor
wing who tipped the balance in favor of passage by mobilizing the support of
Christian labor leaders in the Center, with the result that the controversial tariff
bill was adopted by a narrow margin in the Reichstag on 12 August 1925.74
Although the Nationalists were quick to claim credit for the passage of the
1925 tariff bill,75 they were well aware of its limitations and regarded it as a
little more than a provisional measure that would have to be supplemented by
further action in the future.76 Germany’s large grain producers were particu-
larly displeased with the new tariff bill because it failed to provide them with
the same protection against foreign grain imports that small family farmers
had received for meat and dairy products.77 All of this tended to reinforce the
suspicion in influential agrarian circles that the true beneficiary of the new
tariff bill was not agriculture but those sectors of the German industrial
establishment that were most interested in gaining access to international
markets. As a result, serious doubts over the wisdom of the DNVP’s decision

72
Gerhard von Kanitz, Die Lage der deutschen Landwirtschaft und ihr Verhältnis zur
Industrie. Vortrag im Industrie Club Düsseldorf gehalten am 7. März 1925 (Düsseldorf,
n.d. [1925], 6 11.
73
Letter from Ada Gräfin von Westarp to Gertraude Freifrau Hiller von Gaertringen,
27 May 1925, NL Westarp, Gärtringen.
74
For further details, see Stürmer, Koalition und Opposition, 98 107, as well as Ohnezeit,
Zwischen “schärfster Opposition,” 299 306, and Gessner, Agrarverbände, 46 81.
75
G. R. Treviranus, “Landwirtschaft,” in Politische Praxis 1926, ed. Walther Lambach
(Hamburg, n.d. [1926]), 211 38, esp. 223 24.
76
See Otto Rippel, “Die Deutschnationalen als Regierungspartei,” in Politische Praxis 1926,
ed. Walther Lambach (Hamburg, n.d. [1926]), 66 71, here 68, and Hans Schlange
Schöningen, “Die Deutschnationale Volkspartei und die Landwirtschaft,” in Der natio
nale Wille. Werden und Wirken der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei 1918 1928, ed. Max
Weiß (Essen, 1928), 307 18, esp. 311 13.
77
Comments by Arnim Rittgarten at a meeting of the executive committee of the Branden
burg Rural League, 19 Aug. 1925, BA Berlin, R 8034 I, 268/462 77.
   , –

to enter the national government began to surface within the ranks of organ-
ized agriculture. Whereas Karl Hepp and the more moderate elements of the
RLB leadership defended the government’s trade initiative as a positive step
towards restoring agriculture’s economic viability, many farm leaders – and
particularly those who had opposed the DNVP’s entry into the Luther gov-
ernment in the first place – argued that agriculture had given away too much
to industry in arriving at the compromise upon which the new tariff law was
based.78 This criticism seemed particularly warranted in light of the way in
which the interests of the German wine industry had been shortchanged in the
bilateral trade treaty that Germany had negotiated with Spain in August
1924 and that the DNVP and Bavarian People’s Party had categorically
rejected in committee earlier that spring.79

Foreign Policy Challenges

To many Nationalists, it seemed that the DNVP’s record of accomplishment
entry as a member of the Luther government had not justified the sacrifice of
political principle this had entailed. Agriculture’s uneasiness over the future
course of German trade policy and the frustration the Nationalists felt over
their inability to satisfy the expectations of the revaluation movement left
party leaders increasingly vulnerable on what was to become the litmus test of
the DNVP’s reliability as a coalition partner, the proposed Rhineland security
pact with France and Belgium. In early 1925 the German Foreign Office had
sent the British and French the general outlines of a proposal whereby
Germany would join Great Britain, France, and Belgium in signing a Rhine-
land security pact that would not only end military occupation of the Rhine
but, more importantly from the Allied standpoint, would guarantee existing
boundaries between Germany and her former enemies in the west.80 When the
details of this proposal were made public at the beginning of March, the
leaders of the DNVP voiced reservations about the proposed security pact
but scrupulously avoided a public debate on the matter for fear of jeopardizing
their position in the Luther cabinet.81 In meeting with the leaders of the

78
See the exchange between Hepp and Wangenheim at a meeting of the RLB tariff and
trade committee, 15 Apr. 1925, BA Koblenz, NL Weilnböck, 37.
79
For example, see Hepp to Stresemann, 24 May 1925, PA AA Berlin, NL Stresemann, 93/
172762 63.
80
For further details, see Peter Krüger, Die Aussenpolitik der Weimarer Republik (Darm
stadt, 1985), 269 84, as well as Jonathan Wright, “Stresemann and Locarno,” Contem
porary European History 4 (1995): 109 31.
81
For example, see Schiele to Stresemann, 21 Mar. 1925, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, VN 121,
and to Westarp, 21 Mar. 1925, ibid., II/19, as well as Schultz Bromberg to Westarp, 21
Mar. 1925, ibid. For further details, see Dörr, “Deutschnationale Volkspartei,” 100 10,
and Ohnezeit, Zwischen “schärfster Opposition,” 319 28.
    

DNVP Reichstag delegation on 2 April, Stresemann was thus able to secure

their tentative support for his foreign policy initiative by stressing how the
proposed security pact would tie the French to a specific schedule for the
evacuation of the Rhine, eliminate the threat of future unilateral French action
like the occupation of the Ruhr, and preempt the conclusion of an Anglo-
Franco-Belgian pact directed against the threat of German revanchism.82
Although the leaders of the DNVP Reichstag delegation remained faithful to
the terms of their compromise with the Luther cabinet through the spring of
1925, they came under increasingly heavy attack from both within and outside
the party for their tacit support of Stresemann’s foreign policy initiative. For
Germany’s patriotic and paramilitary Right, the controversy over the proposed
security pact would test the DNVP’s willingness to defend Germany’s national
honor even if this meant forsaking the material benefits of remaining in the
government. Of all the organizations on the radical Right, none was more
aggressive in its attacks on Stresemann’s foreign policy than the Pan-German
League.83 Here the objective was not merely to block the proposed security
pact but, more importantly, to use the fight over the conduct of German
foreign policy to force the DNVP out of the cabinet and to bring its first
experiment in government participation to an ignominious end. After the
1922 racist crisis the Pan-Germans had staked their entire political strategy
on building up a strong position within the DNVP and transforming it into an
instrument of the racist cause. After having played a major role in designing
the party’s successful strategy for the May 1924 Reichstag elections, the party’s
racist wing resented the way in which its message had been muted in the
Nationalist campaign for the December 1924 elections and how they had been
relegated to the sidelines in the negotiations that accompanied the DNVP’s
entry into the national government in January 1925.84 For the Pan-Germans,
the conflict over the proposed security pact with France and Belgium thus
afforded them an opportunity to reclaim their place in the party and to reverse
the course in which the DNVP was apparently headed.

82
Protocol of a discussion between Luther, Stresemann, and the leaders of the DNVP
Reichstag delegation, 2 Apr. 1925, PA AA Berlin, NL Stresemann, 23/158577 85. For
further details, see Gratwohl, Stresemann and the DNVP, 58 75, and Wright, Stresemann,
301 48.
83
For further details, see Barry A. Jackisch, “Kuno Graf von Westarp und die Auseinan
dersetzungen über Locarno. Konservative Aussenpolitik und die deutschnationale Par
teikrise 1925,” in “Ich bin der letzte Preuße”: Der politische Lebensweg des konservativen
Politikers Kuno Graf von Westarp, ed. Larry Eugene Jones and Wolfram Pyta (Cologne,
Weimar, and Vienna, 2006), 147 62, here 150 57.
84
See Claß’s remarks at a meeting of the ADV managing committee, 30 Jan. 1 Feb. 1925,
BA Berlin, R 8048, 141/36 39, 41 44. See also Jackisch, Pan German League, 111 31, and
Hofmeister, “Between Monarchy and Dictatorship,” 275 82.
   , –

Meeting in Dresden on 21–22 March 1925, ADV managing committee

decided to bring as much pressure as possible to bear upon the DNVP
Reichstag delegation and the Nationalist ministers in the Luther cabinet in
an attempt to block approval of Stresemann’s proposed security pact for the
Rhineland.85 This was accompanied by a so-called German Evening in
Dresden’s Wettiner Hall that attracted over a thousand participants and
that was highlighted by speeches by ADV chairman Heinrich Claß and
DNVP Reichstag deputy Carl Gottfried Gok in which they subjected Stre-
semann’s foreign policy to a scathing attack.86 This marked the beginning
of a public crusade against Stresemann that grew in intensity through the
spring and early summer of 1925. In June the ADV leadership intensified
its efforts at the local and regional levels of the DNVP’s national organiza-
tion to make it all the more difficult for the party’s parliamentary leader-
ship to ignore the Pan-German agenda.87 By then, other right-wing
organizations had also begun to take up the struggle against Stresemann
and the proposed security pact. On 23 May 1925 the leaders of the United
Patriotic Leagues denounced the proposed security pact as well as efforts to
join the League of Nations as steps that would lead to Germany’s servitude
and military enslavement to its mortal enemies.88 Privately the VVVD’s
national chairman Count Rüdiger von der Goltz exhorted the DNVP party
leadership to do everything in its power to strengthen the party’s political
resolve in seeing the struggle against the security pact to a successful
conclusion. A repeat of the fateful split of 29 August 1924, he warned,
would have disastrous consequences not just for the DNVP but for the
entire nationalist Right.89
In the meantime, the most visible of Germany’s paramilitary organizations,
the Stahlhelm, felt that it could no longer remain on the sidelines and reluc-
tantly added its voice to the rising cacophony of right-wing demands for a
repudiation of Stresemann’s foreign policy. Following Hitler’s abortive Beer
Hall putsch in November 1923, the Stahlhelm had moved quickly to establish
itself as a formidable force in the struggle for control of public space in towns
and middle-sized cities and came to represent a voice in German national

85
Minutes of the ADV managing committee, 21 22 Mar. 1925, BA Berlin, R 8048, 142/
73 102. See also Vietinghoff Scheel to Leopold, 3 Aug. 1925, NL Westarp, Gärtringen,
VN 54.
86
Jackisch, Pan German League, 118.
87
Claß’s remarks in the minutes of the ADV managing committee, 4 5 July 1925, BA
Berlin, R 8048, 143/52 56.
88
Resolution adopted at the conclusion of the meeting of VVVD delegate conference,
23 May 1925, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, VN 97.
89
Goltz to Westarp, 15 July 1925, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, VN 95.
    

politics that could not be easily ignored.90 The Stahlhelm’s decision to align
itself with the forces opposed to the proposed pact represented a fundamental
reversal of the political course that Franz Seldte and the leaders of the
Stahlhelm had set for themselves following the collapse of efforts in the fall
of 1923 to establish a national dictatorship under the tutelage of Seeckt or
some other right-wing leader. Throughout 1924 and the first half of 1925,
Seldte had remained on cordial terms with Stresemann and seemed perfectly
content to allow the foreign minister to use the Stahlhelm and its demands for
a more aggressive foreign policy as a way of reminding the Allies of the
domestic constraints under which he as foreign minister had to operate.91
All of this, however, began to change when the executive committee of the
Stahlhelm met on 4–5 July 1925 to discuss the proposed security pact. Here
Seldte found himself under heavy pressure from Duesterberg and those
members of the Stahlhelm leadership cadre with close ties to the DNVP’s
right wing to take a more aggressive stance against Stresemann and his foreign
policy.92 The meeting concluded with the adoption of a resolution that
condemned “the voluntary recognition of the provisions of the Versailles
Treaty, as well as the abandonment of German nationals or any of the stolen
territories, as an offense against German honor and dignity, which [the
Stahlhelm] must combat with all the means at its disposal.”93 Although the
leaders of the Stahlhelm tried to avert an open break with Stresemann and the
DVP,94 it was clear from the tone and language of the resolution that it stood
firmly opposed to any foreign policy initiative that purchased a diplomatic
understanding with the Allies by guaranteeing the boundaries of 1919.95
Developments on Germany’s patriotic Right received close attention not
only from Stresemann but also from the leaders of the DNVP. The National-
ists had assiduously cultivated the support of the various organizations that
belonged to the patriotic movement ever since the early 1920’s and enjoyed
particularly close ties to the Stahlhelm and the United Patriotic Leagues

90
Peter Fritzsche, “Between Fragmentation and Fraternity: Civic Patriotism and the Stahl
helm in Bourgeois Neighborhoods during the Weimar Republic.” Tel Aviver Jahrbuch für
deutsche Geschichte 17 (1988): 123 44.
91
Franke (Stahlhelm) to Bernhard, 8 Jan. 1924, PA AA Berlin, NL Stresemann, 265/
156674 75. See also Berghahn, Stahlhelm Bund der Frontsoldaten 1918 1935 (Düssel
dorf, 1966), 75 91.
92
Remarks by Duesterberg and Eulenburg Wicken in the minutes of the Stahlhelm execu
tive committee, 4 5 July 1925, BA Potsdam, R 72, 4/33 35, 53 55, 58 62.
93
Resolution of the Stahlhelm executive committee, 4 July 1925, reprinted in Stahlhelm
Handbuch, ed. Walter Kettner and Heinrich Hildebrandt, 3rd ed. (Berlin, 1927), 45.
94
Ausfeld to Stresemann, 13 July 1925, PA AA Berlin, NL Stresemann, 27/159377 78.
95
For example, see the letter from Hampe to the Stahlhelm’s national leadership, 1
Apr. 1925, BA Berlin, R 72, 279/65 66.
   , –

despite their ostensibly nonpartisan character.96 The leaders of the DNVP

were particularly sensitive to the positions these organization adopted on
issues like the proposed Rhineland security pact and Germany’s entry into
the League of Nations. Their agitation against the security pact struck a
particularly responsive chord among those Nationalists who had opposed
their party’s participation in the national cabinet and were looking for a
suitable pretext that would allow them to return to the relative comfort of
an opposition party.97 The leaders of the DNVP Reichstag delegation, who
were in the final stages of guiding the revaluation and tariff bills through
parliament, were wary of launching a full-scale attack against Stresemann’s
foreign policy that, in all likelihood, would lead to the collapse of the govern-
ment. Though adamantly opposed to a security pact that entailed formal
recognition of Germany’s western boundaries, Westarp was reluctant to force
a cabinet crisis in the summer of 1925 that might lead to the collapse of the
national government and preferred instead to wait and see what course future
developments would take.98 The Nationalists thus found themselves obliged to
give their tacit approval – though subject to explicit reservations that Westarp
spelled out in a speech before the Reichstag on 22 July 1925 – to Stresemann’s
efforts to reach a diplomatic accommodation with the French on the security
of Germany’s western borders.99 Even then, the DNVP Reichstag delegation
remained unanimously opposed to the proposed security pact and was deter-
mined to prevent it from being signed without significant modifications on a
wide range of issues. In the meantime, the Nationalists would use the public
debate that the proposed security pact had spawned to revisit the issue of
Germany’s alleged guilt for the outbreak of World War I and the legitimacy of
the Versailles Treaty until a more propitious moment for attacking Strese-
mann’s conduct of German foreign policy presented itself.100

96
For example, see Otto Schmidt Hannover, Die vaterländische Bewegung und die
Deutschnationale Volkspartei. Vortrag, gehalten in Berlin am 28. März 1924, Deutsch
nationale Flugschrift, no. 167 (Berlin, 1924), and Max Weiß, “Wir und die vaterländi
sche Bewegung,” in Der nationale Wille. Werden und Wirken der Deutschnationalen
Volkspartei 1918 1928, ed. Max Weiß (Essen, 1928), 351 61.
97
For example, see the report on the meeting of the DNVP’s National Racist Committee,
5 July 1925, appended to a circular from the DNVP’s Racist Committee to its members
and affiliated regional chapters, 10 July 1925, BA Berlin, R 8005, 361/192 94.
98
Westarp’s speech at a meeting of the executive committee of the Central Association of
German Conservatives, 6 June 1925, BLHA Potsdam, Rep. 37, NL Arnim Boitzenburg,
4429/42 49.
99
Kuno von Westarp, Keine neue Ketten! Rede zum Sicherheitspakt am 22. Juli 1925 im
Reichstag, Deutschnationale Flugschrift, no. 218 (Berlin, 1925). On Westarp’s dilemma,
see Gasteiger, Westarp, 270 88.
100
Westarp to the Nationale Rundschau in Bremen, 22 July 1925, NL Westarp, Gärtringen,
VN 97. See also the entries in Stresemann’s diary for 3, 7 and 17 July 1925, in
Stresemann, Vermächtnis, ed. Bernhard, 2:143 45, 151 55.
    

The Locarno Predicament

Pressure on the Nationalist party leadership to dissociate itself from the
proposed Rhineland security pact continued to mount through the late summer
and early fall of 1925.101 On 22 September Martin Schiele, the Nationalist
minister of the interior and the DNVP’s official liaison to the Luther cabinet,
presented the government with four demands that had to be met before his
party would consent to any treaties that Germany might conclude with the
Allies at the upcoming conference at Locarno. The most contentious of these
was a demand for the formal repudiation of the war guilt clause by the
signatories of the proposed Rhineland security pact.102 The fact that these
demands were, by Stresemann’s own admission, remarkably mild in tone and
substance suggests that they were formulated not so much to create difficul-
ties for the government as to assuage the leaders of the DNVP’s district and
provincial organizations who, by no strange coincidence, were scheduled to
meet in Berlin later that afternoon. Schiele’s conciliatory attitude was no
doubt informed by the fact that, as a high-ranking official in the National
Rural League, he believed that the DNVP should remain in the government so
that organized agriculture could exercise a decisive influence on the formula-
tion of Germany’s future trade policy. This position stood in sharp contrast to
the militancy of those party leaders who had been subjected to a steady
barrage of anti-Stresemann propaganda from the Pan-German League and
the patriotic Right. Although Schiele tried to appease the anti-Stresemann
elements on the DNVP’s right wing by adopting a tougher posture in subse-
quent negotiations with the foreign minister and other members of the Luther
cabinet, he was reluctant to press the matter to its logical conclusion and
ultimately relented in his efforts to have the DNVP’s demands adopted as the
basis of the guidelines that were to define the position of the German
delegation at Locarno.103 Only Schiele’s insistence upon the inclusion of the
DNVP’s demands for the repudiation of the war guilt clause in the govern-
ment’s acceptance of the invitation to Locarno succeeded in reconciling an

101
Claß’s report to the ADV managing committee, Sept. 4, 1925, BA Berlin, R 8048, 144/
9 19. See also the account in Albrecht Philipp, “Mein Weg: Rückschau eines Siebzig
jährigen auf allerlei Geschenisse und Menschen,” Dritte Teil: “Abgeordnetenjahre in der
Weimarer Republik (1919 1930),” SHStA Dresden, NL Philipp, 4/178 85. For further
details, see Dörr, “Deutschnationale Volkspartei,” 158 201.
102
Westarp, “Ein Jahr Außenpolitik,” in Politische Praxis 1926, ed. Walther Lambach
(Hamburg, n.d. [1926]), 26 47, here 40 41. On contacts with the government, see
Lindeiner Wildau to Schiele, 11 Sept. 1925, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, VN 120. For
further details, see Ohnezeit, Zwischen “schärfster Opposition,” 328 39.
103
Minutes of the ministerial conference, 1 Oct. 1925, and cabinet meeting, 2 Oct. 1925,
Kabinette Luther, ed. Minuth, 1:600 05, 657 66.
   , –

increasingly contentious DNVP Reichstag delegation to Germany’s participa-

tion in the conference.104
By the time the Locarno conference opened on 5 October 1925, the Nation-
alists felt isolated within the Luther cabinet and were frustrated by their
inability to reconcile the imperative for governmental participation with the
commitment to defend Germany’s national honor. More than anything else,
the leaders of the DNVP were determined to prevent a repeat of what had
happened the preceding August when the DNVP Reichstag delegation had
split down the middle in the vote on ratification of the Dawes Plan. The
specter of another split was never far from their minds and remained very
much part of the political baggage that Westarp and other party leaders
brought with them as they approached the problems confronting their party’s
options in the fall of 1925.105 In the early stages of the negotiations at Locarno,
Schiele was able to keep the DNVP Reichstag delegation lined up behind the
German delegation at Locarno despite strong opposition from Hugenberg and
the leaders of the party’s right wing.106 But as reports from Locarno began to
make their way back to Berlin, concerns that Stresemann and the German
delegation were not giving sufficient credence to the Nationalist position on
matters like the war guilt clause or Germany’s entry into the League of Nations
began to take hold within the DNVP Reichstag delegation. This, in turn, left
Schiele with little choice but to accommodate Westarp and other party leaders
who were fundamentally opposed to what Stresemann was trying to accom-
plish at Locarno. Even then, Westarp was reluctant to precipitate a break with
the Luther cabinet for fear that this would clear the way for Social Democratic
participation in a new government in which there would have been little, if
any, resistance to Stresemann’s foreign policy. If a break with the government
was to take place, then it would have to be after and not before the conclusion
of negotiations at Locarno.107
In the meantime, the leaders of Germany’s patriotic Right had begun to
mobilize their supporters for a crusade against the proposed Rhineland secur-
ity pact. At the heart of this activity stood the Pan-German League and its

104
On the situation in the DNVP Reichstag delegation, see Westarp to his wife, 24
Sept. 1925, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, as well as also his notes on a meeting of the DNVP
Reichstag delegation, 25 Sept. 1925, ibid., VN 121.
105
Westarp to the DNVP district organization in Bremen, 12 Oct. 1925, NL Westarp,
Gärtringen, VN 94.
106
Schiele to Luther, 5 Oct. 1925, in Kabinette Luther, ed. Minuth, 2:668 69, n. 5. For
Hugenberg’s position, see his letter to Hergt, 5 Oct. 1925, NL Westarp, Gärtringen,
VN 53.
107
Westarp to Traub, 12 Oct. 1925, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, II/17. See also the exchange of
letters between Westarp and Schiele in the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, 28 Mar. 1931,
no. 142.
    

allies in the DNVP’s National Racist Committee and the patriotic leagues.108
On 22 September the United Patriotic Leagues sent the DNVP Reichstag
delegation a resolution urging the Nationalists to resign from the cabinet if
their point of view on the upcoming Locarno conference did not prevail. The
Stahlhelm and the German Kyffhäuser League of Imperial Warriors
(Deutscher Reichskriegerbund Kyffhäuser), an organization for retired army
officers that dated back to the early 1890s, immediately endorsed this position
with an addendum calling upon the DNVP not to betray the memory of their
fallen comrades by submitting to a pact that so grievously violated Germany’s
national honor.109 On 6 October the executive committee of the Stahlhelm
amplified its position on the Locarno negotiations by adopting a resolution
that specifically enjoined the German delegation from acceding to anything
that might compromise the restoration of Germany’s national honor and
singled out the war guilt clause as a matter upon which no compromise was
possible.110 This was directed first and foremost against those Nationalists
who, like Schiele, sought a compromise formula that would have made it
possible for the DNVP to remain in the government and reinforced the strong
stand that the leaders of the party’s right wing had taken against Germany’s
participation in the Locarno conference. The agitation of the patriotic Right
produced widespread uneasiness at the local and regional levels of the DNVP’s
national organization and made it all the more difficult for the DNVP party
leadership to devise a formula that would allow it to remain in the government
while swallowing what now loomed as an unmitigated foreign policy
disaster.111
The German delegation returned home from Locarno on 17 October after
having initialed an agreement that fell far short of satisfying Nationalist
demands regarding the proposed security pact. At a cabinet meeting two days
later, Schiele gave a indication of what was soon to follow when he refused to
give his stamp of approval or that of his party to the results of the Locarno

108
Correspondence between Freytagh Loringhoven and Prince Wilhelm Friedrich, 19 21
Sept. 1925, BA Berlin, R 8048, 223/84 87. On the role of the Pan Germans in the
crusade against Locarno, see Jackisch, “Westarp und die Auseinandersetzungen über
Locarno,” 155 60.
109
VVVD to the DNVP Reichstag delegation, 22 Sept. 1925, NL Westarp, Gärtringen,
VN 97.
110
Resolution by the Stahlhelm executive committee, 6 Oct. 1925, reprinted in Sigmund
Graff, “Gründung und Entwicklung des Bundes,” in Der Stahlhelm. Erinnerungen und
Bilder aus den Jahren 1918 1933, ed. Franz Seldte, 2 vols. (Berlin, 1932 33), 1:58 59.
111
Treviranus to Jarres, 26 Oct. 1925, BA Koblenz, NL Jarres, 54. On unrest at the grass
roots of the DNVP party organization, see Hergt to Westarp, 16 Sept. 1925, NL Westarp,
Gärtringen, VN 53, and the resolution “Die Deutschnationalen Sachsens zum Sicher
heitspakt,” n.d. [15 Sept. 1925], appended to Kürbs to Westarp, 17 Sept. 1925, ibid.,
VN 94.
   , –

conference.112 Schiele’s position – and that of Westarp as well – was that the
DNVP should remain in the cabinet as long as it could use its influence as a
member of the governmental coalition to reshape the Locarno agreements in
accordance with its own sense of Germany’s national honor. But their efforts
to prevent a break with the Luther cabinet were undercut by the determination
of those on DNVP’s right wing to use the Locarno accords to force their party
out of the government. Schiele and Westarp won the first skirmish when on
21 October they succeeded in persuading the DNVP Reichstag delegation to
go along with their strategy until it had become clear that no improvement in
the terms of the Locarno treaty world be forthcoming.113 But they could not
escape the wrath of the party’s extreme right wing. On 22 October the
executive committee of the DNVP’s National Racist Committee and a bastion
of Pan-German influence within the party met in Berlin to formulate a
resolution denouncing the proposed security pact that would then be pre-
sented at a joint meeting of the party executive committee and the leaders of
the DNVP’s state and regional organizations that was scheduled for the
following day. The resolution rejected the results of the Locarno negotiations
as irreconciliable with the conditions that the DNVP had attached to its
willingness to take part in the negotiations in the first place and demanded
that the Reichstag delegation reverse the position it had taken the day before
by withdrawing from the governmental coalition.114 The battle lines between
the party leadership and the extremists on the DNVP’s right wing could not
have been more clearly drawn.
The meeting of the DNVP party executive committee with the leaders of the
party’s state and regional organizations on the morning of 23 October was
tumultuous from beginning to end, so tumultuous that Schiele, in a move that
reflected his growing desperation over the situation in the party, turned to
Luther in hopes that the chancellor might provide him with a statement on the
future status of Alsace-Lorraine that might appease his critics on the DNVP’s
right wing.115 But there was little that Luther could do to accommodate his
beleaguered cabinet officer, with the result that the representatives of the
DNVP’s district and local organizations proceeded to adopt a resolution that
bluntly rejected the outcome of the Locarno negotiations as “unacceptable for
the party.”116 This placed the party’s organizational base on a collision course
with the party’s national leadership and those within the DNVP Reichstag

112
Minutes of the cabinet meeting, 19 Oct. 1925, in Kabinette Luther, ed. Minuth, 2:780 89.
113
Korrespondenz der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei, 22 Oct. 1925, no. 229.
114
Resolution adopted by the DNVP’s National Racist Committee, 22 Oct. 1925, NL
Westarp, Gärtringen, VN 55.
115
Memorandum by Kempner, 23 Oct. 1925, in Kabinette Luther, ed., Minuth, 2:795 96.
116
Korrespondenz der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei, 24 Oct. 1925, no. 231.
    

delegation who were prepared to accept the Locarno agreement as part of the
price they had to pay for remaining in the national government. But the real
question was whether the party could afford to risk another split reminiscent
of the one that had occurred a scant year earlier in the vote on the Dawes Plan.
At a stormy meeting of the DNVP Reichstag delegation on the afternoon of 25
October, Westarp demanded that for the sake of party unity his colleagues
should set aside their personal feelings and authorize the DNVP’s resignation
from the existing governmental coalition. Although several deputies pro-
ceeded to voice their anger over the way in which the DNVP’s district and
local leaders had meddled in the delegation’s affairs, the delegation neverthe-
less followed Westarp’s directive and instructed Schiele and the other cabinet
officers who belonged to the DNVP – Hergt at the ministry of justice along
with finance minister Otto von Schlieben and economics minister Albert
Neuhaus – to resign from the Luther cabinet.117 In justifying this step, the
official party press insisted that the Locarno accords did not follow the
guidelines the cabinet itself had given to the German delegation at Locarno
and that the DNVP was therefore not bound by the results of the conference.
Responsibility for the collapse of the government coalition, the Nationalists
insisted, rested with the government and not with the DNVP.118
At the same time that the Nationalists tried to avoid responsibility for the
crisis of the Luther cabinet, they appealed to Reich President von Hindenburg
in hopes that he could be persuaded not only to block ratification of the
Locarno Treaty but also to initiate a full-scale reversal of Germany’s political
course. Ever since his election to the Reich presidency, Hindenburg had been
besieged by congratulatory telegrams and letters from prominent Nationalist
leaders hopeful that he would use the powers of his office to support their
political agenda.119 But Hindenburg’s activity in the first months of his Reich
presidency had done little to justify such hopes. Not only had he ignored
Nationalist objections to the retention of Otto Meißner as state secretary in the
bureau of the Reich presidency, but he proved extremely reluctant to use
the powers of his office to bring about the political changes for which the
Nationalists had been hoping. For those Nationalists who had grown disen-
chanted with Hindenburg’s performance at the presidential palace, the
Locarno crisis afforded the Reich president an excellent opportunity to erase

117
Ibid., 26 Oct. 1925, no. 232. See also Treviranus to Jarres, 26 Oct. 1925, BA Koblenz, NL
Jarres, 54.
118
Korrespondenz der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei, 31 Oct. 1925, no. 237. See also Erfüllte
und unerfüllte Forderungen der deutschen Außenpolitik, Heft 2, Locarno, Deutschnatio
nales Rüstzeug, no. 27 (Berlin, 1925), esp. 9 12, 15 17, as well as the articles by Westarp
from late October 1925 in Kuno von Westarp, Locarno. Authentische und kritische
Darstellung, Deutschnationale Flugschrift, no. 243 (Berlin, 1925), 3 16.
119
For example, see Westarp to Hindenburg, 29 Apr. 1925, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, II/66,
and Spahn to Hindenburg, n.d. [ca. 30 Apr. 1925], BA Koblenz, NL Spahn, 173.
   , –

those doubts and reassure the leaders of the German Right of his commitment
to their political aspirations. No less a figure than the DNVP Reichstag deputy
and former head of the German navy Alfred von Tirpitz urged Hindenburg to
use his constitutional authority as Reich president to end the current political
crisis by appointing an interim government that was consistent with his own
political views and that would refuse to implement the Locarno accords.120
By resigning from the government, the Nationalists hoped to precipitate a
crisis of sufficient gravity that Hindenburg would have no alternative but to
intervene on their behalf. That such hopes were indeed poorly founded
became increasingly clear when Hindenburg not only refused to disavow the
accomplishments of the German delegation at Locarno but severely chastised
the Nationalists for their own political foolishness. Writing to Tirpitz on
5 November 1925, Hindenburg did not hesitate to voice his frustration over
developments within the DNVP and to question the political foresight of those
who claimed to be his most loyal supporters:
Through their unexpectedly premature and brash action, the Nationalists
have excluded themselves from their hard fought role in the national
government and have postponed any change in the composition of the
Prussian government. I fear that such an attitude in today’s difficult times
will not find universal sympathy, but rather encourage internal discord to
the great joy of our enemies. Whether the old “conservatives” would have
acted in such a manner is something I leave for you to decide. One already
hears patriots speaking of “bulls in a china closet [Elefanten im Porzel
lanladen].” How unfortunate!121
Hindenburg’s admonition had less to do with the Nationalists’ opposition to
the Locarno accords than with his dissatisfaction over their choice of tactics.122
Though angered by the DNVP’s decision to leave the Luther cabinet, the Reich
president remained sympathetic to the Nationalist position on Locarno and
freely acquiesced in their efforts to mobilize his influence in preventing
Germany’s entry into the League of Nations.123 Still, his reluctance to act
publicly in the matter of Locarno left him vulnerable to attacks from the Pan-
German League and the more militantly antirepublican organizations in the
so-called patriotic front. In the meantime, the public debate over the Locarno
pact seemed to be reaching a crescendo. The Nationalists felt obliged to justify

120
Tirpitz to Hindenburg, 26 Oct. 1925, BA MA Freiburg, NL Tirpitz, 176/33 36. See also
Scheck, Tirpitz, 200 04. For further details, see Harald Zaun, Paul von Hindenburg und
die deutsche Außenpolitik 1925 1934 (Cologne and Vienna, 1999), 387 410, as well as
Pyta, Hindenburg, 490 94.
121
Hindenburg to Tirpitz, 5 Nov. 1925, BA MA Freiburg, NL Tirpitz, 176/37.
122
Keudell to Tirpitz, 10 Nov. 1925, BA MA Freiburg, NL Tirpitz, 278/23 24.
123
Memorandum of a conversation between Hindenburg and Tirpitz, 27 Nov. 1925, BA
MA Freiburg, NL Tirpitz, 176/42 44.
    

their resignation from the Luther cabinet and dispel rumors of a split within
the party by escalating their attacks against the Locarno accords.124 Moreover,
the Allied refusal to implement the corollaries, or so-called Rückwirkungen,
of the Locarno Treaty until after the treaty had been signed only provided
Stresemann’s enemies in the DNVP with added incentive for fighting the
treaty’s acceptance in parliament. Speaking at the DNVP’s national party
congress in Berlin on 16 November 1925, Westarp cited the failure to imple-
ment the corollaries before the treaty was signed as an indication of continued
Allied bad faith toward Germany and criticized the treaty as an ill-conceived
expedient that severely curtailed Germany’s freedom of movement in securing
a more thorough revision of the Versailles Treaty at some point in the future.
Whatever benefits the DNVP may have reaped from its participation in the
Luther cabinet – and here Westarp was clearly defending the decision to enter
the government in the first place – were overshadowed by the ominous
implications the Locarno Treaty held for the future conduct of German
foreign policy.125

With the formal ratification of Locarno 27 November 1925, a particularly

irksome chapter in the history of the German Right had been closed. In the
final analysis, neither the DNVP’s increasingly histrionic attacks against the
Locarno Treaty nor Hindenburg’s involvement in the efforts to block its
acceptance were to much avail. Nevertheless, the episode’s implications for
Germany’s future political development and in particular for the success of
Stresemann’s efforts to stabilize the republic from the Right were enormous.
Not only did the DNVP’s refusal to support Locarno and its subsequent
resignation from the national government constitute a severe setaback for
Stresemann’s efforts to stabilize the Weimar Republic from the right,126 but
this represented a decisive triumph for the Stahlhelm and its sister organiza-
tions on the patriotic Right. By mobilizing popular sentiment against the treaty
at the district and local levels of the Nationalist party organization, the
Stahlhelm and its affiliates in the patriotic movement played a decisive role
in forcing the DNVP’s resignation from the Luther cabinet.127 At the same
time, the fight over Locarno had done much to energize the patriotic move-
ment and to mobilize it against those special economic interests whose

124
For example, see Westarp’s articles from Nov. 1925, reprinted in Westarp, Locarno,
16 28.
125
Kuno von Westarp, Unser Ziel: Deutschlands Befreiung! Rede auf dem Reichsparteitage in
Berlin am 16. November 1925, Deutschnationale Flugschrift, no. 246 (Berlin, 1925),
13 20.
126
For Stresemann’s reaction, see his letter to Keudell, 27 Nov. 1925, PA AA Berlin, NL
Stresemann, 32/160613 15.
127
Treviranus to Jarres, 26 Oct. 1925, BA Koblenz, NL Jarres, 54.
   , –

influence had been instrumental in the ratification of the Dawes Plan and the
DNVP’s entry into the Luther cabinet. The net effect of all of this was to
undermine the unity of the German Right and to exacerbate the differences
between those governmental conservatives who were prepared, albeit with
personal and ideological reservations of the greatest magnitude, to pursue
their objectives within the framework of the existing system of government
and those radical nationalists who remained irreconcilably opposed to any
form of collaboration with the hated Weimar system.
 11

The Road Back to Power

The struggle over Locarno constituted a defining moment in the history of the
German Right. Not only had the DNVP’s resignation from the Luther cabinet
in October 1925 dealt a severe blow to Stresemann’s hopes of stabilizing the
Weimar Republic from the Right, but the struggle over Locarno had done
much to energize the various patriotic and paramilitary organizations that
constituted the nucleus of Germany’s radical Right. At the same time, the
collapse of the first Luther cabinet came as a bitter disappointment to those
special economic interests in agriculture, industry, and the Christian labor
movement that had underwritten the DNVP’s first experiment at government
participation and that were anxious to return to the corridors of power at the
first suitable opportunity. Caught between the demands of agriculture, indus-
try, and Christian labor for a return to government and the agitation of the
patriotic Right against Stresemann’s foreign policy, the leaders of the DNVP
found it increasingly difficult to chart a steady course for the German Right in
the post-Locarno era and floundered in a sea of uncertainty and indecision. At
the heart of this indecisiveness lay the paradox that in order to promote and
protect the welfare of those interests that constituted its material base the
DNVP was obliged to work within the framework of a governmental system to
which it was fundamentally and ideologically opposed. Whether or not the
DNVP would ever succeed in resolving this paradox would ultimately deter-
mine the fate of the Weimar Republic.
All of this coincided with a subtle, yet perceptible, intensification of the
legitimacy crisis that had plagued the Weimar Republic ever since its founding
in the wake of the November Revolution. Not only had the antisocial character
of the government’s stabilization program done much to embitter the very
constituencies upon which Germany’s nonsocialist parties relied for their
electoral support, but the authoritarian manner in which it had been imple-
mented undermined public confidence in the viability of Germany’s repub-
lican institutions. At the same time, the increasingly prominent role that
organized economic interests like the National Federation of German Industry
and the National Rural League began to play in the political process as well as
the increasing fragmentation of the Weimar party system along lines of
economic self-interest lent renewed credence to charges from the radical Right

   , –

that the existing system of government offered an inadequate framework for

the conduct of national policy. The net effect of all this was both to make it all
the more difficult for Weimar’s political leadership to forge a viable domestic
consensus for the conduct of national policy and to erode whatever legitimacy
the Weimar party system still possessed in the eyes of Germany’s nonsocialist
electorate.1

In the Wake of Locarno

By no means was the general course of Germany’s social and economic
development in the second half of the 1920s all that conducive to the success
of Stresemann’s stabilization strategy. The years from 1924 to 1928/29 were
years of economic contraction that contained the seeds of future collapse.
The measures that had been taken to stabilize the mark in 1923–24 triggered
an economic recession that drew to a climax towards the end of 1925 and the
beginning of 1926. The most dramatic symptom of the crisis was a sharp
increase in unemployment from 636,000 in October 1925 to 2,270,000 in
February 1926. This was accompanied by an unprecedented number of
business failures in 1925 and 1926. No sector of the economy managed to
escape the recession unscathed, although agriculture and heavy industry were
more severely affected than banking, manufacturing, and commerce.2 At the
heart of these difficulties lay an acute capital shortage that stemmed not just
from the weakness of the German stock market as a source of investment
capital but also from the restrictive credit policies of the German National
Bank. Further compounding the situation was the erosion of corporate
profits through the high tax rates that had been introduced as part of the
government’s stabilization program in 1923–24.3 Similarly, agriculture was
still reeling from the collapse of its credit cooperatives during the runaway
inflation of the early 1920s and found itself forced to compete with industry
on essentially unfavorable terms for the little capital that was still available.
With the collapse of agricultural prices on the international market and
rising domestic prices for fertilizer, fuel, and farm machinery, the German
farmer was caught in a price and credit squeeze that left him with no
alternative but to go into debt. Whatever gains the German farmer had

1
Larry Eugene Jones, “In the Shadow of Stabilization: German Liberalism and the Legitim
acy Crisis of the Weimar Party System, 1924 1930,” in Die Nachwirkungen der Inflation
auf die deutsche Geschichte 1924 1933, ed. Gerald D. Feldman (Munich, 1985), 21 41.
2
For further details, see Blaich, Die Wirtschaftskrise 1925 26 und die Reichsregierung. Von
der Erwerbslosenfürsorge zur Konjunkturpolitik (Kallmünz, 1977).
3
Harold James, The German Slump: Politics and Economics, 1924 1936 (Oxford, 1986),
130 31.
      

experienced as a result of the inflation were now threatened by the specter of

rising rural indebtedness.4
The recession that struck Germany in 1925–26 was anomalous in the sense
that it did not conform to the general pattern of international economic
development. The realization that the German slump was not part of an
international economic downturn but a specifically German phenomenon that
could be understood only in terms of the specific structural weaknesses of the
German economy gave rise to increased pressure from various sectors of the
German economy for more active state intervention in the economic process.
In December 1925 the leaders of the National Federation of German Industry
intensified their campaign on behalf of tax relief for business and industry by
publishing a set of comprehensive recommendations for economic and fiscal
reform. For the RDI the key to economic recovery lay in facilitating the
process of capital formation through a dramatic reduction in taxation and
government spending.5 In a similar vein, the leaders of the National Rural
League pinned their hopes of recovery on increased tariff protection for
the German farmer and called for a reversal of German trade policy that
would make the defense of the home market and not the conquest of new
markets for industrial and manufactured goods its chief aim.6 Neither these
demands stood any chance of making it through the Reichstag as long as the
DNVP, the largest of Germany’s nonsocialist parties, remained outside the
government.
After the DNVP’s resignation from the national government in the fall of
1925, the Luther cabinet reconstituted itself as a bourgeois minority cabinet
that was to remain in office until the Locarno accords had been ratified and
implemented.7 This was little more than a political expedient that underscored
the inherent weaknesses of Germany’s republican institutions and confirmed
right-wing claims that parliamentary democracy was incapable of producing a
stable domestic consensus for the conduct of national policy. No one was more

4
Ibid., 253 59.
5
Deutsche Wirtschafts und Finanzpolitik, Veröffentlichungen des Reichsverbandes der
Deutschen Industrie, no. 29 (Berlin, 1925), esp. 13 16. See also Weisbrod, Schwerindustrie
in der Weimarer Republik, 226 45.
6
Eberhard von Kalckreuth, Ernährung und Schutzzoll, Wirtschaftsfragen der Zeit, no. 3
(Berlin, n.d. [1925 26]). See also Dirk Stegmann, “Deutsche Zoll und Handelspolitik
1924/5 29 unter besonderer Berücksichtigung agrarischer und industrieller Interessen,” in
Industrielles System und politische Entwicklung. Verhandlungen des Internationalen Sym
posiums in Bochum vom 12 17. Juni 1973, ed. Hans Mommsen, Dietmar Petzinna, and
Bernd Weisbrod (Düsseldorf, 1974), 499 513.
7
Stürmer, Koalition und Opposition, 127 40. See also the memorandum drafted for Hin
denburg, “Bemerkungen zur Regierungs Umbildung,” 2 Dec. 1925, records of the Office of
the Reich Presidency, BA Berlin, Bestand R 601, 401/18 23.
   , –

disturbed by the implications of the DNVP’s decision to leave the government

than the leaders of the National Rural League. At a demonstration in Berlin
just three days after the DNVP’s resignation from the Luther cabinet, Reich
Agricultural Minister Gerhard von Kanitz listened to a steady stream of
speakers from the various parts of the country who deplored the increasingly
desperate situation in which German farmers found themselves since the end
of the inflation and called for immediate state intervention to prevent the total
collapse of German agriculture. Friedrich von Zitzewitz-Kottow from the
Pomeranian nobility, Johannes Wolf from the National Farm Workers’
League, Heimcke from Ravenstedt in Hanover, and DNVP Reichstag deputy
Georg Bachmann from Westheim in Bavaria spoke in telling detail of how the
deepening agricultural crisis had affected large landowners, farm laborers, and
small and middle-sized farmers alike. To conclude the conference, RLB presi-
dent Eberhard von Kalckreuth introduced a three-point resolution that called
for governmental action to reestablish the system of agricultural credit that
had been ruined by the inflation, an energetic price policy aimed at restoring
prewar parity between the production costs of agricultural and industrial
commodities, and strict controls over unproductive and superfluous adminis-
trative costs at the national, state, and municipal levels. All of this was
necessary, Kalckreuth insisted, to restore the health of German agriculture
and with it the health of the German nation.8
By the end of 1925 the moderates within the RLB were apparently prepared
to support Stresemann’s foreign policy in return for increased tariff protection
for domestic farm products.9 At the same time, they had become so distressed
by the implications the DNVP’s withdrawal from the government held for the
future of German trade policy that they began to promote the candidacy of
Karl Hepp, one of the RLB’s two presidents and a member of the DVP
Reichstag delegation, for the ministry of agriculture in the Luther cabinet.10
But this initiative ran into strong opposition at the upper echelons of the RLB
leadership from conservative farm leaders with close ties to the DNVP who
feared that any positive overture toward the national government might be

8
Bauer in Not. Herrenhaus Tagung des Reichs Landbundes, Mittwoch, den 28. Oktober
1925 (Berlin, 1925). For Kalckreuth’s resolution, see 41 42. In a similar vein, see Karl
Böhme, Der Bauern Not des Reiches Tod! (Nowawes, n.d. [1925]), and Franz Schenk
von Stauffenberg, Bauernnot! Ein Mahnruf, Wirtschaftsfragen der Zeit, nos. 4/5 (Berlin,
n.d. [1925 26]).
9
Stresemann’s memorandum of a conversation with Richard von Flemming Paatzig from
the Pomeranian Chamber of Agriculture (Landwirtschaftskammer für die Provinz Pom
mern), 6 Dec. 1925, PA AA Berlin, NL Stresemann, 272, cited in Stürmer, Koalition und
Opposition, 133.
10
Handwritten notes on the meeting of the RLB executive commitee, 13 Jan. 1926, NL
Westarp, Gärtringen, II/24.
      

interpreted as a sign of support for Stresemann’s foreign policy.11 At the same

time, the Brandenburg Rural League (Brandenburgischer Landbund), one of
the RLB’s most conservative regional affiliates, sent the RLB’s national leader-
ship a petition criticizing the DNVP for its failure to pay sufficient attention to
the vital interests of German agriculture and urging the RLB to continue its
cooperation with the government and the parties that supported it despite the
DNVP’s resignation from the cabinet.12 This only fueled rumors that the
leaders of the RLB were about to found a new party of their own as a way of
extricating themselves from the difficult situation in which the DNVP’s
resignation from the Luther cabinet had left them.13
Throughout all of this, the Nationalists remained resolutely opposed to any
accommodation with the Luther cabinet as long as this entailed explicit support
for Stresemann’s foreign policy and refused to go along with Germany’s entry
into the League of Nations unless specific conditions accelerating the timetable
for the evacuation of the Rhineland were met.14 When efforts to reorganize the
Luther cabinet following the ratification of the Locarno accords in December
1925 ended in deadlock,15 the DNVP went into “active opposition” to the new
Luther cabinet and demanded that it withdraw its petition for acceptance into
the League of Nations as a condition of its toleration or support.16 But
Nationalist polemics against the second Luther cabinet did little to repair the
damage the DNVP’s resignation from the national government in the fall of
1925 had done to its relations with the German agriculture. In the late winter
and spring of 1926 the specter of an agrarian secession loomed increasingly
large as Baron Prätorius von Richthofen-Boguslawitz, chairman of the Silesian
Rural League (Schlesischer Landbund) and a member of the RLB presidium,
resigned his seat in the DNVP Reichstag delegation and called upon his
followers to align themselves behind the policies of Luther and Hindenburg.17

11
Memorandum by Goldacker, 12 Dec. 1925, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, VN 52. See also
Goldacker to Kalckreuth, 12 Dec. 1925, ibid., II/24.
12
“Entschließung des Gesamtvorstandes des Brandenburgischen Landbundes zur Politik
der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei,” n.d. [late 1925],” NL Westarp, Gärtringen, VN 54.
For further details, see Pomp, Bauern und Grossgrundbesitzer, 244 50.
13
On rumors to this effect, see Alvensleben to Stresemann, 1 Dec. 1925, PA AA Berlin, NL
Stresemann, 32, cited in Stürmer, Koalition und Opposition, 133.
14
See Westarp to Stegmann, 30 Jan. 1926, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, VN 76, and Westarp to
Knebusch, 8 Feb. 1926, ibid., VN 78.
15
Stürmer, Koalition und Opposition, 127 40.
16
Protocol of a conversation between Luther, Schiele, and Westarp, 28 Jan. 1926, BA
Koblenz, Nachlass Hans Luther, 362. See also Westarp, “Außenpolitik,” in Politische
Praxis 1927, ed. Walther Lambach (Hamburg, n.d. [1927]), 12 13.
17
Richthofen first announced his intent to resign his Reichstag mandate in early December
1925. See Goßler to Westarp, 9 Dec. 1925, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, VN 52. For his
reasons, see Richthofen to Nicholas (Brandenburg Rural League), 7 Apr. 1926, BA Berlin,
   , –

As chairman of the DNVP Reichstag delegation, Westarp tried to reassure

the party’s farm leaders that the government’s weakness in parliament made
it even more as responsive to Nationalist pressure on economic issues than
it would have been had the DNVP remained in the government.18 Even as
the National Rural League commended the DNVP party leadership for
helping to rectify inequities in German tax policy that disciminated against
the German farmer,19 disgruntlement on the party’s agrarian wing continued
to grow.20
These developments only underscored the lack of direction at the upper
echelons of the DNVP’s national organization and set the stage for a change
in the Nationalist party leadership. In late February 1926 Friedrich Winckler,
the DNVP’s national party chairman since the fall of 1924, asked to be
relieved of his responsibilities as party leader so that he could return to his
work in the Lutheran Church.21 Over the course of the next several weeks,
most of those who had been mentioned as Winckler’s possible successor –
Schiele, Hugenberg, and estate owner Hans Schlange-Schöningen from the
party’s Pomeranian organization – withdrew from consideration for one
reason or another, so that in the final analysis only Westarp, chairman of
the DNVP Reichstag delegation since the formation of the first Luther cabinet
in January 1925, remained in contention. The party chairmanship, however,
was not a position that Westarp actively sought or particularly wanted.
Westarp had always conceived of himself as a liaison between the DNVP
and the Prussian conservatives who had regrouped after World War I in the
Central Association of German Conservatives, and he had worked with great
determination to carve out a niche in the postwar DNVP for those who had
formerly belonged to the German Conservative Party. Moreover, his conser-
vative pedigree represented a distinct liability in the eyes of the DNVP’s
Christian-social labor wing, which, along with the young conservatives,
remained decidedly cool to the prospect of his election as party chairman.
It was only after Schiele, who had prevailed over Westarp by a narrow margin
in a preliminary vote on 5 March,22 formally withdrew his name from

R 8034 I, 268/327 31. For further details, see Dörr, “Deutschnationale Volkspartei,”
216 17.
18
Westarp to Weilnböck, 13 Feb. 1926, BA Koblenz, NL Weilnböck, 2a. See also Westarp’s
memorandum, 13 Mar. 1926, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, II/24.
19
Kalckreuth to Westarp, 10 Mar. 1926, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, II/24.
20
Weilnböck to Westarp, 12 Mar. 1926, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, VN 76. See also Hilpert to
Weilnböck, 14 Mar. 1926, BA Koblenz, NL Weilnböck, 2a.
21
Winckler to the members of the DNVP party representation, 26 Feb. 1926, BA Koblenz,
NL Spahn, 174.
22
Letter from Westarp’s wife to his daughter, 6 Mar. 1926, NL Westarp, Gärtringen.
      

Figure 7. Photograph of Count Kuno von Westarp, DNVP Reichstag deputy from
1920 to 1930, chairman of the DNVP Reichstag delegation from 1925 to 1929, and
DNVP national party chairman from 1926 to 1928. Reproduced with permission from
the Bundesarchiv Berlin, Bild 146 1976 067 19A

consideration that party leaders closed ranks behind Westarp as the new
party chairman.23
Westarp’s formal installation as DNVP party chairman took place by
acclamation at a meeting of the DNVP party representation on 24 March.24
Westarp inherited a party that was deeply divided, in no small measure as a
result of his own tactics during the Locarno crisis in the fall of 1925.25
A district-by-district survey of the DNVP’s national organization by the
party’s Berlin headquarters shortly after Westarp assumed office revealed
widespread exhaustion and frustration among the party’s rank-and-file mem-
bership. Local party leaders complained not only of a lack of resources but also
of a general malaise at all levels the party organization.26 It was unclear

23
Letter from 19 Mar. 1926, ibid. See also the report from Linau to Buff on the meeting of
the DNVP party leadership, 17 Mar. 1926, NSSA Osnabrück, C1, 27 II.
24
Letter from Westarp’s wife to his daughter, 24 Mar. 1926, NL Westarp, Gärtringen.
25
For example, see Keudell to Westarp, 1 Mar. 1926, BA MA Freiburg, NL Tirpitz, 278/
34 37.
26
Five page report appended to Weiß to Westarp, Jacobi, and Treviranus, 29 Apr. 1926, NL
Westarp, Gärtringen, VN 73. See also Neubergt to Jacobi, 29 Apr. 1926, ibid., VN 98.
   , –

whether Westarp possessed the personal mandate necessary to restore party

unity. To moderates on the party’s left wing, Westarp’s ties to old-line
Prussian conservatism and his opposition to the aspirations of the Christian-
national labor movement in the first years of the Weimar Republic made him
particularly suspect. To the militantly antirepublican elements on the party’s
right wing, Westarp was too closely identified with the compromise of political
principle that had accompanied the DNVP’s entry into the Luther govern-
ment. Still, the party’s local leaders were relieved by his election and hoped
that he could reinvigorate the party and infuse it with the sense of purpose
necessary to lead the crusade against the twin evils of Versailles and Weimar to
a successful conclusion.27
What Westarp brought to the party chairmanship was an unwavering
commitment to the restoration and preservation of party unity, a commitment
demonstrated both during the 1922 racist crisis and in the aftermath of the
1924 split on the Dawes Plan.28 Moreover, Westarp was an accomplished
negotiator with a conciliatory style of leadership that made it easy for him to
work with the different factions in the party. But his election as DNVP party
chairman did not bring an end to the strife that was tearing the party apart.
For while those on the party’s right wing hoped that Westarp would return the
DNVP to the path of unconditional opposition to the Weimar Republic,29 the
continued deterioration of Germany’s agricultural economy led the leaders of
the party’s agrarian wing to think that only rejoining the government at the
earliest possible opportunity could possibly help.30 East Elbian conservatives
like Count Friedrich von der Schulenburg-Tressow were particularly con-
cerned that farmers and independent peasants, radicalized by the deteriorating
economic situation in the countryside, were falling under the influence of the
racist Right.31 The crisis came to a head when on 30 March 1926 more than
250 conservatives from Brandenburg, most of whom belonged to the land-
owning aristocracy, met in Berlin to protest the state of affairs that existed in
the DNVP. The meeting had been called by Count Dietlof von Arnim-
Boitzenburg, one of Brandenburg’s largest landowners and an outspoken critic
of the DNVP’s apparent accommodation with Germany’s republican system
of government. Arnim-Boitzenburg’s objectives were two-fold, first to energize
the efforts of those who, like him, sought to return the DNVP to the path of
unconditional opposition to the Weimar Republic and second to encourage

27
For example, see Würtz to Spahn, 13 Apr. 1926, BA Koblenz, NL Spahn, 176.
28
Gasteiger, Westarp, 229 358. See also Jones, “Kuno Graf von Westarp und die Krise des
deutschen Konservativismus,” 118 29.
29
Exchange of letters between Westarp and the ADV’s Vietinghoff Scheel, 26 27
Mar. 1926, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, VN 96.
30
Wilmowsky to Krupp, 11 Apr. 1926, HA Krupp Essen, FAH 23/501/83 89.
31
Schulenburg to Westarp, 15 Aug. 1926, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, VN 75.
      

the land-owning aristocracy to assert itself more vigorously within both the
DNVP and the National Rural League.32 The results of the meeting, however,
were ambiguous. For whereas between twenty-five and thirty of those present
supported Arnim-Boitzenburg in his campaign to reverse the direction in
which the DNVP and RLB appeared to be headed, his efforts ran into strong
opposition from his namesake, Count Dietloff von Arnim-Rittgarten-Ragow,
and other Brandenburg conservatives who embraced the political strategy
espoused by those in control of the RLB.33 Among those who rejected the
obstructionist tactics of Arnim-Boitzenburg and his associates was none other
than Jean Nicolas, chairman of the Brandenburg Rural League, who reaffirmed
his commitment to the basic principles of governmental conservatism in a
pamphlet distributed to estate owners in Brandenburg.34
While the meeting in Berlin exposed the divisions that existed within the
ranks of the Prussian aristocracy and thus failed to fulfill the expectations of its
instigators,35 it nevertheless sent a signal to Westarp that he could ill afford to
ignore. Although Westarp continued to rely upon his relationship with
Arnim-Boitzenburg to keep the disgruntlement of the East Elbian aristocracy
from developing into a full-scale mutiny against the DNVP,36 he also realized
that in the long run these developments only underscored the need for the
DNVP to return to the government at the first suitable opportunity so that it
could do what was necessary to prevent the complete collapse of Germany’s
rural economy.37 But as the DNVP intensified its attacks against the Luther
cabinet in preparation for its return to power, it found itself drawn more
closely to the national government on a number of practical issues. Not only
did the DNVP join the government in denouncing socialist and communist
efforts to conduct a referendum authorizing the uncompensated expropriation
of Germany’s dynastic houses,38 but they both opposed the campaign of
former DNVP Reichstag deputy Count Arthur von Posadowsky-Wehner
and the leaders of the Savers’ Association for the German Reich (Sparerbund

32
Arnim Boitzenburg to Nicolas, Mar. 1926, BA Berlin, R 8034 I, 268/332. For Arnim
Boitzenburg’s criticism of the DNVP, see his letters to Wischnöwski, 4 May 1925, and
Westarp 10 May 1926, BLHA Potsdam, Rep. 37, NL Arnim Boitzenburg, 4428/88 90.
For further details, see Flemming, “Konservativismus als ‘nationalrevolutionäre Bewe
gung’,” 295 331.
33
No protocol of the meeting has survived. On the strategic split that developed at the
meeting, see Pomp, “Brandenburgischer Landadel,” 188 95.
34
Nicolas, “Landbundarbeit und Politik,” n.d. [Apr. 1926], NL Westarp, Gärtringen, VN 79.
35
Arnim Boitzenburg to Westarp, 27 Apr. 1926, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, VN 96.
36
Correspondence between Westarp and Arnim Boitzenburg, Apr. June 1926, NL We
starp, Gärtringen, VN 96.
37
See Westarp to Schulenburg, 22 Apr. 1926, and Treviranus to Schulenburg, 23 Apr. 1926,
NL Westarp, Gärtringen, VN 75.
38
Undated nine page report appended to Weiß to Westarp, 26 June 1926, NL Westarp,
Gärtringen, VN 73.
   , –

für das Deutsche Reich) to revise the 1925 revaluation settlement by means of
a popular referendum.39 Perhaps most telling, however, was the DNVP’s
failure to come to the government’s rescue by abstaining on a vote of no-
confidence that the leaders of the DDP introduced on 12 May in response to
the government’s decision to permit Germany’s diplomatic missions to display
not just the new republican flag with its historic black, red, and gold colors but
also a modified version of the old imperial banner that served as Germany’s
commercial flag. As a result, Luther cabinet was forced to resign on 18 May
1926.40

The Economic Imperative

Its disclaimers to the contrary notwithstanding, the DNVP had played a
decisive role in staging the collapse of the second Luther cabinet. Yet while
this turn of events cleared the way for a reorganization of the national
government, it found the Nationalists as indecisive as ever. The DNVP
remained strongly opposed to Germany’s entry into the League of Nations
and balked at participating in the formation of a new government as long as
this entailed explicit acceptance of Stresemann’s foreign policy.41 The Social
Democrats, on the other hand, were no more eager than the Nationalists to
surrender the benefits of opposition for the dubious honor of entering the
government. This left Germany’s republican leadership with the unhappy
prospect of organizing still another minority cabinet based upon the parties
of bourgeois middle. Although the Nationalists opposed the formation of
another minority cabinet that, in the worst of scenarios, might be totally
dependent upon the toleration of the Social Democrats and found themselves
under heavy pressure from their supporters in industry and agriculture to
rejoin the government,42 the DNVP Reichstag delegation remained divided
pretty much down the middle as to whether it should seek a role in the
government. As a result, the DNVP proved incapable of staking out a coherent
position in the negotiations that followed the collapse of the Luther cabinet

39
For example, see Westarp to the Savers’ Association (Sparerbund), 11 June 1926, NSSA
Osnabrück, C1/90/71 73, and 17 June 1926, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, VN 72.
40
Stürmer, Koalition und Opposition, 146 51. On Luther’s relations with the DNVP during
the flag crisis, see his letter to Richthofen, 3 July 1926, BA Koblenz, NL Jarres, 37/2 12.
For further details, see Dörr, “Deutschnationale Volkspartei,” 225 30.
41
In this respect, see Axel von Freytagh Loringhoven, Von Locarno nach Genf und Thoiry
(Berlin, 1926), esp. 16 20, and Paul Bang, Die Deutschen als Landsknechte. Eine Bilanz
des neuesten Kurses (Dresden, n.d. [1926]), esp. 45 63.
42
Letter from Ada Gräfin von Westarp to Gertraude Freifrau Hiller von Gaertringen,
14 May 1926, NL Westarp, Gärtringen. See also Wilmowsky to Krupp, 15 May 1926,
HA Krupp Essen, FAH 23/501/91 94.
      

and languished on the sidelines as the former chancellor Wilhelm Marx

proceeded to organize another bourgeois minority government that was offi-
cially presented to the Reichstag on 17 May 1926.43
From the outset, the third Marx cabinet was nothing more than a temporary
expedient that would eventually be replaced by a majority cabinet if and when
either the Nationalists or the Social Democrats managed to overcome their
aversion to political responsibility. In the meantime, conservative economic
interests worked vigorously both behind the scenes and in public to lay the
foundation for the DNVP’s return to power. No effort was more important in
this respect than that undertaken by the National Federation of German
Industry to resolve the differences that separated it from the National Rural
League in the matter of trade and tariff policy. Organized agriculture con-
tinued to complain about the preferential treatment that Germany’s export-
oriented industries had supposedly received in a series of bilateral trade
treaties that Germany had concluded with Russia, Spain, and the three Scan-
dinavian countries since the passage of the new tariff bill in August 1925.44
The more prescient of Germany’s industrial leaders were well aware of the
danger that such sentiment posed to the unity of the German Right and were
anxious to avert a conflict over trade policy that might complicate Nationalist
efforts to rejoin the government. The key figure in this endeavor was Paul
Reusch, director of the Gutehoffnungshütte in Oberhausen who organized a
series of informal meetings in December 1926 between Germany’s industrial
and agricultural leaders in an attempt to improve relations between the two
factions of Germany’s conservative infrastructure.45 Reusch’s chief liaison to
organized agriculture was Baron Tilo von Wilmowsky, a moderate conserva-
tive who, as the brother-in-law of Ruhr industrialist Gustav Krupp von Bohlen
und Halbach and chairman of the RLB’s regional affiliate in Prussian Saxony,
was uniquely positioned to mediate between Germany’s largest and most
influential industrial and agricultural interest organizations.46 With industry
apparently willing to concede the necessity of a limited agricultural tariff as
long as this did not increase overall production costs, preliminary efforts to
reach an understanding between industry and agriculture on the contentious
issue of trade policy bode well for the stabilization of conservative power in the
late Weimar Republic.

43
For further details, see Stürmer, Koalition und Opposition, 151 55, and Hehl, Marx,
376 79.
44
Minutes of the RLB committee for tariff and trade questions, 15 Apr. 1926, BA Koblenz,
NL Weilnböck, 37.
45
Reusch’s remarks at a meeting of representatives of industry and agriculture, 9 Dec. 1926,
RWWA Cologne, Abt. 130, NL Reusch, 40010124/0. For further details, see Gessner,
Agrarverbände, 72 74.
46
See Zollitsch, “Das Scheitern der ‘gouvernmentalen’ Rechten,” 255 59.
   , –

A further sign of movement on the Right was an initiative taken by the

DNVP’s Baron Wilhelm von Gayl and the DVP’s Karl Jarres in the summer of
1926. The two men, both highly regarded in conservative circles, shared the
leadership of a five year-old coalition, or Arbeitsgemeinschaft, between the
DNVP and DVP in the Prussian State Council (Preußischer Staatsrat), a body
whose principal functions were consultative rather than legislative. On 30 June
1926 Gayl and Jarres approached the leaders of the two parties with the
proposal for the creation of an Arbeitsgemeinschaft in the Reichstag and
Prussian Landtag similar to the one that existed in the Prussian State Council.
Such a step, they contended, would ultimately lead to the consolidation of the
German bourgeoisie on a platform that was national, Christian, and conserva-
tive.47 Not only did their proposal meet with a positive response from the
leaders of the Nationalist delegations in both the Reichstag and Prussian
Landtag,48 but it also received strong public support from influential spokes-
men on the DVP’s right wing.49 Stresemann, however, was particularly wary of
the implications that closer political and organizational ties with the DNVP
held for his own party’s freedom of action. Writing to Jarres on 30 July,
Stresemann explained that the proposed Arbeitsgemeinschaft would deprive
the DVP of the influence it currently enjoyed as an independent party of the
German middle and would eventually force it, as the smaller of the two parties
in question, to resign from the national government. Rather than join the DVP
and DNVP in a new coalition of the bourgeois Right, Stresemann argued, the
Center would opt instead for a return to the Weimar Coalition. The net effect
of the proposed Arbeitsgemeinschaft would not be to strengthen the conserva-
tive element in German political life but to precipitate a swing to the left within
the Center and the reestablishment of the Weimar Coalition as the arbiter of
Germany’s political future.50
Stresemann’s rebuke did little to dampen the enthusiasm of Gayl and his
friends for a parliamentary Arbeitsgemeinschaft with the DVP. With strong
encouragement from Kalckreuth, Wilmowsky, and the leaders of the National
Rural League, Gayl scheduled a meeting for August 28, to which Albert Vögler,
one of Germany’s most politically engaged industrialists, was also invited. The

47
Gayl and Jarres to Stresemann, 30 June 1926, BA Koblenz, R 45 II, 303/7 11. See also
Jarres to Stresemann, 5 July 1926, BA Koblenz, NL Jarres, 37. For further details, see
Jones, German Liberalism, 275 78; Richter, Deutsche Volkspartei, 429 31; and Wright,
Stresemann, 369 72.
48
For example, see Westarp to Gayl, 5 July 1926, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, VN 125, and
Winkler to Gayl and Jarres, 5 July 1926, BA Koblenz, NL Jarres, 37, as well as Gayl to
Jarres, 2 July 1926, ibid.
49
For example, see Gildemeister, “Arbeitsgemeinschaft der Rechten,” Kölnische Zeitung,
13 July 1926, no. 512, and Eduard Dingeldey, “Die Arbeitsgemeinschaft der Bürgerli
chen,” Rheinisch Westfälische Zeitung, 29 July 1926, no. 521.
50
Stresemann to Jarres, 30 July 1926, PA AA Berlin, NL Stresemann, 95/173105 14.
      

purpose of the meeting was to form a five-man committee to oversee the

creation of a special body that would mediate between the various right-wing
parties in hopes of establishing a united front.51 Gayl’s initiative received active
support from Westarp and the leaders of the DNVP but failed to overcome
Stresemann’s resistance to the idea of closer political ties with the DNVP. Gayl
and his associates tried to reassure Stresemann and the DVP party leadership
that they had no intention of unifying the two parties and insisted that their
immediate objective was simply the creation of a loose parliamentary coalition
that would facilitate closer cooperation between the two parties on a number
of practical political issues.52 Similarly, G. R. Treviranus, a rising moderate in
the DNVP Reichstag delegation, tried to soften the DVP’s resistance to the
proposed Arbeitsgemeinschaft by suggesting that it be expanded to include to
the Center as well.53 These efforts notwithstanding, the project was already in
serious trouble when it suffered what proved to be a fatal blow from an entirely
unexpected direction, the National Federation of German Industry.
The RDI held its annual membership convention in Dresden on 4–5
September 1926. Upon his election to the federation’s presidency in early
1925, Carl Duisberg had initiated a change in the RDI’s political orientation
that would draw to a climax at Dresden with a formal declaration of loyalty to
the Weimar Constitution and the republican system of government. In light of
the bitter opposition of certain sectors of Ruhr heavy industry to Germany’s
new republican order, Duisberg felt that he had to secure the cooperation of at
least one major representative of the Ruhr industrial establishment when the
RDI affirmed its acceptance of the Weimar Republic at Dresden. When ill
health caused Vögler to back out of the speech he was scheduled to give,
Duisberg turned to Paul Silverberg, a former Stinnes associate who had
established himself as a dominant figure in the German soft coal industry.54
Speaking at Dresden on 4 September, Silverberg caused a sensation when
toward the end of his remarks he went beyond a simple affirmation of the
RDI’s willingness to work within the framework of the existing constitutional
system to call for the revival of the Zentralarbeitsgemeinschaft and the reentry
of the Social Democrats into the national government. To be sure, Silverberg
prefaced his remarks with an attack on the social welfare system as it had
evolved during the Weimar Republic and criticized the Social Democrats for
their reluctance to accept their fare share of the governmental burden. At the
same time, Silverberg argued that in a parliamentary democracy it was

51
Gayl to Jarres, 14 Aug. 1926, BA Koblenz, NL Jarres, 37.
52
Gayl to Jarres, 26 Aug. 1926, ibid.
53
Treviranus to Jarres, 18 Aug. 1926, ibid. See also Treviranus, “Weg mit den Scheuklap
pen,” Berliner Börsen Zeitung, 23 July 1926, no. 337.
54
Correspondence between Kastl and Silverberg, 22 23 July 1926, BA Koblenz, NL Silver
berg, 235/20 22.
   , –

intolerable for a party in which the overwhelming majority of the German

working class found its political representation to escape the burden of
political responsibility. The Social Democrats must therefore turn their backs
upon the politics of the street and join hands with Germany’s industrial
leadership in revitalizing the German economy and restoring to it the full
flower of its productive potential.55
Silverberg’s speech – and particularly his declaration of loyalty to the
republican system of government – represented the culmination of a con-
certed effort by Duisberg and the more moderate elements in the German
industrial establishment to bring the policies of the largest and most influen-
tial of Germany’s industrial interest organizations in line with the realities
of Weimar’s economic and political stabilization. Industry moderates like
Clemens Lammers from the German Center Party derived great satisfaction
from the outcome of the Dresden convention and hoped that it signaled the
beginning of an harmonious new relationship between industry, labor, and
the state.56 The leaders of Ruhr heavy industry, on the other hand, felt
betrayed by the entire thrust of Silverberg’s speech and countered with a
major campaign aimed at undercutting its impact.57 The attack was spear-
headed by Reusch and Max Schlenker, chairman and executive secretary
respectively of the Langnamverein, who mobilized their resources for a
decisive showdown with Silverberg at a meeting of the Langnamverein in
Düsseldorf on 1 October 1926.58 Here Silverberg came under a sharp attack
from Reusch and steel magnate Fritz Thyssen that left him with little choice
but to qualify some of the positions he had staked out at Dresden. In the
meantime, Reusch continued to argue that industry should not, as Silverberg
had suggested, enter into an alliance with the German working class but
should seek instead an accommodation with organized agriculture on tariff
policy that would expedite the DNVP’s reentry into the national government.
All of this only underscored the extent of Silverberg’s isolation within Ruhr

55
Paul Silverberg, “Das deutsche industrielle Unternehmertum in der Nachkriegszeit,” in
Mitglieder Versammlung des Reichsverbandes der Deutschen Industrie am 3. und 4.
September 1926 in Dresden, Veröffentlichungen des Reichsverbandes der Deutschen
Industrie, no. 32 (Berlin, 1926), 55 65. For further details, see Reinhard Neebe,
Großindustrie, Staat und NSDAP 1930 1933. Paul Silverberg und der Reichsverband der
Deutschen Industrie in der Weimarer Republik (Göttingen, 1981), 35 49, and Boris
Gehlen, Paul Silverberg (1876 1959). Ein Unternehmer (Stuttgart, 2007), 362 66.
56
Lammers to Fonk, 18 Oct. 1926, BA Koblenz, NL ten Hompel, 21.
57
For example, see Blank to Reusch, 6 Sept. 1926, RWWA Cologne, Abt. 130, NL Reusch,
4001012024/3a.
58
For further details, see Schlenker to Reusch, 25 and 27 Sept. 1926, RWWA Cologne,
Abt. 130, NL Reusch, 400101221/4, as well as Schlenker to Silverberg, 21 Sept. 1926, BA
Koblenz, NL Silverberg, 414/110 11.
      

heavy industry and set the stage for a strategic retreat from the goals he had
enunciated at Dresden when the RDI leadership met to discuss the matter on
14 October 1926.59
Although Ruhr heavy industry succeeded in blunting the thrust of Silver-
berg’s Dresden initiative, his appeal for the creation of a coalition with the
Social Democrats spread confusion throughout the ranks of the German Right
and undercut efforts on behalf of closer political and organizational ties
between the DVP and DNVP.60 In his keynote address at the Nationalist
Party congress in Cologne in the second week of September, DNVP party
chairman Westarp tried to salvage what he could from the notion of a
parliamentary Arbeitsgemeinschaft with the DVP by reiterating his party’s
willingness to participate in the creation of a greater German Right.61 By
now, however, many of those within the DVP who had originally embraced
the Gayl-Jarres proposal had begun to cool on the idea of closer ties with the
DNVP.62 Consequently, when the DVP held its annual party congress in
Cologne at the beginning of October, the delegates effectively killed the
proposed Arbeitsgemeinschaft by adopting a unanimous resolution that
reaffirmed Stresemann’s concept of an independent and liberal German
People’s Party.63 In the meantime, Silverberg’s speech – and particularly his
appeal for the creation of a new coalition government that included not only
the “state-supporting” bourgeois parties but also the Social Democrats – had
had a sobering effect upon the situation within the DNVP. For although
Hugenberg and the leaders of the DNVP’s industrial wing were quick to
criticize Silverberg for misusing the RDI as a forum for propagating political
views with which a substantial portion of its membership did not agree,64 his
speech nevertheless served notice on the DNVP that if it could not overcome
its ambivalence toward government participation, then industry might have
no alternative but to reach an accommodation of its own with the Social
Democrats.

59
Weisbrod, Schwerindustrie in der Weimarer Republik, 256 66. See also Dirk Stegmann,
“Die Silverberg Kontroverse 1926. Unternehmerpolitik zwischen Reform und Restaura
tion,” in Sozialgeschichte heute. Festschrift für Hans Rosenberg zum 70. Geburtstag, ed.
Hans Ulrich Wehler (Göttingen, 1974), 594 610.
60
Jarres to Loebell, 9 Sept. 1926, BA Koblenz, NL Jarres, 37.
61
Kuno von Westarp, Klar das Ziel, fest das Wollen! Rede auf dem Reichsparteitage in Köln
am 9. September 1926, Deutschnationale Flugschrift, no. 260 (Berlin, 1926), 18 19.
62
For example, see Scholz, “Innere Entwicklung und Deutsche Volkspartei,” Kölnische
Zeitung, 1 Oct. 1926, no. 732.
63
Minutes of the DVP central executive committee, 1 Oct. 1926, in Nationalliberalismus in
der Weimarer Republik, ed. Kolb and Richter, 2:652 710.
64
Kölnische Zeitung, 10 Sept. 1926, no. 673. See also the report of the meeting of the
Coordinating Committee of German National Industrialists (ADI) at the DNVP party
congress in Cologne, 9 Sept. 1926, StA Hamburg, Blohm und Voß GmbH, 1215.
   , –

Rumblings on the Radical Right

Throughout the fall of 1926 pressure for a reorganization of the national
government continued to mount. Not only would Germany’s formal accept-
ance into the League of Nations on 10 September 1926 remove the single most
serious obstacle to the DNVP’s participation in a new national government,
but the Nationalists found themselves under heavy pressure from Germany’s
most influential industrial and agricultural interest organizations to set aside
their differences with Stresemann over the conduct of German foreign policy
and rejoin the cabinet. If anything, the Silverberg controversy only intensified
heavy industry’s interest in an accommodation with organized agriculture that
would expedite the Nationalists’ return to power.65 But as the DNVP moved
almost inexorably toward a second experiment at government participation,
the forces on the patriotic Right regrouped for another offensive against
Stresemann’s foreign policy and his efforts to stabilize the republic from the
Right. The struggle against Locarno and the DNVP’s resignation from the first
Luther cabinet had done much to energize the Pan-German League, the
Stahlhelm, and other organizations on the patriotic Right.66 That this did
not bode well for the DNVP’s participation in a future government could
not have been more apparent than in the case of the Stahlhelm.
In the wake of Hitler’s abortive “Beer Hall putsch” in the fall of 1923, the
Stahlhelm had quickly established itself as the largest and most influential
organization on Germany’s paramilitary Right. Regional paramilitary organ-
izations that had stood on the fringes of the putsch subsequently affiliated
themselves with the Stahlhelm and were integrated into its national organiza-
tional structure. The Stahlhelm’s original strength had been concentrated in
central Germany with its most important strongholds in Saxony and Magde-
burg, but now it began to develop a truly national profile with chapters in
virtually every part of the country. After having absorbed the Westphalian
League in the fall of 1924, the Stahlhelm continued to expand its organization
into northern Germany with the creation of new chapters in Schleswig-
Holstein, Oldenburg, and Lower Saxony. In 1926 the Stahlhelm absorbed the
remnants of Hermann Ehrhardt’s newly rejuvenated Viking League (Bund
Wiking) after a number of its leaders had become implicated in a crudely
conceived putsch to overthrow established political authority in the Reich and
Prussia, and the following year it merged with the Nuremberg-based Reich
Flag (Reichsflagge). And in 1930 the largest of Bavaria’s paramilitary organiza-
tions, the League Bavaria and Reich (Bund Bayern und Reich), finally suc-

65
Reichert’s remarks before the executive committee of the Association of German Steel
and Iron Industrialists, 16 Sept. 1926, BA Koblenz, R 13 I, 101/110 11.
66
Treviranus to Jarres, 26 Oct. 1925, BA Koblenz, NL Jarres, 54.
      

cumbed to its overtures and agreed to its incorporation into the Stahlhelm.67
With an estimated half million members, the Stahlhelm was far and away the
largest of the various organizations on Germany’s paramilitary Right with only
the Young German Order as a serious rival.68
The large-scale influx of new members from the Viking League and other
paramilitary organizations with a profile more radical than that of the Stahl-
helm itself posed a serious challenge to Franz Seldte’s control of the organiza-
tion. The situation was compounded by the fact that by 1926 more than two-
thirds of the Stahlhelm’s district leaders were former officers from aristocratic
backgrounds who felt that they and not a one-time bourgeois reserve officer
like Seldte should head the organization.69 The ensuing conflict for control of
the Stahlhelm continued right up until the end of the Weimar Republic and
placed an increasingly heavy strain on the Stahlhelm’s relations with more
moderate bourgeois organizations and parties. With the election of DNVP
activist Theodor Duesterberg in April 1923 as leader of the Stahlhelm district
organization in Halle-Merseburg, Seldte and his supporters found it increas-
ingly difficult to contain the forces of political radicalization that had begun to
make their presence felt throughout the organization. The radicals around
Duesterberg and retired general Georg Maercker dealt Seldte and his support-
ers a major political defeat when, at a meeting of Stahlhelm district leaders in
March 1924, they pushed through a resolution that explicitly barred Jews from
membership in the organization.70 This represented a radical break with the
Stahlhelm’s earlier position that any German who had spent at least six
months in military service during World War I could belong to the organiza-
tion and led to a heated exchange between Seldte and Duesterberg at a meeting
of the Stahlhelm executive committee in late May.71 In July 1925 the forces
around Duesterberg succeeded in pressuring Seldte to dissociate himself from
Stresemann’s foreign policy and to issue a public statement repudiating
charges that the Stahlhelm had become politically dependent upon the

67
On developments in Westphalia, Schlewig Holstein, Lower Saxony, and Bavaria, see Gerd
Krüger, “Von den Einwohnerwehren zum Stahlhelm. Der nationale Kampfverband
‘Westfalenbund e.V’ (1921 1924),” Westfälische Zeitschrift 147 (1997): 406 32, esp.
425 30; Lawrence D. Stokes, “‘Wegbereiter des neuen nationalen Werdens’. Der ‘Stahl
helm, Bund der Frontsoldaten’ in Eutin 1923 1934,” Informationen zur Schleswig
Holsteinischen Zeitgeschichte 31 (1997): 3 28; Fritzsche, Rehearsals for Fascism, 166 89;
and Hans Fenske, Konservatismus und Rechtsradikalismus, 255 60.
68
Diehl, Paramilitary Politics, 232 33.
69
Heinz Brauweiler, “Meine Tätigkeit im ‘Stahlhelm’,” 22 Dec. 1965, StA Mönchen Glad
bach, NL Brauweiler, 110. See also Berghahn, Stahlhelm, 64 115, and Klotzbücher, “Der
politische Weg des Stahlhelm,” 103 11.
70
Minutes of the meeting of Stahlhelm district leaders, 9 Mar. 1924, BA Berlin, R 72, 4/
111 14. See also Crim Antisemitism, 45 47.
71
Minutes of the meeting of Stahlhelm executive committee, 29 May 1924, BA Berlin, R 72,
4/89 109.
   , –

German foreign minister.72 Both of these developments underscored the

increasingly influence of the more radical elements around Duesterberg in
the Stahlhelm’s internal affairs.
The Stahlhelm’s shift to the right in 1924–25 was accompanied by a
concerted effort by its leaders and allies on the paramilitary Right to break
the Center Party’s hold over Germany’s Catholic electorate. In their disillu-
sionment with the Center’s sharp swing to the left in the summer of 1917,
many conservative Catholics – but most notably those from the nobility and
intelligentsia – had gravitated toward the paramilitary Right. The significance
of this development was not lost upon the hierarchy of the Catholic Church,
and in March 1924 the Fulda Bishops’ Conference (Fuldaer Bischofskonfer-
enz), the assembly of German bishops from outside of Bavaria that met twice a
year under the presidency of Cardinal Adolf von Bertram from Breslau to
formulate positions on issues of concern to the episcopacy, issued a decree
urging the Catholic clergy to exercise restraint with respect to the patriotic
movement. Then, in August 1924, the conference hardened its position against
Catholic involvement in any of the numerous organizations on Germany’s
patriotic Right.73 This, along with the fact that the annual meeting of the
German Catholic Congress in Hanover a month later was dominated by
representatives of the Center to the exclusion of anyone who represented a
different political position, provoked charges of partisanship within both the
Stahlhelm and the Young German Order.74 In an attempt to provide Catholics
who no longer felt at home in the Center with a new organization of their
own, the Young German Order’s Otto Bornemann, himself a Catholic and
Mahraun’s right-hand man in the order’s chain of command, founded the
Ring of National German Catholics (Ring nationaler deutscher Katholiken) in
early January 1925.75 This organization, whose very name suggested a certain
affinity with the goals of the Ring Movement, received active support not only
from prominent Westphalian nobles such as Ferdinand von Lüninck and
Alexander von Elverfeldt but also from the DNVP’s Reich Catholic

72
See the remarks by Duesterberg and Eulenburg before the Stahlhelm executive commit
tee, 4 5 July 1925, BA Berlin, R 72, 4/33 35, 49 55, as well as the resolution of the
Stahlhelm executive committee, 4 July 1925, reprinted in Stahlhelm Handbuch, 3rd ed.,
ed. Walter Kellner and Heinrich Hildebrandt (Berlin, 1927), 45.
73
Heinrich Czeloth, Klarheit und Wahrheit. Warum wir Katholiken die vaterländischen
Verbände ablehnen müssen! (Cöthen and Berlin, n.d. [1924]), 255 66. For further details,
see Vogel, Kirche und Kampfverbände, 34 55, 106 10.
74
Exchange of letters between Lüninck and the Young German Order’s Otto Bornemann,
26 30 Sept. 1924, VWA Münster, NL Lüninck, 713.
75
For the goals of this organization, see “Richtlinien für den ‘Ring nationaler deutscher
Katholiken’,” n.d., BA Koblenz, NL Spahn, 185. On its founding, see Karp to Lüninck, 28
Oct. 3 Nov. 1924, VWA Münster, NL Lüninck, 713. See also Vogel, Kirche und Kampf
verbände, 121 45.
      

Committee.76 But the venture met with a cool response from the Catholic
episcopacy and never succeeded in generating the public enthusiasm for which
its founders had hoped.77
In the meantime, the struggle against Locarno had done much to push the
Stahlhlem more and more into the orbit of the radical Right. In November
1925 the leaders of the Stahlhelm entered into a coalition, or Arbeitsge-
meinschaft, with the United Patriotic Leagues whereby the two would cooper-
ate with each other in matters of Germany’s national interest.78 At the same
time, spokesmen for the right wing of the DNVP praised the Stahlhelm for its
stand against Locarno and expressed the hope that this foreshadowed an era of
even closer cooperation between the two organizations.79 Anxious to avoid
becoming too closely identified with the DNVP, the Stahlhelm continued to
reaffirm its nonpartisan character by inviting those Reichstag deputies from
the DNVP, DVP, and Business Party who belonged to their organization to a
meeting that, by pure coincidence, took place on the morning of the final vote
on the Locarno Treaty.80 Ratification of the Locarno accords played directly
into the hands of the activists around Duesterberg and strengthened their
position in what was quickly developing into a major struggle for control of
the Stahlhelm. Whatever solidarity the Stahlhelm had shown in the struggle
against Locarno quickly evaporated as Duesterberg and his supporters con-
tinued to undercut Seldte’s position at the regional and local levels of the
Stahlhelm organization.81 Frustrated by the lack of political élan the Stahlhelm
had demonstrated under Seldte’s leadership, Duesterberg sought to transform
it from a staid, predominantly “bourgeois” – and here the term was used
pejoratively – veterans’ organization into a vanguard of revolutionary nation-
alism. For Duesterberg the ultimate objective was to infuse the state with the
activism of the front generation and to free it from the control of outside

76
Minutes of a meeting of the Catholic Ring (Katholischer Ring), 8 Jan. 1925, BA Koblenz,
NL Spahn, 185. On ties to the DNVP’s Reich Catholic Committee, see Karp to Lüninck, 6
Oct. 1924, VWA Münster, NL Lüninck, 713.
77
For the episcopacy’s response, see Bertram to Lüninck, 7 Oct. 1925, VWA Münster, NL
Lüninck, 710/711.
78
Exchange of letters between Goltz and Seldte, 14 19 Nov. 1925, BA Berlin, R 72, 280/5 6.
79
For example, see Schmidt Hannover to Seldte, 15 Dec. 1925, NL Westarp, Gärtringen,
VN 123, and Scheibe to Duesterberg, 25 Jan. 1926, BA MA Freiburg, NL Tirpitz, 171/
191 95.
80
Minutes of a meeting of the Stahlhehm executive committee with Reichstag deputies who
belonged to the Stahlhelm, 27 Nov. 1925, BA Berlin, R 72, 14/2 17. See also Seldte to the
executive committees of the Reichstag delegations of the DNVP, DVP, and Business
Party, 30 Nov. 1925, VWA Münster, BA Berlin, R 72, 280/7 8, as well as the correspond
ence between Treviranus and Ludwig, 23 30 Dec. 1925, ibid., 32/342 43.
81
Duesterberg to Hammerstein, 16 Apr. 1926, BA Koblenz, R 72, 2302. See also the
manuscript of Duesterberg’s unpublished memoirs, BA Koblenz, Nachlass Theodor
Duesterberg, 46/91 93.
   , –

economic interests so that it might be rebaptized in the spirit of those who had
served so heroically and selflessly at the front.82
The task of defining the Stahlhelm’s new mission fell to a group of revolu-
tionary nationalists under the intellectual tutelage of Ernst Jünger. Jünger was
one of the most prolific and popular writers of the postwar period,83 and in
late 1925 he became a major contributor to Die Standarte, a new journal that
the Stahlhelm had launched in an attempt to lend its enterprise an aura of
intellectual and literary legitimacy. Jünger quickly gathered around himself a
number of like-minded intellectuals including Helmut Franke, Wilhelm
Kleinau, Franz Schauwecker, and his brother Friedrich Georg Jünger. Under
their leadership, Die Standarte emerged as a major forum for the dissemin-
ation of what Jünger and his associates proudly hailed as the “new national-
ism.”84 Born in the trenches of World War I, Jünger’s new nationalism
differed from the patriotism of the Wilhelmine era in that it placed a total
claim on the energies and loyalties of the individual and demanded that he
subordinate everything – and particularly his material self-interest – to the
sacred task of Germany’s national salvation. Seen from this perspective, the
war had been a spiritual event that produced an entirely new species of man in
the person of the front soldier. Not only had the war exposed the spiritual
poverty of the so-called bourgeois epoch, but it had liberated those who
received their baptism of fire at the front from the sterile conventions and
obsolete ideologies of a dying social order so that they might take part in their
nation’s spiritual rebirth. The front generation thus represented a new elite
that had been hardened by the horrors of trench warfare to the point where it
and it alone possessed the ruthlessness necessary to save Germany from
national ruin. At the same time, the war had exposed the front generation to
a new and indeed revolutionary sense of solidarity that was to serve as a model
and inspiration for the organization of social life in the future German Reich, a
solidarity in which all social distinctions were dissolved in the mystical unity of
the German nation, a solidarity forged by the fire of combat and watered by
the blood of national self-renewal. But to give this concrete form, it was first
necessary for the front soldier to become a revolutionary. For it was only

82
See Wilhelm Kleinau, Stahlhelm und Staat. Eine Erläuterung der Stahlhelm Botschaften
(Berlin, 1929), 27 37, and Alexander Pache, Der Stahlhelm Bund der Frontsoldaten.
Sein Werden/Sein Wesen/Seine Ziele (Zwickau, n.d. [1929]), 8 12.
83
On Jünger’s political thought in the Weimar era, see Hans Peter Schwarz, Der konserva
tive Anarchist. Politik und Zeitkritik Ernst Jüngers (Freiburg in Breisgau, 1962), 17 94;
Roger Woods, Ernst Jünger and the Nature of Political Commitment (Stuttgart, 1982),
99 231; and Thomas Nevin, Ernst Junger and Germany: Into the Abyss, 1914 1945
(Durham, NC, 1996), 75 114.
84
Marjatta Hietala, Der neue Nationalismus. In der Publizistik Ernst Jüngers und des Kreises
um ihn 1920 1933 (Helsinki, 1975), esp. 42 57, 97 127.
      

through the systematic and ruthless annihilation of the existing political order
that the rebirth of the German nation could ever be achieved.85
For all of its rhetorical force, the “front experience” as depicted in the
writings of Jünger and his associates bore little resemblance to the actual
experience of those who had served at the front in World War I. For all
intents and purposes, the concepts of the “front experience” and “front
generation” were political and literary constructs of the late 1920s designed
to mobilize the support of those who were too young to have served in the war
and to harness their frustration to a conservative political agenda.86 At the
same time, Jünger’s idealization of the “front experience” and his call for
greater activism on the part of the front generation represented an attempt
to redefine the polity on essentially masculine terms to the exclusion of
anything associated with the feminine weakness he held responsible for the
collapse of the German home front in 1917–18.87 Jünger’s brazen contempt for
the existing political order struck at the basic assumptions of Seldte’s political
strategy and clearly reflected the direction in which Duesterberg and his
associates wished to take the Stahlhelm. None of this, however, did much to
clarify the situation in the Stahlhelm. At no point was the confusion at the
upper echelons of the Stahlhelm leadership more apparent than in the fall of
1926, when, much to the dismay of friends and enemies alike, the Stahlhelm
executive committee announced a new strategic gambit with the motto
“Hinein in den Staat!”88 The immediate assumption was that this signaled
the Stahlhelm’s implicit recognition of the Weimar Constitution and that it
too, like other organizations on the German Right, was about to make its peace
with the republican form of government. Such an interpretation could not
have been further from the truth. For, as the leaders of the Stahlhelm reassured
their followers throughout the country, the true meaning of the motto lay in its
exhortation to infiltrate the state and to reshape it in the spirit of the Stahl-
helm’s ideals. “We must,” explained the Stahlhelm’s Hans Ludwig at a meeting
of the organization’s state and district leaders in early October 1926, “conquer

85
For Jünger’s political views, see Ernst Jünger, “Grundlagen des Nationalismus,” in
Stahlhelm Jahrbuch 1927, ed. Franz Schauwecker (Magdeburg, 1927), 68 88. On Jünger
and the Stahlhelm, see Klotzbücher, “Der politische Weg des Stahlhelm,” 72 79, and
Berghahn, Stahlhelm, 91 101, as well as Susanne Meinl, Nationalsozialisten gegen Hitler.
Die nationalrevolutionäre Opposition um Friedrich Wilhelm Heinz (Berlin, 2000), 94 106.
86
Richard Bessel, “The ‘Front Generation’ and the Politics of Weimar Germany,” in
Generations in Conflict. Youth Revolt and Generational Formation in Germany,
1770 1968, ed. Mark Roseman (Cambridge, 1995), 121 36.
87
Bernd Weisbrod, “Kriegerische Gewalt und männlicher Fundamentalismus. Ernst Jün
gers Beitrag zur konservativen Revolution,” Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Unterricht 49
(1998): 542 58.
88
Der Stahlhelm, 10 Oct. 1926, no. 41.
   , –

the state from within.”89 As these remarks and subsequent clarifications in the
official Stahlhelm press clearly indicated, the ultimate objective that lay behind
the new motto was the subversion of the existing system of government for the
purpose of transmuting it into an authoritarian state in which the Reichstag
and the political parties that belonged to it would be stripped of effective
political power.

The Saxon Interlude

The motto “Hinein in den Staat” was fully consistent with Jünger’s call for
greater activism on the part of the front generation, and its promulgation
revealed the extent to which the balance of power within the Stahlhelm had
begun to shift from the moderates around Seldte to Duesterberg and the
organization’s more radical wing.90 Precisely what all of this was supposed to
mean and how the newly proclaimed strategy of “Hinein in den Staat” was to be
implemented remained unclear. The first opportunity to test the new strategy
quickly presented itself in the Saxon Landtag elections scheduled for 31 October
1926. Saxony provided a perfect laboratory for the testing the Stahlhelm’s new
strategy. The absence of a substantial Catholic population meant that the
German Center Party was not available to perform its customary role as a
mediator between different social classes in the interest of political stability. As
a result, the processes of fragmentation and polarization that ultimately led to the
collapse of the bourgeois party system throughout Germany as a whole were
more advanced in Saxony than in states like Prussia, Württemberg, or Bavaria,
where the Catholic parties mediated between middle-class and working-class
elements in a way that inhibited the process of political polarization that would
lead to the collapse of effective parliamentary government throughout much of
the country.91 By the same token, the victory of the Saxon Left in the November
1922 Landtag elections and the subsequent inclusion of the Communists in the
state government in the fall of 1923 put a face on the specter of social revolution
that continued to haunt Saxony’s propertied classes.92

89
Minutes of the meeting of the Stahlhelm’s state and district leaders, 2 3 Oct. 1926, BA
Berlin, R 72, 5/51 53. See also Graff, “Gründung und Entwicklung des Bundes,” 62 64.
90
Remarks by Ausfeld (Stahlhelm) in a conversation with Stresemann’s secretary Bernhard,
27 Oct. 1926, PA AA Berlin, NL Stresemann, 45/162823 26.
91
Much of the following is based on Larry Eugene Jones, “Saxony, 1924 1930: A Study in
the Dissolution of the Bourgeois Party System in Weimar Germany,” in Saxony in
German History: Culture Society, and Politics, 1830 1933, ed. James Retallack (Ann
Arbor, MI, 2000), 336 55. See also Benjamin Lapp, Revolution from the Right: Politics,
Class, and the Rise of Nazism in Saxony, 1919 1933 (Atlantic Highlands, NJ, 1997).
92
Benjamin Lapp, “Remembering the Year 1923 in Saxon History,” in Saxony in German
History: Culture, Society, and Politics, 1830 1933, ed. James Retallack (Ann Arbor, MI,
2000), 322 35.
      

After federal officials intervened in late October 1923 to remove the socialist
Erich Zeigner and his government from power, Saxony was governed by a
bourgeois minority cabinet with the DNVP as the only non-socialist party in
opposition.93 Efforts to stabilize the Weimar Republic from the Right by
co-opting influential economic interest organizations such as the National
Federation of German Industry and the National Rural League found little
resonance in Saxony, which remained something of an economic backwater
during the Weimar Republic and never shared in the benefits of Germany’s
short-lived “return to normalcy” in the second half of the 1920s. As a result,
special-interest parties like the Business Party of the German Middle Class and
the Reich Party for People’s Justice and Revaluation (Reichspartei für Volks-
recht und Aufwertung or VRP) succeeded in establishing themselves much
more quickly in Saxony than in the Reich as a whole. Founded in September
1920 on the initiative of Berlin master baker Hermann Drewitz, the Business
Party quickly attracted the interest of organized housing interests headed by
the former DNVP politician Johann Victor Bredt. Bredt’s benefactors in the
Prussian chapter of the Central Association of Home and Property Owners’
Organization (Zentralverband der deutschen Haus- und Grundbesitzerver-
eine) threw their full support behind the Business Party in the 1921 Prussian
Landtag elections and were rewarded when the WP received over 192,000
votes and elected four deputies to the state parliament.94 But it was in Saxony
that the WP experienced its greatest success. After a disappointing showing in
the 1922 Landtag elections, the WP polled 2.8 and 4.7 percent of the popular
vote in the three Saxon electoral districts in the May and December 1924
Reichstag elections, figures that compared favorably to the 1.8 and 2.3 percent
of the national electorate the party received in the same two elections.95 The
Business Party was not the only party competing for the votes of Saxony’s
disaffected middle class. In the fall of 1924 Reinhard Wüst, a lawyer from
Halle, helped launch the German Revaluation and Recovery Party (Deutsche

93
J. Siegert, 16 Monate sächsischer Landtag. Ein politischer Überblick, Schriften der
Deutschnationalen Volkspartei in Sachsen (Arbeitsgemeinschaft), no. 2 (Dresden, 1924).
94
For the official history of the WP, see Hermann Drewitz, “Die politische Standesbewe
gung des deutschen Mittelstandes vor und nach dem Kriege,” in Jahrbuch der Reichs
partei des deutschen Mittelstandes, ed. Reichspartei des deutschen Mittelstandes (Berlin,
1929), 13 32, here 19 22. See also Jürgen Weber, “Ziele, Handlungsbedingungen und
Ergebnisse mittelständischer Interessenpolitik am Beispiel der ‘Wirtschaftspartei’ (Reichs
partei des deutschen Mittelstandes) 1924 1933” (Wissenschaftliche Hausarbeit, Berlin,
1979) 75 85. On Bredt, see Martin Grosch, Johann Victor Bredt. Konservative Politik
zwischen Kaiserreich und Nationalsozialismus. Eine politische Biographie (Berlin, 2014),
186 93. On the plight of Germany’s middle class homeowners, see Daniel P. Silverman,
“A Pledge Unredeemed: The Housing Crisis in Weimar Germany,” Central European
History 3 (1970): 112 39.
95
See the tables in Schumacher, Mittelstandsfront und Republik, 228, 230 31.
   , –

Aufwertungs- und Aufbaupartei) as a protest against the revaluation provi-

sions of the Third Emergency Tax Decree that had taken effect the preceding
February.96 Although the new party’s impact in the December 1924 Reichstag
elections was negligible, its emergence underscored the frustration that an
increasingly large segment of Germany’s middle-class electorate had begun to
feel over the terms of Germany’s political and economic stabilization.
The Saxon Landtag elections on 31 October 1926 provided Germany’s
middle-class splinter parties with an excellent forum for validating themselves
as legitimate voices of middle-class discontent. In the summer of 1925 the
Business Party had rebaptized itself the Reich Party of the German Middle
Class (Reichspartei des deutschen Mittelstandes or WP) in attempt to escape
the odium of special interest and to broaden its appeal among Germany’s
middle-class voters. The following July the WP held its first national party
congress in Görlitz – no doubt with an eye to the upcoming Landtag elections –
and used the occasion to launch a new party program called the “Görlitzer
Richtlinien.” The work of Saxon party leader Walther Wilhelm, the “Görlitzer
Richtlinien” sought to embellish the party’s ideological profile by reformu-
lating the traditional demands of homeowners, artisans, and small business-
men in the language of German corporatism. With the adoption of the new
party program, the Business Party’s transformation from a party easily stig-
matized as an agent for organized housing interests into one that claimed to
represent the German middle class in all of its social and economic heterogen-
eity was essentially complete.97 All of this, including the choice of Görlitz as
the site where this transformation supposedly culminated in the promulgation
of a new party program, was part of a calculated effort to position the WP as
advantageously as possible in the campaign for the upcoming Saxon state
elections. In the meantime, the various revaluation groups that had surfaced
throughout the country since the enactment of the Third Emergency Tax
Decree in February 1924 had begun to coalesce into a national revaluation
party. These efforts, which capitalized upon the sense of betrayal that Ger-
many’s middle-class investors felt toward the DNVP as a result of its role in

96
See the two pamphlets by Reinhard Wüst, Das Aufwertungsproblem und die 3. Steuer
notverordnung. Eine gemeinverständliche Betrachtung (Halle, 1924), and Reinhard Wüst,
Im Aufwertungskampf für Wahrheit und Recht gegen “Luthertum” und “Marxismus.” Eine
gemeinverständliche Auseinandersetzung mit den Trugschlüssen und Schlagworten der
Aufwertungsgegner (Halle, 1924).
97
Reichspartei des deutschen Mittelstandes, Die Satzungen und Görlitzer Richtlinien der
Reichspartei des deutschen Mittelstandes e.V. (Wirtschaftspartei) (Berlin, [1929]), 18 31.
For the WP’s “middle class ideology,” see Walther Waldemar Wilhelm and Willy
Schlüter, Die Mission des Mittelstandes. 99 Thesen für das schaffende Volk, ed. Eugen
Fabricus (Dresden, 1925), as well as Johann Victor Bredt, “Das politische Parlament und
die berufsständischen Vertretungen,” in Volk und Reich der Deutschen, ed. Bernhard
Harms, 2 vols. (Berlin, 1929), 2: 282 300.
      

the passage of the 1925 revaluation law, drew to a climax in late August
1926 with the founding of the Reich Party for People’s Justice and Revaluation
under the leadership of Stuttgart school inspector Adolf Bauser at a delegate
conference of the Savers’ Association in Erfurt.98 Speaking in Erfurt, the one-
time DNVP patriarch Count Arthur von Posadowsky-Wehner assailed the
more established bourgeois parties for having betrayed the trust of Germany’s
small investor and exhorted those who had been victimized by this betrayal to
seek their revenge at the polls.99
By using the Saxon campaign to thrust themselves into the national political
spotlight, the WP and VRP transformed the campaign for the 1926 Saxon
Landtag elections into a referendum on the future of the more established and
ideologically oriented “people’s” parties like the DDP, DVP, and DNVP. Still
reeling from the heavy losses it had suffered in the Mecklenburg Landtag
elections in August 1926,100 the Nationalists moved quickly to counter the
appeal of the special-interest parties by arguing that they not only isolated the
German middle class from those parties that were committed to the defense of
its legitimate social and economic interests but, more importantly, that their
emergence only frustrated the need for greater bourgeois cohesiveness in the
struggle against Marxism. The WP’s efforts to unite the German middle class
into a single political party were dismissed as a frivolous distraction that
undermined the effectiveness with which the DNVP could defend the interests
of its middle-class constituents.101 By the same token, the Nationalists argued
that single-issue parties like the VRP could not possibly defend the interests of
their supporters as effectively as a larger party like the DNVP.102
The phenomenon of special-interest parties also aroused widespread con-
cern outside the parties that were directly affected by this process. Both the
Stahlhelm and the Young German Order lamented the fragmentation of
Germany’s political culture and were fearful that the Saxon elections would
produce an even greater fragmentation of Germany’s bourgeois forces. As the

98
Adolf Bauser, “Notwendigkeit, Aufgaben und Ziele der Volksrechtspartei,” in Für
Wahrheit und Recht. Der Endkampf um eine gerechte Aufwertung. Reden und Aufsätze,
ed. Adolf Bauser (Stuttgart, 1927), 90 91. See also Hans Peter Müller, “Adolf Bauser
(1880 1948), der Sparerbund und die Volksrechtspartei,” Zeitschrift für Württember
gische Landesgeschichte 75 (2016): 247 76, here 248 53, 256 59.
99
Speech by Posadowsky Wehner, “Ansprache, gehalten auf der Reichsdelegiertentagung
des Sparerbundes zu Erfurt am 28. August 1926,” in Arthur von Posadowsky Wehner,
Die Enteignung des Gläubiger Vermögens. Eine Sammlung von Aufsätzen (Berlin, n.d.
[1928]), 42 46.
100
Report on the Mecklenburg Landtag elections of 6 Aug. 1926, NL Westarp, Gärtringen,
VN 75.
101
“Entwurf zu einer Diskussionsrede in Versammlungen der Wirtschaftspartei,” n.d.,
SHStA Dresden, NL Philipp, 20.
102
Philipp, “Aufwertung und Landtagswahl,” Leipziger Abendpost, 16 Oct. 1926, no. 242.
   , –

elections drew near, the leaders of Saxony’s paramilitary Right called upon the
so-called patriotic parties to set aside their differences and unite in a crusade to
free Saxony – and, by extension, the rest of Germany – from the insidious yoke
of Marxism.103 When this effort at “bourgeois consolidation from below”
foundered on Stresemann’s refusal to countenance any electoral alliance that
might jeopardize the prospects of the “Great Coalition” in the Reich,104 the
Saxon Citizens’ Council (Sächsischer Bürgerrat), with strong support from the
League of Saxon Industrialists (Verband sächsischer Industrieller) and other
bourgeois interest organizations, tried to salvage what it could of the campaign
for bourgeois unity by proposing the creation of an electoral truce for the
duration of the campaign.105 Much less threatening to Stresemann and the
DVP’s national leadership than what the paramilitary leagues had in mind,
this attempt at “bourgeois consolidation from above” eventually produced an
agreement to which the DVP, DNVP, and Business Party all adhered.106
In the final analysis, the experiment in “bourgeois consolidation from
above” failed to insulate the more established bourgeois parties against the
centrifugal forces that more than a decade of economic hardship had
unleashed within the Saxon middle classes. When the votes were counted,
the DDP, DVP, and DNVP had suffered losses amounting to 42.0, 28.7, and
37.6 percent of what they had each received in Saxony in the December
1924 Reichstag elections. The Business Party, on the other hand, more than
doubled the number of votes it had received in 1924, from 124,193 to 237,462
(10.1 percent), and entered the newly elected Landtag with a complement of
ten deputies, while the fledgling People’s Justice Party polled 98,258 votes (4.2
percent) and received four Landtag mandates.107 The dramatic gains the two
middle-class splinter parties recorded in the Saxon elections represented a
stinging indictment of the ideological foundations upon which the Weimar
party system rested and constituted a direct threat not just to the two liberal
parties but to the DNVP as well. Plagued by lingering resentment over its role

103
Brückner (Stahlhelm, Landesverband Sachsen) to the DVP, Wahlkreisverband Leipzig,
29 July 1926, PA AA Berlin, NL Stresemann, 96/173150 51. See also Frank to Strese
mann, 9 Aug. 1926, ibid., 173144 46, as well as the memorandum of a conversation
between the Young German leadership and Stresemann’s secretary Henry Bernhard, 16
Aug. 1926, ibid., 173179 82.
104
Stresemann to Dieckmann, 25 Aug. 1926, PA AA Berlin, NL Stresemann, 96/173225 28.
105
For further details, see Frank to Stresemann, 24 Aug. 1926, PA AA Berlin, NL Strese
mann, 96/173213 14, and Dieckmann to Stresemann, 24 and 28 Aug. 1926, ibid.,
173221 24, 173236 43, as well as the memorandum on the meeting organized by the
Saxon Citizens’ Council, 22 Aug. 1926, ibid., 96/173215 17. The phrases “consolidation
from below” and “above” have been taken from Lapp, Revolution from the Right, 143 50.
106
Arthur Graefe, 3 Jahre Aufbaupolitik. Zu den Sachsenwahlen 1926, ed. Sächsische
Wahlkreisverbände der Deutschen Volkspartei (Dresden, 1926), 59 62.
107
Wirtschaft und Statistik 6, no. 21 (18 Nov. 1926): 783 84.
      

in the passage of the 1925 revaluation legislation, the DNVP was unable to
shake charges that it was nothing more than the party of big agriculture and
industry and sustained massive losses among those petty bourgeois elements
that had rallied to its support in 1924. The VRP, on the other hand, proved
remarkably adept in establishing itself, in the words of the DNVP’s Walther
Rademacher, as a “rallying point for all of those disgruntled elements . . . that
because of their background were either unwilling or unable to support the
Socialists or Communists.”108 What this would have on the balance of power
on the Reich as a whole to be seen.

The Return to Power

Throughout the fall of 1926 pressure for a reorganization of the national
government continued to mount. Not only had Germany’s acceptance into
the League of Nations on 10 September 1926 removed the single most serious
obstacle to the DNVP’s participation in a new national government, but
Nationalist party leaders found themselves under heavy pressure from Ger-
many’s most influential industrial and agricultural interest organizations to
rejoin the cabinet. Westarp’s keynote address at the DNVP’s Cologne party
congress in September 1926 laid the foundation for his party’s reentry into the
national government by reaffirming the Nationalists’ unconditional willing-
ness to enter into negotiations with the other government parties. While
reiterating the DNVP’s opposition to Germany’s entry into the League of
Nations, Westarp stressed that it was also important for Germany to conduct
its foreign policy as forcefully as possible in order to take advantage of the
opportunities that league membership now afforded it. But an essential pre-
requisite for the conduct of such a foreign policy, Westarp continued, was a
healthy and growing economy. Alluding to the economic difficulties that had
plagued Germany since the DNVP had left the government in October 1925,
Westarp argued that the strong and effective political leadership that was
necessary to put Germany’s economic house in order was inconceivable
without the active participation of the DNVP.109
Westarp’s speech affirmed in no uncertain terms the DNVP’s willingness to
accept its share of the governmental responsibility and invited the cabinet and
government parties to enter into serious negotiations aimed at bringing the
DNVP into the government. In a closed caucus, the DNVP leadership
endorsed their party’s reentry into the national government and authorized
the leaders of the Reichstag delegation to initiate negotiations directed toward

108
Rademacher, “Zur Frage der Aufwertung,” 19 Nov. 1926, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, II/24.
109
Kuno von Westarp, Klar das Ziel, fest das Wollen! Rede auf dem Reichsparteitage in Köln
am 9. September 1926, Deutschnationale Flugschrift, no. 260 (Berlin, 1926), 2 12.
   , –

that end at the earliest appropriate opportunity.110 At the same time, DNVP
moderates like Hans Erdmann von Lindeiner-Wildau tried to reassure the
party’s prospective coalition partners by publicly stating that there was no
point in trying to change the existing form of government until the more
urgent social and economic problems that confronted the German people had
been addressed.111 Similarly, the party’s criticism of Stresemann’s foreign
policy was notably more moderate in tone in comparison to its previous
diatribes against the policy of fulfillment and and its campaign against Ger-
many’s entry into the League of Nations.112 Nevertheless, neither the chancel-
lor Marx nor Stresemann were all that eager to bring the DNVP into the
government. Stresemann was still smarting from the DNVP’s behavior over
Locarno and would almost certainly have preferred the maintenance of the
existing governmental coalition.113 Marx and the leaders of the Center, on the
other hand, were far more favorably disposed to an expansion of the coalition
to the Left than to the Right and showed little interest in reorganizing the
government once it became clear that the Social Democrats would not be part
of the solution.114 But efforts to reach an understanding with the SPD that
would have allowed Marx to remain in office with or without its official
blessing were sabotaged first by revelations in the British press about German
violations of the armament provisions of the Versailles Treaty and then by
public attacks against the Social Democrats for their views on social and
military policy by Ernst Scholz, chairman of the DVP Reichstag delegation.115
The government’s last hopes of a reconciliation with the Social Democrats
evaporated when on 16 December Philipp Scheidemann, the SPD’s expert on
military affairs, disclosed German violations of the Versailles Treaty, including
secret military collaboration with the Red Army, in a sensational speech before
the Reichstag. On the following day the Social Democrats and Communists
introduced a motion of no-confidence in the Marx government that passed by
a 249 to 171 margin.116

110
Lindeiner Wildau to Westarp, 3 Feb. 1927, BA Koblenz, Nachlass Hans Erdmann von
Lindeiner Wildau, 3/34, also in NL Westarp, Gärtringen, II/25.
111
Hans Erdmann von Lindeiner Wildau, Die Ziele der Deutschnationalen. Vortrag in der
Lessing Hochschule zu Berlin am 19. Oktober 1926, Deutschnationale Flugschrift, no. 270
(Berlin, 1926), 17.
112
For example, see Otto Hoetzsch and Axel Freytagh von Loringhoven, Deutsche
Außenpolitik und nationale Opposition. Reichstagsreden, Deutschnationale Flugschrift,
no. 276 (Berlin, 1926).
113
Stresemann to Marx, 14 Jan. 1927, PA AA Berlin, NL Stresemann, 49/163560 66.
114
Karsten Ruppert, Im Dienst am Staat von Weimar. Das Zentrum als regierende Partei in
der Weimarer Demokratie 1923 1930 (Düsseldorf, 1992), 230 35. See also Hehl, Marx,
389 91.
115
Richter, Deutsche Volkspartei, 444 46.
116
Stürmer, Koalition und Opposition, 162 81.
      

At the suggestion of Reich President Hindenburg, negotiations on the

formation of a new government were postponed until after the Christmas
recess.117 In the meantime, the various parties began to stake out the positions
they would take once the Reichstag had reconvened. Although Scheidemann’s
revelations had eliminated the SPD as a coalition partner for the more
moderate bourgeois parties, neither the Center nor Stresemann was particu-
larly interested in sharing power with the Nationalists and would have pre-
ferred the maintenance of a bourgeois minority government that would ally
itself alternately with the Left or the Right.118 But the Nationalists found such
an arrangement unacceptable and refused to tolerate a minority cabinet based
upon the parties of the so-called bourgeois middle even if this meant risking
new elections in order to secure their party’s return to power.119 When
negotiations were finally resumed in the second week of January 1927, the
Center remained steadfast in its commitment to a cabinet of the middle and
refused to go along with the DVP’s Julius Curtius in his efforts to organize a
right-wing majority government that would have included the DNVP.120 At
this point, Hindenburg tried to break the deadlock by calling upon Marx to
undertake the formation of a government that rested upon a majority of the
bourgeois parties in the Reichstag and appealed to the parties that would
belong to such a government to resolve their differences as quickly as pos-
sible.121 The fact that Marx and not Curtius was now in line for the chancel-
lorship helped soften the Center’s opposition to a coalition with the DNVP.122
Sensitive to charges from their party’s left wing that a coalition with
the Nationalists was tantamount to a betrayal of the Center’s republican
principles and an abandonment of its commitment to the welfare of the German
working class, the leaders of the Center Reichstag delegation formulated two

117
Meissner, “Bemerkungen zur Regierungsbildung,” 18 Dec. 1926, BA Berlin, R 601, 402/
7 9.
118
On the government’s options, 28 Dec. 1926, BA Koblenz, Nachlass Hermann Pünder,
27/160 67.
119
For the Nationalist position, see Treviranus to Tirpitz, 30 Dec. 1926, BA MA Freiburg,
265/152, and Hugenberg, 30 Dec. 1926, NL Westarp, VN 76, as well as Westarp to
Seidlitz, 31 Dec. 1926, ibid., VN 40.
120
On Hindenburg’s initiative, see “Aktennotiz über die Besprechungen des Herrn Reichs
präsidenten, betreffend die Neubildung der Reichsregierung am 10. Januar 1927,” BA
Berlin, R 601, 402/26 36, and Meissner, “Aktennotiz,” 15 Jan. 1927, ibid., 402/42 46.
For the position of the Center, see the mintues of the Center Reichstag delegation and its
executive committee, 11 14 Jan. 1927, in Protokolle der Reichstagsfraktion und des
Fraktionsvorstandes der Deutschen Zentrumspartei 1926 1933, ed. Rudolf Morsey
(Mainz, 1969), 80 84, as well as Gehrig to Weber, 7 Jan. 1927, ACDP Sankt Augustin,
NL Gehrig, I 087, 001/2.
121
Hindenburg to Marx, n.d. [20 Jan. 1927], BA Berlin, R 601, 402/74 75.
122
Minutes of the Center Reichstag delegation, 20 Jan. 1927, in Protokolle der Reichstags
fraktion, ed. Morsey, 89 90.
   , –

documents – a national political manifesto and a social political manifesto –

that the Nationalists would have to accept before the Center would join them
in a new coalition government.123 The Center further sought to limit the
DNVP’s potential for mischief by securing its commitment to set of guidelines,
or Leitsätze, whose acceptance entailed implicit recognition of the existing
system of government and a pledge of support for the basic principles of
Stresemann’s foreign policy.124 When Westarp met with Marx on the after-
noon of 18 January to reassure the chancellor of his party’s willingness to work
within the framework of the existing constitutional system and subsequently
agreed to accept the Center’s guidelines as part of an arrangement that would
provide the Nationalists with four cabinet posts,125 the internal unity of the
DNVP began to unravel. But as Hugenberg and the leaders of the DNVP’s
right wing began to mobilize their supporters within the DNVP Reichstag
delegation for a showdown,126 they found themselves virtually isolated within
the party. At the decisive meeting of the DNVP Reichstag delegation on 28
January, the leaders of the party’s right wing were able to muster only thirteen
votes in a futile effort to block acceptance of the guidelines that had been
formulated by the Center as the political and ideological cornerstone of the
new cabinet.127 Not only did this remove the last obstacle to the DNVP’s
participation in the formation of a bourgeois majority government under
Marx and Stresemann, but the outcome of the meeting represented a moment

123
Minutes of the executive committee of the Center Reichstag delegation, 21 Jan. 1927, in
Protokolle der Reichstagsfraktion, ed. Morsey, 91. See also Josef Joos, Die politische
Ideenwelt des Zentrums (Karlsruhe, 1928), 67 72. For further details, see Ruppert, Im
Dienst am Staat von Weimar, 243 45.
124
For the text of these guidelines, see BA Koblenz, NL Pünder, 33/65 68. See also Pünder’s
memorandum, 23 31 Jan. 1927, ibid., 41 51. For further details, see Stürmer, Koalition
und Opposition, 188, and Ruppert, Im Dienst am Staat von Weimar, 245 46.
125
On the DNVP’s negotiations with Marx and other government officials, see Pünder’s
memorandum of a meeting between Westarp and Marx, 18 Jan. 1927, BA Koblenz, NL
Pünder, 95/91, as well as Pünder’s memorandum on the cabinet negotiations from
23 30 Jan. 1927, BA Koblenz, ibid., 33/41 51, and the memorandum of a conversation
between Stresemann and a delegation from the DNVP, 25 Jan. 1927, PA AA Berlin, NL
Stresemann, 49/163627 35.
126
See the postscript to Hugenberg’s letter to Westarp, 15 Jan. 1927, NL Westarp, VN 62,
and Hugenberg to Wegener, 15 Jan. 1927, BA Koblenz, Nachlass Leo Wegener, 65/48, as
well as Hugenberg’s notes for a speech before the DNVP executive committee, Jan. 1927,
BA Koblenz, NL Hugenberg, 113. For further details, see the entry in Quaatz’s diary,
17 18 Jan. 1927, BA Koblenz, NL Quaatz, 16, and the letter from Ada Gräfin von
Westarp to Gertraude Freifrau Hiller von Gaertringen, 17 Jan. 1927, NL Westarp,
Gärtringen.
127
Entry in Quaatz’s diary, 28 Jan. 1927, BA Koblenz, NL Quaatz, 16. See Lindeiner Wildau
to Westarp, 3 Feb. 1927, BA Koblenz, NL Lindeiner Wildau, 3/14 36, as well as
Westarp’s memorandum, “Meine persönliche Einstellung zu dem Vorschlag
v. Lindeiner’s als Reichsminister,” n.d. [Feb. 1927], NL Westarp, Gärtringen, II/25.
      

of supreme humiliation to Hugenberg and the militantly antirepublican elem-

ents on the party’s extreme right wing.128
Frustrated by their failure to block the party’s decision to rejoin the govern-
ment, the leaders of the DNVP’s right wing set out to influence the selection of
the four men who were to represent the party in the new cabinet. Although it
was generally conceded that Schiele would receive the ministry of agriculture
and Christian labor leader Wilhelm Koch the ministry of transportation, a
bitter fight developed over the appointees to the ministries of justice and
the interior.129 The party’s right wing hoped to block the appointment of
Lindeiner-Wildau as minister of the interior but agreed to go along with this if
the ultra-conservative Walther Graef-Anklam was tapped as the minister of
justice. But this compromise fell apart when Marx and the Center vetoed the
appointment of Graef-Anklam, whereupon the Nationalists nominated former
party chairman Oskar Hergt as his replacement. Though amenable to the
Center, Hergt’s nomination infuriated the leaders of the DNVP’s right wing,
who provoked a crisis so severe that at one point the Reich President
threatened the Nationalists with new national elections if they could not settle
their petty internal differences. The stalemate was eventually broken when the
DNVP Reichstag delegation settled on Walther von Keudell, an East Prussian
landowner and close associate of retired admiral Alfred von Tirpitz who was
acceptable to both Hindenburg and the other coalition parties, to replace
Lindeiner-Wildau as its nominee for the ministry of interior.130
The new government with Marx as chancellor and Stresemann as foreign
minister was formally installed in office on 3 February 1927. The fact that the
DNVP was represented in the cabinet by four ministers – Hergt, Keudell, Schiele,
and Koch – reflected the party’s parliamentary strength and was consistent with
what Westarp and the DNVP party leadership had hoped to accomplish. Many
Nationalists, however, still found the conditions that had been attached to their
party’s entry into the government humiliating and difficult to accept. Never was
the awkwardness of the DNVP’s position more apparent than in the tortured
defense of his party’s decision to enter the government that Westarp offered in
the parliamentary debate that accompanied the cabinet’s installation. For while

128
Axel von Freytagh Loringhoven, Deutschnationale Volkspartei (Berlin, 1931), 41 42.
129
On the haggling over the DNVP’s cabinet appointments, see the memoirs of Albrecht
Philipp, “Mein Weg: Rückschau eines Siebzigjährigen auf allerlei Geschenisse und
Menschen,” Dritte Teil: “Abgeordnetenjahre in der Weimarer Republik (1919 1930),”
SHStA Dresden, NL Philipp, 4/191 94, as well as see the letters from Ada Gräfin von
Westarp to Gertraude Freifrau Hiller von Gaertringen, 20 Jan. 1 Feb. 1927, NL Westarp,
Gärtringen.
130
See the entries in Quaatz’s diary, 26 28 Jan. 1927, BA Koblenz, NL Quaatz, 16, as well as
the correspondence between Lindeiner Wildau and Westarp, 3 Feb. 9 Mar. 1927, BA
Koblenz, NL Lindeiner Wildau, 3/2 36, 58 66. See also Dörr, “Deutschnationale Volks
partei,” 270 87.
   , –

Westarp had no choice but to concede that the DNVP’s entry into the govern-
ment was predicated upon de facto acceptance of the existing political system as
the framework within which it would pursue its short-term political objectives,
he went to great pains to reassure the leaders of his party’s right wing that this did
not mean that the DNVP had abandoned its struggle for a restoration of the
monarchy. The DNVP’s ultimate commitment, Westarp argued, was to serve the
state regardless of the particular form in which that state might exist. But
agreeing to serve the state on the basis of the republican form of government,
he continued, was by no means the same thing as making an emotional commit-
ment to that form of government and all its emblems, symbols, and organs. The
DNVP, therefore, would continue to fight for the principles upon which it had
been founded and for the defense of German dignity, German freedom, and
German interests.131 Bromides like this, however, did little to conceal or heal the
deep divisions that had developed within the party and that had only been
exacerbated by the its entry into the fourth Marx cabinet.132

Ever since the DNVP’s resignation from the first Luther cabinet as a result of its
opposition to the Locarno accord, party leaders – and particularly the organized
interests allied with the party – worked long and hard at plotting a course that
would end with the DNVP’s return to power. This enterprise was driven by the
conviction of Westarp and his supporters that only a return to power would
make it possible for the DNVP to provide the various interests that constituted
their party’s material base with the effective protection they needed during a
period of increasing economic hardship. But the calculus of interest politics that
lay at the heart of the DNVP’s second experiment in governmental participation
encountered strong resistance from the various nationalist pressure groups that
stood on the extreme right of Germany’s political spectrum. From their per-
spective, the very idea of using the state as a mechanism for promoting the
material interests of specific sectors of German society constituted a heresey
they could not reconcile with their concept of the nation as a sacred entity in
which the distinctions of class, confession, and region were somehow mystically
dissolved. The dividing line between these two distinctly different approaches to
politics ran right through the heart of the the DNVP. Once again, the ability of
the party and its leaders to strike a balance between these two political concepts
would be severely tested.

131
Verhandlungen des Reichstags, vol. 391, 8804 06. See also Lambach, “Um die Führung
im Reiche,” in Politische Praxis 1927, ed. Walther Lambach (Hamburg, n.d. [1927]),
60 61, as well as Walther Graef Anklam, “Der Werdegang der Deutschnationalen
Volkspartei 1918 1928,” in Der nationale Wille. Werden und Wirken der Deutschnatio
nalen Volkspartei 1918 1928, ed. Max Weiß (Essen, 1928), 50.
132
For the reaction to Westarp’s speech, see the letter from Ada Gräfin von Westarp to
Gertraude Freifrau Hiller von Gaertringen, 3 Feb. 1927, NL Westarp, Gärtringen.
 12

The Burden of Responsibility

The installation of the fourth Marx cabinet in January 1927 marked the
beginning of the DNVP’s second experiment with governmental responsibility.
For the next thirteen months the DNVP would serve as an integral member of
the governmental coalition and as the party that provided the Marx cabinet with
the parliamentary majority it needed to secure passage of its legislative agenda.
This experiment in governmental participation, however, differed from the
DNVP’s earlier attempt in 1925 in several important respects. In the first place,
the DNVP was now a full-fledged member of a governmental coalition with
formal ties to the cabinet, whereas in 1925 the first Luther cabinet had presented
itself as a cabinet of experts in which each of the four parties supporting it was
represented by one cabinet officer apiece. Second, the fourth Marx cabinet was
based on formal political commitments that had been negotiated by the parties
that supported it, the most important being the agreements that had been
reached by the DNVP and Center. In the case of the Luther cabinet two years
earlier, no such commitments had existed. Third, the general economic climate
at the beginning of 1927 was generally better than it had been in 1925, although
the deterioration of Germany’s rural economy would only intensify during the
tenure of the Marx cabinet. Fourth, the diplomatic controversies that had
figured so prominently during the DNVP’s first experiment at government
participation had faded into the background. For all intents and purposes,
1927 was a year of relative inactivity on the diplomatic front, with the result
that the disruptive potential of disputes over foreign policy had been greatly
reduced, if not eliminated altogether. All of this augured well for the success of
the DNVP’s second experiment at government participation.
Still, things were not as easy for the Nationalist party leadership as they
might have seemed. First of all, the DNVP was far less united in 1927 than it
had been at the time of its entry into the first Luther cabinet in January 1925,
when even Hugenberg, arguably the most influential figure on the DNVP’s
right wing, had gone along with the decision to join the government.1 The

1
Hugenberg’s remarks at a meeting of the DNVP Reichstag delegation, 12 June 1928, BA
Koblenz, NL Schmidt Hannover, 35.


   , –

DNVP’s right wing was far better organized in 1927 than it had been two years
earlier and enjoyed a broad base of support at the local and regional base of the
DNVP’s national organization that could be mobilized against the party’s
parliamentary leadership with telling effect.2 The pressure the leaders of the
DNVP’s right wing could bring to bear upon the party leadership was further
enhanced by their ties to the Pan-German League, the Stahlhelm, and other
organizations on the patriotic Right. The struggle against Locarno had moved
the Pan-German League back into the political limelight, and its leaders were
determined to reverse the direction in which the DNVP was headed and bring
its second experiment at government participation to a quick and decisive end.
Similarly, the radicalization of the Stahlhelm was to continue unabated
through 1927–28 as the radical nationalists behind former DNVP activist
Theodor Duesterberg intensified their campaign against Franz Seldte and the
more traditional species of bourgeois nationalism he represented.

Initial Successes, Initial Challenges

The key figure in the DNVP’s second experiment at governmental participa-
tion was Count Kuno von Westarp. Ever since his election as DNVP party
chairman in March 1926 Westarp had steadfastly steered the DNVP toward a
return to power, and the DNVP’s entry into the fourth Marx cabinet repre-
sented a great personal triumph for Westarp for which he received the plaudits
of most of his colleagues in the DNVP Reichstag delegation.3 Despite his deep-
seated aversion to the republican system of government, Westarp was not only
fully initiated into what Thomas Mergel has called the parliamentary culture
of the Weimar Republic but became one of its most effective practitioners.4 As
chairman of the parliamentary coordinating committee, or Interfraktioneller
Ausschuß, that oversaw the flow of legislation to and from the floor of the
Reichstag, Westarp excercised more direct influence upon the legislative
process than the chancellor himself. His office in the Reichstag became a
virtual clearing house for all the legislation that reached the floor of the
Reichstag or the chambers of its various and sundry committees. His disdain

2
For example, see the report on the Mecklenburg party organization, n.d. [after 6
Aug. 1926], NL Westarp, Gärtringen, VN 75, as well as Fleischauer to Westarp, 9
Dec. 1926, ibid., II/24.
3
On Westarp’s role in the formation of the Marx cabinet, see the letters from Ada Gräfin
von Westarp to Gertraude Freifrau Hiller von Gaertringen, 21 Jan. 1 Feb. 1927, NL
Westarp, Gärtringen.
4
On the concept of parliamentary culture and its place in the history of the Weimar
Republic, see Thomas Mergel, Parlamentarische Kultur in der Weimarer Republik. Poli
tische Kommunikationen, symbolische Politik und Öffentlichkeit im Reichstag (Düsseldorf,
2002), 13 31.
     

for the republican system of government notwithstanding, Westarp used the

position he had carved out for himself as power broker for the fourth Marx
cabinet to advance the agenda of the German Right at every conceivable
opportunity – and nowhere more so than in the areas of social, economic,
and agricultural policy.5
Of the various factions within the DNVP, none embraced the Nationalists’
entry into the Marx cabinet more enthusiastically than the leaders of the
Christian-national labor movement. Walther Lambach, a member of the
DNVP Reichstag delegation who doubled as its chief liaison to the German
National Union of Commercial Employees, hailed the new government as a
“people’s conservative coalition” in which the consolidation of workers and
peasants on a Christian-national basis had finally been achieved. Lambach and
his associates took credit for having used their ties to the working-class
elements in the Center to wear down its resistance to a coalition with the
DNVP.6 Having served as midwife to the birth of the new government, the
DNVP’s working-class and white-collar wings now expected to see their
efforts rewarded with new laws expanding and improving the existing body
of social welfare legislation. But the new-found militancy of the Christian labor
movement and its embrace of the government as the vehicle for initiating a
new round of social welfare legislation posed a direct threat to the position of
industry and agriculture in the governmental coalition and threatened to
undermine their ties to the coalition parties. From the outset, the fourth Marx
cabinet rested upon a fragile and inherently unstable coalition of disparate
social and economic interests that, if subjected to sufficient stress, could fall
apart with little or no warning.
The DNVP’s decision to enter the Marx cabinet had been driven by the
party’s desire to assume a more active role in the formulation and implemen-
tation of state social and economic policy. Yet all of this assumed that the
various interests that constituted the DNVP’s material base could be recon-
ciled to each other without threatening the unity of the party. As the DNVP’s
Paul Lejeune-Jung, an industrialist and outspoken Catholic conservative,
stressed in a programmatic speech before the Reichstag on 4 February 1927,
the fundamental premise of the DNVP’s social and economic program was
that there was no contradiction between the social and economic needs of the
German nation and that the former could be satisfied only on the basis of a

5
On Westarp’s role in shaping the legislative agenda of the fourth Marx cabinet, see
Albrecht Philipp, “Mein Weg: Rückschau eines Siebzigjährigen auf allerlei Geschenisse
und Menschen, Dritte Teil: Abgeordnetenjahre in der Weimarer Republik (1919 1930),”
SHStA Dresden, NL Philipp, 4/198 200.
6
Walther Lambach, “Um die Führung im Reiche,” in Politische Praxis 1927, ed. Walther
Lambach (Hamburg, n.d. [1927]), 60 61.
   , –

vigorous and healthy economic policy.7 This premise would be severely tested
in late February 1927 when the cabinet revived a bill that sought to restore the
eight-hour workday as the norm for industrial labor and to establish a new
and less generous formula for the compensation of overtime work. This bill,
the essential outlines of which had been agreed upon in the last days of the
previous government, aroused such intense opposition from Ruhr heavy
industry that the DNVP’s industrial supporters threatened to curtail their
subsidies to the party if it capitulated to the trade-union elements on its left
wing and helped secure passage of the bill in the Reichstag.8 In an attempt to
offset the influence of the Christian labor unions, the DNVP joined forces with
the DVP in allowing deputies with close ties to German industry to take the
lead in working out the final details of the bill in the parliamentary committee
to which it had been assigned. Representatives of the two parties were thus
able to pressure the Center into accepting a weakened version of the bill that
eliminated many of the provisions on overtime that organized industrial
interests had found so offensive.9 Despite the fact that Hugenberg and sixteen
other members of the DNVP Reichstag delegation signaled their disapproval
of the proposed bill by staying away from the Reichstag at the time during the
decisive vote, the compromise saved the governmental coalition and paved the
way for the bill’s eventual acceptance by a narrow 196–184 margin on 8 April
1927.10
The struggle over the Provisional Work Hours Law in the spring of
1927 only foreshadowed the difficulties the DNVP would continue to have
as a member of the governmental coalition. Even as this law was making its
way through parliament, Heinrich Brauns and the ministry of labor were
preparing another bill aimed at softening the social and economic hardships
the German worker had experienced as a result of the currency stabilization of
1923–24. Designed to protect the German worker against the vicissitudes of an
uncertain labor market, the Unemployment Insurance Act enjoyed a broad
base of support that extended from the Social Democrats to the left wing of the
DNVP and was approved by an overwhelming margin in the Reichstag on

7
Paul Lejeune Jung, Gegenwartsaufgaben deutscher Wirtschafts und Sozialpolitik. Reich
stagsrede am 4. Februar 1927, Deutschnationale Flugschrift, no. 283 (Berlin, 1927), esp. 6 12.
8
For example, see Kirdorf to Westarp, 26 Feb. 1927, and Hugenberg to Westarp, 2
Mar. 1927, both in NL Westarp, Gärtringen, II/25, as well as circular no. 5 from the
ADI, 10 Mar. 1927, HA Krupp Essen, FAH IV C 178.
9
For further details, see Rademacher to Westarp, 1 Mar. 1927, and Westarp to Kirdorff, 10
Mar. 1927, both in NL Westarp, Gärtringen, II/25. See also Michael Stürmer, Koalition
und Opposition, 203 10, and Ohnezeit, Zwischen “schärfster Opposition,” 368 70.
10
See Hugenberg’s speech before the DNVP economic conference in Bielefeld, 24
Apr. 1927, BA Koblenz, NL Hugenberg, 113/96 112.
     

7 July 1927.11 The passage of this act marked the high-point of the legislative
influence of Christian labor and provided dramatic proof that the DNVP was
not the party of social reaction its rivals had always made it out to be. But if the
leaders of the DNVP’s Christian-national labor wing hailed the bill’s passage
as a major triumph for workers and white-collar employees throughout the
country,12 spokesmen for the DNVP’s industrial and agrarian wings resented
the way in which the party’s national leadership had been outmaneuvered by
the forces of organized labor.
Sentiment to this effect was particularly strong among the leaders of the
party’s industrial wing. In the spring of 1927 – indeed, at the precise moment
that the work hours bill was making its way through the Reichstag – Ruhr
heavy industry had tried to shore up its position within the DNVP by agreeing
to provide the DNVP and DVP with two 50,000 mark subsidies each to help
them sustain their national organizations in the period of relative inactivity
between national elections.13 Given the severe financial difficulties the DNVP
had experienced through 1925 and 1926,14 this support was critical to the
party’s long-term financial stability.15 But Fritz Thyssen, the industrialist
responsible for steering this money to the DNVP, was so enraged by the
passage of the Unemployment Insurance Act that he warned Westarp in July
1927 that the financial arrangements of the previous spring were in jeopardy.16
The Coordinating Committee of German National Industrialists (ADI), which
had been founded at the DNVP’s 1921 Munich party congress, tried to placate
the party’s industrial supporters by defending the DNVP’s role in blunting the
thrust of Brauns’s legislative agenda. Had not the DNVP been in the govern-
ment, the ADI’s Anton Scheibe argued in a circular that was widely distributed
throughout the German industrial establishment, the legislation in question
would have been far more damaging to industry than it actually was. The
ultimate problem, continued Scheibe, lay not with a lack of commitment on
the part of the DNVP but rather with the parliamentary system of government

11
Stürmer, Koalition und Opposition, 210 12. See also Dörr, “Deutschnationale Volkspar
tei,” 335 39, and Ohnezeit, Zwischen “schärfster Opposition,” 371 73.
12
Karl Dudey, Deutschnationale Sozialpolitik. Vortrag gehalten auf dem Deutschnationalen
Parteitag in Königsberg am 22. Sept. 1927, Deutschnationale Flugschrift, no. 302 (Berlin,
1927), 10 12.
13
For further details, see Kirdorf to Krupp, 14 Mar. 1927, HA Krupp Essen, FAH IV C 178,
as well as Thyssen’s correspondence with Westarp, 11 14 Apr. 1927, NL Westarp,
Gärtringen, II/23. On the rationale behind this arrangement, see Wilmowsky to Krupp,
12 Nov. and 15 Dec. 1927, HA Krupp Essen, FAH 23/501.
14
Report by Widenmann at the DNVP party congress in Cologne, 9 Sept. 1926, BA MA
Freiburg, NL Tirpitz, 60/330 37.
15
Remarks by Westarp at a meeting with a group of Ruhr industrialists, Düsseldorf, 18
Mar. 1927, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, VN 59.
16
Correspondence between Thyssen and Westarp, 18 23 July 1927, NL Westarp, Gärtrin
gen, VN II/23.
   , –

in which the DNVP was obliged to operate. Only a radical overhaul of the
existing political system and the establishment of a more authoritarian form of
government, Scheibe concluded, would free German industry from the fetters
under which it was forced to operate so that it might realize the full flower of
its productive potential.17

The Price of Compromise

As the struggle over the Work Hours Law of April 1927 and the Unemploy-
ment Insurance Act three months later clearly indicated, the task of reconcil-
ing the respective demands of social and economic policy was by no means as
easy as Lejeune-Jung had intimated in his Reichstag speech earlier that
February. This was no less true of the DNVP’s relations to German agriculture.
One of the compelling reasons behind the DNVP’s decision to rejoin the
government had been the need to provide the party’s agricultural interests
with more effective representation than the party could do in opposition. The
need to do so was all the more urgent in light of the continued deterioration of
Germany’s rural economy since the stabilization of the currency in 1923–24.18
With more than 1.7 million members, the National Rural League was far and
away the largest of Germany’s agricultural interest organizations, and it stood
fully behind the DNVP’s reentry into the national government, though with
the important caveat that this not be construed as acceptance of the existing
constitutional system.19 In his maiden speech as Reich agricultural minister,
the Schiele outlined a comprehensive program of agrarian relief that envisaged
not only more vigorous tariff protection against agricultural imports from the
rest of Europe, Canada, and the United States but also fundamental structural
changes that would reverse a decade of governmental neglect and restore
agricultural productivity to its prewar levels. To accomplish this, Schiele
proposed a series of measures designed to reduce the high level of rural
indebtedness that had resulted from the inflationary turmoil of the early
1920s and restore the profitability of small and middle-sized agricultural
enterprises. The net effect of these reforms, Schiele argued, would be to
revitalize German agriculture so that it could serve as a catalyst of Germany’s
national economic recovery.20

17
ADI, circular no. 6, Aug. 1927, StA Hamburg, Blohm und Voß GmbH, 1215. See also
Anton Scheibe, Wirtschaft und Parlamentarismus. Ein Beitrag zur Kritik an der Partei,
Deutschnationale Flugschrift, no. 300 (Berlin, 1927).
18
For further details, see Harold James, German Slump, 246 59.
19
Reichs Landbund 6, no. 48 (27 Nov. 1926): 545 46, and no. 50 (11 Dec. 1926): 573 74.
20
Martin Schiele, Die Agrarpolitik der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei in den Jahren 1925/
1928, Deutschnationale Flugschrift, no. 320 (Berlin, 1928), 5 9, 15. See also Schiele,
“Deutsche Agrarpolitik nach dem Kriege,” Nationalwirtschaft. Blätter für organischen
Wirtschaftsaufbau 1, no. 4 (Apr. 1928): 493 507.
     

Despite Schiele’s deep and abiding commitment to the social and economic
welfare of the German farmer, organized agriculture became increasingly
impatient with the pace of the government’s farm program. On 18 March
1927 Ernst Brandes, president of the German Chamber of Agriculture
(Deutscher Landwirtschaftsrat), wrote a long letter to Westarp in which he
warned the DNVP party chairman of the depressed mood that existed
throughout the German countryside and implored him to do what he could
to expedite the implementation of the government’s farm program. While
praising Schiele for the scope and vision of his farm program, Brandes
questioned the DNVP’s resolve and unity of purpose “to create the necessary
economic prerequisites for its successful implementation.”21 Brandes’s letter
constituted a direct challenge to Schiele and the DNVP party leadership and
exhorted them to fulfill the promises that had accompanied their return to the
national government. On 4 April Westarp met with representatives from the
other coalition parties to draft the outlines of a new tariff policy aimed at
securing the livelihood of German agriculture, increase its productive capabil-
ities, strengthen the domestic market, and create the prerequisites for new
settlement in the east.22 Over the course of the next several months Schiele
succeeded in securing improvements benficial to agriculture in commercial
treaties that Germany was in the process of negotiating with Spain, France,
Poland, and Canada. At the same time, he was able to persuade the cabinet to
reduce taxes on the consumption of sugar and rye in an attempt to expand the
market for domestically produced agricultural products.23 Responding to
Brandes in April 1927, Westarp cited this as proof of the DNVP’s commit-
ment to the welfare of German agriculture and reassured him that the DNVP
would continue to do everything in its power to rescue the German farmer
from the increasingly desperate situation in which he currently found itself.24
The exchange between Brandes and Westarp revealed just how fragile the
relationship between the DNVP and organized agriculture had become. Bran-
des’s dissatisfaction over the speed with which Schiele was implementing his
farm program underlined a deeper frustration that conservative economic
interest organizations in both industry and agriculture had come to feel about
the exigencies of coalition politics. For, as Westarp reminded Brandes, the
DNVP was a member of a coalition government and had to respect the
interests and concerns of its coalition partners.25 At no point was the poign-
ancy of Westarp’s statement more apparent than in the party’s agonizing

21
Brandes to Westarp, 18 Mar. 1927, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, VN 59.
22
Memorandum by Westarp, 4 Apr. 1927, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, VN 66.
23
Schiele, Agrarpolitik der DNVP, 7 9. For further details, see Dörr, “Deutschnationale
Volkspartei,” 339 46.
24
Westarp to Brandes, 11 Apr. 1927, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, VN 59.
25
Ibid.
   , –

struggle to come to terms with the renewal of the 1922 Law for the Protection
of the Republic. This law, which had been enacted in the aftermath of
Rathenau’s assassination and gave the state extensive powers to monitor the
activities of anti-republican organizations, was scheduled to expire in the
summer of 1927. The struggle over its renewal dramatized the dilemma in
which the DNVP found itself as a member of the governmental coalition. For
Marx and his supporters, Nationalist acceptance of the controversial bill was a
sign of the DNVP’s good faith as a coalition partner and a conditio sine qua
non for the Center’s continued collaboration with the DNVP.26 For the
Nationalists, on the other hand, the Law for the Protection of the Republic
had always been a thorn in their side and an affront to their monarchist
principles. As Westarp reminded the party faithful at a rally in Berlin in the
second week of May, the DNVP was a monarchist party whose fundamental
opposition to the republican form of government had been compromised in
no way whatsoever by its participation in the national government. If the
DNVP was to fulfill its mission as the bearer of Germany’s conservative
tradition, Westarp insisted, then it had no choice but to remain true to the
principles that had inspired its founding, not the least of which was its
commitment to the monarchical form of government as the form of govern-
ment best suited to the character of the German nation.27
The Nationalists came under heavy pressure to support renewal of the Law
for the Protection of the Republic from the Center, where Joseph Wirth and
the party’s left wing were on the verge of an open revolt as a consequence of
their party’s coalition with the DNVP.28 Marx was fully prepared to resign as
chancellor if renewal of the law failed to receive the necessary two-thirds
majority in the Reichstag and demanded that the Nationalists demonstrate
their reliability as a member of the national government by making a declar-
ation of loyalty to the Weimar Constitution that went beyond Westarp’s pallid
reassurances before the Reichstag on 3 February.29 Although Westarp and the
leaders of the DNVP Reichstag delegation were anxious to prevent the collapse
of the governmental coalition, they regarded the controversial law as a meas-
ure directed against their own party and registered strong opposition to its
renewal at a meeting with their coalition partners 11 May 1927.30 The DVP

26
Hehl, Marx , 416 22.
27
Kuno von Westarp, Die Sendung der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei. Ansprache in der
Werbewoche des Landesverbandes Berlin am 9. Mai 1927, Deutschnationale Volkspartei,
no. 294 (Berlin, 1927), 9 12. See also Kuno von Westarp, Deutschnationale Innenpolitik
in der Regierungskoalition, Deutschnationale Flugschrift, no. 292 (Berlin, 1927), 27 31.
28
Josef Becker, “Joseph Wirth und die Krise des Zentrums während des IV. Kabinetts Marx
(1927 28),” Zeitschrift für die Geschichte des Oberrheins 109 (1961): 371 92.
29
Hehl, Marx, 416 22.
30
Westarp’s remarks at a meeting of government party leaders, 11 May 1927, in Akten der
Reichskanzlei: Die Kabinette Marx III und IV. 17. Mai 1926 bis 29. Januar 1927. 29 Januar
     

and BVP tried to break the deadlock with an amendment that permitted
extension of the law for another two years but abolished the special courts
that had been set up for the purpose of investigating and suppressing anti-
republican organizations. The so-called Kaiser paragraph prohibiting the
return of the emperor or members of the other ruling dynasties to Germany,
on the other hand, would be retained over strenuous objections from the
Nationalists.31 Anxious to avoid the onus of bringing about the fall of the
government, the Nationalist party leadership reluctantly agreed to this com-
promise, and in the decisive vote on 17 May all but six members of the DNVP
Reichstag delegation voted for it, thereby assuring its passage by the necessary
two-thirds majority.32
For the Nationalists all of this was a particularly bitter pill to swallow. The
retention of the Kaiser paragraph ignited a storm of protest throughout the
DNVP party organization and prompted threats of resignation from several
prominent party members.33 The imperial household was particularly dis-
traught over the DNVP’s alleged betrayal of the monarchist cause and
protested vigorously from its exile in Doorn.34 In an attempt calm the waters,
Westarp undertook an energetic defense of the compromise he had negoti-
ated with the other government parties at a particularly stormy meeting of
the DNVP executive committee on 2 June 1927. Not only did Westarp
dismiss the Kaiser paragraph as a measure of little practical import, but he
reiterated his fear that the DNVP’s failure to support an extension of the
controversial law would lead to the collapse of the existing governmental
coalition and the formation of a new left-wing government under Social
Democratic influence. For the DNVP it was essential to prevent the Center
from falling once again under the control of Wirth and the elements on its
extreme left wing, and this, Westarp insisted, was almost certain if the DNVP
persisted in its opposition to an extension of the Law for the Protection of
the Republic.35 Although the leaders of the DNVP district organizations in
central and western Germany tended to accept the arguments with which
Westarp defended the DNVP’s role in the renewal of the Law for the

1927 bis 29. Juni 1928, ed. Günther Abramowski, 2 vols. (Boppard am Rhein, 1988),
1:730 33.
31
Minutes of a meeting of government party leaders, 12 May 1927, ibid., 1:745 47.
32
Undated memorandum by Westarp, May 1927, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, 61. For further
details, see Dörr, “Deutschnationale Volkspartei,” 303 13.
33
Ada Gräfin von Westarp to Gertraude Freifrau Hiller von Gaertringen, 12 May 1927, NL
Westarp, Gärtringen.
34
Dommes to Westarp, 26 May 1927, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, VN 60.
35
Westarp’s speech at the meeting of the DNVP executive committee, 2 June 1927, BA MA
Freiburg, NL Tirpitz, 60/155 56. See also Westarp to Dommes, 4 June 1927, NL Westarp,
Gärtringen, VN 60, as well as Westarp, Deutschnationale Innenpolitik, 24 27.
   , –

Protection of the Republic,36 his words did little to assuage the bitterness that
those who stood on the party’s right wing felt over what they regarded as an
unconscionable sacrifice of political principle for the sake of preserving a
governmental coalition that had yet to fulfill its promise.37

Revolt on the Patriotic Right

Westarp had come to recognize that the exigencies of coalition politics some-
times took precedence over the DNVP’s ideological opposition to the repub-
lican form of government and believed that compromises were unavoidable in
order to protect the welfare of those interests that were essential for the future
of the conservative movement. This sort of thinking, however, found little
favor on the patriotic Right, where opposition to any form of collaboration
with the existing political system was deeply suspect. Of the various organiza-
tions on Germany’s patriotic Right, none was more incensed over the DNVP’s
participation in the Marx cabinet that the Pan-German League. The Pan-
Germans were particularly frustrated by their exclusion from any sort of
meaningful role in the deliberations that had preceded the DNVP’s entry into
the fourth Marx cabinet. Westarp had met with ADV chairman Heinrich Claß
on several occasions in the second half of December 1926, leaving him with
the distinct impression that the DNVP was not interested in becoming part of
a government based upon a pariliamentary majority and sought instead the
formation of a right-wing minority government in which the DNVP would
replace the Center as the dominant force.38 But when the DNVP, contrary to
all expectations, joined the Center and other parties of the middle and
moderate Right in a new government that rested on a Reichstag majority, this
struck the Pan-Germans an act of capitulation to the very system the DNVP
had pledged to overthrow. Meeting in Berlin on 12–13 February 1927, the
leaders of the ADV denounced the DNVP’s decision to join the Marx cabinet
as a betrayal of the struggle against the existing system of government and
called upon the their supporters throughout the country to rededicate them-
selves to the task of building a strong “national opposition” at the local and
regional levels of the DNVP organization.39 Claß was particularly critical of

36
Ada Gräfin von Westarp to Gertraude Freifrau Hiller von Gaertringen, 2 June 1927, NL
Westarp, Gärtringen.
37
Remarks of Lineau (Hamburg), Averdunk (Potsdam I), Schiele Naumburg, and Steinhoff
(Potsdam II), in the minutes of the DNVP executive committee, 2 June 1927, BA MA
Freiburg, NL Tirpitz, 60/156 58.
38
Remarks by Claß at a meeting of the ADV managing committee, 12 13 Feb. 1927, BA
Berlin, R 8048, 149/42 56.
39
“Alldeutsche Kundgebung zur Lage,” Deutsche Zeitung, 14 Feb. 1927, no. 37. For further
details, see Jackisch, Pan German League, 150 51.
     

Westarp’s role in the creation of the new cabinet and accused the DNVP of
having betrayed the very principles upon which the it had been founded.40 The
proper response, according to ADV secretary general Baron Leopold von
Vietinghoff-Scheel, would not be to leave the DNVP for the sake of a new
political party as some had suggested but to mobilize the party’s rank-and-file
membership against the policies of the party’s national leadership and to
refashion the DNVP as a radical opposition party capable of winning back
the support of those who had abandoned it in disapppointment over its
current political course.41
The situation within the Pan-German League was not substantially different
from that within the United Patriotic Leagues of Germany under the leader-
ship of retired major Count Rüdiger von der Goltz. Ever since he assumed
leadership of the organization in early 1925, Goltz had led the VVVD more
and more decisively into the orbit of the radical Right.42 In the dispute over
Locarno the VVVD had done its part in forcing the DNVP out of the Luther
government, and it continued to press the party to take a strong stand on
matters of national interest even after the DNVP had left the government.43
Lke the Pan-Germans, the VVVD had been caught off-guard by the DNVP’s
decision to join the Center in forming a new government that derived its
mandate from a majority in the Reichstag. For Goltz and his associates, the net
effect of this had been to “paralyze the national opposition in parliament,” a
situation that could be corrected only by mobilizing and unifying the forces of
the national opposition.44 Stunned by the Nationalist entry into the Marx
cabinet, the VVVD immediately tried to embellish its credentials as a member
of the national opposition by enlisting retired general and field marshall
August von Mackensen as its honorary protector or Schirmherr.45 Mackensen
was one of Germany’s most venerated heroes of World War I, and the leaders
of the VVVD hoped that his patronage would enable their organization to
reestablish itself as the unquestioned leader of the patriotic movement.46

40
Claß at the meeting of the ADV managing committee, 12 13 Feb. 1927, BA Berlin,
R 8048, 149/42 56.
41
Remarks by Vietinghoff Scheel, ibid., 56 59.
42
Report by Goltz at the VVVD national delegate conference, 25 Aug. 1926, BA Berlin,
R 8005, 86/24 26.
43
For example, see Goltz to Westarp, 13 Mar. 1926, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, VN 76.
44
Resolution adopted by the VVVD national delegate conference, 16 Mar. 1927, Nachlass
August von Mackensen, BA MA Freiburg, 337/28 29.
45
Goltz to Mackensen, 25 Mar. 1927, BA MA Freiburg, NL Mackensen, 337/32. See also
Theo Schwarzmüller, Zwischen Kaiser und “Führer.” Generalfeldmarschall August von
Mackensen. Eine politische Biographie (Paderborn, 1998), 202 31.
46
Goltz, “Beurteilung der Lage der vaterländischen Bewegung im Spätsommer 1927,” 2
Sept. 1927, records of the Dresden chapter of the Pan German League, Stadtarchiv
Dresden (hereafter cited as StA Dresden), 10. For Mackensen’s political stance, see
Cramon to Seldte, 19 Dec. 1926, BA Berlin, R 72, 55/114 16.
   , –

In the meantime, the struggle for the control of the largest of Germany’s
paramilitary organizations, the Stahlhelm, drew to its inexorable climax. The
struggle against Locarno had done much to energize the Stahlhelm’s more
radical elements and to fuel their challenge to Seldte’s leadership of the
organization. Critical of Seldte’s inability to articulate a clear political line
for the Stahlhelm to follow, Duesterberg and his supporters and were intent
upon transforming the Stahlhelm from a staid, predominantly bourgeois
veterans’ organization into a vanguard of revolutionary nationalism.47 At the
same time, Duesterberg sought to tie the Stahlhelm more closely to Goltz and
the more militantly antirepublican elements in charge of the VVVD.48
Emboldened by their earlier successes, the forces around Duesterberg
launched a direct challenge to Seldte’s leadership of the Stahlhelm in the
spring of 1927 in a determined effort to drive him from control of the
organization and to bring about a fundamental change in its political orienta-
tion.49 These efforts would almost certainly have succeeded had not Seldte
taken legal precautions to tie the designation “Stahlhelm” to his own person,
thereby making it impossible for his opponents to remove him as its leader
without changing the organization’s name. As a result, Duesterberg was forced
to accept a compromise whereby he and Seldte would share responsibility for
leadership of the Stahlhelm with Duesterberg as its second leader, but with
powers and responsibilities equal to those of its first leader Seldte.50
This arrangement represented a clear triumph for the activists around Dues-
terberg and completed the Stahlhelm’s transformation from an ostensibly non-
partisan veteran’s organization into a political combat league. In the course of
this, the Stahlhelm had abandoned the pretense of political neutrality to become,
as Seldte wrote defiantly to Stresemann in April 1927, “a political national
freedom movement.”51 This transformation reached its climax in May 1927 at
the eighth Reich Front Soldiers’ Congress (Reichsfrontsoldatentag) in Berlin.52
Here, in the presence of four Hohenzollern princes, the leaders of the Stahlhelm
issued a special proclamation, or Botschaft, outlining the Stahlhelm’s program
for Germany’s national renewal at home and abroad. Not only did the proclam-
ation underscore the Stahlhelm’s refusal to accept the conditions that had been
created by Versailles and subsequent diplomatic agreements, but it demanded
the unconditional repudiation of the war guilt clause as a necessary precondition

47
Duesterberg to Hammerstein, 16 Apr. 1926, BA Koblenz, R 72/2305.
48
Exchange of letters between Duesterberg and Ausfeld, 10 15 Jan. 1927, BA Berlin, R 72,
53/141 42.
49
Brauweiler to Lüninck, 16 Mar. 1927, VWA Münster, NL Lüninck, 768.
50
Brauweiler, “Meine Tätigkeit im ‘Stahlhelm’,” 22 Dec. 1965, StA Mönchen Gladbach, NL
Brauweiler, 110. For further details, see Berghahn, Stahlhelm, 103 14; Klotzbücher, “Der
politische Weg des Stahlhelm,” 72 111; and Simon, “Brauweiler,” 210 16.
51
Seldte to Stresemann, 29 Apr. 1927, PA AA Berlin, NL Stresemann, 53/164031.
52
Seldte, “Der 8. Reichsfrontsoldatentag,” Der Stahlhelm, 8 May 1927, no. 19.
     

for German membership in the League of Nations. At the same time, the
proclamation reaffirmed the Stahlhelm’s commitment to the black, red, and
gold colors of the imperial flag and called for a constitutional reform to
strengthen the powers of the Reich President so that he could protect the
national welfare against the arbitrariness of parliamentary government. In the
area of social and economic policy, the Stahlhelm denounced the Marxist
concept of class conflict at the same time that it advocated a policy of internal
colonization and the settlement of Germany’s eastern mark with peasants from
other parts of the country to correct the problem of “over-industrialization” and
“the progressive detachment of healthy national energy [Volkskraft] from its
native soil [Heimatboden].”53
As the Stahlhelm fell more and more under the influence of Duesterberg
and the elements on its extreme right wing, its relations with Artur Mahraun
and the Young German Order became increasingly strained. The Young
Germans had already begun to extricate themselves from the so-called
national opposition on the grounds that it had fallen so thoroughly under
the influence of reactionaries like Hugenberg and Claß that it was no longer
capable of satisfying the German people’s longing for political rejuvenation.54
This was to become a recurrent refrain in Mahraun’s attacks against the Pan-
Germans, the Stahlhelm, and the other groups on the patriotic Right, and in
the fall of 1926 it provided the Young Germans with all the justification they
needed to dissociate themselves from the Stahlhelm’s initiative on behalf of a
bourgeois unity ticket in the Saxon state elections.55 The Young Germans also
refused to join the Stahlhelm, the VVVD, and other right-wing organizations
in public demonstrations against the Locarno accords once the treaty had been
ratified and dissociated themselves as forcefully as possible from the vilifica-
tion to which the patriotic Right subjected Reich President von Hindenburg
for his failure to block Germany’s acceptance of the controversial treaty.56 At
the same time, the Young German Order remained deeply contemptuous of
the existing party system and carefully avoided becoming entangled in parti-
san political controversy. What ultimately separated the Young German Order
from its former allies in the patriotic movement was not so much their

53
Brauweiler, “Die Stahlhelm Botschaft,” Die Standarte. Zeitschrift des neuen Nationalis
mus 2, no. 9 (26 June 1927): 271 75.
54
Mahraun, “Jungdeutscher Orden und nationale Opposition,” Der Meister 1, no. 2
(Dec. 1925): 46 50. See also Laudahn, “Jungdeutscher Orden und vaterländische Ver
bände,” ibid., 1, no. 6 (Apr. 1926): 24 27, and “V.V.V.D.,” ibid., 1, no. 9 (July 1926):
19 22.
55
Memorandum of a conversation between Bernhard, Mahraun, and Bornemann, 16
Aug. 1926, PA AA Berlin, NL Stresemann, 96/173179 82.
56
Laudahn, “Die Haltung des jungdeutschen Ordens gegenüber dem Vertrage von
Locarno,” Der Meister 1, no. 2 (Dec. 1925): 26 31.
   , –

respective attitudes toward parliamentarism and the German party system as

its call for the peaceful evolution of the Weimar Republic into a higher and
more perfect form of democracy that derived its spiritual legitimacy from the
experience of those who had served at the front in World War I and that
envisaged the dissolution of all social, confessional, and political differences in
a deep and abiding love of the nation.57
The defection of the Young Germans from the patriotic front was of no
immediate consequence and did little to temper the militancy of the other
organizations on the patriotic Right. Both the Stahlhelm and the VVVD
escalated their attacks against the so-called Weimar system through the latter
half of 1927 at the same time that the Pan-Germans were steppimg up their
efforts to reassert themselves within the DNVP and reverse the direction in
which the party appeared to be moving. All of this placed an increasingly
heavy burden on the DNVP’s relations with the patriotic Right and posed a
threat to its effectiveness as a member of the Marx cabinet. Although Westarp
and the DNVP party leadership sought to cultivate close relations with all of
Germany’s patriotic associations with the notable exception of the Young
German Order, this began to wear increasingly thin in light of the anti-
system histrionics of the patriotic Right and its hostility to the DNVP’s
collaboration with the existing system of government. With new national
elections scheduled for the spring of 1928, the need to clarify this situation
and normalize relations between the DNVP and the patriotic Right would
become ever more urgent.

A Restless Party
By the time the Reichstag broke for its summer recess in late July 1927, the
DNVP party leadership had become increasingly concerned about the lethargy
of the party organization and the apparent indifference of large sectors of the
Nationalist electorate. For the most part, the DNVP’s rank-and-file member-
ship seemed more interested in issues of immediate import than in the more
fundamental questions of ideology and national policy that lay at the heart of
the party’s identity. The task confronting party leaders, therefore, was to
reinvigorate the DNVP’s popular base without driving those who were motiv-
ated primarily by their own economic self-interest into the arms of special-
interest parties like the Business Party or People’s Justice Party. This task was
not made any easier by the fact that there were no longer foreign policy issues
like the Dawes Plan or Locarno that could be used to infuse new energy into
the local and regional levels of their party’s national organization. By the same

57
Artur Mahraun, Das jungdeutsche Manifest. Volk gegen Kaste und Geld. Sicherung des
Friedens durch Neubau der Staaten (Berlin, 1927), esp. 7 10, 95 107, 139 42, 197 203.
     

token, the fact that the DNVP was a member of the national government
meant that it could no longer avail itself of the often inflammatory anti-
government rhetoric that had served it so well in the past. Whether the DNVP
could somehow square the circle and recapture its emotional élan remained to
be seen.58
In his capacity as DNVP national chairman, Westarp continued to offer a
vigorous defense of the Nationalists’ accomplishments as a member of the
governmental coalition, though always with the cavaet that the exigencies of
coalition politics made it difficult, if not impossible, for the party to achieve
everything it had set out to achieve.59 At the same time, Westarp categorically
rejected the argument that this had compromised the party’s ideological
integrity and insisted that the DNVP remained as committed as ever to the
restoration of the monarchy. But as the party concluded preparations for its
annual party congress in Königsberg – a site carefully selected to reaffirm the
DNVP’s identification with the symbols and traditions of Prussian power – in
the third week of September 1927, hopes of restoring unity within the DNVP
were again jeopardized by the antics of the party’s right wing.60 Through the
summer and fall of 1927 ADV chairman Heinrich Claß had met with Alfred
Hugenberg, the putative leader of the party’s right wing, on several occasions
to persuade him to become more actively involved in the struggle for control
of the party.61 Hugenberg had always preferred to stay out of the political
limelight and rely upon his influence over Germany’s right-wing press, his
extensive contacts in the German business community, and his control of
party finances to achieve his objectives. An embittered opponent of the Dawes
Plan, Hugenberg had nevertheless supported the DNVP’s entry into the
Luther cabinet in 1925 only to break with Westarp and the leaders of the
DNVP Reichstag delegation at the height of the Locarno crisis by lending
the full weight of his authority to the efforts of those who sought to force the
DNVP out of the government.62 But more than anything else, it was the

58
See Scheibe, “Für Reichsparteitag und Werbewoche,” n.d., appended to Scheibe to Tirpitz,
12 Aug. 1927, BA MA Freiburg, NL Tirpitz, 171/208, 211 29.
59
Kuno von Westarp, Die deutschnationale Arbeit in der Regierungskoalition. Sommerta
gung 1927, Deutschnationale Flugschrift, no. 296 (Berlin, 1927). In a similar vein, see
Treviranus, “Bilanz der deutschnationalen Regierungsarbeit,” Politische Wochenschrift 3,
no. 37 (15 Sept. 1927): 199 203.
60
Correspondence between Westarp and Dommes, 11 Aug. 3. Sept. 1927, NL Westarp,
Gärtringen, VN 32. See also Westarp to Schlange Schöningen, 13 Sept. 1927, ibid.,
VN 63.
61
See the unpublished second volume of Claß’s memoirs “Wider den Strom,” BA Berlin,
Nachlass Heinrich Claß, 3/879 81.
62
Hugenberg to Hergt, 5 Oct. 1925, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, VN 53. See also Hugenberg,
“Locarno,” 15 Nov. 1925, in Alfred Hugenberg, Streiflichter aus Vergangenheit und
Gegenwart (Berlin, 1927), 88 90.
   , –

DNVP’s decision to join the fourth Marx cabinet that prompted Hugenberg to
set aside whatever reservations he might have had and to challenge Westarp
for control of the party.
On 17 September 1927 Hugenberg threw down the gauntlet with a highly
charged letter to Westarp in which he insisted that the party must end the
contradiction that lay at the heart of its present strategy and return to a policy
of uncompromising opposition to the existing system of government. Hugen-
berg categorically rejected the premise that the party had to work within the
framework of a governmental system to which it was fundamentally opposed
in order to defend and promote the welfare of those interests that were vital to
the DNVP’s growth and development. “Whoever,” wrote Hugenberg in a
passage that reflected his scorn for the professional politicians he held respon-
sible for the crisis that had taken hold of the DNVP, “affirms the need for a
thorough reorganization and reconstruction of our existing state life . . . and
accordingly scorns today’s state only to base his personal career and future on
collaboration with parliamentarism is an inner cripple whose ambition will
soon triumph over all theories and convictions . . .” The deep schism that had
developed within the ranks of the DNVP, he continued, could only be ended
by committing the party without any reservation whatsoever to “the establish-
ment of a new state compatible with the German character.” To do this,
however, one only had to listen to those who made up the party’s popular
base throughout the country. “Give the party that exists in the nation at large,”
Hugenberg exhorted Westarp, “a genuine life of its own alongside that of its
parliamentary delegations, and let the unparliamentary party in the country as
a whole serve as the conscience of those delegations that sit in parliament
today! Then at least a formal line,” he concluded, “will have been drawn from
which we can free and consolidate the forces for a solution to the real tasks of
our party.”63
Hugenberg’s letter represented a frontal attack upon the political course the
DNVP had charted ever since the summer of 1924 and marked the beginning
of a pitched battle for control of the party that would continue for the better
part of the next three years. But the immediate effect of Hugenberg’s letter,
copies of which were sent to a number of his associates on the DNVP’s right
wing,64 was only to underscore his isolation within the party as a whole.65 In
the meantime, the Königsberg party congress passed without further incident.
In his keynote address on the afternoon of 20 September, Westarp delivered a
speech that was carefully crafted to heal the divisions that had developed

63
Hugenberg to Westarp, 17 Sept. 1927, BA Koblenz, NL Hugenberg, 113/78 83, reprinted
in Leo Wegener, Hugenberg. Eine Plauderei (Solln Munich, 1930), 53 54.
64
For a list of recipients, see Hugenberg to Westarp, 15 Nov. 1927, NL Westarp, Gärtringen,
II/25.
65
Wegener to Bang, 8 Oct. 1927, BA Koblenz, NL Wegener, 23/70.
     

within the party in the wake of its two experiments at government participa-
tion. Westarp not only reminded the party faithful of the DNVP’s achieve-
ments as a member of the government but stressed that the party’s work was
not yet finished and outlined an ambitious agenda for the months ahead.
Concentrating on those issues that were most likely to reinforce the party’s
inner unity, Westarp struck a notably strident tone by criticizing the Allies for
their failure to fulfill the commitments they had made at Locarno, Geneva, and
Thoiry and called for an end to all talk about future “compensations” until
England and France had begun to live up to their own promises. At the same
time, Westarp identified a number of domestic issues, the most prominent of
which were the passage of a Reich School Law and a reform of the criminal
justice system, that the DNVP hoped to accomplish in what still remained of
the current legislative period. None of this, he reassured his audience, com-
promised the DNVP’s political and ideological integrity in the slightest, for the
DNVP remained unshakably committed to the restoration of the monarchy
and to the defense of Germany’s imperial legacy against all who sought to drag
it down into the muck of partisan politics. Yet to do all of this and at the same
time prepare for the upcoming national elections, it was essential for the party
to strengthen its organization and internal solidarity. Therein, concluded
Westarp, lay the keys to the DNVP’s success and future.66

Cultural Politics and the End of the Coalition

Of all the issues that Westarp touched upon in his Königsberg address, none
was more critical than the Reich School Law. The DNVP’s participation in the
fourth Marx cabinet was premised upon a series of compromises with the
Center that, among other things, envisaged the introduction of a new school
law that would authorize the establishment of denominational schools
throughout the entire Reich.67 This was an issue upon which virtually every
sector of the DNVP could agree, though some, like the party’s two confes-
sional committees, obviously ascribed much greater significance to it than
others. For the leaders of the party’s Catholic wing, the introduction of a
new national school law was obviously a more effective way of advancing
their political agenda than pursuing a concordat with the Holy See, a move
that was certain to encounter strong opposition from the DNVP’s Lutheran

66
Kuno von Westarp, Unser Weg zur Macht in Reich und Ländern! Rede auf dem Reichs
parteitag in Königsberg Pr. am 20. September 1927, Deutschnationale Flugschrift, no. 304
(Berlin, 1927). See also Westarp to Hugenberg, 8 Oct. 1927, NL Westarp, Gärtringen,
VN 62.
67
For further details, see Günther Grünthal, Reichsschulgesetz und Zentrumspartei in der
Weimarer Republik (Düsseldorf, 1968), 196 207.
   , –

leadership.68 For Reinhard Mumm and the leaders of the DNVP’s Evangelical
Reich Committee, on the other hand, the struggle for the national school law
afforded them an opportunity to reassert the primacy of cultural policy over
the social and economic issues that had thus far dominated the DNVP’s
agenda in the Marx cabinet.69 But these considerations were secondary to
the broader strategic goals of the party’s national leadership. For by placing
themselves at the head of the crusade for a national school law, Westarp and
his supporters in the DNVP Reichstag delegation hoped that they would be
able to restore the unity of their own party and inject new energy into the
flagging fortunes of the national movement.70
Responsibility for drafting the new law lay within the purview of the
DNVP’s Walther von Keudell and the Reich ministry of the interior. After
some initial delay, Keudell presented his draft of the school bill to the cabinet
on 22 June 1927.71 Inspired by the Christian and conservative values that lay at
the heart of the DNVP’s sense of identity, Keudell’s bill had been crafted in
obvious deference to demands of the Catholic and Lutheran churches for legal
recognition of their claims to a more direct role in the German educational
system. Keudell’s bill sought to rewrite the compromise on public education
that had been incorporated into the language of the Weimar Constitution. For
not only did Keudell’s bill privilege denominational schools at the expense of
the non-denominational Christian common schools, or Simultanschulen, that
had been established by the Weimar Constitution as one of the three alternate
modes of public education, but it also made provisions for the direct involve-
ment of Catholic and Lutheran clergy in shaping the curricula for religious
instruction in the schools. Moreover, the Keudell bill established denomin-
ational schools as the norm throughout the country, thereby forcing Christian
common schools in areas like Baden, Hesse-Darmstadt, and the former duchy
of Hesse-Nassau to conform to the national standard.72 But this came as a

68
Minutes of the DNVP’s Reich Catholic Committee, 12 July 1927, VWA Münster, NL
Landsberg, E1.
69
Reinhard Mumm, Der christlich soziale Gedanke. Bericht über eine Lebensarbeit in
schwerer Zeit (Berlin, 1933), 127 30.
70
Correspondence between Tiling and Westarp, 21 Feb. 1 Mar. 1927, NL Westarp, Gär
tringen, II/23. See also Ellenbeck, “Das Reichsschulgesetz und der Vormarsch der natio
nalen Bewegung,” Politische Wochenschrift 3, no. 28 (14 July 1927), 598 601, as well as
Wilhelm Kähler, “Die Kulturpolitik der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei,” Jahrbuch der
Erziehungswissenschaft und Jugendkunde, ed. Erich Stern, 3 (1927), 5 30, esp. 19 29. For
further details, see Ohnezeit, Zwischen “schärfster Opposition,” 399 410.
71
Minutes of the minsterial conference, 22 June 1927, in Die Kabinette Marx III und IV, ed.
Abramowski, 2:808 10.
72
Walther von Keudell, “Unser Kampf um das Reichsschulgesetz,” in Der nationale Wille.
Werden und Wirken der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei 1918 1928, ed. Max Weiß (Essen,
1928), 204 07.
     

sharp slap in the face to the leaders of the DVP and their representatives in the
Marx cabinet, Stresemann and economics minister Julius Curtius. In celebrat-
ing the sixtieth anniversary of the founding of its predecessor, the National
Liberal Party, earlier that spring, the DVP had made a concerted effort to
reaffirm the national and liberal values that lay at the heart of its political
heritage.73 The proposed school law threatened to compromise the very
principles upon which the DVP had been founded, and at a ministerial
conference on 13 July Stresemann indicated that, while he and his party
supported the bill, they would not be able to go along with the conversion of
the Christian common schools in southwest Germany into denominational
schools.74
For Stresemann, who was generally satisfied with the DNVP’s performance
as a member of the governmental coalition,75 the conflict over the national
school bill constituted a genuine threat to the success of his efforts to stabilize
the republic from the Right. The situation was complicated even further by the
fact that the Center was anxious to reverse the series of electoral defeats it had
suffered since the beginning of the decade by using the school issue to mobilize
Catholic parents who might not otherwise support the party.76 Stresemann
was understandably irritated with Keudell and the leaders of the Center Party
they proceeded to rescue the national school bill from the hands of the Federal
Council, or Reichsrat, where delegates of the Prussian government had taken
the lead in first rejecting it and then rewriting it in such a way that it that no
longer reflected the original intentions of the DNVP and Center. After the
revised draft of Keudell’s bill was rejected in the Federal Council on 14 October
by a 37 to 31 vote, the Marx cabinet voted over the vigorous objections of the
DVP to take the original version of the bill to the Reichstag in hopes that the
threat of a collapse of the governmental coalition would leave the DVP with no
choice but to allow passage of the controversial bill.77 To Stresemann, this turn
of events not only represented an affront to his party’s most deeply held

73
“Das Manifest der Deutschen Volkspartei,” in 60 Jahr Feier der Nationalliberalen Partei
am 19. und 20. März 1927 in Hannover, ed. Reichsgeschäftsstelle der Deutschen Volks
partei (Berlin, n.d. [1927]), 8 9. See also Richter, Deutsche Volkspartei, 464 69.
74
Statement by Stresemann at the ministerial conference, 13 July 1927, in Die Kabinette
Marx III und IV, ed. Abramowski, 2:856 58. See also Stephen G. Fritz, “‘The Center
Cannot Hold.’ Educational Politics and the Collapse of the Democratic Middle in
Germany: The School Bill Crisis in Baden,” History of Education Quarterly 25 (1985):
413 37.
75
Stresemann to Jänecke, 15 Aug. 1927, PA AA Berlin, NL Stresemann, 285/150326 31.
76
Ellen L. Evans, “The Center Wages Kulturpolitik: Conflict in the Marx Keudell Cabinet of
1927,” Central European History 2 (1969): 139 58. See also Hehl, Marx, 428 37, and
Ruppert, Im Dienst am Staat von Weimar, 287 99.
77
Minutes of the ministerial conference, 14 Oct. 1927, in Die Kabinette Marx III und IV, ed.
Abramowski, 2:999 1001.
   , –

ideological convictions but, more importantly, seriously jeopardized the suc-

cess of his own stabilization strategy.78
The resuscitation of the national school bill in its original and unrevised
form constituted a direct threat to the survival of the fourth Marx cabinet.
Given the DVP’s unremitting opposition to the provisions of the proposed
school law affecting the status of the Christian common schools in south-
west Germany, it was only a matter of time until the governmental coalition
fell apart. A number of other issues unrelated to the controversial school bill
also threatened the survival of the Marx cabinet. A sweeping reform of
Germany’s civil servant salary structure in October 1927 had met with
strong opposition from Adam Stegerwald and the leaders of the Christian
trade unions and inflamed tensions between Christian labor and civil
servant representatives in both the Center and DNVP.79 At the same time,
organized agriculture had become increasingly dissatisfied with the benefits
of the government’s trade policy and intensified its pressure upon the
cabinet for the more vigorous representation of agrarian interests in bilat-
eral trade treaty negotiations with Poland and other east European states.80
None of this augured well for the future of the Marx cabinet, and in January
1928 Keudell effectively sealed its fate when he brought the controversial
school bill before the Reichstag for final action.81 A new round of high-level
conferences between representatives of the government parties in the
middle of February failed to break the deadlock,82 and on 15 February the
Center’s Theodor von Guérard, a vigorous defender of his party’s alliance
with the DNVP and a champion of the proposed school law, announced
that for him and his party the governmental coalition had been dissolved.83
Although the cabinet would remain in office until new elections the
following spring, the DNVP’s second experiment at government participa-
tion had ended in failure.

78
Stresemann’s speech before the DVP central executive committee, 21 Nov. 1927, in
Nationalliberalismus in der Weimarer Republik, ed. Kolb and Richter, 2:732 36.
79
Adam Stegerwald, Zur Reform der Beamtenbesoldung, 2nd printing (Berlin Wilmersdorf,
1928). See also Ruppert, Im Dienst am Staat von Weimar, 274 87.
80
For further details, see Stresemann to Marx, 24 Nov. 1927, PA AA Berlin, NL Strese
mann, 284/150286 97.
81
For Keudell’s position, see his letter to Traub, 7 Jan. 1928, BA Koblenz, NL Traub, 64/52.
For his defense of the bill, see Walther von Keudell, Eltenrecht und christliche Schule. Rede
in Dresden am 4. März 1928 (Berlin, 1928).
82
“Bericht über die interfraktionellen Verhandlungen vom 13. 19. Februar 1928,” Nachlass
Alfred Zapf, BA Koblenz, 32.
83
Statement by Guérard at a meeting of representatives of the government parties and
cabinet members, 15 Feb. 1928, in Die Kabinette Marx III und IV, ed. Abramowski,
2:1310 12.
     

Crisis in the Countryside

The collapse of the governmental coalition and the preparations for new
elections in the spring of 1928 could not have come at a more difficult time
for the leaders of the DNVP. The party was still deeply divided over its
participation in the Marx cabinet, and its record of accomplishment since
the embarrassment of having to support the Law for the Protection of the
Republic in May 1927 seemed hardly adequate to justify either the high hopes
that had accompanied its entry into the national government or the com-
promises that governmental participation had necessarily entailed. No prob-
lem was more vexing to the leaders of the DNVP than the deepening crisis in
the German countryside. The DNVP had entered the Marx cabinet in large
part because of pressure from the National Rural League for the more vigorous
representation of agricultural economic interests at the upper echelons of
Germany’s national government. While the RLB concentrated its efforts
primarily upon German trade policy in hopes of providing Germany’s agri-
cultural producers with more effective tariff protection against farm imports
from the rest of Europe, the United States, and Canada, German agriculture
was besieged by a host of other problems, not the least of which were the
collapse of agricultural prices on the world market, rising production costs at
home, an oppressive tax burden, and the lack of access to inexpensive credit.
The result was an extraordinarily high level of indebtedness that was particu-
larly acute among the large estate owners from east of the Elbe.84 While Marx
and his cabinet were not insensitive to the difficulties in which the German
farmer found himself, none of the measures the government had undertaken
on his behalf in the second half of 1927 afforded the relief he so desperately
needed. This, in turn, had a radicalizing effect upon the mood of the German
farmer and severely strained the DNVP’s ties to the German agricultural
community.85
With the approach of new national elections, the leaders of the DNVP and
their allies in the National Rural League faced a difficult challenge in contain-
ing the rising tide of rural unrest to which the deepening agrarian crisis had
given birth. Peasant unrest reached a dramatic climax on 28 January 1928
when more than 140,000 farmers, artisans, and small shopkeepers from
Schleswig-Holstein demonstrated throughout the province to protest high
taxes, high interest rates, and inadequate protection against foreign agricul-
tural imports.86 The rally in Schleswig-Holstein was quickly followed by

84
James, German Slump, 246 82.
85
For example, see Winkler to Westarp, 21 Jan. 1928, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, VN 64. For
further details, see Gessner, Agrarverbände, 83 181, and Müller, “Fällt der Bauer, stürzt
der Staat,” 58 77.
86
Jacobi to Westarp, 2 Feb. 1928, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, VN 64.
   , –

similar demonstrations in Thuringia, Württemberg, and other parts of the

country as the leaders of the RLB’s regional affiliates tried to keep the rising
wave of agrarian discontent under their own control.87 Similarly, the RLB’s
national leadership moved quickly to finalize preparations for its annual
congress in Berlin at the very end of January.88 The RLB’s two presidents,
Count Eberhard von Kalckreuth and Karl Hepp, would use the congress as a
forum to outline a series of additional measures they deemed necessary to
restore the profitability of German agriculture, while Schiele, acting in his
capacity as the RLB’s minister in the Marx cabinet, reaffirmed the govern-
ment’s commitment to the welfare of the German farmer and called upon the
German agricultural community to stay the course in the struggle for social
and economic rehabilitation.89
Efforts on the part of Germany’s rural conservatives to keep the rising tide
of agrarian protest under their protective wing received a rude shock when
Anton Fehr and the leaders of the Bavarian Peasants’ League outlined plans of
their own for the founding of a new peasants’ party. Speaking at a demonstra-
tion of the Silesian Peasants’ League (Schlesischer Bauernbund) in Breslau on
12 February 1928, Fehr announced that the Bavarian Peasants’ League would
present a full slate of candidates under the name of the German Peasants’
Party (Deutsche Bauernpartei or DBP) in the Reichstag elections that were
scheduled to take place later that spring.90 This represented the culmination of

87
On the demonstrations in Rudolstadt (Thuringia) and Stuttgart (Württemberg), see
Thüringer Landbund. Thüringer Bauernzeitung für die im Thüringer Landbund zusam
mengeschlossenen Bauernvereinigungen 9, no. 12 (11 Feb. 1928): 1, and Der württember
gische Bauernfreund. Ein Wegweiser und Jahrbuch für unsere bäuerlichen und
gewerblichen Mittelstand für das Jahr 1929, ed. Württembergischer Bauern und Wein
gärtnerbund (Stuttgart, n.d. [1929]), 90 91. For the broader context, see Jürgen Berg
mann and Klaus Mergerle, “Protest and Aufruhr der Landwirtschaft in der Weimarer
Republik (1924 1933). Formen und Typen der politischen Agrarbewegung im regionalen
Vergleich.” In Regionen im historischen Vergleich. Studien zu Deutschland im 19. und
20. Jahrhundert, ed. Jürgen Bergmann et al., Opladen, 1989, 221 28.
88
Report on the meeting of the RLB executive commitee, 14 Dec. 1927, BA Koblenz, NL
Weilnböck, 29b.
89
For the speeches of Kalckreuth, Hepp, and Schiele, see Der 8. Reichs Landbund Tag. Die
Reden der Präsidenten und des Ernährungsministers Schiele (Berlin, n.d. [1928]), esp.
1 36.
90
See the text of Fehr’s speech in the Bayerischer Bauern und Mittelstandsbund. Beilage der
“Neuen freien Volkszeitung” in München, 22 Feb. 1928, no. 5, as well as the correspond
ence between Lübke and Hiltmann, 28 Feb. 1 Mar. 1928, BHStA Munich, Abt. V,
Nachlass Anton Fehr, 29. See also Larry Eugene Jones, “Crisis and Realignment: Agrarian
Splinter Parties in the Weimar Republic, 1928 33,” in Peasants and Lords in Modern
Germany: Recent Studies in Agricultural History, ed. Robert G. Moeller (London, 1986),
198 232, and Arno Panzer, “Parteipolitische Ansätze der deutschen Bauernbewegung bis
1933,” in Europäische Bauernparteien im 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Heinz Gollwitzer (Stuttgart
and New York, 1977), 524 42.
     

a development that had begun the previous summer when the leaders of the
Silesian Peasants’ League first explored the possibility of a new peasants’ party
in negotiations with Fehr and the leadership of the BBB.91 Fehr, who had
served as Bavarian minister of agriculture since the summer of 1924, stood
considerably to the left of the rural conservatives in control of the RLB, and the
founding of the new German Peasants’ Party under his auspices aroused
widespread concern within the ranks of Germany’s conservative agrarian elite.
Not only did the Bavarian Peasants’ League, the driving force behind the
founding of the DBP, represent a nascent agrarian populism for which Ger-
many’s more conservative leaders felt little sympathy, but they feared it
foreshadowed a further radicalization of the German countryside.
The decentralized structure of the RLB made it difficult for Germany’s
conservative farm leaders to formulate a concerted response to the radicalizing
effect the deepening agricultural crisis was having upon Germany’s rural
population. Moreover, several of the RLB’s regional affiliates – most notably
in Thuringia and Württemberg – had run their own slate of candidates in
virtually every state and national election since the founding of the Weimar
Republic and thus exercised considerably more influence over their local
constituencies than the RLB itself. In November 1927 the leaders of the
Thuringian Rural League had petitioned the RLB’s national leadership on
behalf of a national agrarian ticket for the Reichstag elections that were set
for the following spring.92 This proposal encountered fierce opposition from
the RLB leaders with close ties to the DNVP, and it was shelved at a meeting of
the RLB executive committee on 14 December 1927 in favor of a resolution
that left the question of electoral strategy in the hands of the RLB’s affiliates
themselves.93 As a result, confusion reigned at the RLB headquarters in Berlin
and in the offices of its regional affiliates throughout the country.94 It was only
after a demonstration by 36,000 Thuringian peasants in Rudolstadt on 7 Feb-
ruary 1928 and Fehr’s announcement five days later that the Bavarian

91
For further details, see Paul Hiltmann, “Tatsachen und Probleme der Bauernbewegung,”
Die grüne Zukunft. Zeitschrift für deutsche Bauernpolitik 1, no. 1 (Oct. 1928): 3 5, and
no. 2 (Nov. 1928): 18 24.
92
Resolution from the TLB executive committee, 24 Nov. 1927, appended to Mackeldey to
the RLB, 28 Nov. 1927, BA Koblenz, NL Weilnböck, 42. On the TLB, see the official
history “Der Thüringer Landbund in den ersten zehn Jahren,” in Zehn Jahre Thüringer
Landbund. Festschrift zum 10jährigen Gedenktag der Gründung des Thüringer Land
bundes, ed. Thüringer Landbund, Hauptgeschäftsstelle (Weimar, n.d. [1929]), 26 36, as
well as Guido Dressel, Der Thüringer Landbund Agrarischer Berufsverband als politische
Partei in Thüringen 1919 1933 (Weimar, 1998), esp. 46 56.
93
Report on the meeting of the RLB executive committee, 14 Dec. 1927, BA Koblenz, NL
Weilnböck, 29b.
94
Report by Nicolas at the delegate assembly of the Brandenburg Rural League, 25
Jan. 1928, BA Berlin, R 8034 I, 50/40 49. On the situation in Brandenburg, see Pomp,
Bauern und Grossgrundbesitzer, 265 71.
   , –

Peasants’ League would join the DBP in presenting a national slate of candi-
dates in the forthcoming Reichstag elections that the leaders of the TLB
decided that they could no longer afford to wait for the official sanction of
the RLB leadership in Berlin. On 17 February Franz Hänse and Friedrich
Döbrich from the Thuringian Rural League along with Wilhelm Dorsch from
the Hessian Rural League (Hessischer Landbund) took matters into their own
hands by announcing their resignation from the DNVP Reichstag delegation
to join a new agrarian party that called itself the Christian-National Peasants’
Party (Christlich-nationale Bauernpartei).95
The fact that the three principals involved in the founding of the Christian-
National Peasants’ Party – Franz Hänse, Döbrich, and Dorsch – were all
former members of the DNVP Reichstag delegation gave rise to immediate
suspicions that the new party was nothing but a Nationalist front organization
created for the purpose of duping unwitting peasants into voting for candi-
dates who, once they had been elected, would immediately rejoin the DNVP.
The new party’s credibility, however, was greatly enhanced when the three
former Nationalists were joined by Karl Hepp, a member of the DVP Reichs-
tag delegation from Hesse-Nassau and a farm leader of truly national stature.96
Having served as one of the RLB’s two national presidents ever since its
founding in 1921, Hepp had long sought to organize the small and middle-
sized farmers from central and southwestern Germany into a force sufficiently
powerful to prevent the RLB from falling under the domination of the large
landowners from east of the Elbe.97 Buoyed by Hepp’s defection, the official
founding of the new agrarian party – now known as the Christian-National
Peasants and Farmers’ Party (Christlich-nationale Bauern- und Landvolkpar-
tei or CNBLP) – took place in the Thuringian capital of Weimar on 8 March
1928.98 Contrary to Nationalist fears that this foreshadowed a further radical-
ization of the German peasantry,99 the founders of the CNBLP showed little
interest in overtures from Fehr and left his queries about the possibility of a
merger of the two new agrarian parties into a united peasant party
unanswered.100 In point of fact, the impulse that lay behind the founding of
the CNBLP was profoundly conservative and had little in common with the

95
Thüringer Landbund 9, no. 15 (22 Feb. 1928): 1. For further details, see Markus Müller,
Die Christlich Nationale Bauern und Landvolkpartei 1928 1933 (Düsseldorf, 2001),
23 48.
96
On Hepp’s defection, see Kempkes to Stresemann, 24 Feb. 1928, PA AA Berlin, NL
Stresemann, 99/173883 89.
97
Hepp to Stresemann, 4 Sept. 1921, PA AA Berlin, NL Stresemann, 231/141458 60.
98
Thüringer Landbund 9, no. 20 (10 Mar. 1928): 1.
99
Stauffenberg to Westarp, 24 Feb. 1928, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, VN 100.
100
Fehr’s report in the minutes of the DBP delegate conference in the Reichstag, 23
Mar. 1928, BHStA Munich, Abt. V, NL Fehr, 29. See also Hiltmann to Fehr, 12
Apr. 1928, ibid.
     

agrarian populism of the Bavarian Peasants’ League. As Ernst Höfer, chairman

of the Thuringian Rural League, explained in an article written shortly after
the CNBLP’s founding, the party to which he and his associates had given
birth was essentially an attempt to contain the wave of agrarian unrest that was
spreading across the countryside by providing the farmer with the effective
political representation he needed in order to survive the deepening agricul-
tural crisis. Given the way in which all of Germany’s nonsocialist parties had
consistently sacrificed the welfare of the German farmer to that of other social
groups, Höfer concluded, it was only through the consolidation of the entire
agricultural community into a united agrarian party that the radicalization of
the German countryside could be held in check.101

Heavy Industry to the Rescue

The founding of the Christian-National Peasants and Farmers’ Party sent
shock waves through the ranks of the DNVP and posed a clear threat to its
prospects in the upcoming national elections. In the meantime, a similar strain
had developed in its relations to German industry with severe implications for
the party’s financial situation.102 In his report on the state of party finances at
the DNVP’s Cologne party congress in September 1926, party treasurer
Wilhelm Widenmann had identified a revenue shortfall of approximately
780,000 marks that resulted in large part from the failure of the DNVP’s
district organizations to keep up with their payments to the party’s national
headquarters in Berlin.103 Westarp addressed this situation by meeting with
the party’s backers from Ruhr heavy industry in the spring of 1927 and
proceeded to negotiate an agreement whereby the DNVP would receive two
50,000 mark subsidies to help sustain its national organization in the period of
relative inactivity before the next national election.104 But this arrangement
began to unravel as a result of the DNVP’s role in the passage of the
Unemployment Insurance Act in the summer of 1927, and in October
1927 Fritz Thyssen, the Ruhr magnate responsible for steering this money to
the DNVP, decided to punish the party for its failure to block the passage of
social legislation detrimental to the vital interests of German industry by

101
Höfer, “Zur Gründung der Christlich Nationalen Bauernpartei,” Thüringer Landbund 9,
no. 23 (21 Mar. 1928): 1. See also Karl Dorsch, “Zur Gründung der Christlich
Nationalen Bauern und Landvolkpartei,” ibid., no. 32 (21 Apr. 1928): 1.
102
For example, see Winnacker to Westarp, 25 June 1926; Dryander to Winnacker, 10 July
1926; and Kellermann to Westarp, 13 July 1926, all in NL Westarp, Gärtringen, VN 78.
103
Report by Widenmann at the DNVP party congress in Cologne, 9 Sept. 1926, BA MA
Freiburg, NL Tirpitz, 60/330 37.
104
For further details, see Kirdorf to Krupp, 14 Mar. 1927, HA Krupp Essen, FAH IV C 178,
as well as the correspondence between Thyssen and Westarp, 11 14 Apr. 1927, NL
Westarp, Gärtringen, II/23.
   , –

refusing to pay the second of the two 50,000 mark installments to which the
party was entitled.105 In November 1927 Widenmann tried to negotiate an
agreement with Hugenberg whereby the latter would restrict his solicitation of
party funds to the iron, steel, and coal mining industries, while responsibility
for raising funds from the other branches of German industry would rest with
the DNVP party leadership for the intervals between elections and the Coord-
inating Committee of German National Industrialists during the campaigns
themselves. But this arrangement was rejected by Hugenberg, who was deter-
mined to use his control over party finances to bring about a change in the
direction in which the DNVP was headed and thus refused to countenance
any change in the collection of industrial contributions that might undermine
his leverage within the party.106
Panicked by the prospect of facing new national elections with empty
campaign coffers, Westarp and the leaders of the DNVP turned once again
to Ruhr heavy industry for its help in the upcoming campaign. Not only was
Westarp able to persuade the Ruhr industrial elite to restore the 50,000 marks
the DNVP was supposed to have received in October 1927,107 but he inadvert-
ently prompted Ruhr heavy industry to become more actively involved in
efforts to curtail Hugenberg’s growing influence over party affairs. The key
figure in this regard was Paul Reusch, director of the Gutehoffnungshütte in
Oberhausen and a bitter and inveterate opponent of Hugenberg.108 Reusch,
who had belonged to the German People’s Party until his resignation from the
party in protest over the termination of passive resistance in the Ruhr in the
fall of 1923,109 is best described as a conservative nationalist whose differences
with Hugenberg had less to do with their ultimate objectives than with the
means by which they proposed to achieve those objectives. Although both
remained fundamentally opposed to the changes that had taken place in the

105
Reichert to Reusch, 31 Oct. 1927, RWWA Cologne, Abt. 130, NL Reusch, 400101293/8b.
On the DNVP’s financial difficulties, see Thyssen to Wilmowsky, 8 Nov. 1927, and
Wilmowsky to Reusch, 11 Nov. 1927, ibid., and Wilmowsky to Krupp, 12 Nov. 1927, HA
Krupp Essen, FAH 23/501, as well as Thyssen to Scheibe, 28 Nov. 1927, NL Westarp,
Gärtringen, II/23.
106
For further details, see Widenmann to Westarp, 14 Nov. 1927, and the three appendices
attached to his letter, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, VN 61.
107
Wilmowsky to Krupp, 15 Dec. 1927, HA Krupp Essen, FAH 23/501. See also Sprin
gorum to Westarp, 19 Feb. 1928, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, II/28.
108
On Reusch, see Gerald D. Feldman, “Paul Reusch and the Politics of German Heavy
Industry 1908 1933,” in People and Communities in the Western World, ed. Gene
Brucker, 2 vols. (Homewood, IL, and Georgetown, ON, 1979), 2:293 331. On Reusch’s
political activities, see Langer, Macht und Verantwortung. Der Ruhrbaron Paul Reusch
(Essen, 2012), esp. 361 64, 389 98, and Christian Marx, Paul Reusch und die Gutehoff
nungshütte. Leitung eines deutschen Großunternehmens (Göttingen, 2013), 308 47.
109
Reusch to Blumberg, 26 Sept. 1923, RWWA Cologne, Abt. 130, NL Reusch, 400101293/4.
     

structure of German political life after the end of World War I, Reusch
rejected the “all-or-nothing” strategy that characterized Hugenberg’s political
agenda in favor of a more differentiated approach that included working
within the existing party system to promote a conservative and nationalist
political agenda. Though very much out of the public eye, the conflict between
Reusch and Hugenberg would become one of the defining features of conser-
vative politics in the late Weimar Republic.
In the fall and early winter of 1927 Reusch would undertake three separate
projects, all of which had as either their explicit or implicit objective the
isolation of Hugenberg and the neutralization of his influence on the politics
of the German Right. The most ambitious of these was the founding of the
League for the Regeneration of the Reich (Bund zur Erneuerung des Reiches or
BER) under the chairmanship of former chancellor Hans Luther. In July
1927 Reusch outlined a grandiose plan to Hamburg banker Max Warburg
for “a full-scale [regelrecht] crusade against the Dawes Plan,” which he and his
fellow industrialists regarded as economically impracticable. In the course of
his remarks, Reusch identified tax and administrative reform as an essential
prerequisite for the success of his plan, if for no other reason than the fact that
defenders of the Dawes Plan could argue that the economic problems associ-
ated with its implementation resulted not from the provisions of the plan itself
but from the fiscal irresponsibility of state and municipal governments
throughout the country.110 As discussion unfolded in the summer and early
fall of 1927, Reusch revised his original plan to incorporate Warburg’s sugges-
tion that they enlist Luther to head a movement dedicated to a sweeping
reform of Germany’s federal structure with the goal of reducing administrative
costs and taxation at all levels of government. Plans for the creation of a new
organization that would both educate the public about the necessity of struc-
tural reform and win the political support necessary for its implementation
were finalized at a meeting between Reusch, Warburg, Luther, the RDI’s
Ludwig Kastl, and Count Siegfried von Roedern at Reusch’s Württemberg
estate on 19–20 September 1927.111 The official founding of the League for the
Regeneration of the Reich took place on 6 January 1928 at a convention in
Berlin to which eighty guests from all walks of German economic and political
life had been invited. Luther, who no doubt hoped to use the League to launch
his return to active political life, was tapped as chairman of the BER with
Baron Tilo von Wilmowsky, the brother-in-law of industrial magnate Gustav

110
Reusch to Warburg, “Undurchführbarkeit des Dawesplans,” 8 July 1927, RWWA Co
logne, Abt. 130, NL Reusch, 400101293/15.
111
Hak Ie Kim, Industrie, Staat und Wirtschaftspolitik. Die konjunkturpolitische Diskussion
in der Endphase der Weimarer Republik 1930 1932/33 (Berlin, 1999), 20 24. See also
Warburg to Reusch, 21 and 23 Oct. 1927, and Reusch to Cossmann, 21 Dec. 1927,
RWWA Cologne, Abt. 130, NL Reusch, 400101293/15.
   , –

Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach and a conservative moderate with close ties to
the German agricultural community, as its vice chairman.112
Although the inspiration for the founding of the League for the Regeneration
of the Reich came from Reusch and his associates in the German business
community, it afforded reform-minded elements from all of Germany’s non-
socialist parties a bipartisan forum from which they could address the need for
federal, administrative, and constitutional reform.113 With an estimated three
hundred members, the League for the Regeneration of the Reich represented a
genuine cross-section of Germany’s bourgeois leadership that stretched from
the National Federation of German Industry and National Rural League to the
Christian labor movement and the German National Union of Commercial
Employees. At the same time, the organization’s membership was drawn from
the DDP and Center as well as from the DVP and DNVP.114 The political and
ideological diversity of the BER membership stood in sharp contrast to Hugen-
berg’s own political agenda and generated little enthusiasm among his support-
ers, one of whom – Rudolf Blohm from the Hamburg ship-building industry –
discreetly dissociated himself from the BER in private correspondence with
Reusch.115 Hugenberg and representatives of Germany’s radical Right were
conspicuously absent from BER membership lists, a fact that only underscored
the extent to which the new organization represented an implicit repudiation of
the “all-or-nothing” politics of the extreme Right in favor of a reformist strategy
that presumed tacit, though by no means unqualified, acceptance of the existing
constitutional order.
Despite the fact that the founders of the League for the Regeneration of the
Reich included representatives of the industrial and agricultural elites that
stood behind the DNVP, the BER’s proposal for a reform of the Weimar
Constitution met with a cool response from the Nationalist party leadership.
At its Königsberg party congress in September 1927 the DNVP had empaneled

112
Most to Reusch, 7 Jan. 1928, RWWA Cologne, Abt. 130, NL Reusch, 400101293/15. On
Luther’s involvement, see his letters to his supporters, 12 and 25 Nov. 1927, TKA
Dortmund, NL Springorum, B 1a 60, as well as Hans Luther, Vor dem Abgrund.
Reichsbankpräsident in Krisenzeiten 1930 1933 (Berlin, 1964), 37 48. On Wilmowsky’s
involvement, see Zollitsch, “Das Scheitern der ‘gouvernementalen’ Rechten,” 254 73,
here 259 60.
113
For the BER’s goals, see Hans Luther, “Die Reichsreformvorschläge des Bundes zur
Erneuerung des Reiches,” Der deutsche Volkswirt. Zeitschrift für Politik und Wirtschaft 3,
no. 2 (12 Oct. 1928): 44 47.
114
Kim, Industrie, Staat und Wirtschaftspolitik, 25 30. For a list of conservative farm
leaders affiliated with the BER, see Nagel to Weilnböck, 23 Dec. 1927, BA Koblenz,
NL Weilnböck, 42.
115
Blohm to Reusch, 6 Nov. 1928, StA Hamburg, Blohm und Voß GmbH, 1218. For
Hugenberg’s rejection of the BER’s proposals for constitutional reform, see his letter
to Frowein, 24 June 1928, BA Koblenz, NL Hugenberg, 114/137 40.
     

a special committee under the chairmanship of DNVP Reichstag deputy

Walther Rademacher to prepare recommendations for a comprehensive
reform of the existing constitutional system. This was perfectly in line with
the strategic objectives of the governmental conservatives, who rejected calls
for the forcible overthrow of the Weimar Republic in favor of working to for
its revision within the existing constitutional system. The leaders of the
DNVP, however, felt pressured by the pace of events to move up their schedule
for the publication of their party’s program for a revision of the Weimar
Constitution so as to position the DNVP at the head of the movement for
constitutional reform.116 Despite Hugenberg’s criticism that the committee’s
recommendations did not go far enough in curtailing the tyranny of parlia-
ment or in calling for an end to the “war of all against all” that dominated
Germany’s political life,117 the preliminary draft of the DNVP’s proposal was
essentially complete by the end of November 1927 and was formally adopted
by party leaders at a special meeting of the DNVP party representation on 9
December. The DNVP’s proposal proceeded from the assumption that a
restoration of the monarchy was not in Germany’s immediate future and that
the party had to resign itself to pursuing its objectives within the framework of
the existing constitutional order. In this respect, however, the DNVP explicitly
rejected the idea of a unitary state and strongly opposed measures aimed at
undermining the sovereignty of the individual German states. At the same
time, the Nationalists proposed consolidating the office of the chancellor with
that of the Prussian minister president and increasing the executive powers of
the Reich president and his counterparts at the state level as a corrective to the
monopoly of power currently invested in the Reichstag and various state
parliaments. Similarly, the Nationalist proposal called for strengthening
the legislative prerogatives of the Federal Council, or Reichsrat, to counter
the influence of constantly fluctuating parliamentary majorities in the
Reichstag.118
The grand design that lay behind the founding of the League for the
Regeneration of the Reich was to unite Germany’s middle and moderate Right
behind an ambitious program of federal, administrative, and constitutional
reform. If successful – and this was clearly Reusch’s unspoken hope – this
would neutralize Hugenberg’s growing influence over the politics of the
German Right. At the same time, Reusch was directly involved in two other

116
Rademacher to Westarp, 20 Nov. 1927, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, II/26.
117
Memorandum from 30 Nov. 1927, appended to Hugenberg to Westarp, 1 Dec. 1927, NL
Westarp, Gärtringen, II/26.
118
“Wege zur Verfassungsreform. Ein deutschnationales Programm,” Unsere Partei 5,
no. 24 (15 Dec. 1927): 201 02. See also “Verhandlungsprogramm des Verfassungs
ausschusses der D.N.V.P. Nach dem Ergebnis der Generaldebatte am 25. November
1927,” NL Westarp, Gärtringen, II/26.
   , –

projects aimed at curtailing Hugenberg’s influence. After meeting with

Westarp, Thyssen, Wilmowsky, and Fritz Springorum from the Hoesch Steel
Works in Dortmund on 15 December 1927, Reusch proposed the creation of a
special committee consisting of five industrialists – Springorum, Ernst Brandi
from the United Steel Works in Dortmund, Ernst von Simson from the Berlin
chemical industry, Heinrich Retzmann from the League of Saxon Industrial-
ists, and Carl Jordan from the textile industry in Upper Bavaria – and four
parliamentarians, two each from the DVP and DNVP to be nominated by
Westarp.119 From the DNVP Westarp chose himself and Walther Rademacher
from mining interests in Saxony, from the DVP Ernst Scholz, chairman of the
party’s delegation to the Reichstag, and Hans von Raumer from the Berlin
electrical industry.120 The ostensible purpose of this committee, known as the
Joint Committee of the German National People’s Party and German People’s
Party (Gemeinsamer Ausschuß der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei und der
Deutschen Volkspartei), was to coordinate the representation of industrial
interests by the two right-wing parties in the hope that this would strengthen
industry’s position in parliament. Whatever hopes Reusch and his associates
might have had that the creation of the new committee might also undercut
the influence that Hugenberg enjoyed as chair of the Coordinating Committee
of German National Industrialists, however, were thwarted when Westarp, in
response to a nudge from Brandi, belatedly invited Hugenberg to join the
committee.121
Reusch’s efforts to bring together industrialists and parliamentarians out-
side the orbit of Hugenberg’s influence never achieved their intended goal. To
be sure, the joint committee established for this purpose continued to meet
through most of 1928, but it had faded into insignificance by the end of the
year.122 In the meantime, Reusch moved on still another front to counter
Hugenberg’s growing influence on the politics of the German Right. In
November 1927 Reusch, along with Krupp and Thyssen, announced the
creation of an exclusive club of Ruhr industrialists known as the “Ruhrlade”
and invited nine of their fellow industrialists to join.123 The purpose of this
organization, which met for the first time in early January 1928 and which
continued to meet on a monthly basis for the balance of the Weimar Republic,

119
Reusch to Westarp, 15 Dec. 1927, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, VN 39. Jordan declined to
join the committee and was replaced by Hans Dietrich from the German banking
community. See Reusch to Westarp, 26 Dec. 1927, ibid., and Reusch to Dietrich, 31
Dec. 1927, RWWA Cologne, Abt. 130, NL Reusch, 400101293/8b.
120
Westarp to Reusch, 17 Dec. 1927, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, VN 39.
121
Westarp to Hugenberg, 14 Jan. 1928, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, VN 39. See also Brandi to
Reusch, 24 Dec. 1927, RWWA Cologne, Abt. 130, NL Reusch, 400101293/8b.
122
For a record of the committee’s meetings and activities, see RWWA Cologne, NL
Reusch, 400101293/8b.
123
Reusch to Springorum, 22 Nov. 1927, TKA Dortmund, NL Springorum, F1 i 3.
     

was to bridge the differences that existed within the ranks of the Ruhr indus-
trial elite and to forge, in so far as possible, a united front for the more effective
representation of industry’s vital interests at all levels of government. The
“Ruhrlade” was truly bipartisan in character and included those who were
aligned with the DVP, the DNVP, and the Center as well as several who
preferred to remain politically unaffiliated. Of the twelve industrialists who
belonged to the “Ruhrlade,” only Thyssen openly sympathized with Hugen-
berg’s political agenda, although none, with the possible exception of Peter
Klöckner who belonged to the Center Party, felt much in the way of loyalty to
Germany’s republican institutions. By bringing the twelve together for regular
meetings that were primarily social but invariably political as well, Reusch
hoped to foster a greater sense of social and political solidarity within the
ranks of the Ruhr industrial elite.124

As 1927 drew to a close, the situation in the DNVP was far from clear. The
extent to which Reusch and his associates would be able to hold Hugenberg
and his supporters in check would depend in large part upon the outcome of
the Reichstag elections that were scheduled to take place later that spring. The
elections would test whether the economic benefits of reentering the govern-
ment outweighed the cost of having to work within a system of government to
which the DNVP remained fundamentally opposed. As the gains that middle-
class splinter parties had recorded since 1924 and the unrest in the German
agricultural community clearly suggested, the situation in which the DNVP
found itself was indeed precarious, all the more so because of the deep and
unresolved divisions within the party itself.

124
Henry Ashby Turner, Jr., “The Ruhrlade, Secret Cabinet of Heavy Industry in the
Weimar Republic,” Central European History 3 (1970): 195 228. On the anti Hugenberg
animus of Reusch and Ruhr heavy industry, see Wilmowsky to Krupp, 15 Dec. 1927, HA
Krupp Essen, FAH 23/501.
 13

From Defeat to Crisis

The call for new elections in the spring of 1928 found the German Right
more deeply divided than ever before. With the economic and political
stabilization of the Weimar Republic in the second half of the 1920s a deep
and increasingly bitter gulf had developed within the German Right between
those who were prepared to work within the framework of Germany’s
republican system to promote interests vital to the conservative cause and
those who denounced any such accommodation as an betrayal of Germany’s
sacred national trust. This split ran right through the middle of the German
National People’s Party, where the party’s national leaders struggled valiantly
to bridge the gap between the two strands of right-wing political commit-
ment until they themselves became a target of right-wing invective. In the
meantime, the disintegration of the DNVP’s social base continued unabated
as first the economic and commercial middle class, then the small investor,
and finally the farmer began to desert the DNVP in favor of parties that
claimed to represent their special interests more effectively than the DNVP.1
Moreover, the general climate in which the campaign opened was not as
favorable to the forces of the German Right as they had been in 1924. The
relative stability that Germany had enjoyed since the end of 1923 tended to
favor the parties that identified themselves with the Republic and robbed the
Nationalist campaign of much of its emotional force. To be sure, the Nation-
alists would wage a furious attack against reparations and Stresemann’s
policy of understanding, but this no longer resonated as powerfully as it
had four years earlier when the debate the Dawes Plan occupied center stage.
Without the benefit of a foreign policy issue they could use to arouse the
passions of the Nationalist electorate, the leaders of the DNVP were forced
back on to the terrain of domestic politics where they were vulnerable to
attack from the various special-interest parties that had surfaced during the
course of the 1920s.

1
For further details, see Attila Chanady, “The Disintegration of the German National
People’s Party, 1924 1930,” Journal of Modern History 39 (1967): 65 80.


     

The Challenge of Special Interests

The campaign for the May 1928 Reichstag elections was dominated above all
else by the assault of the special-interest parties. The Business Party, which had
whittled away at the margins of the Nationalist electorate ever since its
emergence in the early 1920s, continued to press its bid for the support of
those middle-class elements that had been excluded from the benefits of
Germany’s economic stabilization in the second half of the decade.2 On
18 March 1928 WP party chairman Hermann Drewitz and the leaders of an
ostensibly nonpartisan organization known as the Reich Cartel of the German
Middle Class (Reichskartell des deutschen Mittelstandes) opened the WP’s
campaign with a series of demonstrations throughout the country under the
slogan “Mittelstand in Not.” This initiative reached its high point in Berlin,
where several thousand demonstrators closed their shops and took to the
streets in protest against high taxes, rent controls, and excessive government
spending.3 Though presumably nonpartisan in character, these demonstra-
tions afforded Drewitz and the leaders of the WP an excellent forum for
carrying their attack to the other nonsocialist parties. The DNVP was singled
out in particular for having capitulated to organized labor in supporting the
Work Hours Law in the spring of 1927, for having blocked the creation of a
state secretary for the artisanry in the ministry of economics, and for having
failed to live up to all the promises it had made over the years to German
homeowners. All of this, WP campaign strategists argued, was part of a
consistent pattern of middle-class neglect by the DNVP and other nonsocialist
parties that could be remedied only through the unification of the German
middle class behind the banner of a new political party that was unequivocally
committed to the defense of its vital interests.4
In a similar vein, the various revaluation groups that had come together in
late August 1926 to form the People’s Justice Party were determined to take
their measure of revenge upon the Nationalists for their in the passage of the
1925 revaluation law. The VRP enjoyed closed ties to the Savers’ Association

2
Hermann Drewitz, “Die politische Standesbewegung des deutschen Mittelstands vor
und nach dem Kriege,” in Jahbruch der Reichspartei des deutschen Mittelstandes 1929
(N.p., n.d. [1929]), 13 32. See also Schumacher, Mittelstandsfront und Republik. Die
Wirtschaftspartei Reichspartei des deutschen Mittelstandes 1919 1933 (Düsseldorf,
1972), 31 112.
3
Ibid., 30. See also the Kölner Nachrichten. Wochenschrift der Reichspartei des deutschen
Mittelstandes (Wirtschaftspartei), 24 Mar. 1928, no. 12.
4
Wahrheiten 1928. Wahlhandbuch der Reichspartei des deutschen Mittelstandes
(Wirtschaftspartei), ed. Reichspartei des deutschen Mittelstandes (Berlin, 1928), 3 8,
90 92, 164 65. See also the broadsides in the Kölner Nachrichten, 14 and 21 Apr. 1928,
nos. 15 and 16, as well as the WP’s last minute election appeal, ibid., 19 May 1928, no. 20,
as well as Benjamin Lieberman, “Turning against the Weimar Right: Landlords, the
Economic Party, and the DNVP,” German History 15 (1997): 56 79.
   , –

Figure 8. WP campaign placard with a quote from Bismarck designed by Paul

Jürgens for the May 1928 Reichstag elections. Reproduced with permission from the
Bundesarchiv Berlin, Plakat 002 031 013
     

for the German Reich and sought to mobilize the outrage of those small
investors who had been hurt by the runaway inflation of the early 1920s and
felt betrayed by the DNVP’s failure to honor its commitment to a “full and
equitable” revaluation of those paper mark assets that had been destroyed by
the inflation. From the perspective of the revaluation movement, the DNVP’s
role in securing passage of the 1925 revaluation settlement only underscored
the extent to which the party was willing to sacrifice the welfare of the small
investor to the interests of big business and large landed agriculture. Like the
WP, the VRP had also recorded dramatic gains at the DNVP’s expense in the
October 1926 Saxon Landtag elections, and now it hoped to build upon its
success in Saxony to compete for the votes of Germany’s disaffected middle
class as a party with a national profile.5 At the same time, the VRP tried to
escape the odium of a splinter party by insisting that in a larger sense its
objective was to restore the sense of right and justice that had been violated
with the passage of the 1925 revaluation legislation. The VRP was therefore
not just for the rights of the dispossessed investor but also for the ethical
principles that lay at the heart of Germany’s national culture.6
Westarp and the leaders of the DNVP responded to the attack of the
middle-class splinter parties with a vigorous defense of their own party’s
record of accomplishment on behalf of the German middle class.7 At the same
time, they warned that the continued splintering of Germany’s middle-class
electorate only weakened the strongest of Germany’s nonsocialist parties and
thus played directly into the hands of the German Left.8 This particular
admonition, however, was not directed just at the urban middle classes but
was also pregnant with meaning for Germany’s rural voters whose economic
situation had continued to deteriorate throughout the second half of the 1920s.
The outburst of widespread rural protest in the first months of 1928 and the
subsequent founding of the Christian-National Peasants and Farmers’ Party
sent shock waves through the ranks of the DNVP party organization and
threatened the party with the loss of its largest and most significant voting

5
Adolf Bauser, “Auf zur Wahl!,” Deutsches Volksrecht. Zentralorgan des Sparerbundes/
Offizielles Nachrichtenblatt der Volksrechts Partei, 19 May 1928, no. 40. See also Adolf
Bauser, “Notwendigkeit, Aufgaben und Ziele der Volksrechtspartei,” in Für Wahrheit und
Recht. Der Endkampf um eine gerechte Aufwertung. Reden und Aufsätze, ed. Adolf Bauser
(Stuttgart, 1927), 90 96, as well as Müller, “Adolf Bauser,” 259 62.
6
“Wahlaufruf der Volksrechts Partei,” Deutsches Volksrecht, 16 May 1928, no. 39.
7
In this respect, see Johann Howe, Zur Abwehr wirtschaftsparteilicher Angriffe! (Kiel, n.d.
[1928]), 1 4, as well as Deutschnationale Volkspartei, Landesverband Schleswig Holstein.
Die Sozialisierung der deutschen Wirtschaft! Rechenschaftsbericht über die Wohnungspoli
tik des Verbandes Schleswig Holsteinischer Haus und Grundbesitzer Vereine, ed. Howe
(Kiel, n.d. [1928]). For further details, see Dörr, “Deutschnationale Volkspartei,” 363 70.
8
Kuno von Westarp, Die Deutschnationale Volkspartei und der gewerbliche Mittelstand,
Deutschnationale Flugschrift, no. 306 (Berlin, 1927).
   , –

Figure 9. VRP campaign placard designed by an unidentified graphic artist for the
May 1928 Reichstag elections. Reproduced with permission from the Bundesarchiv
Berlin, Plakat 002 031 017

bloc, the German farmer. The leaders of the CNBLP attacked the DNVP’s
performance as a member of the national government and lamented about
how little it had done to provide the farmer with the help he so desperately
needed.9 The DNVP responded with an emergency farm program that
Westarp introduced from the floor of the Reichstag on 22 February and that,
among other things, called for the consolidation of agricultural debt, the
conversion of short-term personal indebtedness into mortgages and other
forms of long-term credit, a reduction of the income tax and estate taxes on
agricultural property, government subsidies to rationalize the market for
agricultural products, and tariffs to protect the domestic market for agricul-
tural products against unfair competition from foreign imports.10 Similarly,
Martin Schiele and other party leaders highlighted what the DNVP had

9
Erwin Baum, “Was will die Christlich Nationale Bauern und Landvolkpartei?,” Nas
sauische Bauern Zeitung. Organ und Verlag des Bezirksbauernschaft für Nassau und den
Kreis Wetzlar e.V., 5 May 1928, no. 105.
10
Kuno von Westarp, Bauernnot Volksnot. Das Arbeitsprogramm des Reichstages und das
landwirtschaftliche Programm der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei. Reichstagsrede vom 22.
Februar 1928, Deutschnationale Flugschrift, no. 317 (Berlin, 1928), 7 16.
     

accomplished for the farmer by virtue of its participation in the national

government and reaffirmed their party’s deep and abiding commitment to
the material and spiritual welfare of the German agricultural community.11 At
the same time that they dismissed the CNBLP as a splinter party whose
existence only undermined the effectiveness with which the DNVP could
represent the interests of the German agricultural community,12 party leaders
like Saxony’s Albrecht Philipp warned against a splintering of Germany’s
conservative forces that would only make it that much easier for the German
Left to regain the reins of power.13
To Westarp and his associates, the most troubling aspect of the CNBLP’s
sudden emergence as a rival for the votes of the German farmer was that its
founding enjoyed the support of influential regional affiliates of the National
Rural League, most notably in Thuringia and Hesse-Nassau. Fearing that this
was the beginning of a trend that might spill over into other parts of the
country,14 the leaders of the DNVP urged the RLB’s national leadership to
dissociate itself from the CNBLP and to reaffirm in no uncertain terms its
alliance with the DNVP.15 But in its initial response to the founding of the
CNBLP, the National Rural League chose instead to reaffirm its long-standing
policy of bipartisan neutrality toward all political parties and stated that its
position on any particular party would depend upon that party’s “engagement
for the welfare of German agriculture and the Fatherland.”16 This statement,
no doubt adopted in deference to the deep-seated distrust that certain sectors
of the German agricultural community felt toward toward the DNVP and
other Weimar parties,17 met widespread resentment from the leaders of the
DNVP, who criticized the RLB for its vacillation and insisted that it disavow
the efforts of the new party to establish itself in areas where the RLB’s regional

11
Martin Schiele, Die Agrarpolitik der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei 1925/1928, Deutsch
nationale Flugschrift, no. 320 (Berlin, 1928).
12
Lothar Steuer, Die deutsche Landwirtschaft und die politische Parteien. Eine Wahlkampf
betrachtung (Kassel, 1928), 12 15.
13
Albrecht Philipp, Die Zukunft der deutschen Landwirtschaft. Nach einer Rede gehalten am
30. April 1928 zu Gethain auf der Generalversammlung des Landbundes Borna, Schriften
der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei in Sachsen (Arbeitsgemeinschaft), no. 26 (Borna,
1928), 13 14.
14
Schmidt Hannover to Treviranus, 14 Feb. 1928, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, VN 67.
15
Westarp to Wilmowsky, 23 Feb. 1928, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, II/29.
16
Statement by the RLB executive committee, 18 Feb. 1928, in Reichs Landbund. Agrarpo
litische Wochenschrift 8, no. 8 (25 Feb. 1928): 101. See also the minutes of the RLB
executive committee, 18 Feb. 1928, Landeshauptarchiv Sachsen Anhalt, Abteilung Mag
deburg/Wernigerode (hereafter cited as LHA Magdeburg Wernigerode), Marienthal
Gutsarchiv, 319/219ff.
17
Wendhausen to the RLB presidium and the chairmen of the RLB’s regional affiliates, 20
Feb. 1928, BA Berlin, R 8034 I, 132/35.
   , –

affiliates had remained loyal to the DNVP.18 When the RLB revisited the issue
at a meeting of its executive committee on 21 March, sentiment was so deeply
divided that all it could do was to reiterate the RLB’s neutrality toward all of
those parties, the CNBLP included, that were prepared to fight for the vital
interests of German agriculture. As a concession to the DNVP, the RLB
executive committee also stipulated that the expansion of the CNBLP into
areas other than those where it was already established required the express
approval of the RLB’s regional affiliate.19
It was no longer possible to deny that the founding of the CNBLP had
produced a deep rift within the ranks of the RLB leadership.20 The defection of
RLB president Karl Hepp to the CNBLP in mid-February 1928 evoked the
specter of an open conflict between those like Schiele and Kalckreuth who
continued to support the DNVP and those like Hepp and the leaders of the
Thuringian Rural League had come out in support of the new party.21 The
state and provincial leaders of the DNVP party organization entered into
direct negotiations with the RLB’s regional affiliates in an attempt to prevent
other RLB affiliates from supporting the CNBLP and to discourage them from
sponsoring the creation of special agarian tickets.22 But this proved more
difficult than the leaders of the DNVP had anticipated. For while the Würt-
temberg Peasants and Wine Growers’ League under the leadership of Theodor
Körner alt moved quickly to reaffirm an alliance with the DNVP that had been
in effect since the first years of the Weimar Republic,23 things were not so easy
with the RLB’s affiliates in states like Bavaria or Saxony. In Bavaria, for
example, Hans Hilpert and the leaders of the Bavarian Middle Party, as the
DNVP’s state organization was commonly known, were fearful even before the
founding of the CNBLP that the Bavarian Rural League might run its own slate

18
Wilmowsky to the RLB presidium, 15 Mar. 1928, BA Koblenz, NL Weilnböck, 29b. See
also Schmitt Stettin to Hepp, 26 Mar. 1928, ibid., 29a, and Richthofen to Hepp, 25
Apr. 1928, ibid., 29b.
19
Report on the meeting of the RLB executive committee, 21 Mar. 1928, LHA Magdeburg
Wernigerode, Marienthal Gutsarchiv, 319/186ff. See also Feldman to Hepp, 27 Mar. 1928,
NL Westarp, Gärtringen.
20
Wangenheim’s notes on a meeting of the RLB leadership, 17 Mar. 1928, BA Koblenz, NL
Weilnböck, 29b. For further details, see Merkenich, Grüne Front gegen Weimar, 287 300.
21
For example, see Hepp to Weilnböck, 11 Feb. 1928, BA Koblenz, NL Weilnböck, 29b. For
the Thuringian context, see Jochen Grass, Studien zur Politik der bürgerlichen Parteien
Thuringens in der Weimarer Zeit 1920 1932. Ein Beitrag zur Landesgeschichte (Hamburg,
1997), 168 83, and Guido Dressel, Der Thüringer Landbund Agrarischer Berufsverband
als politische Partei in Thüringen (Weimar, 1998), 54 56.
22
Westarp to Wilmowsky, 23 Feb. 1928, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, II/29.
23
Wahlhandbuch für das Wahljahr 1928. Zum Gebrauch und zur Aufklärung für die
württembergischen Wähler, ed. Württembergischer Bauern und Weingärtnerbund/Bund
der Landwirte in Württemberg (Stuttgart, 1928), 24.
     

of candidates in the state and national elections scheduled for later that
spring.24 Hilpert and his associates in the BMP redoubled their efforts in the
last two weeks of February to keep the Bavarian Rural League from fielding its
own slate of candidates, eventually signing an agreement on 3 March 1928 that
contained far-reaching concessions to the BLB in the placement of rural
candidates on a joint BMP-BLB ticket in both the state and national elec-
tions.25 An open break was thus avoided, all but eliminating the threat of
large-scale defections to the CNBLP in the DNVP’s Franconian strongholds.
Nor was the situation much different in Saxony, where local party leaders
were concerned that the enthusiastic support the founding of the CNBLP had
received in the neighboring state of Thuringia might spill over into the Saxon
peasantry and inflict a defeat upon the DNVP even more severe than the one it
had suffered in the 1926 state elections.26 The leaders of the Saxon Rural
League, most of whom remained loyal to the SLB’s alliance with the local
DNVP,27 worked hand in hand with the local DNVP leadership to check the
spread of the new party by running their own slate of candidates on a list
entitled the Saxon Landvolk (Sächsisches Landvolk) with the understanding
that those elected on this ticket would join the DNVP Reichstag delegation in
the new national parliament.28 When the leaders of the Thuringian Rural
League carried their campaign on behalf of the CNBLP across state borders
and began to set up a Saxon chapter of the new agrarian party, Otto Feldmann
and the leaders of the SLB complained bitterly that this violated the terms of
the position the RLB’s national leadership had taken in its resolution of
21 March and exhorted RLB headquarters in Berlin to disavow the renegades

24
Hilpert to the BLB executive committee (Vorstandschaft), 2 Feb. 1928, BA Koblenz, NL
Weilnböck, 29a. For further information, see Brosius to Weilnböck, 21 Feb. 1928, and
Hopp (BLB) to Brügel, 23 Feb. 1928, ibid., 29a, as well as Hopp to Weilnböck, 1
Mar. 1928, ibid., 50.
25
Agreement between the BLB and the Bavarian DNVP, 3 Mar. 1928, BA Koblenz, NL
Weilnböck, 29b. See also the minutes of the meeting of the BLB executive committee, 3
Mar. 1928, BA Berlin, R 8034 I, 170/42, as well as Hans Hilpert, “Meinungen und
Kämpfe. Meine politische Erinnerungen,” BHStA Munich, Abt. V, Nachlass Hans Hil
pert, 18/3222 24.
26
For example, see Rademacher to Beutler, 7 Mar. 1928, appended to Rademacher to
Westarp, 10 Mar. 1928, and Rademacher to Westarp, 23 Mar. 1928, NL Westarp,
Gärtringen, VN 101. For the position of the Saxon DNVP, see Lüttichau to Westarp,
ibid., VN 67, as well as “Grundsätzliches zur Reichstagswahl 1928 für die Rechtsgruppen
in Sachsen,” n.d., SHStA Dresden, NL Philipp, 20.
27
Feldmann to Höfer, 27 Mar. 1928, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, VN 99. See also Feldmann to
Kriegsheim, 23 Feb. 1928, BA Berlin, R 8034 I, 132a/7 10.
28
Feldmann to Westarp, 24 Mar. 1928, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, VN 99. For the details of
this arrangement, see Lüttichau to Westarp, 24 Mar. 1928, ibid., and 17 Apr. 1928, ibid.,
VN 67. See also “Warum: Sächsisches Landvolk?” Sächsische Bauern Zeitung. Amtliches
Organ des Sächsischen Landbundes e.V. 35, no. 17 (22 Apr. 1928): 166 67.
   , –

in Thuringia.29 Although the leaders of the RLB, in the words of Bodo von
Alvensleben from the RLB’s affiliate in Magdeburg, regarded the founding of
the CNBLP as an act of “political stupidity [eine politische Dummheit],”30 they
clearly feared that the rivalry between the DNVP and CNBLP might destroy
their own organization and quickly reaffirmed the declaration of neutrality
they had issued at the beginning of the campaign.31

Campaign Dilemmas
The belligerence of the CNBLP’s campaign forced the DNVP on to the
defensive throughout much of the countryside and severely undermined the
effectiveness of its efforts to retain the support of the German farmer. The
common thread that united the CNBLP with the other middle-class splinter
parties in the 1928 elections was their implicit rejection of the existing political
system as the source of the social and economic hardships that had been
visited upon their respective constituencies. Anti-system sentiment had
become an increasingly widespread feature of German political culture in
the second half of the 1920s and formed the essential subtext of much of what
was said and done during the 1928 campaign.32 For the DNVP this repre-
sented a paradox from which it had to extricate itself if its campaign was ever
going to be successful. By joining the national government, the DNVP had
effectively abdicated its place in German political life as the anti-system party
of choice, with the result that it now found itself the target of precisely the
same rhetoric that had served it so well in the early years of the republic. This
paradox affected not just those constituencies that had broken away from the
DNVP in search of a more effective way of securing their social and economic
interests but also those that had remained loyal to the party. The DNVP’s civil
service wing, for example, was indignant over the way in which the party
leadership had acquiesced to the Center in the passage of the civil service
salary reform in the fall of 1927 but, unlike the civil servants within the
Center itself, abstained from any sort of overt public demonstration that
might have embarrassed the party leadership. Though critical of the political
course the DNVP had pursued over the last several years, the Association of
German Nationalist Higher Civil Servants of the Reich (Vereinigung der

29
Feldman to the presidents of the RLB, 28 Mar. 1928, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, VN 99.
30
Memorandum dated 4 Apr. 1928 on a meeting of the Magdeburg Rural League with
representatives of the CNBLP, 2 Apr. 1928, ibid., VN 99.
31
Comments by Alvensleben and Schiele, 2. Apr. 1928, ibid. See also Schmidt Stettin to
Hepp, 26 Mar. 1928, BA Koblenz, NL Weilnböck, 29a, and Nicolas (Brandenburg Rural
League) to Stützner Karbe, 23 Apr. 1928, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, VN 68.
32
Thomas Childers, “Interest and Ideology: Anti System Politics in the Era of Stabilization,
1924 1928,” in Die Nachwirkungen der Inflation auf die deutsche Geschichte 1924 1933,
ed. Gerald D. Feldman (Munich, 1985), 1 20.
     

deutschnationalen höheren Beamten des Reichs) that had been founded in

November 1926 denounced those who had left the party in search of a more
effective way of representing their material interests and remained committed
to working within the party for the welfare of the civil service and the German
nation in all of its manifold complexity.33
The position of the DNVP’s civil servant contingent did not differ materi-
ally from that of the working-class and white-collar elements that formed the
nucleus of the party’s left wing. No faction within the party had benefited more
from the DNVP’s two experiments at government participation than the
workers and white-collar employees who had joined the DNVP under the
banner of Christian-Socialism.34 But the leaders of the DNVP’s Christian-
Social faction were uneasy over the increased assertiveness of the Hugenberg
wing, in part because Hugenberg’s entourage included outspoken critics of the
postwar labor movement like Paul Bang from the League for National Eco-
nomics and Industrial Peace (Bund für Nationalwirtschaft und Werkge-
meinschaft) and Wilhelm Schmidt from the National Alliance of Patriotic
Workers’ Clubs (Reichsbund vaterländischer Arbeitervereine or RvA). These
elements were fundamentally opposed to the special recognition that German
industry had accorded the socialist, Christian, and liberal labor unions in the
compact that had established the Zenralarbeitsgemeinschaft at the end of
1918.35 In their struggle with the Christian labor for parity within the DNVP,
Schmidt and the leaders of the so-called yellow workers’ unions had Hugen-
berg in the hope that this would provide them with the leverage they need to
challenge the preferential treatment Christian labor had received from the
DNVP party leadership.36 The DNVP’s Christian-Social faction saw this as
nothing less than a concerted effort by the social reactionaries around Hugen-
berg to undermine the independence and vitality of the German trade-union

33
Memorandum appended to Lammers to Westarp, 13 Apr. 1928, NL Westarp, Gärtringen,
VN 99. For a defense of the DNVP’s record on behalf of the civil service, see Otto
Schmidt Stettin, “Beamtenfragen im Reichstage,” in Politische Praxis 1927, ed. Walther
Lambach (Hamburg, n.d. [1927]), 188 90.
34
Lambach, “Von Köln bis Königsberg. Deutschnationaler Kampf um die Führung im
Reich,” Politische Wochenschrift 3, no. 37 (15 Sept. 1927): 196 98. See also Stupperich,
Volksgemeinschaft oder Arbeitersolidarität, 98 121.
35
For example, see Wilhelm Schmidt, Die deutsche Arbeiterbewegung der Vorkriegs und
der Revolutionsjahre in besonderer Berücksichtigung des Werkgemeinschafts Gedankens
(Berlin, n.d. [1925]), 24 40, and Wilhelm Schmidt, Der Werkgemeinschafts Gedanke in
Staat und Wirtschaft. Vortrag gehalten auf der 1. Reichstagung des Reichsbundes vater
ländischer Arbeiter und Werkvereine, e.V., in Halle a. Saale, 18. bis 21. September 1925
(Berlin, n.d. [1925]).
36
For example, see the letters from the Coalition of Nationalist Workers (Arbeitsge
meinschaft nationaler Arbeitnehmer) to Westarp, 19 Mar. 1928, NL Westarp, Gärtringen,
II/19, and Wolf from the Workers’ Group of the Pomeranian Rural League (Arbeitneh
mergruppe des Pommerschen Landbundes) to Westarp, 22 Mar. 1928., ibid., VN 67.
   , –

movement. In response, Walther Lambach and the leaders of the DNVP’s

working-class and white-collar wing published a “Bekenntnis zur Christlich-
nationalen Selbsthilfe” in January 1928 to reaffirm the Christian and social
principles that lay at the heart of the DNVP’s political program in the hope
that this would help them stake out their position in time for the upcoming
national elections.37
The German National Workers’ League and its allies in the Christian-
national labor movement had been one of the DNVP’s most important
sources of electoral support since the first years of the Weimar Republic. Even
a staunch conservative like Westarp readily conceded that without the support
of right-wing workers the DNVP would never have increased its popular vote
from three to over six million between January 1919 and December 1924.38
But the position that Christian labor had managed to carve out for itself within
the DNVP was deeply resented by other sectors of the party that felt that this
had come at their expense. This sentiment was particularly strong among
those who served as representatives of the independent middle class. Robert
Hampe, a Nationalist deputy who functioned as the DNVP’s liaison to the
hotel and restaurant industry, relayed the frustration that his supporters had
experienced as a result of new government regulations that in some cases had
been supported by representatives of his own party’s labor wing.39 Even more
revealing was the case of Gustav Budjühn, one of the DNVP’s most persistent
and dedicated spokesmen for middle-class economic interests and chairman of
the DNVP’s Reich Middle-Class Committee. In the nomination of candidates
for the 1928 Reichstag elections in his home district of Potsdam I, Budjühn
had been passed over in favor of the Stahlhelm’s Eduard Stadtler, a Catholic
conservative who stood on the DNVP’s extreme right wing without any ties
whatsoever to Germany’s beleagured middle class.40 “How am I to behave
during the campaign,” Budjühn wrote to Westarp on 18 April 1928, “when
I run into the argument that the party’s empathy for the middle class expresses
itself best not just by denying a secure candidacy to one of its middle-class
leaders but even worse by dropping him down in the placement of candidates
[on its national ticket]?”41 The irony that lay at the heart of Budjühn’s

37
“Bekenntnis zur christlich nationalen Selbsthilfe,” n.d., BA Berlin, NL Mumm, 286/195 98,
reprinted in Politische Wochenschrift 4, no. 4 (26 Jan. 1928): 70 76. See also the letter from
Lambach, 12 Feb. 1928, FZH Hamburg, Nachlass Alfred Diller, 7, as well as the report on
the DNVP white collar conference in Berlin, 29 Jan. 1928, appended to Lambach to
Westarp, 1 Feb. 1928, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, VN 71. For further details, see Stupperich,
Volksgemeinschaft oder Arbeitersolidarität, 134 40, and Roder, Gewerkschaftsbund, 447 52.
38
Westarp, Konservative Politik, ed. Hiller von Gaertringen, 119.
39
See the two letters from Hampe to Westarp, 4 Feb. 1928, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, II/29.
40
Budjühn to Westarp, 4 and 12 Apr. 1928, ibid., II/29.
41
Budjühn to Westarp, 18 Apr. 1928, ibid., II/29.
     

rhetorical question did not augur well for the DNVP’s ability to meet the
challenge of the Business Party and other middle-class interest parties.
Although Westarp, Schiele, and other Nationalist leaders offered a vigorous
defense of their party’s record of achievement in the fourth Marx cabinet and
took great pride in what it had been able to accomplish for the various
constituencies that constituted their party’s social base,42 party strategists also
hoped to recapture the political high ground that the DNVP’s had enjoyed as
an opposition party from 1918 to 1924.43 In an effort to reclaim their party’s
legacy as an opposition party, the Nationalists focused the full force of their
fury on the situation in Prussia, where the parties of the Weimar Coalition
had governed almost without interruption since the founding of the Weimar
Republic.44 At the same time, the Nationalists called for a fundamental
reform of the Weimar Constitution that, if successfully implemented, would
have stripped the Reichstag of much of its power and decoupled the exercise
of executive authority from the will of the people as manifest in the con-
stantly fluctuating party configurations of the Reichstag. Here the Nationalists
went to great pains to identify themselves as closely as possible with Hinden-
burg’s mystic aura and the call for “More power to the Reich president” in
the hope that this would somehow insulate the DNVP against the appeal of
the special-interest parties.45 On a parallel front, Annagrete Lehmann and the
leaders of the DNVP’s women’s movement complained bitterly about the
“Bolshevization” of German public life and projected an inherently conserva-
tive vision of the German woman and her role in the family, nation, and state
as an antidote to the moral decay of modern society.46 All of this was

42
Westarp to Finckenstein, 23 Feb. 1928, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, VN 65. See also the
manuscript of an undated speech by Westarp from the spring of 1928, ibid., VN 66, as
well as Kuno von Westarp, 14 Monate Deutschnationale Regierungsarbeit. Rückblick und
Ausblick. Reichstagsrede vom 29. März 1928, Deutschnationale Flugschrift, no. 322
(Berlin, 1928), and Alfred Hanemann, Materialien für deutschnationale Wahlredner
(Freiburg im Breisgau, 1928), 10 16.
43
See the speeches by Westarp and Treviranus at the DNVP Training Week (Schülungs
woche), 28 Mar. 1928, BA Berlin, R 8005, 58/73 96, and 59/33 73.
44
Hans Schlange Schöningen, Die große Abrechnung mit den Zuständen in Preußen. Rede
am 27. März 1928 im Preußischen Landtag, Deutschnationale Flugschrift, no. 321
(Berlin, 1928).
45
Axel von Freytagh Loringhoven, Verfassungsreform, Deutschnationale Flugschrift,
no. 314 (Berlin, 1928). See also Rademacher to Westarp, 27 Dec. 1927 and 13
Jan. 1928, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, II/26.
46
Annagrete Lehmann, Der Kampf gegen die Bolschewisierung von Sitte und Sittlichkeit, Aus
Deutschlands Not und Ringen, no. 2 (Berlin, 1928). See also Käthe Schirmacher, Was
verdankt die deutsche Frau der deutschen Frauenbewegung? Die deutschen Frau in
Familie, Volk, und Staat. No. 7 (Querfurt, 1927), and Magdalene von Tiling, Wir Frauen
und die christliche Schule (Berlin, 1928). See also Heinsohn, Konservative Parteien in
Deutschland 1912 bis 1933. Demokratisierung ind Partizipation in geschlecthistorischer
Perspektive (Düsseldorf, 2010), 147 52, and Sneeringer, Winning Women’s Votes:
   , –

Figure 10. DNVP campaign placard designed by Herbert Rothgaengel for the May
1928 Reichstag elections. Reproduced with permission from the Bundesarchiv Berlin,
Plakat 002 029 053
     

carefully crafted to reestablish the DNVP’s credentials as the party of national

opposition to the changes that had taken place in Germany’s political, social,
and cultural life since the end of World War I. That this ran counter to what
party leaders were saying about the DNVP’s accomplishments as a member
of two national governments only helped create a mixed message that
amplified the deeper divisions that existed at all levels of the DNVP party
organization.

Campaign Financing
The difficulties the DNVP experienced in reconciling its self-image as a party
of national opposition with its two stints in the national government were
further reflected in its relationship to the German industrial community. In
November 1927 the DNVP party leadership had tried to free the party from
its financial dependence upon Hugenberg and his supporters by negotiating
an arrangement whereby Hugenberg would restrict his solicitation of funds to
the coal and steel industries while the Coordinating Committee of German
National Industrialists, or ADI, would be responsible for the collection of all
other funds. But Hugenberg was reluctant to relinquish control over the
collection of party funds and balked at going along with the proposed changes
in the way the DNVP solicited contributions from its industrial backers.47
Just how Hugenberg proposed to exercise this control became abundantly
clear when he threatened to withhold campaign funds from the party if one of
his closest associates, Paul Bang from the ADV, was not nominated to a
secure candidacy in Saxony.48 In February 1928 Westarp turned once again to
the Ruhr industrial elite with the complaint that Hugenberg had failed to
honor his financial commitments and pleaded for its help in financing the
party’s campaign for the upcoming Reichstag elections.49 The situation in the
DNVP and the problem of party financing were discussed at length at a
meeting of the “Ruhrlade” on 5 March, at which time it was decided to create
a special fund that could be used, among other things, to help finance the

Proaganda and Politics in Weimar Germany (Chapel Hill, NC, London, 2002), 134 35,
140 41, 160 62.
47
Widenmann to Westarp, 14 Nov. 1927, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, VN 61. On Hugen
berg’s role in soliciting funds for the 1928 campaign, see the circular from Hugenberg,
Reichert, and Scheibe to the DNVP’s industrial backers, Mar. 1928, StA Hamburg, Blohm
und Voß GmbH, 1215.
48
For further details, see Philipp to Westarp, 9 and 14 Mar. 1928, NL Westarp, Gärtringen,
VN 71, and Lüttichau to Westarp, 27 Mar. 1928, ibid., VN 67.
49
On the difficulties with Hugenberg, see Widenmann to Westarp, 4 Mar. 1928, NL
Westarp, Gärtringen, II/28.
   , –

campaigns of candidates sympathetically disposed to the concerns of Ruhr

heavy industry.50
In doing this, the “Ruhrlade” was establishing a campaign fund that was
beyond Hugenberg’s control and free from his machinations. An account
bearing the name “Wirtschaftshilfe” was established under Springorum’s
signature at the Berlin office of the German Bank and Discount Society
(Deutsche Bank und Diskonto-Gesellschaft), and a levy of 1.11 marks for each
ton of raw steel produced in February 1928 was imposed upon all members of
the “Ruhrlade.”51 The “Ruhrlade” proceeded to raise several hundred thou-
sand marks for use in the 1928 elections and made campaign contributions to
the DVP, DNVP, and Center according to the number of candidates from
industry that each party nominated to secure candidacies in the upcoming
Reichstag elections. According to this arrangement, the DNVP received
200,000 of the 487,000 marks it spent in the 1928 campaign from the account
administered by Springorum.52 Another 50,000 marks came from Hugenberg,
who begrudgingly honored his commitment to the DNVP from the funds that
had been placed at his disposal by Ruhr heavy industry.53 At the same time,
individual candidates for the DNVP received another 184,000 marks from
Ruhr heavy industry, 47,000 marks from a consortium of Berlin banks, and
67,000 marks from the Curatorium for the Reconstruction of German Eco-
nomic Life, as well as several smaller contributions from industrialists who
stood outside the orbit of either the “Ruhrlade” or the Siemens Curatorium.54
Hugenberg, in turn, was so aggravated by his lack of influence over the
nomination of candidates for the Reichstag that he not only refused to provide
another 50,000 marks from his own reserves but a scant two weeks before the
election demanded repayment of the 50,000 marks that he had donated to the
party leadership earlier in the campaign.55
The success with which Westarp and his associates in Ruhr heavy industry
were able to circumvent Hugenberg’s control over the DNVP’s campaign
finances afforded the party leadership a measure of independence in its

50
See Haniel to Reusch, 5 Mar. 1928, RWWA Cologne, Abt. 130, NL Reusch, 40010124/11,
and Silverberg to Reusch, 6 Mar., 1928, ibid., 400101290/35a, as well as Springorum to
Westarp, 29 Feb. 1928, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, II/28.
51
Springorum to Reusch, 3 Apr. 1928, RWWA Cologne, Abt. 130, NL Reusch, 400101290/
36a.
52
“Einzahlungen auf den Wahlfonds 1928,” 25 June 1928, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, II/28.
53
Hugenberg to Westarp, 29 Feb. 1928, ibid., II/28.
54
“Einzahlungen auf den Wahlfonds 1928,” 25 June 1928, ibid., II/28. On the DNVP’s
support from the Siemens Curatorium, see “Unterlagen zur Sitzung des Kuratoriums zum
Wiederaufbau des deutschen Wirtschaftslebens am 2. November 1928,” SHI Berlin, NL
Siemens, 4/Lf 646.
55
Hugenberg to Westarp, 6 May 1928, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, VN 67. In a similar vein,
see Hugenberg to Westarp, 19 May 1928, ibid.
     

conduct of the campaign for the 1928 elections. Still, the fight over control of
industrial campaign contributions to the DNVP was only the opening skirmish
in a conflict that would continue for at least the next two years. In the short
run, however, Hugenberg’s machinations only exacerbated the chronic finan-
cial difficulties the DNVP had experienced since the stabilization of the mark
in 1923–24 and severely limited its ability to counter the appeal of the special-
interest parties with a dynamic and effective counter-offensive of its own. This
did not augur well for its prospects in the May 1928 Reichstag elections.

The Anatomy of Defeat

Throughout the campaign for the 1928 Reichstag elections the leaders of the
DNVP walked a fine line between the Scylla of highlighting their party’s
accomplishments as a member of the governmental coalition and the Char-
ibydis of reclaiming the DNVP’s role as the leader of the so-called national
opposition.56 That was a problematic strategy at best could be seen in the
outcome of the elections. For when all the votes had been tallied, the DNVP
had lost more than 1.8 million votes – or approximately 30 percent of what it
had received four years earlier – and saw its share of the popular vote fall from
20.5 percent in December 1924 to 14.2 percent in May 1928. In terms of its
parliamentary strength, this translated into the loss of 30 of the 103 mandates
the DNVP had won in December 1924. The party’s losses extended to all but
one of Germany’s thirty-five electoral districts – the lone exception was
Cologne-Aachen – and as a general rule were substantially heavier in those
areas in central and western Germany where independent farmers constituted
the most important voting bloc than in urban areas or the predominantly
agricultural areas east of the Elbe where the social and political hegemony of
the local aristocracy was still relatively intact. The DNVP suffered its heaviest
losses in a broad swath of territory stretching from the three Saxon districts of
Dresden-Bautzen (–49.6 percent), Leipzig (–62.8 percent), and Chemnitz-
Zwickau (–51.6 percent) through East and South Hanover (–48.6 percent
and –47.5 percent respectively) and Weser-Ems (–45.0 percent) to Hesse-
Darmstadt (–57.2 percent), Hesse-Nassau (–47.7 percent), and Württemberg
(–44.6 percent). The DNVP fared much better in areas east of the Elbe with
substantially lighter losses in East Prussia (–20.3 percent), Potsdam I and II
(–20.9 percent and –16.5 percent respectively), Frankfurt an der Oder (–24.4
percent), and the three Silesian districts of Breslau (–18.7 percent), Liegnitz
(–16.5 percent), and Oppeln (–18.4 percent). In Berlin the DNVP managed to
keep its losses to 25.2 percent of its December 1924 vote, whereas in East and

56
For example, see Albrecht Philipp, Bilanz und Aufgaben deutschnationaler Arbeit 1928.
Eine politische Übersicht. Schriften der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei in Sachsen
(Arbeitsgemeinschaft), no. 27 (Dresden, 1928), 6 13.
   , –

West Düsseldorf Nationalist losses amounted to 18.1 and 20.2 percent of what
the party had received in 1924.57 Even if the reasons for the DNVP’s defeat
differed significantly from district to district, it all added up to an electoral
disaster that was unprecedented in the annals of German conservatism.
By no means was the DNVP the only party to experience the bitter pill of
defeat in the May 1928 Reichstag elections. In point of fact, all of the more
established, ideologically oriented non-socialist parties like the Center,
German Democratic Party, and German People’s Party incurred heavy losses
in the face of what on the surface appeared to be a massive swing to the left
highlighted by a particularly strong performance by the Social Democrats. The
DDP and DVP lost 21.7 and 12.1 percent respectively of the popular vote they
had tallied in December 1924, whereas the Center lost 9.9 percent of its 1924
vote.58 The principal beneficiaries of this were the Business Party, the
Christian-National Peasants and Farmers’ Party, and the other middle-class
splinter parties that had risen to prominence since the last national elections.
The WP more than doubled the popular vote it had polled in the December
1924 Reichstag elections and increased its representation in the Reichstag from
eleven to twenty-three deputies, whereas the CNBLP and the German Peas-
ants’ Party received a combined total of more than a million votes and elected
seventeen deputies to the Reichstag. The People’s Justice Party, on the other
hand, polled nearly half a million votes in the 1928 Reichstag elections, while
another 830,000 votes were cast for parties that were too small to receive so
much as a single mandate. All told, middle-class splinter parties received
nearly 12 percent of the popular vote, or more than twice what they had
received in December 1924. Combined with a particularly high rate of voter
abstention of over 25 percent, this inflicted unexpectedly heavy losses on all of
Germany’s more established nonsocialist parties.59 A major factor in all of this
was the lethargy of the so-called younger generation. Not only the Nationalists
but Stresemann and the leaders of all other parties with the exception of
the Communists lamented the fact that their parties had failed to excite
the imagination of Germany’s younger voters. For some, this reflected the
estrangement of the younger generation from the increasing materialism of
German political life.60 For the Nationalists, on the other hand, this was was a

57
The raw data for this has been taken from Statistisches Jahrbuch des Deutschen Reiches 46
(1927): 498 99, and 47 (1928): 580 81. See also Dörr, “Deutschnationale Volkspartei,”
387 90. On the party’s losses in Saxony, see Rademacher to Westarp, 21 May 1928, NL
Westarp, Gärtringen, VN 101. On the situation in Hanover, see Jaeger to Westarp,
29 May 1928, ibid., VN 99.
58
Falter, Lindenberger, and Schumann, Wahlen und Abstimmungen, 41, 70 71.
59
Ibid., 40, 70 71.
60
Larry Eugene Jones, “Generational Conflict and the Problem of Political Mobilization in
the Weimar Republic,” in Elections, Mass Politics, and Social Change in Germany: New
Perspectives, ed. Larry Eugene Jones and James Retallack (New York, 1992), 347 69.
     

signal that maybe their party’s crusade for a restoration of the monarchy no
longer resonated as powerfully with those who had risen to political conscious-
ness since the end of World War I as it had with their fathers.61
Westarp and the leaders of the DNVP could find little solace in the losses of
the other bourgeois parties. The sheer magnitude of their own party’s defeat
was totally unexpected and left them in a state of deep shock.62 The DNVP’s
defeat at the polls stemmed from a variety of factors, the common denomiator
of which was its inability to satisfy the expectations of those socio-economic
groups whose support had catapulted it to victory in May and December of
1924. In his post-mortem before the DNVP Reichstag delegation on 12 June
1928 Westarp attributed the Nationalists’ defeat to the increasingly material-
istic attitude of significant sectors of the German electorate – particularly the
farmers and independent middle class – and their lack of interest in the larger
ideological and foreign policy issues around which the DNVP had structured
its campaign. Westarp offered a vigorous defense of the policies the DNVP
had pursued as a member of the national government and argued that the
party’s losses at the polls were part of the cost it had to bear for accepting its
share of governmental responsibility. Had it not been for the relentless agita-
tion of special-interest parties like the CNBLP and WP, he concluded, these
losses would have been held within acceptable limits and would not have
prejudiced the party’s return to power.63 But Westarp’s analysis of his party’s
debacle at the polls was immediately challenged by Hugenberg and his sup-
porters on the DNVP’s right wing. Claiming that Westarp had misrepresented
the reasons for the DNVP’s defeat, Hugenberg argued that the party’s entry
into the government in 1927 had diverted it from its long-range goal of
bringing about a fundamental change in the existing system of government

61
Undated memorandum appended to Hoetzsch to Westarp, 30 May 1928, NL Westarp,
Gärtringen, II/34.
62
This is clearly reflected in the letter from Ada Gräfin von Westarp to Gertraude Freifrau
Hiller von Gaertringen, 21 May 1928, NL Westarp, Gärtringen.
63
Westarp’s remarks at a meeting of the DNVP Reichstag delegation, 12 June 1928, BA
Koblenz, NL Schmidt Hannover, 35. This analysis of the DNVP’s losses at the polls is
confirmed in large part by a memorandum from the Berlin headquarters of the German
National Workers’ League, appended to Lindner to Westarp, 12 June 1928, NL Westarp,
Gärtringen, VN 69. According to his analysis, the party had lost approximately 450,000
votes to the VRP, another 240,000 to middle class interest parties, and 120,000 to the
CNBLP and DBP. For further information, see Lothar Steuer, Die Deutschnationale
Wahlniederlage am 20. Mai 1928. Ihre Ursachen, Zusammenhänge, Folgerungen (Anklam,
1928), as well as Lambach, “Wie ist eine Verjüngung der Parteien zu erzielen?,” Lejeune
Jung, “Gehen die deutschnationalen Verlüste auf Abwanderung oder Enthaltung
zurück?,” and Treviranus, “Was wurde an den Deutschnationalen am meisten kritisiert?,”
all in the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, 27 May 1928, nos. 243 44. For the best analysis of
the DNVP’s defeat at the polls, see Ohnezeit, Zwischen “schärfster Opposition,” 414 24.
   , –

and that henceforth the DNVP should forswear all attempts to reenter the
government in that this would fatally compromise not just the ideals and
fundamental principles upon which the party was based but, more import-
antly, the integrity and effectiveness of its struggle against the hated Weimar
system.64

Hugenberg and the Pan-Germans

The reverberations from the shock of the Nationalist defeat in the 1928
Reichstag elections targeted the one person who was most closely identified
with the party’s move to the center between 1924 and 1928, Count Kuno von
Westarp. The first slap against Westarp’s leadership of the party had come
during the campaign itself and in fact from some of his oldest associates in the
Central Association of German Conservatives. A bastion of reactionary con-
servativism that refused to accept the new republican system that Germany
had adopted after the end of World War I, the Central Association had been a
thorn in the side of the DNVP ever since the party’s founding in November
1918 despite the fact that Westarp himself had served as its chairman until his
election as chairman of the DNVP Reichstag delegation in early 1925. Even
then, Westarp continued to function as the Central Association’s honorary
chairman and principal liaison to the party, often finding himself in the
uncomfortable position of having to defend the DNVP’s more unpopular
policies before some of the party’s most outspoken critics.65 The anger that
hard-line conservatives like Count Dietlof von Arnim-Boitzenburg and Count
Ernst Julius von Seidlitz-Sandrecski felt over the DNVP’s acquisence in the
extension of Law for the Protection of the Republic in the summer of
1927 continued to simmer within the Central Association until the spring of
1928, when on 31 March it refused to endorse the DNVP and encouraged its
members to support those parties and candidates who in their opinion best
represented conservative values and thought. For Westarp this was the final
straw, and on 13 April he resigned from the organization in a letter to Seidlitz-
Sandrecski that gave full vent to the anquish and pain he felt over the break
with his erstwhile comrades-in-arms.66

64
Hugenberg’s remarks, ibid. See also the remarks of Schmidt Hannover and Freytagh
Loringhoven, ibid., as well as [Wegener], “Betrachtungen über die und Folgerungen aus
der Reichstagswahl vom 20.5.1928,” n.d., BA Koblenz, NL Wegener, 42/1 20. In a similar
vein, see Ernst Oberfohren, Auf zur Opposition. Reichstagrede am 5. Juli 1928, Deutsch
nationale Flugschrift, no. 328 (Berlin, 1928).
65
For further details, see Flemming, “Konservatismus als ‘nationalrevolutionäre Bewe
gung’,” 295 331.
66
Exchange between Westarp and Seidlitz Sandrecski, 12 13 Apr. 1928, NL Westarp,
Gärtringen, VN 40. See also Daniela Gasteiger, “From Friends to Foes: Count Kuno
von Westarp and the Transformation of the German Right,” in The German Right in the
     

While the break between the Central Association and DNVP was symp-
tomatic of the problems that bedeviled the DNVP in the wake of its two
experiments at governmental participation, the driving force in the anti-
Westarp campaign in the DNVP came from the Pan-German League. Having
been pushed pretty much to the periphery of German political life since the
founding of the Weimar Republic, Heinrich Claß and the leaders of the ADV
were bitterly opposed to the republican institutions that Germany had
inherited from the November Revolution and sought nothing less than the
repeal of universal suffrage, an end to parliamentarianism and the party
system, and a restoration of the monarchy as the keys to Germany’s national
salvation.67 Following the DNVP’s return to the national government in
January 1927, the Pan-Germans redoubled their efforts to gain control of
the DNVP and transform it into an instrument of Pan-German policy.68
There was, however, a curious anomaly in all of this since the Pan-Germans
decided to launch their campaign to gain control of the DNVP at a time
when its fortunes could not have been lower. The ADV’s membership had
declined steadily from a peak of 38,000 in 1922 to approximately 16,000 by
the end of 1928 as a result of its inability to compete with the more militant
forms of mass mobilization on the extreme Right.69 Confronted by what
appeared to be an irreversible decline in its membership and with limited
resources to rectify this problem, the Pan-Germans decided to concentrate
what remained of their political capital on a last-ditch effort to build up a
strong base of support within the DNVP in hopes of eventually capturing
control of the party. It was a peculiar feature of Weimar political culture that
an organization so obviously in the grip of decline as the Pan-German
League should seek and achieve such a decisive role in the affairs of the
German Right.
The key figure in the Pan-German calculations was press and film magnate
Alfred Hugenberg. Hugenberg’s ties to the ADV dated back to the period
before World War I, when he had played a major role first in the founding of

Weimar Republic: Studies in the History of German Conservatism, Nationalism, and

Antisemitism, ed. Larry Eugene Jones, (New York and Oxford, 2014), 48 78, esp. 59 71.
67
Heinrich Claß, “Alldeutsche Ziele für Deutschlands Rettung,” Deutschlands Erneuerung
12, no. 10 (Oct. 1928): 575 80.
68
Remarks by Claß before the ADV managing committee, 12 13 Feb. 1927, BA Berlin,
R 8048, 146/55.
69
Jackisch, Pan German League, 88. See also the detailed discussion of the ADV’s member
ship trends in the minutes of the ADV managing committee, 1 2 Dec. 1928, BA Berlin,
R 8048l, 156/55 56. For further details, see Björn Hofmeister, “Realms of Leadership and
Residues of Social Mobilization: The Pan German League, 1918 33,” in The German
Right in the Weimar Republic. Studies in History of German Conservatism, Nationalism,
and Antisemitism, ed. Larry Eugene Jones (New York and Oxford, 2014), 134 65, esp.
142 47.
   , –

its predecessor, the General German League, in 1891 and then in its recon-
stitutation as the Pan-German League three years later. Unlike Westarp, who
possessed a noble pedigree and identified himself with the world-view and
values of the East Prussian land-owning aristocracy, Hugenberg came from
an unabashedly bourgeois background and belonged to that cadre of erst-
while liberals who in the 1890s embraced radical nationalism as an antedote
to the ossification and sterility of Wilhelmine politics.70 Hugenberg used his
unquestioned managerial skills to build up a massive press empire that was
without parallel in Germany and that included such high-circulation news-
papers as the Berliner Lokal-Anzeiger and Der Tag as well as a large portion
of Germany’s provincial press.71 Hugenberg had also developed substantial
interests in the German coal industry, took part in the founding of the
National Federation of German Industry, and was soon to be elected to
high-ranking executive positions in Germany’s two largest interests organiza-
tions for mining, the Association for Mining Interests (Verein für bergbau-
liche Interessen) and the organization of Ruhr employers known as the
Zechenverband.72 By the end of the war and well into the first years of the
Weimar Republic Hugenberg was recognized as one of Germany’s most
influential industrial leaders. But for many he epitomized all that was wrong
with German capitalism.
After the collapse of 1918 Hugenberg cast his lot with the DNVP, where he
joined Oskar Hergt, Karl Helfferich, and Otto Hoetzsch in the so-called 4-H
consortium that effectively ran party affairs from 1919 to 1924. Although he
stood on the party’s right wing, he rejected the Kapp putsch in the spring of
1920 and supported the expulsion of the racists from the DNVP in the fall of
1922. At the same time, Hugenberg supported a wide array of right-wing
organizations, including young conservative projects like the June Club,
Martin Spahn’s Political College, and the Evangelical-Social Academy of
Friedrich Brunstäd. Hugenberg’s largesse even extended to elements on the
right wing of the Christian labor movement around Franz Behrens and the
Central Association of Farm Laborers. In all of this Hugenberg was driven by
the determination to unite all of those who shared his love for Germany and
longed for its political rebirth into a broadly based and cohesive political
movement that would sweep those responsible for Germany’s misery from

70
On Hugeberg’s early career, see John A. Leopold, Alfred Hugenberg: The Radical Nation
alist Campign against the Weimar Republic (New Haven and London, 1977), 1 20.
71
For further details, see Dankwart Guratsch, Macht durch Organisation. Die Grundlegung
des Hugenbergschen Presseimperiums (Düsseldorf, 1974), 344 93. See also Holzbach, Das
“System Hugenberg.” 259 89.
72
Stefan Przigoda, Unternehmerverbände im Ruhrbergbau. Zur Geschichte von Bergbau
Verein und Zechenverband 1858 1933 (Bochum, 2002), 163 66, 234 55.
     

Figure 11. Photograph of Alfred Hugenberg, DNVP Reichstag deputy from 1920 to
1933 and DNVP national party chairman from 1928 to 1933. Reproduced with
permission from the Bundesarchiv, Bild 183 2005 0621 500

power.73 But this would all change with the fateful split in the DNVP Reich-
stag delegation on the vote on the Dawes Plan. Hugenberg was bitterly
opposed to the Dawes Plan and had done his best to prevent its ratification
with an impassioned plea from his sickbed at home.74 Furious with those in
the delegation who had placed their own special interests ahead of the national
welfare, Hugenberg began to withdraw support from those whom he held
responsible for the betrayal of Germany’s national trust. Still, he was reluctant
to be drawn into the Pan-German intrigues against Westarp and steadfastly
resisted efforts to draw him into the feud that was consuming his party. It was
probably not until a series of high-level discussions in the summer of 1927 that
Claß was finally able to overcome Hugenberg’s reticence and persuade him to
accept the charge the Pan-Germans had given him.75 With the letter that
Hugenberg wrote to Westarp on the eve of the DNVP’s Königsberg party
congress and in which he demanded that “the unparliamentary party through-
out the country as a whole serve as the conscience of those delegations that sit

73
Hozlbach, Das “System Hugenberg,” 136 66.
74
Hugenberg to Hergt, 26 Aug. 1924, in Alfred Hugenberg, Streiflichter aus Vergangenheit
und Gegenwart (Berlin, 1927), 96 97.
75
Claß, “Wider den Strom,” BA Berlin, NL Claß, 3/880. See also Leicht, Claß, 362 63.
   , –

in parliament today,” Hugenberg threw down the gauntlet and began his fight
for control of the party.76

Westarp’s Retreat
The conflict that had been building within the party for the better part of a
year and a half would come to a dramatic head at a meeting of the DNVP
Reichstag delegation on 12 June 1928. Having worked diligently to organize
support for Hugenberg at the local and district levels of the DNVP’s national
organization and to secure the election of candidates who would reinforce his
position in the DNVP Reichstag delegation, the Pan-Germans were confident
that the moment to reverse the direction in which the party was headed had
arrived.77 The prospect of a Hugenberg bid for control of the party sent chills
through the ranks of the DNVP’s white-collar and working-class supporters.
This animus stemmed in large part from the fact that Hugenberg’s entourage
included men like Paul Bang, a long-time Pan-German activist who was
renown for his involvement in the yellow trade-union movement as chairman
of the League for National Economics and Industrial Peace and as a propo-
gandist for a new concept in labor relations called the “work community” or
Werkgemeinschaft. Modelled after the carto del lavoro that Mussolini had
instituted in Fascist Italy, Bang’s concept of the “work community” sought
to reestablish a paternalistic relationship between employer and employee
through the creation of factory unions under the direct control of the factory
owner himself.78 To Christian labor leaders both within and outside the
DNVP, the notion of the “work community” was little more than a fraud

76
Hugenberg to Westarp, 17 Sept. 1927, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, II/25, also in BA
Koblenz, NL Hugenberg, 113/78 83, reprinted in Leo Wegener, Hugenberg. Eine Plau
derei (Solln Munich, 1930), 53 54. For further details, see John A. Leopold, “The Election
of Alfred Hugenberg as Chairman of the German National People’s Party,” Canadian
Journal of History 7 (1972): 149 71, and Larry Eugene Jones, “German Conservatism at
the Crossroads: Count Kuno von Westarp and the Struggle for Control of the DNVP,
1928 30.” Contemporary European History 18 (2009): 147 77, as well as Dörr, “Deutsch
nationale Volkspartei 1925 bis 1928,” 410 65; Holzbach, Das “System Hugenberg.”
192 253; Ohnezeit, Zwischen “schärfster Opposition,” 386 94, 425 48, and Mergel,
“Das Scheitern des deutschen Tory Konservatismus, Die Umformung der DNVP zu
einer rechtsradikalen Partei 1928 1932.” Historische Zeitschrift 276 (2003): 341 45.
77
On the Pan German strategy in the 1928 elections, see the resolution that Claß intro
duced at the meeting of the ADV managing committee, 26 27 Nov. 1927, BA Berlin,
R 8048, 152/23 24, as well as Claß’s remarks before the ADV managing committee in
Eisenach, 21 Apr. 1928, BA Berlin, R 8048, 154/70 71, and his reflections in Claß, “Wider
den Strom,” BA Berlin, NL Claß, 3/881 83. See also Jackisch, Pan German League,
151 53, and Hofmeister, “Between Monarchy and Dictatorship,” 269 98.
78
Bang, “Werkgemeinschaft,” Nationalwirtschaft. Blätter für organischen Wirtschaftsaufbau
1 (1927): 149 73.
     

perpertrated upon Germany’s working and white-collar classes by social reac-

tionaries intent upon destroying their ability to negotiate for themselves when
it came to wages and work conditions.79
In September 1926 the DNVP party leadership had negotiated a truce
between the two factions at the DNVP’s Cologne party congress. But this
truce broke down in the spring of 1928 amid complaints from the German
National Workers’ League (DNAB), the organizational home of the Christian
labor movement in the DNVP, about the aggressiveness of the “yellow” unions
in the selection of candidates for the upcoming Reichstag elections.80 The
belligerence of the “yellow” unions was a matter of particular concern to the
leaders of the German National Union of Commercial Employees, the largest
of Germany’s white-collar unions with more than 375,000 members and the
architect of an elaborate network of Querverbindungen that it had built up
since the early 1920s and that extended to all of the established bourgeois
parties with the exception of the DDP.81 The DHV’s chief liaison to the DNVP
was Walther Lambach, a Reichstag deputy since 1920 who also served as
chairman of the DNVP’s National White-Collar Committee. As a self-
proclaimed young conservative, Lambach was particularly distressed by the
fact that in the 1928 Reichstag elections the established bourgeois parties,
including the DNVP, appeared to have lost the confidence of the younger
generation, something that in his mind only confirmed the need for a sweep-
ing reform and rejuvenation of the German party system.82
Lambach would return to this theme in an article he wrote for the Politische
Wochenschrift in which he had the temerity to challenge the DNVP’s commit-
ment to the principle of monarchism. The central thrust of Lambach’s argu-
ment was that monarchism as a political issue had lost all appeal for the
German voter and especially for the German youth. For those who had
reached political maturity after 1918, the monarchy was little more than a
symbol they had come to know only through stage and screen. The election of
Hindenburg to the Reich Presidency in 1925, argued Lambach, had given the

79
For example, see Max Habermann, “Zur Werkgemeinschaftsfrage,” Deutsche Handels
Wacht 34, no. 23 (7 Dec. 1927): 539 42.
80
Memorandum from the DNAB to the DNVP party leadership, 12 Mar. 1928, appended
to Lindner to Westarp, 13 Mar. 1928, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, VN 71. On the animus
between the two trade union factions, see Richter to Behrens, 25 Feb. 1924, appended to
Richter to Westarp, 26 Feb. 1924, ibid., VN 48, and Schmidt to Hergt, Helfferich, Wallraf,
and Westarp, 4 Apr. 1928, ibid., VN 44. See also Stupperich, Volksgemeinschaft oder
Arbeitersolidarität, 131 34.
81
For further details, see Larry Eugene Jones, “Between the Fronts: The German National
Union of Commerical Employees from 1928 to 1933,” Journal of Modern History 48
(1976): 462 82, and Iris Hamel, Völkischer Verband, 167 238.
82
Lambach, “Wie ist eine Verjüngung der Parteien zu erzielen?” Deutsche Allgemeine
Zeitung, 27 May 1928, nos. 243 44.
   , –

German people a substitute Kaiser, who as a living symbol of Germany’s past

greatness completely overshadowed all memory of the royal family. The
DNVP’s recent defeat at the polls only confirmed the demise of the monarchist
cause. If the party were ever to regain the support of the younger generation,
then it must realize that the restoration of the monarchy is little more than a
dream which can never be realized in the foreseeable future. The DNVP,
concluded Lambach, had no choice but to adapt to the new situation by
opening its ranks to monarchists and conservative republicans alike.
In the future we of the German National People’s Party . . . must direct
our appeal to the entire German electorate. Monarchists and republicans,
join our ranks! And at the same time that we revise our attitude concern
ing the form of government, we must also change our program and our
party leadership. The DNVP must approach the future not as a one sided
party of the past, but as a new conservative party that represents the entire
nation.83

Published without the foreknowledge of the DHV’s chief political strategist

Max Habermann,84 Lambach’s article struck a sensitive nerve with the cham-
pions of the monarchist cause and brought the conflict that had been building
within the DNVP for the past several years to a dramatic head. The anti-
Westarp forces on the DNVP’s right wing seized upon Lambach’s indiscretion
to intensify their attacks against Westarp’s leadership of the party in the hope
of blocking his reelection as chairman of the DNVP Reichstag delegation.
Speaking before the DNVP organization in his home district of North West-
phalia on 16 June, Hugenberg complained bitterly about Westarp’s leadership
of the party and warned that if he were reinstalled as its parliamentary leader,
the party could no longer count on his financial support.85 Meeting privately
with Westarp on 23 June, Hugenberg demanded Lambach’s expulsion as a
precondition for an end to the turmoil in the party.86 As a dedicated mon-
archist, Westarp was deeply offended by the thrust of Lambach’s argument
and publicly reaffirmed the DNVP’s unequivocal commitment to the

83
Lambach, “Monarchismus,” Politische Wochenschrift 4, no. 24 (14 June 1928): 485 87.
See also Lambach, “Die Stellung des Verbandes im öffentlichen Leben,” Deutsche Han
dels Wacht 35, no. 12 (25 June 1928): 230 31.
84
Habermann, “Der Deutschnationale Handlungsgehilfen Verband im Kampf um das
Reich,” DHV Archiv Hamburg, 68.
85
Ada Gräfin von Westarp to Gertraude Freifrau Hiller von Gaertringen, 17 June 1928, NL
Westarp, Gärtringen. See also Westarps’s undated memorandum to the DNVP’s district
chairmen, appended to Westarp to Tirpitz, 25 June 1928, BA MA Freiburg, NL Tirpitz,
60/1 3.
86
Ada Gräfin von Westarp to Gertraude Freifrau Hiller von Gaertringen, 24 June 1928, NL
Westarp, Gärtringen.
     

restoration of the monarchy.87 At the same time, however, Westarp was

reluctant to take disciplinary action against the dissident trade-union secretary
for fear of precipitating a general secession on the DNVP’s left wing and
counseled prudence on the part of those who were trying to drive Lambach
from the party.88 Westarp’s restraint only played into the hands of his
opponents on the DNVP’s right wing, who cited his refusal to take action
against Lambach as only one more example of the weak and indecisive
leadership responsible for the DNVP’s precipitous decline between 1924 and
1928.89
Efforts by Hugenberg and his supporters to block Westarp’s reelection as
chairman of the DNVP Reichstag delegation and thus put an end to the
personal union of delegation chairman and party chairman suffered an
embarrassing setback when all but nine members of the delegation – among
them Hugenberg, Bang, Quaatz, and Freytagh-Loringhoven – voted on 2 July
to reinstall Westarp as chairman of the delegation.90 At the same time,
Lambach moved to appease his more moderate critics within the delegation
by reading a statement in which he reaffirmed his personal loyalty to the
monarchist principle and was let off with a mere reprimand for his article in
the Politische Wochenschrift.91 This only infuriated the forces around Hugen-
berg, who intensified their efforts in preparation for a meeting of the DNVP
party representation that was scheduled to take place in Berlin on 8–9 July. As
a result of the vigorous campaign the Pan-Germans had waged on his behalf at
the local levels of the DNVP organization, Hugenberg could now count on the
support of at least ten of the party’s thirty-five state and provincial organiza-
tions with another five leaning in his direction.92 Westarp’s tepid response to
Lambach’s indiscretion had had the effect of tipping several district organiza-
tions that had initially supported Westarp in Hugenberg’s direction. A case in
point was the DNVP district organization in Potsdam II, whose chairman
Werner Steinhoff had originally supported Westarp’s reelection to both the

87
Westarp, “Der monarchische Gedanke und die Deutschnationale Volkspartei,” Neue
Preußische (Kreuz )Zeitung, 26 June 1928, no. 196. See also Westarp’s correspondence
with G. W. Schiele, 26 30 June 1928, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, VN 100.
88
Ada Gräfin von Westarp to Gertraude Freifrau Hiller von Gaertringen, 17 June 1928, NL
Westarp, Gärtringen.
89
For further details, see Blank to Springorum, 22 June 1928, RWWA Cologne, Abt. 130,
NL Reusch, 400101293/8b.
90
Ada Gräfin von Westarp to Gertraude Freifrau Hiller von Gaertringen, 2 July 1928, NL
Westarp, Gärtringen. For Westarp’s credo, see Kuno von Westarp, Um die christlichen,
sozialen und nationalen Güter der Nation. Oppositionsrede im Reichstag am 4. Juli 1928,
Deutschnationale Flugschrift, no. 327 (Berlin, 1928).
91
Neue Preußische (Kreuz )Zeitung, 3 July 1928, no. 309.
92
Wegener to Rojahn Wabnitz, 25 July 1928, BA Koblenz, NL Wegener, 11.
   , –

chairmanship of the DNVP Reichstag delegation and the DNVP party chair-
manship,93 but which now not only aligned itself with Hugenberg in his efforts
to unseat Westarp but initiated expulsion proceedings against Lambach on
10 July for having damaged the image of the party.94
By this time, the principal objective of the forces behind Hugenberg was no
longer just to force Lambach’s expulsion from the party, but to use the
Lambach affair to prevent Westarp’s reelection as DNVP national chairman.95
A spokesman for the fifteen district organizations that supported Hugenberg
opened the meeting by reading a statement demanding Lambach’s immediate
expulsion from the party with vague threats of a general secession on the
DNVP’s right wing if Westarp and the party leadership failed to take decisive
action in the Lambach affair. When Hugenberg refused to retract this state-
ment, Westarp announced that he no longer possessed the support necessary
to lead the party and announced his resignation as its chairman. After Westarp
left the room in obvious disgust with the tactics of the Hugenberg faction, Max
Wallraf assumed the chairmanship and succeeded in restoring a modicum of
unity as Hugenberg and his supporters relented in their attacks against
Westarp. The assembly then proceeded to adopt a unanimous resolution
beseeching Westarp to resume his functions as DNVP party chairman. On
the following day, however, the newly found sense of unity fell apart when the
fifteen district organizations aligned with Hugenberg and under the leadership
of retired general Wilhelm von Dommes presented Westarp with a new
resolution on the Lambach affair that was promptly rejected because it devi-
ated from established procedures for dealing with matters of party discipline.
When Hugenberg and Dommes refused to withdraw their resolution or
amend it in a manner acceptable to the DNVP party leadership, Westarp
tendered his resignation once again, this time making his decision irrevocable.
Westarp, however, would remain at the post until a new party chairman could
be elected later that fall.96

93
Blank to Springorum, 22 June 1928, RWWA Cologne, Abt. 130, NL Reusch, 400101293/
8b.
94
“Beschluß des Landesverbandes Potsdam II der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei, nach §19
der Parteisatzung vom Amts wegen ein Ausschlußverfahren gegen das im Bezirk des
Landesverbandes wohnhafte Parteimitglied, Herrn Walther Lambach, MdR, mit
Bezugnahme auf §17 der Parteisatzung zu eröffnen,” signed by Steinhoff, 10 July 1928,
BA Koblenz, Nachlass Walther Lambach, 10/72 74.
95
Reusch to Springorum, 5 July 1928, RWWA Cologne, Abt. 130, NL Reusch, 400101293/9.
See also Reichert to Reusch, 17 July 1928, BA Koblenz, NL Lambach, 24.
96
Westarp’s memorandum on the developments on 8 9 July 1928 to the chairmen of the
DNVP state and provincial organizations, 12 July 1928, NL Westarp, II/30. See also
Reichert to Wesenfeld, 9 July 1928, BA Koblenz, NL Lambach, 24, as well as the account
in Hilpert, “Meinungen und Kämpfe,” BHStA Munich, Abt. V, NL Hilpert, 18/3666 78.
For the perspective of the Hugenberg faction, see the entries in Quaatz’s diary, 8 9
July 1928, BA Koblenz, NL Quaatz, 16. The Quaatz diary has been published as Die
     

The Battle Lines Form

The meeting of the DNVP party representation in July 1928 represented a
decisive triumph for Hugenberg and those who sought to return their party to
a policy of uncompromising opposition to the Weimar Republic. A final
resolution of the crisis, however, was still not in sight. Hugenberg’s ultimate
objective, perhaps best summed up by his slogan “Block, nicht Brei,” was to
transform the DNVP from a socially heterogeneous reservoir of Christian,
conservative, and national sentiment into a strong, compact bloc “fused
together by the iron hammer of Weltanschauung.”97 This aim ran sharply
counter to Westarp’s conception of the DNVP as a conservative Sammelpartei
that stood above the clash of antagonistic social and economic interests and
that sought sought to fuse these interests into a stable and harmonious
whole.98 The key to Hugenberg’s campaign to transform the DNVP from a
socially heterogeneous conservative Sammelpartei into a strong and united
bloc lay in the support he received at the local and district levels of the DNVP’s
national organization. Relying in large part upon the resources of his Pan-
German allies, Hugenberg’s confederates had been hard at work organizing
grass-roots support for his political agenda ever since the DNVP reentered the
national government in January 1927. Invariably this had been accompanied
by bitter fights at the local and district levels of the DNVP’s national organiza-
tion between those who supported and those who opposed Hugenberg’s
program for a reform of the party. In March 1927, for example, the leaders
of the party’s right wing in Württemberg were able to unseat long-time state
party chairman Gustav Beißwänger in what was a rebuff to the role the DNVP
had played in the stabilization of Weimar parliamentarism both in the Reich
under Westarp and in Württemberg under Wilhelm Bazille, the Nationalist
minister president of Württemberg since 1924.99 In East Saxony pro-Hugen-
berg forces were able to force the Bang’s candidacy down the throats of the
local party leaders in the spring of 1928, with the result that the district party
chairman and Westarp supporter Kurt Philipp resigned in protest.100 And in
Pomerania Hugenberg’s forces waged a full-scale offensive against Reichstag
deputy Hans Schlange-Schöningen and his right-hand man Karl Passarge in

Deutschnationalen und die Zerstörung der Weimarer Republik. Aus dem Tagebuch
von Reinhold Quaatz 1928 1933, ed. Hermann Weiß and Paul Hoser (Stuttgart,
1989), but for reasons of economy only the unpublished diary in the Bundesarchiv
has been cited.
97
Hugenberg, “Block oder Brei?” Berliner Lokal Anzeiger, 26 and 28 Aug. 1928, nos. 404
and 406.
98
Kuno von Westarp, Die Aufgaben der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei, Deutschnationale
Flugschrift, no. 330 (Berlin, 1928), 4 11.
99
On the coup in Württemberg, see Müller, “Bürgerpartei,” 405 17.
100
Philipp to Westarp, 20 Mar. 1928, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, VN 67.
   , –

what was ultimately an unsuccessful attempt to drive Schlange-Schöningen

from the chairmanship of the DNVP’s district organization.101 All of this was
part of a pattern that had repeated itself in one district after another before the
fateful meeting of the DNVP representation on 8–9 July 1928.
When the DNVP party representation concluded its deliberations in July,
Hugenberg could count on the support of fifteen of the DNVP’s thirty-five
district organizations.102 Of the remaining district organizations, ten were in
the hands of party moderates who supported Westarp and ten remained
uncommitted.103 In the time before the DNVP party representation recon-
vened later that fall to elect a new party chairman, Hugenberg’s supporters
hoped that they would be able to win over two, if not more, of the undecided
district organizations, thereby giving Hugenberg a virtual mandate when it
came to shaping the DNVP’s future political course.104 But while Hugenberg
hoped to rally sufficient support at the local levels of the DNVP party
organization to reverse the direction in which the party was headed, it was
unclear just how Hugenberg was going to exercise his control of the party in
light of his own ambivalence about serving as party chairman. To address this
quandry, Reinhold Quaatz, a strong Hugenberg ally from the outset, proposed
in late July 1928 that leadership of the party be entrusted to a three-man
presidium consisting of Hugenberg, Westarp, and Friedrich von Winterfeld,
chairman of the DNVP delegation to the Prussian Landtag. Not only would
this effectively subordinate Westarp to Hugenberg and the policies of the
DNVP’s right wing, but the presence of Westarp in the proposed triumvirate
would minimize the dangers of a secession on the party’s left wing. For
Hugenberg Quaatz’s proposal had the added advantage of allowing him to
dictate party affairs without having to leave the relative obscurity in which he
was accustomed to operating.105
The support he enjoyed at the grass-roots level of the DNVP’s national
organization notwithstanding, Hugenberg still encountered formidable resist-
ance from the representatives of the three most important special-interest
groups in the DNVP party organization: agriculture, industry, and
Christian-social labor. The leaders of the National Rural League, the vast
majority of whom still regarded themselves as loyal adherents of the DNVP,
were fearful that Hugenberg’s uncompromising opposition to any sort of
accommodation with Germany’s republican system of government would

101
Report on the annual meeting of the DNVP Pomeranian district organization in Stettin,
23 June 1928, BA Koblenz, NL Schlange Schöningen, 19/10 25.
102
For the districts aligned with Hugenberg, see Hilpert, “Meinungen und Kämpfe,” BHStA
Munich, Abt. V, NL Hilpert, 18/3667.
103
Reichert to Reusch, 17 July 1928, BA Koblenz, NL Lambach, 10a.
104
Wegener to Rojahn Wabnitz, 25 July 1928, BA Koblenz, NL Wegener, 11.
105
Entries in Quaatz’s diary, 27 July and 7 Aug. 1928, BA Koblenz, NL Quaatz, 16.
     

make it difficult for them to advance their legislative agenda in the Reichstag.
No issue in this regard was more pressing than the upcoming negotiations on
the German-Polish trade treaty.106 At the same time, the RLB’s ties to the
DNVP were also strained by virtue of the fact that there was no longer one, but
two conservative parties with a strong commitment to the welfare of the
German farmer, the DNVP and CNBLP.107 In cognizance of this fact, the
RLB approved a sweeping reorganization of its leadership structure 1 August
1928, the central feature of which was the creation of a three-person presidium
in which each of the three major sectors of the German agricultural commu-
nity – estate agriculture from east of the Elbe, the middle-sized peasanty of
central Germany, and small peasant proprietors from the northern and west-
ern parts of the country – would be represented by its own president. Accord-
ingly, Schiele was chosen to serve in the presidium as the representative of
estate agriculture, Hepp for the small and middle-sized peasants in the west,
and Albrecht Bethge from Mark Brandenburg for the small, independent
peasantry.108 The genial and accommodating Schiele, who had served as
minister of agriculture in the fourth Marx cabinet, would soon emerge as
one of Hugenberg’s sharpest critics within the DNVP.
By the same token, the leadership struggle within the DNVP was also
having a profound impact on the party’s relationship to German industry.
For the most part, Germany’s industrial magnates did not look with favor
upon Hugenberg’s bid for control of the DNVP. Among the twelve coal and
steel industrialists who comprised the “Ruhrlade,” only Fritz Thyssen sympa-
thized with Hugenberg’s political agenda, while the Gutehoffnungshütte’s Paul
Reusch and Fritz Springorum from Hoesch Steel Works in Dortmund sup-
ported Westarp in his efforts to retain control of the party. Meeting with
Westarp on 5 July 1928, Reusch indicated that the Ruhr steel industry was
willing to help the DNVP cover the deficit in its operating budget with a
substantial contribution in the second half of the year but stipulated that this

106
For example, see the letter from the members of the RLB presidium to Reich Chancellor
Müller, 9 Nov. 1928, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, VN 99. See also Andreas Müller, “Fällt
der Bauer, stürzt der Staat.” Deutschnationale Agrarpolitik 1928 1933 (Hamburg, 2003),
113 22.
107
Kriegsheim, “Schlußfolgerungen des Reichs Landbundes auf Grund der Wahlergebnisse
vom 20. Mai 1928,” 28 June 1928, BA Koblenz, NL Weilnböck, 17. See also the
memorandum from Kriegsheim to the members of the RLB executive committee, 6 June
1928, ibid., 15.
108
Nicolas, “Die Neuorganisation der Führungsorgane des Reichs Landbundes,” 16
Aug. 1928, BA Koblenz, NL Weilnböck, 15. See also the minutes of the meeting of the
RLB regional chairmen, 31 July 1928, BA Berlin, R 8034 I, 50/105a 105d, as well as the
report in Reichs Landbund 8, no. 31 (4 Aug. 1928): 351 52. For further information, see
Wilmowsky to Krupp, 2 Aug. 1928, HA Krupp Essen, FAH 23/502, and Reusch, 2
Aug. 1928, RWWA Cologne, Abt. 130, NL Reusch, 400101290/39.
   , –

commitment was to him personally and would not be honored if there was a
change in the party leadership.109 When Westarp formally resigned from the
DNVP party chairmanship four days later, Reusch exploded with a bitter
invective against the architect of Westarp’s demise, Hugenberg. “I have,”
Reusch wrote to Springorum, “been following the activity of this man for
more than twenty years, activity which has been neither fruitful nor useful for
either his party or industry. On the contrary, it is now and has always been my
conviction that Hugenberg’s activities have inflicted enormous damage upon
industry in the west.”110 Yet for all of his fury, Reusch had little leverage within
the DNVP and was unable to use the resources at his disposal to influence the
outcome of the leadership crisis.
No one in the DNVP felt more threatened by the prospect of Hugenberg’s
elevation to the party chairmanship than the party’s Christian-Social faction.
The Christian-Socials were deeply suspicious of Hugenberg’s ties to Bang and
the leaders of the “yellow” trade union movement and feared that his ascend-
ancy to the party leadership would legitimate the struggle to undo all that
organized labor had managed to accomplish since the fall of the Second
Empire.111 Moreover, the fact that one of their own – the DHV’s Walther
Lambach – had become a special target of the party’s extreme right wing and
was threatened with expulsion from the party for having questioned the
DNVP’s embrace of monarchism only exacerbated the uneasiness that the
Christian-Socials felt about their prospects in a party under Hugenberg’s
control.112 Lastly, the leaders of the DNVP’s Christian-Social faction had
already taken what many saw as the first step toward the creation of a new
political party when they met on 14 June 1928 under the leadership of
theologian Karl Veidt to found the Christian-Social Union (Christlich-soziale
Vereinigung) as the crystallization point around which all of those within the
DNVP who shared a commitment to the social gospel of Lutheran pastor
Adolf Stoecker could unite.113 On 18–19 August the Christian-Socials met in
Bielefeld to finalize arrangements for the founding of the new organization,
now known as the Christian-Social Reich Union (Christlich-soziale Reichs-
vereinigung or CSRV), and appointed a three-man committee consisting of
DNVP Reichstag deputies Reinhard Mumm and Gustav Hülser along with

109
Reusch to Springorum, 5 July 1928, RWWA Cologne, Abt. 130, NL Reusch, 400101293/
9.
110
Reusch to Springorum, 11 July 1928, RWWA Cologne, Abt. 130, NL Reusch, 400101290/
36a.
111
On Bang’s hostility toward Lambach and his supporters, see his letter to Lambach,
16 June 1928, BA Koblenz, NL Lambach, 10/69 70.
112
See Hartwig to Jacobi, 7 Aug. 1928; Rippel to Treviranus, 9 Aug. 1928; and Treviranus to
Westarp, 8 Aug. 1928, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, VN 91.
113
Circular from Veidt and Drebes, June 1928, BA Berlin, NL Mumm, 282/114.
     

Count Leopold von Baudissin from the Bodelschwingh Institute in Bethel

to share its leadership responsibilities.114 All of this raised the spectre of a
Christian-Social secession from the DNVP should Hugenberg and the social
reactionaries supporting his candidacy succeed in taking over control of the
party.

Hugenberg’s Road to Victory

In the meantime, the Lambach affair worked its way through the various levels
of the DNVP party organization. On 24 July 1928 – two weeks after the DNVP
district organization in Potsdam II had initiated expulsion proceedings against
Lambach for having supposedly damaged the image of the party with his
attack on monarchism – Lambach was officially expelled from both the party
and the Reichstag delegation and given four weeks in which to appeal this
decision.115 The matter was now referred to a special party court that could
either annul the decision or let it stand. The reaction to this development was
predictable. Baron Axel von Freytagh-Loringhoven, chairman of the DNVP’s
National Racist Committee and a close Hugenberg ally, applauded Lambach’s
expulsion as an important step toward the creation of a German Right that
made up in unity for what it might have lacked in size,116 while the DHV’s
Max Habermann warned that the triumph of Hugenberg’s monolithic con-
ception of the party could only lead to a rapid deterioration of his own
organization’s relations with the DNVP and the collapse of the Querverbin-
dungen that the DHV and its allies in the Christian labor movement had built
up since the end of the war.117 The gravity of the crisis became apparent as
most of the DNVP’s white-collar organizations throughout the country came
out in support of Lambach’s reinstatement and in some cases even evoked the
specter of a general secession on the DNVP’s left wing should his explusion be
upheld.118 No doubt pressure of this sort played a role when on 29 August the

114
On developments in Bielefeld, see the report on the meeting of the Christian Social
leadership, 18 Aug. 1928, and the national conference of the Christian Socials, 19
Aug. 1928, BA Berlin, NL Mumm, 282/167 71, 185 92, as well as the official report of
the Bielefeld congress in Angestelltenstimme und Arbeiterstimme, ed. Deutschnationaler
Angestelleten und Arbeiter Bünde 8, no. 9 (Sept. 1928): 2 4. On the aims of the
Christian Socials, see Hülser, “Die Arbeiterschaft und die neue Rechte,” Der Tag, 7
Aug. 1928, no. 188.
115
Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, 26 July 1928, nos. 345 46.
116
Freytagh Loringhoven, “Nicht große, sondern starke Rechte,” Der Tag, 25 July 1928,
no. 177.
117
Habermann, “Querverbindungen. Eine politische Betrachtung zum ‘Fall Lambach’,”
Deutsche Handels Wacht 35, no. 14 (25 July 1928): 281 82.
118
Einige Stimmen aus der durch den Aufsatz Monarchismus von Walther Lambach, M.d.R.,
im Gang gebrachten Aussprache (Hamburg, 1928), 38 48.
   , –

party court to which Lambach had appealed his expulsion announced that it
had reversed the decision of the DNVP district organization in Potsdam II and
had reinstated the deputy to full membership in the party and Reichstag
delegation with little more than a reprimand for impropriety.119
Westarp had hoped that Lambach’s reinstatement would give the DNVP an
opportunity to restore discipline in the party, clarify its basic values with a
reaffirmation of its commitment to monarchism, and announce an aggressive
social policy that would solidy its position within the Christian-national
working class.120 But the immediate effect of Lambach’s reinstatement was
to energize the oppositionist elements on the DNVP’s right wing in their
assault against Westarp’s leadership of the party. On 5 September representa-
tives from the fifteen DNVP state and provincial organizations that had
supported Hugenberg earlier that summer met in Berlin under Dommes’s
chairmanship to pass a resolution condemning Lambach’s reinstatement as a
betrayal of the principles for which the DNVP had always stood. At the same
time, they petitioned Westarp to convene another meeting of the DNVP party
representation so that the leadership crisis that currently paralyzed the party
could be resolved for once and for all.121 In the meantime, Hugenberg’s
confederates stepped up their efforts at the local level of the DNVP organiza-
tion so that by the end of the summer the number of state and provincial
organizations firmly committed to Hugenberg had risen to seventeen with
another four leaning heavily in his direction.122 At a minimum, Hugenberg’s
supporters hoped to implement a plan drafted by Steinhoff and Quaatz for a
full-scale reorganization of the party’s leadership structure that would under-
cut the influence that Westarp had amassed through the personal union of the
party chairmanship with that of the Reichstag delegation. Not only would this
presumably result in significant budgetary savings, but more importantly it
would have the effect of weakening the DNVP’s character as a parliamentary
party and make its parliamentary delegations more responsive to the demands
of its state and provincial organizations.123
As Hugenberg and his supporters forged ahead with their sundry schemes
to gain control of the DNVP, they too became increasingly concerned about

119
Decision of the DNVP party court, 29 Aug. 1928, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, VN 91.
120
Kuno von Westarp, Aufgaben der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei, Deutschnationale
Flugschrift, no. 330 (Berlin, 1928), 6 12.
121
Kreisverein Potsdam der DNVP, “Bericht über die heutige Besprechung in Berlin,
Dessauerstraße 14,” 5 Sept. 1928, records of the DNVP county organization in Aurich,
Niedersächsisches Staatsarchiv Aurich, Depositum 51, 1/523 26. See also Hilpert, “Mei
nungen und Kämpfe,” BHStA Munich, Abt. V, NL Hilpert, 18/3694 95.
122
Wegener to Rojahn Wabnitz, 25 July 1928, and Hassel, 31 July 1928, both in BA
Koblenz, NL Wegener, 11.
123
Steinhoff and Quaatz, “Denkschrift zur Reform der Parteiorganisation,” 1 Oct. 1928, BA
Koblenz, NL Wegener, 31, also in NL Westarp, Gärtringen, II/30.
     

the possibility of a secession that might extend far beyond the Christian trade-
union elements on the party’s left wing. In marked contrast to the situation on
the party’s right wing, Hugenberg’s opponents on the DNVP’s left wing found
themselves in a state of complete disarray. On 4 September Martin Schiele and
Wilhelm Koch, both former ministers in the fourth Marx cabinet and spokes-
men for the DNVP’s agrarian and Christian-Social labor wings respectively,
met with Westarp in an attempt to persuade him to stand for reelection to the
DNVP party chairmanship.124 Two days later Westarp received a delegation of
Christian-Social labor leaders including Koch and DNAB chairman Emil
Hartwig, who pleaded with him to challenge Hugenberg and his supporters
and stand for reelection in so far as that was the only possible solution to the
DNVP’s leadership crisis.125 But Westarp, who still harbored a great deal of
anger over the way in which he had been treated by Hugenberg, remained
non-committal and did nothing to encourage further efforts on his behalf. In
the meantime, another candidacy surfaced in the person of former Reich
minister of the interior Walther von Keudell, who had the gall to present
himself as the candidate of the “younger generation.”126 Gradually Hugen-
berg’s opponents began to crystallize into a small group under the leadership
of Koch and Pomeranian landowner Hans Schlange-Schöningen. A one-time
antisemite and an outspoken opponent of Germany’s republican system,
Schlange-Schöningen had emerged as one of the DNVP’s most committed
and eloquent moderates.127 On 8 October he and Bernhard Leopold, an
industrialist and member of the DNVP Reichstag delegation, met with repre-
sentatives from the district organizations that were not yet under Hugenberg’s
control and other party moderates to formulate a strategy for retaining control
of the party. Not only did those around Schlange-Schöningen reject the idea of
a triumvirate as incompatible with the goal of effective political leadership, but
they sent a delegation to Hugenberg and his supporters recommending that
the two factions unite behind Westarp’s reelection as DNVP party chair-
man.128 Three days later, however, Westarp instructed Schlange-Schöningen
and his associates to suspend their efforts on his behalf and categorically

124
Ada Gräfin von Westarp to Gertraude Freifrau Hiller von Gaertringen, 4 Sept. 1928, NL
Westarp, Gärtringen.
125
Ibid., 6 Sept. 1928, NL Westarp, Gärtringen.
126
On the Keudell candidacy, see the letters from Otto von Keudell to Tirpitz, 21 Aug. and
25 Sept. 1928, BA MA Freiburg, NL Tirpitz, 278/68 69, 74 75.
127
Entry in diary of Karl Passarge, 14 Oct. 1928, BA Koblenz, Nachlass Passarge, 1/49 53.
On Schlange Schöningen, see Günter J. Trittel, “Hans Schlange Schöningen. Ein ver
gessener Politiker der ‘Ersten Stunde’,” Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 35 (1987):
25 63, esp. 26 32.
128
Memorandum on the meeting of DNVP moderates, 8 Oct. 1928, appended to Leopold to
Westarp, 16 Oct. 1928, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, II/30.
   , –

dissociated himself from the idea of a triumvirate as propagated by Quaatz and

other Hugenberg supporters.129
Westarp’s refusal to seek reelection to the DNVP party chairmanship or to
participate in the proposed triumvirate dealt a severe blow to the efforts of
party moderates to keep Hugenberg from gaining control of the party. In the
meantime, the forces around Hugenberg moved quickly to exploit the disor-
ganization of their opponents. As late as the first week of October Hugenberg
had been contemplating the possibility of organizing a secession from the
DNVP should his efforts to bring about a change in the party leadership
fail.130 The following day, however, Hugenberg informed Quaatz that
Dommes would present his name as a candidate for the party chairmanship,
presumably as a way of frightening his opponents into accepting the creation
of a triumvirate as an alternative to his own election.131 When the seventeen
DNVP district organizations supporting his candidacy met on 8 October to
give unanimous approval to a resolution endorsing Hugenberg’s election as
DNVP party chairman, Hugenberg reserved judgement and declined to
commit himself to accepting the chairmanship.132 The following day Hugen-
berg wrote to Maximilian von Dziembowski, the Saxon envoy in Munich with
close ties to both the DNVP and Stahlhelm, and encouraged the leaders of the
Bavarian Middle Party – as the DNVP’s Bavarian chapter was generally
known – to endorse the creation of a triumvirate as the best possible solution
to the leadership crisis.133 The BMP had generally supported Westarp’s
political line from 1924 to 1928 only to suffer abnormally heavy losses in the
state and national elections in the spring of 1928.134 Hans Hilpert, chairman of
the state party organization, saw a direct connection between his party’s
decline and its participation in state and national governments and had begun,
much against his initial inclination, to slide into the Hugenberg camp.135
Consequently, when the leaders of the DNVP’s Bavarian state organization
met on 13 October to determine the position their delegates would take when

129
Ada Gräfin von Westarp to Gertraude Freifrau Hiller von Gaertringen, 11 Oct. 1928, NL
Westarp, Gärtringen. See also Westarp’s memorandum, “Parteiführung oder Parteivor
sitzender,” appended to Weiß, “Erwiderung auf die ‘Denkschrift zur Reform der Par
teiorganisation’,” 15 Oct. 1928, ibid., II/30.
130
Notes by Wegener, 4 Oct. 1928, BA Koblenz, NL Wegener, 65/285.
131
Entry in Quaatz’s diary, 5 Oct. 1928, BA Koblenz, NL Quaatz, 16.
132
Report on the meeting of seventeen DNVP district organizations in Berlin, 8 Oct. 1928,
appended to a circular from Dommes, 8 Oct. 1928, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, II/30. See
also Hilpert, “Meinungen und Kämpfe,” BHStA Munich, Abt. V, NL Hilpert, 18/
3696 3700.
133
Hugenberg to Dziembowski, 9 Oct. 1928, BHStA Munich, Abt. V, Nachlass Maximilian
Dziembowski, 16.
134
Kiiskinen, DNVP in Bayern, 244 313.
135
On Hilpert’s dilemma, see Manfred Kittel, “Zwischen völkischem Fundamentalismus
und gouvernementaler Taktik,” 882 85.
     

the DNVP convened to elect a new party leader, they forced Hilpert’s hand by
adopting a resolution that expressed “full confidence in the person of Hugen-
berg” and announced its support “for a new leadership of the party with
Hugenberg.”136 Although the phrase “with Hugenberg” left open the question
whether this would take the form of a triumvirate or Hugenberg’s outright
election as DNVP party chairman, the action of the Bavarian DNVP neverthe-
less tipped the balance in Hugenberg’s favor.
Hugenberg’s election was far from certain when the DNVP representation
convened in Berlin on 20–21 October 1928 to resolve the party’s leadership
crisis. By now it was possible to distinguish between at least three different
factions in the party. First, there were the seventeen DNVP district organiza-
tions that had consistently supported Hugenberg in his efforts to gain control
of the party and reverse the direction in which it had been headed since
1924–25. Second, there was a smaller contingent of ten more moderate district
organizations that had coalesced behind Schlange-Schöningen and Leopold
and rejected the Hugenberg faction’s not so subtle threats of a secession as a
crude attempt to unilaterally impose Hugenberg upon the DNVP as its new
party chairman.137 Between these two factions stood a third and even smaller
group of technically uncommitted district organizations led by Bavaria and
Württemberg that sought to preserve party unity through a compromise that
was amenable to the other two groups.138 But, as the resolution adopted by the
leaders of the Bavarian DNVP clearly demonstrated, local party leaders there
were sympathetic to Hugenberg’s candidacy even though they had not gone so
far as to formally endorse his bid for the party chairmanship. Three days after
the Bavarian DNVP had met, Hugenberg’s supporters scored a similar success
with Walther Hirzel and the leaders of the DNVP’s Württemberg affiliate, the
Württemberg Burgher Party.139 Just as everything seemed to be falling in place
for Hugenberg and his associates, his opponents were still without a viable
candidate and pinned what remained of their hopes of stopping Hugenberg on
convincing a reluctant Oskar Hergt, the former DNVP party chairman from
1918 to 1924, to challenge Hugenberg for the leadership of the party.140

136
Minutes of the meeting of the state executive committee of the Bavarian DNVP, 13
Oct. 1928, BHStA Munich, Abt. V, NL Hilpert, 1/10 14, as well as Hilpert’s memoirs,
“Meinungen und Kämpfe,” ibid., 18/3706 08. See also Dziembowski to Lüttichau, 14
Oct. 1928, BHStA Munich, Abt. V, NL Dziembowski, 14. For further details, see
Kiiskinen, DNVP in Bayern, 314 28.
137
Resolution circulated by Lüttichau from the DNVP district organization in East Saxony,
13 Oct. 1928, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, VN 15.
138
Hilpert, “Meinungen und Kämpfe,” BHStA Munich, Abt. V, NL Hilpert, 18/3693 94.
139
Entry in Quaatz’s diary, 16 Oct. 1928, BA Koblenz, NL Quaatz, 16.
140
Ada Gräfin von Westarp to Gertraude Freifrau Hiller von Gaertringen, 17 Oct. 1928, NL
Westarp, Gärtringen.
   , –

“What happens today in this room may very well be a turning point in the
history of the entire German nation.” With these words Westarp opened the
meeting of the DNVP party representation in Berlin on 20 October 1928.141
But even as Westarp began his remarks, Hugenberg’s followers began to
distribute copies of Hugenberg’s letter to Westarp from September 1927 and
of his article “Bloc oder Brei?” among the more than 300 delegates in attend-
ance along with a cover letter in which Hugenberg claimed that the moment
had arrived for the DNVP to decide “whether it was to be reborn as the great
ideological movement it had once been or would continue to degenerate into a
tool of Germany’s parliamentary system.”142 At the outset, however, it seemed
as if the moderates had gained the upper hand as the result of a skillful
counterattack orchestrated by Siegfried Lüttichau from the party’s East Saxon
organization against the proposal of four pro-Hugenberg, yet technically
uncommitted provincial organizations – Bavaria, Württemberg, East Prussia,
and Frankfurt an der Oder – to entrust the party leadership to a triumvirate
consisting of Hugenberg, Westarp, and a representative from the party in
Prussia.143 The goal of this action, as Lüttichau explained to a colleague in
Bavaria, was to protect the party against the convulsions that Hugenberg’s
election to the party chairmanship would almost certainly bring and to work
out a compromise that would enable Westarp to maintain his firm hand at the
helm of the party.144 But whatever headway the moderates had made in
derailing the idea of a triumvirate quickly evaporated when Keudell took the
podium to launch a bitter personal attack against Hugenberg. Keudell alleged
that Hugenberg was nothing but the pawn of special economic interests whose
easy access to the campaign coffers of Ruhr heavy industry had severely
irreparably tarnished the party in the eyes of the younger generation.145

141
Westarp’s speech before the DNVP party representation, 20 Oct. 1928, NL Westarp, NL
Gärtringen, II/30. On the meeting, see the entry in Quaatz’s diary, 21 Oct. 1928, BA
Koblenz, NL Quaatz, 16, as well as the account in Hilpert, “Meinungen und Kämpfe,”
BHStA Munich, Abt. V, NL Hilpert, 18/3717 28, and Reichert to Reusch, 22 Oct. 1928,
RWWA Cologne, Abt. 130, NL Reusch, 400101293/9.
142
These documents, in addition to Hugenberg’s cover letter of 18 Oct. 1928, are in BA
Koblenz, NL Wegener, 31, also in NL Westarp, Gärtringen, II/30.
143
See the text of Lüttichau’s resolution as an attachment to his note to Westarp, 13
Oct. 1928, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, VN 15. On the fate of this proposal, see Schlange
Schöningen to Passarge, 21 Oct. 1928, BA Koblenz, NL Passarge, 11/21, and Mumm’s
statement on Hugenberg’s election to the DNVP party chairmanship, n.d., NL Westarp,
Gärtringen, II/30.
144
Lüttichau to Dziembowski, 11 Oct. 1928, BHStA Munich, Abt. V, NL Dziembowski, 14.
145
For the text of Keudell’s remarks, see “Betrifft: Die Differenz zwischen Herrn
Reichsminister a.D. von Keudell und Herrn Geheimen Finanzrat Dr. Hugenberg, beide
Mitglieder der Deutschnationalen Reichstagsfraktion,” n.d. [fall 1929], NL Westarp,
Gärtringen, II/30. For Keudell’s possible motives, see the letter from Otto von Keudell
to Tirpitz, 11 Nov. 1928, BA MA Freiburg, NL Tirpitz, 278/76 80.
     

Hugenberg responded to Keudell’s attacks not in kind but with a magnanimity

that dismarmed his opponents and reassured his supporters that he was
indeed the man of the hour.146 Even a shocked and exasperated Westarp rose
to Hugenberg’s defense against Keudell’s allegations.147 The tide had indeed
turned in Hugenberg’s favor, and after a brief recess the four provincial
organizations that had originally proposed the formation of a triumvirate
withdrew their motion and recommended that Hugenberg be elected as the
sole leader of the DNVP. At this point Hergt, the man upon whom the
moderates had pinned their last hopes of keeping Hugenberg from the party
chairmanship, withdrew his name from consideration, leaving the moderates
without a candidate. Sensing that their moment had at long last arrived,
Hugenberg’s backers immediately moved that the assembly simply vote yes
or no on Hugenberg’s candidacy. In the subsequent vote Hugenberg prevailed,
but by a margin so narrow that it was never made public and that may have
been no more than a single vote.148

Hugenberg’s election to the DNVP party chairmanship on 20 October 1928

represented a critical turning in the history of the German Right. Not only did
it spell the definitive collapse of Stresemann’s efforts to stabilize the republic
from the right, but it left a party that was deeply divided between governmen-
tal conservatives and radical nationalists, between those like Schiele,
Treviranus, and Lindeiner-Wildau who sought to pursue conservative object-
ives within the framework of the German republic and who who behind the
banner of Hugenberg and the Pan-Germans rejected any sort of compromise
with the existing political order and were determined to transform the DNVP
into an instrument of the radical Right. The latent antipathy that had existed
between these two factions on the German Right ever since the founding of the
Weimar Republic had now been transformed into an open split that
threatened not just the unity of the DNVP but the future of Weimar democ-
racy itself.

146
Entry in Quaatz’s diary, 21 Oct. 1928, BA Koblenz, NL Quaatz, 16.
147
“Erklärung, abgegeben von Graf Westarp nach der Rede des Ministers v. Keudell am
20.10.1928,” BA NL Westarp, Gärtringen, II/30.
148
Gottfried Reinhold Treviranus, Das Ende von Weimar. Heinrich Brüning und seine Zeit
(Düsseldorf, 1968), 99.
 14

Reverberations and Realignment

On 9 November 1928 the Weimar Republic celebrated the tenth anniversary

of the fall of the Second Empire and the proclamation of the German
Republic. Whereas in republican circles the events of a decade earlier were
celebrated in a subdued and respectful manner that reflected the strength of
republican conviction, on the radical Right this signaled the beginning of a
renewed offensive against the social and political legacy of the November
Revolution as conservatives and nationalists alike joined in a rising crescendo
of condemnation of Germany’s republican order.1 Hugenberg’s election to
the chairmanship of the German National People’s Party in the fall of 1928,
therefore, was not an isolated incident but must be seen in the context of a
renewed militancy on the part of the radical Right that extended well beyond
the boundaries of the DNVP. The effects of Hugenberg’s election to the
DNVP party chairmanship were by no means confined to his own party but
would be felt throughout the bourgeois spectrum of German party life. The
deteriorating economic situation, particularly in the countryside and the
independent middle class, only intensified the forces of social and political
disintegration that were at work within the bourgeois party system, with the
result that the integrative potential of those parties that conceived of them-
selves as sociologically heterogeneous “people’s parties” would be severely
challenged. The magnitude of the socialist victory in the 1928 elections and
the transfer of power to a new government headed by the Social Democrats
had set in motion a pronounced shift to the right that could be seen in
differing degrees in all of the parties from the DDP to the DNVP. Seen from
this perspective, the Lambach affair in the DNVP was not an isolated event

1
For example, see memorial speeches by Kuno von Westarp, Zehn Jahre republikanische
Unfreiheit. Das Verbrechen vom 9. November und seine Folgen (Berlin, n.d. [1928]); Martin
Hauffe, Rede gehalten am 9. November 1928 in der großen nationalen Kundgebung
des Stahlhelms Dresden in Zirkus Sarrasani (N.p., n.d. [1928]); and Rüdiger von der
Goltz, Ernste Gedanken zum 10. Geburtstag der deutschen Republik 9.11.1928 (Berlin,
n.d. [1928]).


    

but part of a more general process that mirrored events in the DVP and
Center.2 And throughout all of this, Hugenberg and his supporters on the
patriotic Right were doing what they could to polarize the German party
system into two mutually antagonistic camps and to push the crystallization
point around which an increasingly fractured German bourgeoisie might
reconstitute itself more and more to the right.

Turmoil in the People’s Party

Hugenberg’s election as DNVP party chairman had immediate repercussion
on the situation in the ranks of its one-time coalition partner, the German
People’s Party. The DVP had been in the grip of a crisis ever since the
1928 Reichstag elections and its participation in the cabinet that Social Demo-
crat Hermann Müller formed with Stresemann’s strong support in the last
week of June. Stresemann’s willingness to collaborate with the Social
Democrats had met with strong opposition from the DVP’s right wing and
the influential chairman of the DVP Reichstag delegation Ernst Scholz.3
Although Stresemann moved quickly to reassert his authority as the party’s
chairman as forecefully as possible, the conflict with his party’s right wing gave
him pause to look beyond the current party crisis into the future development
of the German party system. Not only did Stresemann cultivate closer ties with
DDP party chairman Erich Koch-Weser in the hopes that this might help hold
his party’s right wing in check,4 but he also reached out to August Weber and
the leadership of the Liberal Association (Liberale Vereinigung), an organiza-
tion founded in 1924 that sought to bring unite the DDP and DVP into a
single liberal party.5 But Stresemann was interested in far more than the
simple merger of the DDP and DVP and hoped ultimately for the creation
of a comprehensive bourgeois party that extended from the right wing of the
DDP to the more moderate elements on the DNVP’s left wing. Only through

2
See Patch, Christian Trade Unions, 125 56, and Hartmut Roder, Der christlich nationale
Deutsche Gewerkschaftsbund (DGB) im politisch ökonomischen Kräftefeld der Weimarer
Republik (Frankfurt a.M., Bern, and New York, 1986), 441 53.
3
For further details, see Jones, German Liberalism, 314 16, and Wright, Stresemann,
421 28, as well as Ludwig Richter, “Führungskrise in der DVP. Gustav Stresemann im
Kampf um die ‘Große Koalition’ 1928/29,” in Demokratie in Deutschland. Chancen und
Gefährdungen im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert. Historische Essays, ed. Wolther von Kieseritzky
and Klaus Peter Sick (Munich, 1999), 202 27.
4
Correspondence between Koch Weser and Stresemann, 16 25 June 1928, PA AA Berlin,
NL Stresemann, 68/167019 22, 167937.
5
Stresemann to Weber, 5 July 1928, PA AA Berlin, NL Stresemann, 105/175126 27. See
also Stresemann’s remarks at a banquet organized by the Liberal Association on 1 February
1926, in Die Liberale Vereinigung (Berlin, n.d. [1926)], 13 14. For further details, see
Jones, German Liberalism, esp. 271 78, 309 14.
   , –

the creation of such a party, Stresemann wrote to the Saxon industrialist

Rudolf Schneider, would it be possible to check the growing influence of
organized economic interests and reverse the decline of Germany’s liberal
parties.6
Before Stresemann had an opportunity to follow up on his overtures to the
DDP and Liberal Association, his party was rocked by another crisis involving
the German Right, in this case the Stahlhelm. Stresemann had always tried to
cultivate good relations with the Stahlhelm and other organizations on the
paramilitary Right in the hope that they might eventually be won over to
the support of the Republic and his foreign policy.7 But the ourcome of the
1928 Reichstag elections and particularly the strong showing by the Social
Democrats had come as a rude shock to the leaders of the Stahlhelm and had
only intensified their sense of urgency about the plight of the national cause.8
At the same time, Hugenberg’s bid for the DNVP party chairmanship had
done much to excite the antirepublican fervor of the Stahlhelm leadership and
to frustrate Stresemann’s hopes of stabilizing the republic from the Right. At
no point was this more apparent than when Elhard von Morosowicz, the
leader of the Stahlhelm’s Brandenburg section, issued his infamous “Fürsten-
wald Hate Declaration” at a demonstration in early September 1928. “We hate
the present form of government,” Morosowicz exclaimed, “with all our hearts –
its form and content, its appearance and essence. . . For us there is only the
uncompromising struggle against the system that dominates today’s state.”9
The “Fürstenwald Hate Declaration” came as the last and most blatant in a
long series of developments that threatened to end in a complete rupture of his
party’s relations with the veterans’ association .10
Stresemann reacted to Morosowicz’s declaration of hatred against Ger-
many’s republican system by insisting that those members of the DVP
Reichstag and Prussian Landtag delegations who still belonged to the Stahl-
helm must announce their resignation with a public statement that, he
hoped, would ignite a general secession from the organization on the part
of DVP members throughout the country.11 At the time, no less than seven

6
Stresemann to Schneider, 11 July 1928, PA AA Berlin, NL Stresemann, 101/174305 06.
7
Bernhard’s protocol of a meeting between Stresemann, Seldte, and Duesterberg, 1
Oct. 1927, PA AA Berlin, NL Stresemann, 354/488. See also Stresemann to Carl, 7
Nov. 1927, ibid., 98/173687 88.
8
Jüttner to the Stahlhelm leadership, 11 July 1928, StA Mönchen Gladbach, NL
Brauweiler, 117.
9
Morosowicz, “Fürstenwalder Botschaft,” n.d. [Sept. 1928], BA MA Freiburg,
Nachlasssplitter Elhard von Morosowicz, MSg 2/11675. For the text of Morosowicz’s
speech, see Elhard von Morosowicz, Die “Haß” Botschaft von Fürstenwalde (Oranienberg
and Beinau, n.d. [1928]).
10
Stresemann to Kempkes, 23 Sept. 1928, PA AA Berlin, NL Stresemann, 102/174412 13.
11
Stresemann to Scholz, 26 Sept. 1928, PA AA Berlin, NL Stresemann, 102/174418 20.
    

of the DVP’s forty-five Reichstag deputies, including its chairman Ernst

Scholz, were members of the Stahlhelm and had seen no contradiction
between belonging to the DVP and belonging to the Stahlhelm. But Scholz,
who had had his differences with Stresemann over the course of the preced-
ing months, agreed with his party chairman that a break with the Stahlhelm
could no longer be avoided. With Scholz taking the lead, the DVP Reichstag
delegation proceeded to adopt a resolution that recommended that all office-
holders in the DVP party organization – this referred first and foremost to
those who sat in the Reichstag or a state legislature – should resign from the
Stahlhelm. The fact that the resolution did not also call upon party members
to follow their lead reflected a desire on the part of the DVP party leadership
not to make the situation any worse than it already was and to minimize the
damage that Morosowicz’s declaration had already done to relations between
the two organizations.12
Furstrated by what was happening on the German Right, Stresemann
began to show renewed interest in the theme of bourgeois concentration.
To Stresemann and his circle of associates, the recent developments in the
DNVP and Stahlhelm only underscored the imperative of strengthening the
political middle through the establishment of closer ties between the various
non-confessional parties and organizations that stood to the left of the
DNVP. Writing to his colleague Alfred Zapf in the wake of Hugenberg’s
victory, Stresemann characterized the party’s failure to release the margin of
Hugenberg’s victory as “an monstrosity [eine Groteske] that was unpreced-
ented in [German] party life,” adding that “the beginning is dark and the end
could be civil war.”13 To address this situation, Stresemann proposed a
reform of the DVP’s national organization that would not only prevent a
recurrence of the crisis that had erupted earlier that summer but free the
party from the control of the business interests that had entrenched
themsvles on its right wing in the hope that this would attract the support
of the disaffected white-collar and working-class elements from the DNVP.
Stresemann immediately enlitsted the cooperation of Otto Thiel, a member
of the DVP Reichstag delegation who, like Lambach, functioned as a liaison
between his party and the German National Union of Commercial
Employees. Thiel shared Stresemann’s concerns about the future of the
DVP, and at a meeting of its central executive committee in November

12
Minutes of the executive committee of the DVP Reichstag delegation, 2 Oct. 1928, BA
Koblenz, R 45 II, 366/125 38. See also Scholz to Stresemann, 1 Oct. 1928, PA AA Berlin,
NL Stresemann, 102/174429, and Karl von Schoch, “Stahlhelm, Deutsche Volkspartei
und Volksbegehren,” Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, 19 Oct. 1928, nos. 489 90. For further
details, see Richter, Deutsche Volkspartei, 509 16, and Berghahn, Stahlhelm, 103 14.
13
Stresemann to Zapf, 23 Oct. 1928, PA AA Berlin, NL Stresemann, 102/174478 80.
   , –

1928 he presented plans for a organizational reform of the party that would
strengthen the position of its younger, middle-class, and working-class elem-
ents within the DVP party organization and check the influence of the
industrial interests that stood on its right wing.14
Before Stresemann had an opportunity to act on Thiel’s plans for an
organizational reform of the DVP, the party was convulsed by yet another
internal crisis that struck at Stresemann’s authority as party chairman. In
November 1928 Reich chancellor Hermann Müller reopened negotiations
with the Center to fulfull a promise he had made the previous summer to
reorganize his government and broaden its base basis at the earliest possible
opportunity. Still embittered over its failure to secure a seat in the Prussian
government in return for its support of the Müller cabinet, the DVP Reichstag
delegation saw in this an excellent opportunity not only to revisit the Prussian
question once again but also to voice its concerns in the areas of budgetary and
tax policy.15 Although Stresemann was eventually able to rescue the “Great
Coalition” from the antics of his party’s right wing,16 the episode left him
deeply discouraged about the future of his party and revived his interest in a
comprehensive bourgeois party reaching from the right wing of the DDP to
the left wing of the DNVP.17 Pinning his hopes on the idealism of the younger
generation, Stresemann threw his full support behind a new political club
known as the “Front 1929” that his biographer and protégé Baron Rochus von
Rheinbaben had founded in the early spring of 1929.18 Meeting with Rhein-
baben and the founders of the “Front 1929” in late April, Stresemann encour-
aged them not to limit their efforts to the development of closer ties between
the two liberal parties but to seek the support and cooperation of the anti-
Hugenberg dissidents on the DNVP’s left wing. The future of the German
party system and with it the fate of the German republic, Stresemann argued,
lay in the hands of the younger generation and its ability to fuse like-minded
elements across the political spectrum into a dynamic force capable of trans-
forming German political life.19

14
Otto Thiel, “Die Deutsche Volkspartei,” in Internationales Handwörterbuch des
Gewerkschaftswesens, ed. Ludwig Heyde, 2 vols. (Berlin, 1931 32) 1:347 49. For the
details of Thiel’s plans, see “Denkschrift über die Reorganisation der Deutschen
Volkspartei,” 31 Dec. 1928, appended to Thiel, to the members of the DVP executive
committee, 5 Jan. 1929, BA Koblenz, NL Jarres, 41.
15
Scholz, “Sachlichkeit,” Nationalliberale Correspondenz, 6 Mar. 1929, no. 49.
16
For further details, see Jones, German Liberalism, 319 22; Wright, Stresemann, 445 61;
and Richter, Deutsche Volkspartei, 530 40, as well as the article by Richter cited in n. 2.
17
Stresemann to Kahl, 13 Mar. 1929, PA AA Berlin, NL Stresemann, 104/174722 33.
18
In this respect, see Rheinbaben to Stresemann, 23 Mar. 1929, ibid., 78/169430 35.
19
Memorandum of a conversation between Stresemann, Bernhard, Rheinbaben, and Stein,
26 Apr. 1929, ibid., 105/174987 88. In a similar vein, see Stresemann to Zöphel, 15
Apr. 1929, ibid., 105/174941 44.
    

The Center’s Confessional Gambit

By no means was the ferment that existed within the ranks of the DVP and
DNVP in the late 1920s confined to these two parties. To the contrary, the
German Center Party, outwardly the healthiest and most stable of Germany’s
nonsocialist parties, found itself in the grips of a crisis that was every bit as
ominous as those that were tearing apart the predominantly Protestant parties
to its immediate right.20 To be sure, the Center’s close identification with the
values and institutions of the Catholic faith gave it a measure of internal
coherence that its Protestant counterparts sorely lacked.21 But not even this
had adequately insulated the Center against the processes of social and
political disintegration that were at work throughout Germany’s bourgeois
party system. The Center too had sustained heavy losses in the 1928 Reichstag
elections, seeing its share of the popular vote fall from 13.6 in December 1924
to 12.0 percent in 1928 and losing seven of its sixty-nine deputies in the
Reichstag. Center loyalists were quick to interpret this as “the breakthrough
of class conflict” into the ranks of the party, a development that placed its
long-term prospects in serious doubt. Whether the Center’s losses had
stemmed from defections to the Social Democrats by Catholic workers in
the Rhineland and Westphalia or from defections to the Business Party on the
part of its middle-class supporters or from the estrangement of the Catholic
peasantry, the common denominator underlying each of these trends was the
increasingly high priority that important segments of Germany’s Catholic
electorate had come to place upon economic as opposed to confessional issues.
The most alarming statistic of all was the fact that the percentage of eligible
Catholic voters who supported the Center or the Bavarian People’s Party had
fallen from 85 percent in 1870 and 55 percent in 1912 to 48 percent in 1928.
But even this concealed the true extent of the Center’s deteriorating position
within the Catholic electorate, for it included women voters who had been
enfranchised only in 1919 and who generally supported the Center more
enthusiastically than their male counterparts. Of male Catholic voters, only
39 percent still supported the Center in 1928.22
In October 1928 Wilhelm Marx tendered his resignation as party chairman
in order to expedite a resolution of the crisis in which the Center found itself.23
The hier apparent to the position Marx had held for the previous seven years

20
Becker, “Wirth und die Krise des Zentrums,” 361 482.
21
Karsten Ruppert, “Die weltanschaulich bedingte Politik der Deutschen Zentrumspartei in
ihrer Weimarer Epoche,” Historische Zeitschrift 285 (2007): 49 97.
22
Johannes Schauff, Das Wahlverhalten der deutschen Katholiken im Kaiserreich und in der
Weimarer Republik. Untersuchungen aus dem Jahre 1928, ed. and with an introduction by
Rudolf Morsey (Mainz, 1975), 191 204. See also Ruppert, Im Dienst am Staat von
Weimar, 315 29.
23
Hehl, Marx, 455 62.
   , –

was Adam Stegerwald, the acting chairman of the Center Reichstag delegation.
Stegerwald had remained faithful to the spirit of his “Essen Program” from
1920 and still envisaged the creation of a large, socially heterogeneous, inter-
confessional “people’s bloc” as the only viable solution to the problem of
Germany’s social and political fragmentation.24 Stegerwald, who continued
to serve as chairman of both the United Federation of Christian Trade Unions
and the German Trade-Union Federation, launched his candidacy with a
programmatic speech at a party conference in Alternberg on 23–24 September
1928. Here Stegerwald deplored the fragmentation of Germany’s Catholic
electorate into factions both within and outside the Center that placed primary
emphasis on the representation of special economic interests and not on the
welfare of the state and nation as a whole. What this reflected, Stegerwald
lamented, was an inadequate sense on the part of the vast majority of the
German people – Catholics included – of what it meant to be a citizen whose
primary loyalties lay not with the class, estate, or special-interest group to
which one belonged but to the state and the national community, or Lebens-
gemeinschaft, it served. To remedy this deficiency in Germany’s political
culture, Stegerwald argued, the Center must rebaptize itself as a party that
no longer conceived of itself as the representative of specifically Catholic
interests but as one whose primary responsibilities lay in reconciling the
interests and welfare of all those who made up the German nation as a party
that represented the entire German family in all of its social, regional, and
confessional diversity.25
When the executive committee of the Center met in Berlin first on
17 November and then again on 1 December, a clear majority of the party’s
leaders supported Stegerwald’s candidacy. At this point, only the question of
separating the party chairmanship from the chairmanship of the Reichstag
delegation seemed to stand in the way of Stegerwald’s election.26 But Steger-
wald’s candidacy had begun to encounter strong opposition from many in the
party who were reluctant to entrust the party chairmanship to someone so
closely identified with the Christian labor unions. Opposition was particularly
strong among the Center’s civil servants, whose wrath Stegerwald had incurred
toward the end of the previous year with his vociferous opposition to any
increase in civil servant salaries that ignored Germany’s fiscal realities and

24
Adam Stegerwald, Arbeiterschaft, Volk und Staat. Vortrag, gehalten auf dem elfster
Kongreß der christlichen Gewerkschaften in Dortmund (Berlin Wilmersdorf, 1926),
15 27.
25
Stegerwald, “Geistige und politische Grundlagen der Zentrumspartei,” n.d. [23 24
Sept. 1928], ACDP Sankt Augustin, NL Stegerwald, I 206, 004/2. See also Forster,
Stegerwald, 453 54.
26
Kaiser, “Aufzeichnungen zur Wahl des ersten Vorsitzenden der Deutschen Zentrumspartei
auf dem 5. Reichsparteitag in Köln, im Dezember 1928,” 12 Jan. 1929, ACDP Sankt
Augustin, NL Stegerwald, I 206, 5/606.
    

exceeded increases in the private sector for workers and white-collar employ-
ees.27 Stegerwald’s tirade against the proposed civil service salary reform was
all the more regrettable because the bill had originated in the ministry of
finance headed by another member of the Center, Heinrich Köhler.28 At a
meeting of Center party leaders from the Rhineland on 16 November, spokes-
men for the party’s civil servant wing took a strong stand against Stegerwald’s
candidacy but were not able to come up with a credible alternative except to
urge Marx to reconsider his resignation.29 Then, at a meeting of the Center
executive committee on 6 December a delegation from the party’s National
Civil-Servant Advisory Council (Reichsbeamtenbeirat der Deutschen Zen-
trumspartei) read a declaration in which they stated that Stegerwald’s election
to the party chairmanship could only be interpreted as a repudiation of the
civil service by the party as a whole. In the ensuing vote only fifteen of the
committee’s twenty-eight members endorsed Stegerwald’s candidacy. Steger-
wald suffered another defeat on the following day when the party’s national
committee passed a resolution to separate the office of the party chairman
from the chairmanship of the party’s delegation to the Reichstag by an
overwhelming 120 to 40 margin. Infuriated by the party’s rejection of Steger-
wald, union spokesman Johannes Giesberts read a declaration at a meeting the
Center executive committee on 7 December in which he denounced the
treatment that Stegerwald had received at the hands of the national committee
as a repudiation of the Catholic working class and announced that he and his
colleagues would not take part in further deliberations and left the meeting
with five of his associates.30
All of this took place as the Center was making final preparations for its
national party congress that was set to open in Cologne on 8 December. In a
desperate attempt to salvage party unity and to prevent a major secession on
the part of either its civil servant or working-class constituencies, the leaders of
the Center decided to entrust leadership of the party to a special three-man
collegium. This effort, however, collapsed when a petition calling for the
immediate election of the new party chairman was circulated at the opening
session of the Cologne party congress and received the requisite number of
signatures. By then, two other candidates for the party chairmanship had
surfaced in Joseph Joos, a Catholic labor leader who was too closely identified

27
Adam Stegerwald, Zur Reform der Beamtenbesoldung (Berlin Wilmersdorf, 1928), 3 12,
19 27.
28
Ruppert, Im Dienst am Staat von Weimar, 274 87.
29
Bachem to Müller, 17 Nov. 1928, in Rudolf Morsey, “Die Deutsche Zentrumspartei,” Das
Ende der Parteien 1933, ed. Erich Matthias and Rudolf Morsey (Düsseldorf, 1960),
281 453, here 418.
30
Kaiser, “Aufzeichnungen zur Wahl,” 12 Jan. 1929, ACDP Sankt Augustin, NL Stegerwald,
I 206, 5/606.
   , –

with the People’s Association for Catholic Germany to satisfy the Center’s
middle-class constituencies, and Monseigneur Ludwig Kaas, an experienced
church diplomat and constitutional expert who offered himself as a comprom-
ise candidate. In the election that took place without any further debate, Kaas
received 184 votes – twenty-four more than the absolute majority required for
election – while Joos and Stegerwald received 92 and 42 votes respectively.31
While Stegerwald’s election would have most likely exacerbated the social and
economic divisions that were already eating away at the party’s internal
cohesiveness, Kaas’s election had the effect of reaffirming those confessional
principles that lay at the heart of the Center’s unique Weltanschauung. The
obvious hope here was that this might hold in check the forces of social and
political disintegration that were at work within the party. “The solidarity of all
those who believe in Christ,” stressed Kaas in his acceptance speech at
Cologne, “must be greater than that which separates us from one another.”32
The symbolism of Kaas’s election was immediately apparent. In choosing
Kaas over Joos and Stegerwald, the Center had opted for a leader who stood
above the conflict that was eating away at the unity of the party and whose
election afforded it the best chance of reversing its electoral decline and
attracting new support from disaffected Catholic voters.33 His election was
immediately hailed by Catholic nobles who had remained loyal to the Center
and who hoped that his election signaled a turn to the right that might make
the party more attractive to those of their peers who had abandoned it after the
end of World War I.34 But as difficult as it was to situate Kaas in a left-right
sprectrum, the signature feature of his political world-view was a deep and
abiding loyalty to the principles of constitutional government. Kaas was
acutely sensitive to the legacy of the Kulturkampf of the 1870s and believed
as early as 1919 that the best way to secure the interests of Germany’s Catholic
minority was through legally binding agreements or concordats with duly
constituted political authority. But unlike the Catholic Right, Kaas was not
wedded to the monarchical form of government and never questioned the
legitimacy of the republican institutions that Germany had inherited from the
November Revolution.35 Beyond that, Kaas embraced the concept of concen-
tration, or Sammlung, as a way not only of uniting German Catholics on the

31
Offizieller Bericht des fünften Parteitages der Deutschen Zentrumspartei. Tagung zu Köln
am 8. und 9. Dezember 1928, ed. Reichsgeneralsekretariat der Deutschen Zentrumspartei
(Trier, n.d. [1929]), 43. See also Ruppert, Im Dienst am Staat von Weimar, 335 47, and
Forster, Stegerwald, 455 64.
32
Deutsche Zentrumspartei, Offizieller Bericht 1928, 76.
33
Bachem to Müller, 10 Dec. 1928, reprinted in Morsey, “Deutsche Zentrumspartei,” 419.
34
For example, see the letter from the future Bishop of Münster, Clemens August von
Galen, to his brother Franz, 9 Dec. 1928, WVA Münster, NL Galen, 227.
35
Ludwig Kaas, Staat und Kirche im neuen Deutschland. Rede gehalten auf dem Trierer
Katholikentag am 12. Okt. 1919 (Trier, n.d. [1919]).
    

basis of the Center but also of uniting the German nation across class and
confessional lines into a political unity that could withstand the centrifugal
forces that were slowly, but surely eroding the fabric of Germany’s national
life. Precisely what Kaas’s concept of Sammlung meant in practical terms was
imprecise, but in the immediate context it meant reorganizing the Müller
government so that the Center received the full complement of cabinet posts
to which it was entitled as the second largest party in the governmental
coalition.36 In a broader sense, however, Sammlung implied the consolidation
of all those who, regardless of their party affiliation, shared similar a commit-
ment to the defense of Germany’s Christian culture and envisaged the cultiva-
tion of closer ties to parties and organizations outside the Center. Whether or
not Kaas’s strategy with its implications for the Center’s relations with the
DNVP represented a viable response to the fragmentation and polarization of
German party life, particularly in the light of Hugenberg’s election as DNVP
party chairman, remained unclear.37
For Stegerwald Kaas’s election was a slap in the face,38 and the reaction of
his supporters in the Christian trade unions was as quick as it was ominous.
On the second day of the Cologne party congress, the Center’s working-class
delegates met separately under Giesberts’s chairmanship to vent their anger
over what had happened the day before with a sharply worded statement in
which they equated the rejection of Stegerwald’s candidacy with a rejection of
the Catholic worker. A conference of Centrist labor leaders in Essen was set for
16 December to subject the question of the party’s ties to the Christian trade-
union movement to a thorough reexamination.39 Throughout all of this Jakob
Kaiser, a prominent Catholic labor leader from the Rhineland and one of
Stegerwald’s most trusted associates, worked diligently to repair the damage
that Stegerwald’s defeat had done to the Centers relations with the Catholic
working class.40 But the driving force behind this effort at reconciliation was
Stegerwald himself, who at the conference in Essen unequivocally reaffirmed

36
Kaas to Stresemann, 20 Feb. 1929, PA AA Berlin, NL Stresemann, 77/169252 54. See also
the exchange of letters between Kaas and Wirth, 29 30 Oct. 1929, BA Koblenz, Nachlass
Joseph Wirth, 73.
37
For one of the more cogent statements of this concept, see Ludwig Kaas, Nicht rückwärts
vorwärts (Berlin, n.d. [1931]), 8 10. For further insight, see Martin Menke, “Ludwig Kaas
and the End of the German Center Party,” in From Weimar to Hitler: Studies in the
Dissolution of the Weimar Republic and the Establishment of the Third Reich, 1932 1934,
ed Hermann Beck and Larry Eugene Jones (New York and Oxford, 2018), 79 109, esp.
81 83.
38
Forster, Stegerwald, 463.
39
Kaiser, “Aufzeichnungen zur Wahl,” 12 Jan. 1929, ACDP Sankt Augustin, NL Stegerwald,
I 206, 5/606.
40
Circular from Kaiser, 10 Dec. 1928, ACDP Sankt Augustin, NL Stegerwald, I 206, 5/607.
For further details, see Patch, Christian Trade Unions, 133 41.
   , –

his loyalty to the Center and its new party chairman. Explaining that Kaas had
always been committed to the principle of class reconciliation, Stegerwald
dismissed the notion that his defeat represented a rejection of the Catholic
worker or of the ideals of the Christian labor movement. At the same time,
Stegerwald criticized the Center for its failure to respond to the changes that
were taking place in the structure of German society and evoked, as he had
done at Essen eight years earlier, the vision of a Christian-social people’s party
that would unite Catholics and Protestants to defend the basic values of
Germany’s Christian heritage and to lay the foundation for the creation of a
genuine people’s state. Only Stegerwald’s contention that the Center was the
prototype of such a party and the seed out of such a party could develop
robbed his comments of the sting they might otherwise have held for Kaas and
the Center party leadership.41
Stegerwald’s allusion to the “Essen Program” of 1920 notwithstanding, his
speech at the Essen conference of Centrist labor leaders was a clear attempt to
put the bitterness of defeat behind him and to reassure his audience that the
struggle for the future of the party was still very much ahead of them. In a
similar vein, industrialist Rudolf ten Hompel proposed at a meeting of the
party’s Advisory Council for Trade and Industry (Handels- und Industrie-
Beiräte der Deutschen Zentrumspartei) on 6 December 1928 that representa-
tives from the Christian trade-unions, the Catholic Worker’s Associations
(Katholische Arbeitervereine), and the party’s industrial supporters should
meet on a regular basis in an attempt to promote social harmony and party
unity.42 The first such meeting took place on 21 January 1929 with Stegerwald,
Kaiser, and Bernhard Otte from the Christian labor movement and Joos for
the Catholic Workers’ Associations in attendance.43 Kaas too helped reduce
tensions within the party by offering Stegerwald the chairmanship of the
Center delegation to the Reichstag with the understanding that he would
support Stegerwald for the party chairmanship should the opportunity present
itself in the future.44 With Kaas’s endorsement, Stegerwald election as chair-
man of the Center Reichstag delegation took place by acclamation on 25

41
Adam Stegerwald, Zentrumspartei, Arbeiterschaft, Volk und Staat (Berlin Wilmersdorf,
n.d. [1928]), esp. 7 11. See also Kaiser to Giesberts, Imbusch, and Stegerwald, 17
Dec. 1928, BA Koblenz, NL Kaiser, 247. For further details, see Forster, Stegerwald,
464 69.
42
Minutes of the meeting of the Center’s Advisory Council for Trade and Industry,
6 Dec. 1928, in Mitteilungen der Handels und Industrie Beiräte der Deutschen Zen
trumspartei, 22 Dec. 1928, BA Koblenz, NL ten Hompel, 38.
43
Minutes of the meeting of Center Party industrialists and labor leaders, 21 Jan. 1929, BA
Koblenz, NL ten Hompel, 33.
44
Kaas to Stegerwald, 9 Jan. 1929, ACDP Sankt Augustin, NL Stegerwald, I 206, 014/13. See
also Heinrich Teipel, “Kaas und Stegerwald,” Deutsche Republik, 3, no. 18 (1 Feb. 1929):
549 54.
    

January, whereupon he resigned his chairmanships of both the United Feder-

ation of Christian Trade Unions and the German Trade-Union Federation.45
What these three developments – Stegerwald’s conciliatory speech at Essen,
ten Hompel’s proposal for regular meetings between representatives of the
party’s working-class and industrial interests, and Stegerwald’s election to the
chairmanship of the Reichstag delegation – all underscored was a willingness
on the part of the Center leadership and the various interest groups that
comprised the party’s material base to strive for a genuine resolution of the
social antagonisms that nearly fifteen years of unrelieved economic pressure
had produced within the ranks of their party. It was precisely this willingness,
sustained no doubt by a shared commitment to confessional and religious
values that transcended private economic interests, that helped insulate the
Center so effectively against the forces of social and political disintegration
that were ravaging the other bourgeois parties.
Still, Kaas’s election as Center party chairman presented a host of problems
whose ultimate resolution would have a profound impact on the future of
political Catholicism in Germany. In the first place, Kaas’s election signaled a
shift to the right that may not have been as dramatic as what had happened in
the DNVP but nevertheless raised questions about the stability of Germany’s
republican institutions. Second, Kaas had not previously held a leadership
position in the Center, and his genial and non-confrontational manner of
dealing with his colleagues left him ill-suited to assume the responsibilities of
leading a party beset by the myriad problems facing the Center. Third, Kaas
was a cleric whose election to the Center party chairmanship represented part
of a more general trend that Stegerwald would later decry as the “clericaliza-
tion” of the Germany’s Catholic parties.46 Fourth, Kaas was no ordinary cleric
but one whose close friendship with the Papal Nuncio in Germany, Eugenio
Pacelli, raised concerns about the independence of the Center vis-à-vis the
Vatican. Like Kaas, Pacelli was a canon lawyer and diplomat who operated on
the premise that it was only through diplomatic arrangements with secular
states that the interests of the church could be secured. Pacelli had played a
major role in negotiating the concordat with the state of Bavaria in 1924 and
was hopeful that a similar arrangement could be worked out with Prussia.47

45
Minutes of the Center Reichstag delegation, 25 Jan. 1929, in Protokolle der Reichstags
fraktion und des Fraktionsvorstandes der Deutschen Zentrumspartei 1926 1933, ed.
Rudolf Morsey (Mainz, 1969), 256 57.
46
Stegerwald, “Aus meinen Erlebnissen im Kampf gegen den Integralismus und die poli
tische Reaktion in katholisch kirchlichen Kreisen,” 1945, ACDP Sankt Augustin, NL
Stegerwald, I 206, 016/4.
47
See Karsten Ruppert, “Interaktionen von politischem Katholizismus, Kirche und Vatikan
während der Weimarer Republik,” in Eugenio Pacelli als Nuntius in Deutschland. For
schungsspektiven und Ansätzen zu einem internationellen Vergleich, ed. Hubert Wolf
(Paderborn, 2012), 215 46, here 17 21.
   , –

But Pacelli was no friend of parliamentary democracy and enjoyed close ties to
the anti-democratic elements on the Catholic Right, having, for example,
officiated at the marriage of one of Franz von Papen’s daughters in 1926.48
Given Kaas’s close relationship with Pacelli, it was unclear just how much the
latter’s aversion to parliamentary democracy would undercut Kaas’s commit-
ment to working within the framework of duly constituted political authority.

Towards a “Hugenberg Party”

The turmoil within the DVP and Center mirrored the situation within the
German National People’s Party. Developments within the three parties were
all part of a more general crisis within the German party system that could
seen in part as a reaction to the socialist victory in the 1928 Reichstag elections
but was also a sign of growing frustration of Germany’s nonsocialist electorate
with the government’s ineffectiveness in dealing with the country’s economic
stagnation. Hugenberg’s confederates were quick to take note of these devel-
opments and easily convinced themselves that this could only work to the
advantage of their own party.49 Two days after his election as DNVP party
chairman Hugenberg outlined his goals and methods at a special meeting of
nearly three hundred party strategists in Berlin. Here Hugenberg set three
objectives for himself and his party: first, a sweeping reform of party finances
that would require more in the way of contributions from individual party
members to make the party less dependent upon outside economic interests;
second, a reexamination of the factors responsible for the DNVP’s defeat in
the May 1928 Reichstag elections as part of a plan to regain the confidence of
the general populace; and third, “the ordering of ideas and the creation of a
battle plan with clear lines of conflict for the solution of the great problems
facing the party.” Hugenberg then proceeded to review the strengths and
weakness of the party press, the party’s progaganda apparatus, and the party
organization as a whole.50 Hugenberg was followed by Lothar Steuer, a
member of the DNVP delegation to the Prussian Landtag from Hesse-Kassel
who provided a more detailed analysis of the 1928 election results with
particular emphasis upon the appeal of special-interest parties, the high rate
of voter non-participation, and the alienation of the younger generation.51
Subsequent speakers then turned their attention to matters of special concern
such as the party’s relationship to the middle class and workers, its efforts to

48
Pacelli to Papen, 12 June 1926, BA Koblenz, Nachlass Max von Stockhausen, 2.
49
For example, see Wegener to Claß, 1 Nov. 1928, BA Koblenz, NL Wegener, 23/99 100.
50
Hugenberg, “Rückblick und Ausblick,” in Deutschnationale Volkspartei, Hauptgeschäfts
stelle, Wahlkampftagung der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei im Reichstag am Montag, den
22. Oktober 1928 (Berlin, 1928), 1 5, in BA Koblenz, ZSg 1 44/6 (16).
51
Steuer, “Gründe für den Wahlausfall,” ibid., 5 8.
    

solicit the support of women and youth, and its involvement in the patriotic
movement.52
Hugenberg and his associates in the DNVP party leadership focused much
of their attention on the German middle class. The leaders of the DNVP were
particularly concerned about the inroads that the Business Party had made
into the ranks of their party’s middle-class constituency and linked their
party’s recovery at the polls “to leading middle-class circles back into the
bosom of the party.”53 The DNVP’s middle-class representatives complained
bitterly about the “irresponsible demagoguery of the WP” and struggled to
find a formula that would allow it to stress what it had done on behalf of the
independent middle class without compromising its character as an oppos-
ition party. Only by squaring the fight for middle-class economic interests
with the struggle for Germany’s highest national goals, argued Wilhelm Jaeger
as the party’s specialist on middle-class issues, would the DNVP ever be able to
win back the support of the German middle class and fulfill its responsibilities
to the German fatherland.54 Another group that was every bit as important to
the fate of the DNVP as the independent middle-class was the German farmer.
Here the leaders of the DNVP were facing an animated challenge from the
newly founded Christian-National Peasants and Farmers Party. Nationalist
efforts to persuade the leaders of the CNBLP to resolve their differences with
the DNVP and and join forces in the struggle for the welfare of the German
farmer met with little reaction from the CNBLP,55 whose leaders were con-
vinced that the wave of the future was a fundamental reorganization of the
German party system along vocational and corporatist lines.56 Speaking at a
conference of the DNVP’s Agricultural National Committee in Berlin on
10 November 1928, Hugenberg reassured his party’s farm leaders that he
was every bit as committed to the welfare of the German farmer as they. At
the same time, however, he insisted that agricultural recovery could not be
secured by piece-meal measures but only through a thorough overhaul of
German trade and reparations policy.57

52
Speeches by Jaeger, Lindner, Hertwig, Müller Loebnitz, and Krause, ibid., 10 17.
53
Remarks by Jaeger, 19 Oct. 1928, in Deutschnationale Volkspartei, Reichsausschuß für
den Mittelstand, Deutschnationale Mittelstandstagung in Berlin (Berlin, 1928), 1.
54
Jaeger, “Unsere Werbung in Mittelstandskreisen,” in Wahlkampftagung der Deutschna
tionalen Volkspartei, 10 11.
55
Correspondence between Richthofen and Westarp, 6 16 July 1928, and in particular
Richthofen to Hepp, 6 July 1928, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, VN 100.
56
See Hepp’s programmatic speech, “Die Ziele der Christlich Nationale Bauern und Land
volkpartei,” Hanover, 9 Sept. 1928, in the Nassauische Bauern Zeitung, 4 and 5 Oct. 1928,
nos. 230 31.
57
Hugenberg’s remarks to the DNVP’s Agricultural National Committee, 10 Nov. 1928, BA
Koblenz, NL Hugenberg, 114/78 88.
   , –

If the DNVP was going to fend off the challenges of special-interest parties
like the WP and CNBLP, an essential prerequisite in the eyes of Hugenberg
and his supporters was a comprehensive reform of the DNVP party organiza-
tion. Even party leaders from the Westarp era had begun to realize that the
decentralized party structure the DNVP had developed in the aftermath of the
November Revolution was badly outmoded and in need of a complete over-
haul.58 In the wake of the DNVP’s defeat in the May 1928 Reichstag elections
two of Hugenberg’s lieutenants, Reinhold Quaatz and Werner von Steinhoff,
had been entrusted with the task of developing a comprehensive plan for a
reorganization of the party. Action on their proposals, which were presented
to the DNVP party representation in October 1928,59 was shelved until the
turmoil that surrounded the election of the new party chairman had subsided.
It was not until this body had an opportunity to meet again on 8 December
that the party revisited the proposals for a reform of the DNVP party organ-
ization. The reforms proposed by Quaatz and Steinhoff had as much to do
with the party’s internal politics as they did with the efficiency of the party
organization. The most important feature of the proposal was a recommenda-
tion to eliminate the thirty-two man party leadership council (Parteileitung)
with its veto power over the policies of the party chairman in favor of an
expanded executive committee (Parteivorstand) in which the chairmen of the
DNVP’s state and provincial organizations enjoyed ipso jure membership.60
As a move that greatly strengthened the influence of Hugenberg’s supporters
at the upper levels of the party organization, it encountered strong opposition
from a group of Reichstag deputies that had coalesced behind the leadership of
Lindeiner-Wildau. But this group was powerless to block the efforts of Hugen-
berg and his confederates to bring the party more firmly under the new
chairman’s personal control and went down to an lop-sided defeat in the final
and decisive vote.61
The outcome of the meeting of the DNVP party representation on 8 Decem-
ber 1928 represented a clear victory for Hugenberg and his efforts to transform
the party into an instrument of his political will.62 Westarp, who had stayed on

58
Dewitz (Pomeranian Rural League) to Westarp, 4 Jan. 1928, NL Westarp, Gärtringen,
II/31.
59
Steinhoff and Quaatz, “Denkschrift zur Reform der Parteiorganisation,” 1 Oct. 1928, NL
Westarp, Gärtringen, II/30. On the origins of this memorandum, see Westarp’s circular
to the members of the DNVP party representation, 12 Oct. 1928, ibid.
60
Documents on the reorganization of the party for the meeting of the DNVP party
representation, 8 Dec. 1928, FZG Hamburg, NL Diller, 9.
61
Unsere Partei, 6, no. 27 (15 Dec. 1928): 397 99. See also Blank to Reusch, 7 Dec. 1928,
RWWA Cologne, Abt. 130, NL Reusch, 4001012024/4b.
62
Entry in Quaatz’s diary, 8 Dec. 1928, BA Berlin, NL Quaatz, 16.
    

as chairman of the DNVP Reichstag delegation with Hugenberg’s apparent

blessing,63 avoided becoming involved in the dispute over the reorganization
of the party but was concerned that the centralization of power in the hands of
Hugenberg and the newly reconstituted party executive committee threatened
the autonomy of the delegation.64 These fears proved fully justified when in
the spring of 1929 Hugenberg moved to curtail the freedom of the DNVP
Reichstag delegation. On 18 March 1929 Westarp met with Reich President
von Hindenburg to discuss, among other things, the possibility of a new right-
wing government under the leadership of Lindeiner-Wildau or one of his
colleagues on the DNVP’s left wing.65 Hugenberg regarded Westarp’s action as
a circumvention of his own authority, and at a meeting of the DNVP executive
committee in early April one of his lieutenants introduced a resolution that
made the decisions of the party chairman in all important political questions,
including that of participating in the government, binding upon the DNVP
Reichstag delegation and the DNVP’s other parliamentary delegations
throughout the country.66 Westarp, who was determined to preserve the
autonomy of the Reichstag delegation, succeeded in blocking acceptance of
Hugenberg’s motion by a narrow margin at a special caucus of the DNVP
Reichstag delegation in early May 1929.67 Hugenberg then proceeded to
mobilize his supporters in the DNVP executive committee in June 1929 to
override the delegation’s vote in a move that formally subordinated Westarp
and the DNVP Reichstag delegation to the control of the DNVP party
chairman.68 To Westarp this represented an unwarranted infringement of
the delegation’s freedom of action, but he lacked the leverage within the party’s

63
Letter from Ada Gräfin von Westarp to Gertraude Freifrau Hiller von Gaertringen, 23
Oct. 1928, NL Westarp, Gärtringen.
64
Westarp to his son in law Berthold Freiherr Hiller von Gaertringen, 5 Dec. 1928, NL
Hiller, Gärtringen. For further details, see Larry Eugene Jones, “Conservatism at the
Crossroads: Count Kuno von Westarp and the Struggle for Control of the German
National People’s Party,” Contemporary European History 18 (2009): 147 77.
65
Memorandum of Westarp’s conversation with von Hindenburg, 18 Mar. 1929, NL
Westarp, Gärtringen, II/61.
66
Diller’s handwritten notes on the meeting of the DNVP executive committee, 8 9
Apr. 1929, FZG Hamburg, NL Diller, 7.
67
Entry in Quaatz’s diary, 2 May 1929, BA Koblenz, NL Quaatz, 16. See also Westarp’s
correspondence with Hugenberg, 19 22 Apr. 1929, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, VN 122, as
well as his letters to Traub, 4 May 1929, ibid., II/37, and Natzmer, 14 May 1929, ibid., VN
102. For a breakdown of the anti Hugenberg forces in the DNVP Reichstag delegation,
see Traub to Hilpert, 22 May 1929, BA Koblenz, NL Traub, 50/8 15.
68
Report of the meeting of the DNVP executive committee, 15 June 1929, in Unsere Partei
7, no. 13 (1 July 1929): 207 09. See also the entry in Quaatz’s diary, 18 June 1929, BA
Koblenz, NL Quaatz, 16, as well as Quaatz to Westarp, 19 June 1929, NL Westarp,
VN 102.
   , –

governing bodies to reverse what he saw an intolerable situation.69 Hugenberg

had taken another step toward transforming the DNVP into an instrument of
his political will.

Christian-Social Unrest
Hugenberg’s efforts to bring the DNVP more and more under his personal
control aroused deep-seated misgivings in various sectors of the party. Not
only was Westarp concerned about the autonomy of the DNVP Reichstag
delegation, but the reforms that the new party chairman had pushed through
the DNVP executive committee at the beginning of December 1928 only
reinforced the fears that the leaders of the party’s working-class wing had
already voiced about their party’s future development. The first group to break
the uneasy truce that had existed between Hugenberg and his opponents on
the DNVP’s left wing was the Christian-Social faction led by Emil Hartwig,
Gustav Hülser, and Reinhard Mumm.70 Ever since the Lambach affair in the
summer of 1928, the Christian-Socials had been moving toward a break with
the DNVP. In August 1928 the leaders of the DNVP’s Christian-Social faction
met in Bielefeld to found the Christian-Social Reich Association as the first
step toward uniting all of those in the DNVP who embraced the social and
political gospel of the late Adolf Stoecker in a move that designed to
strengthen Christian-Social influence at all levels of the DNVP party organiza-
tion.71 Although the founders of the new organization remained committed to
pursuing their objectives within the framework of the DNVP, they were hoped
to establish closer ties to like-minded groups from Württemberg and other
parts of the country that stood outside the immediate orbit of the DNVP.72
The fact that Hugenberg’s immediate entourage included outspoken social
reactionaries like Paul Bang from the League for National Economics and
Industrial Peace and a champion of Germany’s management-controlled
“yellow unions” and Gustav Hartz, author of a controversial proposal to
dismantle the existing system of social legislation in favor of a compulsory

69
Westarp to Quaatz, 24 June 1929, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, VN 102.
70
On the goals of the DNVP’s Christian Social faction, see Hülser, “Die volks und
staatspolitische Bedeutung der Gewerkschaften,” Politische Wochenschrift 5, no. 5 (31
Jan. 1929): 100 04, as well as Reinhard Mumm, Die entscheidende Frontstellung (Berlin,
n.d. [ca. 1928]). See also Stupperich, Volksgemeinschaft oder Arbeitersolidarität, 98 194.
71
Protocol of the national congress (Reichstreffen) of the Christian Socials in Bielefeld, 19
Aug. 1928, NL Mumm, 282/181 95. See also Friedrich, “Die christlich soziale Fahne
empor!,” 230 56.
72
Büchenschütz’s remarks at the national congress of the Christian Socials, 19 Aug. 1928,
BA Berlin, NL Mumm, 282/185. For further details, see Günter Opitz, Der Christlich
soziale Volksdienst. Versuch einer protestantischen Partei in der Weimarer Republik
(Düsseldorf, 1969), 33 133.
    

savings program out of which Germany’s social-welfare needs would be met,73

only fueled Christian-Social fears that the social and economic progress of the
previous decade was under siege. Two days after Hugenberg’s election
approximately thirty members of the DNVP’s Christian-Social Reich Union
held a special conference in Berlin to put their final stamp of approval on the
organizational statutes and guidelines they had adopted two months earlier at
Bielefeld.74 By the following spring Hülser had already begun to characterize
himself and his followers as “unwilling rebels” and did not hesitate to criticize
Hugenberg in public for his lack of a commitment to the material and moral
welfare of the German worker.75 At the same time, the leaders of the DNVP’s
Christian-Social Reich Union continued to reaffirm their loyalty to the DNVP
and disclaimed any interest in the founding of a new party.76 All of this drew
to a climax in April 1929 when Hartwig and the leaders of the German
National Workers’ League brought their complaints about the Hartz program
to the DNVP executive committee only to be rebuffed when the committee
referred the matter to a special commission created for the purpose of
reviewing Hartz’s proposals and the feasibility of their implementation.77
Hugenberg’s refusal to dissociate himself from Hartz’s recommendations came
as a slap in the face to the leaders of the DNVP’s Evangelical labor wing, who
now began to fear that it might be necessary for them to leave the party if they
were to remain faithful to their Christian-Social ideals.78 All of this, as Mumm
wrote to Hugenberg in February 1929, was part of a larger question as to
whether the German party system would organize itself on a spiritual or a
material basis, whether the values of the Christian faith would still have

73
Gustav Hartz, Irrwege der deutschen Sozialpolitik und der Weg zur sozialen Freiheit
(Berlin, 1928), esp. 95 133, 149 210.
74
Minutes of the first meeting of the CSRV, 21 October 1928, BA Berlin, NL Mumm, 282/
301 02. See also the report in Christlich soziale Stimmen. Mitteilungsblatt der Christlich
sozialen Reichsvereinigung, 15 Feb. 1929, no. 1, as well as Hartwig, “Vorwärts! Trotz
allem!” Angestelltenstimme und Arbeiterstimme, ed. Deutschnationale Angestellten und
Arbeiterbünde, 8, no. 11 (Nov. 1928): 1 2.
75
Hülser, “Rebellen wider Willen,” Politische Wochenschrift, 5, no. 14 (6 Apr. 1929):
324 25. See also Hülser, “Positive Kritik und Mitarbeit an der Sozialpolitik!” Der
Reichsbote, 14 Dec. 1928, and Hülser, “Ein Herold des christlich sozialen Gedankens.
Zu Adolf Stoeckers 20. Todestag,” Der Deutsche, 8 Feb. 1929, no. 33.
76
Heinz Dietrich Wendland, Christlich soziale Grundsätze. Gedanken zu einem neuen
christlich sozialen Programm (Berlin, 1929).
77
Unsere Partei 7, no. 9 (1 May 1929): 132. For the Christian Social position, see “Sozial
versichering oder Sparzwang?” Angestelltenstimme und Arbeiterstimme, 9, no. 5 (May
1929): 1 4, as well as Lambach’s letter of 26 Mar. 1929, FZG Hamburg, NL Diller, 7.
78
For example, see Baudissin’s remarks at the CSRV’s first annual congress in Bielefeld, 2
Aug. 1929, in DNVP, Mitteilungen no. 36, 30 Aug. 1929, FZG Hamburg, NL Diller, 10.
   , –

meaning in a political system dominated by the one-sided representation of

special economic interests.79

Agrarian Activism and the “Green Front”

Of the various social and economic interests that supported the DNVP, none
was more important than organized agriculture. With the stabilization of the
mark in 1923–24 the German farmer began to encounter economic difficulties
that were to become even more severe than those he had experienced during
the runaway inflation of the early 1920s. As a result, ties between organized
agriculture and the parties through which it had traditionally sought to
represent its vital interests became increasingly strained. The demonstrations
in Schleswig-Holstein and other parts of the country in the early winter and
spring of 1928 came as a rude shock to Germany’s conservative establishment
and constituted a direct threat to conservative hegemony in the countryside.
A particularly disturbing aspect of this development was the emergence of the
Rural People’s Movement, or Landvolkbewegung, as a radical and sometimes
violent alternative to the more traditional forms of rural protest. This phe-
nomenon – which surfaced in the wake of the first mass demonstrations in
Schleswig-Holstein and then spread to Pomerania, Thuringia, and East Prussia
– featured the threat of boycott, silent marches, attacks on government finance
offices, and the occasional use of bombs. All of this raised the specter of a
peasant insurrection, the likes of which had not been seen since the great
revolt of 1524–25.80
The peasant uprising in the late 1920s caught Germany’s conservative
agrarian elites off-guard and forced them to take immediate action to contain
it before it wreaked havor with their own organizations. The founding of the
CNBLP with support from the leaders of the regional affiliates of the National
Rural League in Thuringia and Hesse posed a direct threat to the RLB’s
internal cohesion and obliged its leaders to look for a formula that would
both preserve the unity of their organization and make it possible for them to
contain the wave of social and political radicalization that was sweeping the
countryside.81 Efforts to reorganize the RLB’s leadership structure had been
under way for some time before drawing to a concluions at a meeting of the
RLB full executive committee (Gesamtvorstand) on 5 July 1928. Here RLB

79
Mumm to Hugenberg, 27 Feb. 1929, BA Berlin, NL Mumm, 300/50 53.
80
Hans Beyer, “Die Landvolkbewegung Schleswig Holsteins und Niedersachsens
1928 1932,” Jahrbuch der Heimatgemeinschaft des Kreises Ecken förde e.V. 15 (1957):
173 202. For the broader context, see Bergmann and Megerle, “Protest und Aufruhr der
Landwirtschaft in der Weimarer Republik,” 200 87.
81
Memorandum by Kriegsheim for the members of the RLB executive committee, 6 June
1928, BA Koblenz, NL Weilnböck, 15.
    

president Count Eberhard von Kalckreuth proposed that the dual presidency
that had been in effect since 1925 be replaced by a new three-person presidium
consisting of the former Reich agricultural minister Martin Schiele and two
subordinate presidents, the identity of whom was yet to determined.82 Despite
protests from the representatives of the small peasant proprietors from west-
ern Germany that this arrangement bestowed preferential treatment upon
large landowning interests from east of the Elbe, the RLB overwhelmingly
approved a slightly modified version of Kalckreuth’s proposal in a series of
meetings on 31 July 1928 and 1 August.83 According to the compromise
embodied in this arrangement, Schiele would serve as the RLB’s executive
president (geschäftsführender Präsident) with CNBLP Reichstag deputy Karl
Hepp from Hesse-Nassau and estate owner Albrecht Bethge from Pomerania
as his deputy presidents. The fact that Hepp came from the west and Bethge
from the east represented a compromise that would satisfy the concerns of
large landowners and independent peasants alike and thus salvage the unity of
the RLB.84
Schiele’s election as RLB executive president was immediately hailed as a
victory for the more moderate elements within the German agricultural
community over those who sympathized with the more radical elements of
the Landvolkbewegung.85 Schiele’s election was particularly well received by
German industrialists who saw in him “a calm, well-balanced, and thoroughly
objective individual . . . who would strive to reach a compromise with indus-
try” on matters of common concern.86 At the same time, the election of Hepp
and Bethge as Schiele’s deputies was an attempt to depoliticize the RLB and to
insulate it against the increasingly bitter rivaly between the CNBLP and
DNVP. But Schiele’s reputation as a moderate and as a man of compromise
would set him on a collision course with Hugenberg and his “all-or-nothing”
policy as the DNVP’s newly elected national chairman. Such a collision
seemed all the more likely in view of Schiele’s interest in establishing closer
ties with agricultural interest organizations of different political persuasions as
a way of enhancing the effectiveness of the agrarian lobby at all levels of
government. Negotiations toward this end were already under way at the

82
Minutes of the full executive committee of the RLB, 5 July 1928, LHA Magdeburg
Wernigerode, Marienthal Gutsarchiv, 319/119 26. See also memorandum from Nicolas,
“Die Neuorganisation der Führungsorgane des Reichs Landbundes. Denkschrift für den
Gesamtvorstand des Brandenburg. Landbundes zur Vorstandssitzung vom 22.8.1928,” 16
Aug. 1928, BA Koblenz, NL Weilnböck, 15.
83
Nicholas, “Die Neuorganisation der Führungsorgane des Reichs Landbundes,” 16
Aug. 1928, BA Koblenz, NL Weilnböck, 15.
84
Reichs Landbund 8, no. 31 (4 Aug. 1928): 351.
85
Wilmowsky to Krupp, 2 Aug. 1928, Krupp Archiv Essen, FAH 23/502. See also Wil
mowsky to Reusch, 2 Aug. 1928, RWWA Cologne, Abt. 130, NL Reusch, 400101290/39.
86
Reusch to Wilmosky, 4 Aug. 1928, RWWA Cologne, Abt. 130, NL Reusch, 400101290/39.
   , –

regional level in the Rhineland, where in 1927–28 the predominantly Catholic

Rhenish Peasants’ Union (Rheinischer Bauern-Verein) under the leadership of
Baron Clemens von Loë-Bergerhausen, a Catholic conservative with close ties
to the DNVP, seceded from its parent organization in Berlin, the Association
of German Peasant Unions (Vereinigung der Deutschen Bauernvereine or
VDBV), to pursue closer organizational ties with the RLB’s regional affiliate,
the Rhenish Rural League (Rheinischer Landbund).87 Similar developments
were under foot in the neighboring province of Westphalia, where efforts to
merge the predominantly Catholic Westphalian Peasants’ Union (Westfälischer
Bauernbund or WBB) with the politically more conservative and Protestant-led
Westphalian Rural League (Westfälischer Landbund) enjoyed strong support
from elements of Westphalia’s Catholic aristocracy.88
All of this was part of an attempt by the more conservative elements of
Germany’s Catholic aristocracy to shore up their social and political hegem-
ony in the face of mounting peasant unrest. These developments, however,
caused great concern not just among the leaders of both the National Rural
League, who feared that the numerically stronger Catholic peasant unions in
the Rhineland and Westphalia would overwhelm their Protestant counterparts
in the RLB’s regional affiliates,89 but also within the Association of German
Peasant Unions, whose leaders were apprehensive that the two largest Catholic
peasant unions outside of Bavaria might fall under conservative domination.90
In response to grass-roots pressure for the creation of a single organization for
all of German agriculture, Schiele met with Andreas Hermes, the recently
elected chairman of the VDBV and a member of the Center Party, to explore
the possibility of closer cooperation between their respective organizations.
Hermes, who had replaced Baron Engelbert Kerckerinck zur Borg as VBDV
chairman earlier in the year, was more open than his predecessor to the

87
See the detailed memorandum by the Rheinischer Bauernverein, Hauptforstand, Bericht
über die Vorgänge, die zum Austritt des Rheinischen Bauernvereins aus der Vereinigung
der deutschen Bauernvereine geführt haben (n.p. [Cologne], 1927), ACDP Sankt Augus
tin, Bestand VI 051, 768. See also [Clemens von Loë Bergerhausen], Der Rheinische
Bauern Verein und seine Gesamtorganisation (n.p. [Cologne], n.d. [1929]), 61. For
further information, see Klaus Müller, “Agrarische Interessenverbände in der Weimarer
Republik,” Rheinische Vierteljahrsblätter 38 (1974): 386 405, and Jens Flemming, “Land
wirtschaftskammer und ländliche Organisationspolitik in der Rheinprovinz, 1918 1927.
Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der ‘Grünen Front’,” in Von der Reichsgründung bis zur
Weimarer Republik, ed. Kurt Düwell and Wolfgang Köllmann, 2 vols. (Wuppertal,
1984), 2:314 32.
88
See Papen to Lüninck, 16 Feb. 1928, VWA Münster, NL Lüninck, 732, and Lüninck to
Schorlemer, 20 Feb. 1928, ibid., 834.
89
Merkenich, Grüne Front gegen Weimar, 259.
90
Heide Barmeyer, Andreas Hermes und die Organisation der deutschen Landwirtschaft.
Christliche Bauernvereine, Reichslandbund, Grüne Front, Reichsnährstand 1928 1933
(Suttgart, 1971), 59 73.
    

possibility of an arrangement with the RLB and had already taken an import-
ant step toward toward that end when in October 1928 he succeeded in
negotiating an arrangement whereby Loë and the Rhenish Peasants’ Union
would rejoin the parent organization in Berlin.91
In late January 1929 Schiele set events in motion by calling for the creation
of a united agrarian front in his keynote address at the RLB’s annual conven-
tion.92 The negotiations that followed dragged on until 20 February when
Schiele, Hermes, Anton Fehr for the German Peasantry (Deutsche
Bauernschaft), and Ernst Brandes for the German Chamber of Agriculture
(Deutscher Landwirtschaftsrat) agreed to issue a joint appeal on behalf of a
united solution to the deepening agricultural crisis.93 At a mass rally in
Cologne later that month Schiele announced that the four organizations would
henceforth work “shoulder to shoulder” to promote the welfare of all of
German agriculture under the aegis of a new umbrella organization known
as the “Green Front.” Although Hermes and Schiele were careful to discourage
speculation that this foreshadowed a merger of their respective organizations,
their dementi did little to deter Loë and the organizers of the rally from
releasing a resolution of their own that called for “the creation of a united
economic-political organization for all German farmers without regard for
size, confession, or party.”94 The creation of the “Green Front,” however, fell
far short of this goal and represented instead a compromise by which Schiele
and Hermes sought to insulate their respective organizations against the
growing pressure from below for the creation of a single interest organization
for the entire agricultural community.95 On 20 March the four leaders of the
“Green Front” finalized the details of a comprehensive farm program that
covered everything from indexing of agricultural prices and increased tariff
protection for the domestic market to tax relief, easier access to credit, and
resettlement policy.96 At the same time, both Schiele and Hermes were quick

91
See Loë to Lüninck, 11 June 1928, WVA Münster, NL Lüninck, 732, as well as Loë’s
correspondence with Hermes, 23 June 1928 8 Oct. 1928, ibid., 733.
92
Schiele’s speech at the RLB’s annual conference in Berlin, 28 Jan. 1929, reported in
Reichs Landbund 9, no. 5 (2 Feb. 1929): 45 48.
93
Wilmowsky to Krupp, 20 Feb. 1929, HA Krupp, FAH 23/502. See also Hopp to Weiln
böck, 22 Feb. 1929, BA Koblenz, NL Weilnböck, 16b.
94
On the Cologne rally, see the report in the Rheinischer Bauer 47, no. 9 (2 Mar. 1929):
70 74, as well as Schiele, Hepp, and Bethge, “Zur Entwicklung des Einigungsgedankens
in Westfalen,” n.d. [April 1929], BA Kobelnz, NL Weilnböck, 16b. See also Barmeyer,
Hermes, 75 79.
95
Ibid., 83 89. See also Dieter Gessner, “Industrie und Landwirtschaft 1928 30,” in Indus
trielles System und politische Entwicklung in der Weimarer Rebublik. Verhandlungen des
Internationalen Symposiums in Bochum von 12. 17. June 1973, ed. Mommsen, Petzinna,
and Weisbrod (Düsseldorf, 1974), 762 78.
96
Wilmowsky to Krupp, 20 Mar. 1929, HA Krupp, FAH 23/502. See also Barmeyer,
Hermes, 89 94.
   , –

to reassure their supporters that the formation of the “Green Front” infringed
in no way whatsoever upon the integrity or independence of the participating
organizations.97 Not even this could satisfy the leaders of the Catholic peasant
unions and RLB affiliates in the Rhineland and Westphalia, who met in Hagen
on 11 March to issue an ultimatum to their counterparts in Berlin that if they
had not succeeded in creating a united national agricultural interest organiza-
tion by the beginning of October, they would invite all of the agricultural
associations throughout the country to join them in negotiations aimed at the
creation of such an organization.98
The Hagen ultimatum was the handiwork of Catholic nobles like Loë and
the two Lüninck brothers who sought to pressure Hermes and the Berlin
leadership of the Christian peasant unions into carrying the unification of
the German agricultural community, presumably under conservative auspices,
further than either Hermes or Schiele had originally intended.99 Infuriated by
the impudence of the Hagen ultimatum, Hermes summoned the leaders of the
Rhenish and Westphalian Peasants’ Unions to a meeting of the executive
committee of the Association of German Peasant Unions in Berlin on 20
March, where the very future of VDBV was at stake.100 Here Hermes mobil-
ized the support of the twenty-five other peasant unions that belonged to the
VDBV to isolate the delegations from the Rhineland and Westphalia and to
hand them a sharp and unequivocal rebuff.101 Under no circumstances,
stressed the resolution the VDBV released at the close of the meeting, should
cooperation with the RLB and other agrarian interest organizations in the
common struggle to provide the German farmer with the relief he so despa-
rately needed be jeopardized by the agitation for the creation of a single
agricultural interest organization. Nor would the Christian peasant unions,
the resolution continued, ever be part of a merger that in any way whatsoever
compromised their distinctly Christian character and sense of Christian
mission.102

97
See Schiele’s remarks before the RLB executive committee, 13 Mar. 1929, and Hermes’s
statement at a committee meeting of the Westphalian Peasants’ Union, 26 Mar. 1929,
both reprinted in Schiele, Hepp, and Bethge, “Zur Entwicklung des Einigungsgedankens
in Westfalen,” n.d. [Apr. 1929], BA Koblenz, NL Weilnböck, 16b.
98
For the text of the Hagen ultimatum, see [Loë Bergerhausen], Der Rheinische Bauern
Verein (see n. 91), 62, as well as Schiele, Hepp, and Bethge, “Zur Entwicklung des
Einigungsgedankens in Westfalen,” n.d. [Apr. 1929], BA Koblenz, NL Weilnböck, 16b.
99
Report by Golte at a meeting of the central committee of the Westphalian Peasants’
Union, 1 Mar. 1929, VWA Münster, NL Kerckerinck, 252.
100
Hermes to Kerckerinck, 13 Mar. 1929, VWA Münster, NL Kerckerinck, 289.
101
See Hermes to Kerckerinck zur Borg, 28 Mar. 1929, VWA Münster, NL Kerckerinck,
280, and the reports by Dieckmann and Golte at the meeting of the executive committee
of the Westphalian Peasants’ Union, 25 Mar. 1929, VWA Münster, NL Lüninck, 744.
102
Resolution of the VDBV executive committee, 20 Mar. 1929, appended to the circular
from Hermes to the Peasants’ Union, 21 Mar. 1929, BA Koblenz, Nachlass Karl Herold,
    

Despite the sharp rebuff the leaders of the Rhenish and Westaphalian
peasant unions received at the hands of the VDBV executive committee, the
agitation for the creation of a single interest organization for all of German
agriculture continued and would not relent until after Loë’s death in early
1930. The Rhenish Peasants’ Union would in fact conclude an alliance with the
Rhenish Rural League on 1 July 1929,103 while in Westphalia the leaders of
Westphalian Peasants’ Union would beat a tactical retreat in the face of heavy
pressure not just from Hermes but also from the organization’s former
chairman Kerckerinck zur Borg.104 All of this underscored the highly volatile
situation that existed in much of the German countryside as a result of the
deepening agricultural crisis and heightened the likelihood of a collision
between the pragmatic leadership of the “Green Front” and the “all-or-noth-
ing” strategy of Hugenberg. In fact, the leaders of the DNVP’s agrarian wing
were already growing wary of the direction in which Hugenberg seemed to be
taking the party and feared that relations between organized agriculture and
the DNVP would continue to deteriorate.105

Ordeal of the Catholic Right

The reverberations of Hugenberg’s election to the DNVP party chairmanship
also extended to the leadership of the party’s Catholic wing. Although the
DNVP was and remained a predominantly Protestant party, it had experi-
enced remarkable success in attracting the support of Catholic conservatives
who had become disenchanted with the Center’s turn to the left during and
after World War I. Much of this could be attributed directly to the work of the
DNVP’s National Catholic Committee, which had been founded in 1920–21
under the leadership of Count Engelbert von Landsberg-Velen. Although
Landsberg and his supporters had contributed in no small measure to the
DNVP’s victories in the May and December 1924 Reichstag elections,106 they
were obliged to temper their attacks on the Center for the sake of coalition
etiquette and assumed a less conspicuous role in the party’s internal affairs
after the DNVP’s entry into the national government first in January 1925 and

24. See also the official protocol of this meeting, ACDP Sankt Augustin, Nachlass
Andreas Hermes, I 090 2
103
Müller, “Agrarische Interessenverbände,” 399.
104
Kerckerinck zur Borg to Dieckmann, 14 Mar. 1929, VWA Münster, NL Kerckerinck,
252. See also the exchange of letters between Hermes and Kerckerinck, 28 Mar. 20.
Apr. 1929, ibid., 280, as well as Lüninck’s remarks at a meeting of the WBB executive
committee, 6 Nov. 1929, VWA Münster, NL Lüninck, 744.
105
Lind to Hugenberg, 6 May 1929, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, VN 102.
106
For further information, see Jones, “Catholics on the Right: The Reich Catholic Com
mittee of the German National People’s Party, 1920 33,” Historisches Jahrbuch 126
(2006): 221 67, and Hübner, Rechtskatholiken, 235 64, 352 73.
   , –

then two years later in January 1927.107 Westarp’s resignation as DNVP party
chairman in July 1928 plunged the party’s Catholic leaders into the middle of
the bitter fight for control of the party that ensued. Martin Spahn, arguably the
most prominent DNVP Catholic after his defection to the party at the Munich
party congress in September 1921, had actively supported Hugenberg’s candi-
dacy for the party chairmanship.108 Landsberg, on the other hand, was among
those who did not vote for the new party chairman in the decisive meeting of
the DNVP party representation in October 1928, although he quickly recon-
ciled himself to Hugenberg’s election in the hope that under the new party
chairman the DNVP’s Reich Catholic Committee might reclaim for itself the
role it had played in the early 1920s.109 This, however, never materialized.
Although the leaders of the DNVP’s Catholic committee received exemption
from the organizational reforms that Hugenberg introduced as DNVP party
chairman at the end of 1928,110 they soon found themselves embroiled in a
bitter conflict with the party leadership over its position on the ratification of
the Concordat that the Prussian state government negotiated with the Holy
See in June 1929.
After the end of World War I the Vatican launched a determined effort to
secure the legal status of the Catholic Church wherever possible through the
conclusion of special treaties or concordats with secular political authorities.
Following the defeat of the national school bill in early 1928, the Prussian
government under the leadership of Social Democrat Otto Braun – no doubt
in an attempt to bind the Center more firmly to the existing governmental
coalitions in both Prussia and the Reich – negotiated a concordat with the
Holy See in June 1929 that contained a number of far-reaching concessions on
the legal status and prerogatives of the Catholic Church in Prussia.111
Although the treaty discreetly avoided any mention of the role of the churches
in the Prussian educational system, it encountered widespread opposition
from Protestant groups affiliated with the DNVP that greatly exacerbated
confessional tensions throughout the party organization. All of this placed
the leaders of the DNVP’s Reich Catholic Committee in a difficult situation.
For while the Catholic members of the DNVP delegation to the Prussian

107
Spahn to Hugenberg, 23 Apr. 1930, BA Koblenz, NL Spahn, 86.
108
On Spahn’s relationship to Hugenberg, see his letter to Hugenberg, 3 Jan. 1928, BA
Koblenz, NL Spahn, 86.
109
Landsberg to Hugenberg, 15 Nov. 1928, VWA Münster, NL Landsberg, II. This desig
nation refers to the second of two volumes of correspondence with the DNVP in the
Landsberg Nachlass that do not carry any special identification.
110
Landsberg’s remarks in the minutes of the DNVP Reich Catholic Committee, 10
Mar. 1929, VWA Münster, NL Landsberg, E1.
111
For further details, see Stewart Stehlin, Weimar and the Vatican, 1919 1933: German
Vatican Diplomatic Relations in the Interwar Years (Princeton, NJ, 1983), 412 29.
    

Landtag would most likely vote for the proposed concordat if it met their
expectations,112 the party’s Protestant leaders remained strongly opposed to
any arrangement with the Vatican that was not accompanied by a parallel
arrangement with the Lutheran Church.113 In December 1928 Hugenberg
brought the leaders of the two factions together in an attempt to resolve their
differences and formulate a common position on the question of the Prussian
concordat.114 The net result of this was a resolution adopted by the DNVP
party representation on 8 December 1928 whereby the party endorsed the
principle of a concordat with the Catholic Church but only if it were accom-
panied by a similar agreement with the Lutheran Church and did not infringe
upon either the sovereign rights of the Prussian state or Germany’s national
interest.115
The Prussian government had little interest in an arrangement with the
Prussian Lutheran Church and saw no point in including the DNVP in the
concordat negotiations. The concordat that Prussia concluded with the Vati-
can on 14 June 1929 fell far short of the DNVP’s demands for parity with the
Lutheran Church and provoked immediate condemnation from the DNVP
party leadership. Since ratification of the concordat in the Prussian Landtag
was by no means certain, the ten Catholics who belonged to the DNVP’s
Prussian delegation found themselves caught between the insistence of the
party leadership that they must maintain solidarity with the delegation major-
ity by voting against ratification and pressure from the local and district
leaders of the party’s Catholic committees to join the Center in voting for
ratification.116 For the leaders of the DNVP Reich Catholic Committee, their
“trial by fire,” as Landsberg put it at a hastily convened meeting of the

112
Minutes of the DNVP Reich Catholic Committee, 5 Dec. 1928, VWA Münster, NL
Landsberg, E1.
113
For example, see Albrecht Philipp, Betrachtungen zur Konkordatsfrage, Schriften der
Deutschnationalen Volkspartei Sachsen, no. 21 (Dresden, 1927). See also Norbert
Friedrich, “‘National, Sozial, Christlich’. Der Evangelische Reichsausschuß der Deutsch
nationalen Volkspartei in der Weimarer Republik,” Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte 6 (1993):
290 311, esp. 297 301, and Jonathan Wright, “Above Parties”: The Political Attitudes of
the German Protestant Church Leadership, 1918 1933 (Oxford, 1974), 38 42.
114
Minutes of Hugenberg’s meeting with representatives from the DNVP’s Reich Catholic
and Evangelical Reich Committees, 6 Dec. 1928, VWA Münster, NL Landsberg, E1.
115
“Entschließung zur Konkordatsfrage,” 8 Dec. 1928, BA Berlin, R 8005, 15/18. See also
“Gutachten in der Sache des preußischen Konkordats,” n.d., appended to a letter from
Mumm to Westarp, 28 Mai 1929, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, VN 102. For further infor
mation, see Die Konkordatsfrage, Deutschnationales Rüstzeug, no. 14 (Berlin, 1928),
18 21, 26 30.
116
Glasebock and Klövekorn from the DNVP State Catholic Committee for the Lower
Rhein (Landes Katholikenausschuß Niederrhein der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei) to
the DNVP Prussian Landtag delegation, 27 June 1929, BA Berlin, NL Mumm, 655/
252 54.
   , –

committee on 19 June 1929, had arrived.117 Virtually the entire committee

supported Landsberg’s argument that the Catholic members of the Prussian
delegation should be allowed to vote according to the dictates of their con-
science and denounced the efforts of the party’s Prussian leadership to impose
party discipline upon the Catholics in the DNVP delegation. Only Spahn, one
of Hugenberg’s closest confidants in the party, struck a dissenting note when
he claimed that the concordat was essentially a ploy by the Social Democrats to
play one confession off against the other and sew disunity in the ranks of the
nationalist Right. For Spahn the highest priority was to preserve the unity of
the Prussian delegation regardless of whether it voted to support or reject
ratification of the concordat.118
At a joint meeting of the DNVP’s two confessional committees under
Keudell’s chairmanship later that afternoon, Wilhelm Koch and the leaders
of the party’s Lutheran faction reaffirmed their party’s commitment to the
principle of confessional parity and insisted that the delegation abide by
the resolution of the DNVP party representation from 8 December 1928.
In the face of strong opposition from the DNVP’s Lutheran leadership,
Landsberg and his supporters insisted that the Catholic members of the
Prussian delegation should be allowed to vote their conscience and that the
party would be ill-advised to force them to do otherwise.119 On the following
day Landsberg wrote to Hugenberg to register the severity with which the
DNVP Reich Catholic Committee and the Catholic members of the Prussian
delegation viewed the situation. Not only did Landsberg stress that his com-
mittee had neither the desire nor the power to impose any sort of discipline on
the Catholic members of the Prussian delegation, but he warned that those
Catholic deputies who failed to support the concordat would find themselves
alienated from the rest of the committee by such a profound gulf that future
cooperation within the framework of the committee would be impossible.120
Hugenberg, who felt that party unity and tactical considerations took priority

117
Landsberg’s remarks at the meeting of the DNVP Reich Catholic Committee, 19 June
1929, VWA Münster, NL Landsberg, E1. See the entry in Gallwitz’s diary, 19 June 1929,
BA MA Freiburg, NL Gallwitz, 49. On the dilemma of DNVP Catholics, see Landsberg
to Mumm, 9 June 1929, BA Berlin, NL Mumm, 655/232. For further details, see Hübner,
Rechtskatholiken, 541 70.
118
Minutes of the DNVP Reich Catholic Committee, 19 June 1929, VWA Münster, NL
Landsberg, E1. For Landsberg’s account of this meeting, see [Engelbert von Landsberg
Steinfurth], Der Reichskatholikenausschuß und das Konkordat. Eine Rechenschaftsbericht
(N.p., n.d. [1929]), 4 5, in VWA Münster, NL Landsberg, E4.
119
Minutes of a meeting between representatives from the DNVP Reich Catholic Commit
tee and the DNVP Evangelical Reich Committee, 19 June 1929, VWA Münster, NL
Landsberg, E1.
120
Landsberg to Hugenberg, 20 June 1929, VWA Münster, NL Landsberg, E1. The text
of this letter has been published as appendix IIa in [Landsberg Velen], Reichs
katholikenausschuß und das Konkordat, 11 12.
    

over the sectarian concerns of the DNVP’s Catholics, responded coolly to

Landsberg’s entreaties and simply repeated the well rehearsed arguments of
those within the DNVP’s Prussian delegation who opposed ratification of the
concordat.121
On 1 July Landsberg and Max Wallraf from the DNVP’s Reich Catholic
Committee met with Hugenberg and other party leaders in a last-ditch effort
to break the impasse over the concordat. Hugenberg and the party leadership
remained firm in making the DNVP’s support of the concordat with the
Catholic Church in Prussia contingent upon the simultaneous conclusion of
a similar arrangement with the Prussian Lutheran Church.122 Whatever hopes
Landsberg may have had of averting an open break with the DNVP party
leadership were definitively dashed when at the close of a tumultuous meeting
of the DNVP Prussian Landtag delegation on 5 July Hugenberg announced
that “in the final vote no deputy, as long as he is a member of the delegation,
may vote for acceptance of the concordat.” The delegation then incorporated
Hugenberg’s statement into a resolution it adopted over the strenuous objec-
tions of its Catholic members.123 To Landsberg, Hugenberg’s action infringed
upon the individual deputy’s freedom of conscience, and he protested vigor-
ously that this constituted a breach of the party’s faith with its Catholic
supporters.124 One member of the delegation, Franz Goldau, was so aggrieved
by Hugenberg’s handling of the matter that on the day before the decisive vote
in the Prussian Landtag he announced that he would vote for the concordat
regardless of the consequences this might have for his membership in the
DNVP’s Prussian delegation.125 The remaining Catholics in the DNVP’s
Prussian delegation, however, submitted to party discipline and voted against
the proposed concordat when it came up for ratification on 9 July 1929.126
Although Hugenberg’s opposition was not sufficient to keep the concordat
from finding the votes it needed for ratification, his refusal to allow the
Catholic members of the Prussian delegation to vote according to their
conscience represented the final indignity for Landsberg and his supporters.
Frustrated by the lack of support his efforts at a compromise had received at

121
Brackel to Landsberg, 21 June 1929, VWA Münster, NL Landsberg, II.
122
For Landsberg’s account of his meeting, see [Landsberg Velen], Reichs
katholikenausschuß und Konkordat, 5 6. See also Landsberg to Buchner, 4 July 1929,
VWA Münster, NL Landsberg, II, also in BA Koblenz, Nachlass Max Buchner, 66.
123
For a defense of the resolution, see “Die Wahrheit über die Konkordats Verhandlun
gen!,” n.d. [July 1929], BA Berlin, NL Mumm, 655/289. See also Hugenberg to Lands
berg, 10 July 1929, 10 July 1929, VWA Münster, NL Landsberg, II.
124
Landsberg to Hugenberg, 6 July 1929, VWA Münster, NL Landsberg, II.
125
Statement by Goldau, 8 July 1929, BA Berlin, R 8005, 474/12. See also the memorandum
by Brackel, n.d. [July 1929], VWA Münster, NL Landsberg, II.
126
Entry in Gallwitz’s diary, 10 July 1929, BA MA Freiburg, NL Gallwitz, 41. See also
Unsere Partei 7, no. 14 (15 July 1929): 238 39.
   , –

the upper echelons of the party leadership, Landsberg informed Hugenberg

that it was no longer possible for him to function as a representative of the
party’s Catholic interests and that he was resigning both as chairman of the
DNVP Reich Catholic Committee and from the committee itself.127 Landsberg
was immediately joined in his decision to leave the committee by its deputy
chairman Paul Lejeune-Jung, Reichstag deputy Max Wallraf, Max Buchner
from Bavaria, Willy Glasebock from the Rhineland, Viktor Lukassowitz and
Kurt Ziesché from Silesia, and retired general Max von Gallwitz from south-
west Germany.128 Aside from Goldau, none of the party’s Catholic leaders
went so far as to leave the party, although their disenchantment with Hugen-
berg’s political leadership was indeed great. The leaders of the DNVP’s
Catholic wing were demoralized by these events, and their loyalty to the party,
particularly under Hugenberg’s leadership, could no longer be taken for
granted.

The DNVP Catholics were the first casualties of Hugenberg’s efforts to

transform the DNVP from a sociologically and confessionally heterogeneous
conservative Sammelpartei into a block forged by “the iron hammer of Welt-
anschauung.” As his first major test of strength with those who did not fully
share his political agenda, the dispute over the Prussian concordat exposed
Hugenberg’s shortcomings as a political leader and in particular his inability to
compromise when that was clearly the reasonable course of action. But as
developments within the German People’s Party and Center clearly indicated,
the unrest that existed within the DNVP was by no means confined to that
party alone. In fact, the entire spectrum of bourgeois politics seemed to be in a
state of ferment that suggested that far-reaching changes in the structure of the
German party system were at hand. For Hugenberg and the leaders of the
radical Right, the question was whether they could turn this to their own
advantage and transform the uneasiness that had made itself manifest in
various sectors of Germany’s party system into a mandate for political change.

127
Landsberg to Hugenberg, 9 July 1929, VWA Münster, NL Landsberg, II, reprinted in
[Landsberg Steinfurt], Reichskatholikenausschuß und Konkordat. Ein Rechenschaftsbericht,
13. See also the entries in Gallwitz’s diary, 8 10 July 1929, BA MA Freiburg, NL
Gallwitz, 41.
128
Ibid. See also Lejeune Jung to Hugenberg, 6 July 1929, in [Landsberg Steinfurt],
Reichskatholikenausschuß und Konkordat, 13, as well as Lukassowitz to Landsberg,
11 July 1929, and Gallwitz to Landsberg, 7 and 16 July 1929, both in VWA Münster,
NL Landsberg, II. On Gallwitz, see Jakob Jung, Max von Gallwitz (1952 1937). General
und Politiker (Osnabrück, 1995), 175 84.
 15

The Chimera of Right-Wing Unity

Speaking before the DVP central executive committee in February 1929,

Gustav Stresemann exclaimed: “Let us not delude ourselves: We stand in a
crisis of parliamentarism that is far more than a mere crisis of confidence or
no confidence in a particular government.”1 DDP party chairman Erich Koch-
Weser echoed these sentiments several months later when in his keynote
address at the DDP’s Mannheim party congress in early October 1929 he
stated: “The [Weimar] Constitution is good. But what the parties have made of
it is a mockery.”2 Coming from two of Germany’s most highly respected
liberal statesmen, these comments reflected the growing uneasiness that even
those who were most deeply committed to the existing constitutional order
were beginning to feel about the way in which it had developed over the course
of the previous decade. At the heart of the problem lay the fact that Germany’s
political parties had been transformed more and more into instruments of the
special economic interests that constituted their material base. This was very
much a legacy of the role that organized economic interests had played in the
stabilization of the mark in 1923–24 and in the return to a measure of
economic normalcy in the second half of the 1920s. But with the onset of
the great depression, the level of social and economic conflict was intensified
to the point where Germany’s parliamentary system was no longer capable of
generating a viable domestic consensus for the conduct of national policy, a
fact that had become all too apparent in the torturous negotiations that
accompanied the reorganization of the Müller cabinet in the spring of 1929.
The crisis to which Stresemann and Koch-Weser were alluding had suddenly
become a fact of German political life.3

1
Stresemann’s speech before the DVP central executive committee, 26 Feb. 1929, PA AA
Berlin, NL Stresemann, 103/174673 90, reprinted in an abridged version as “Die Krise des
Parlamentarismus,” Deutsche Stimmen 41, no. 5 (5 Mar. 1929): 134 41.
2
Koch Weser’s speech at the DDP’s Mannheim party congress, 4 Oct. 1929, in Der
Demokrat. Mitteilungen aus der Deutschen Demokratischen Partei 10, no. 20 (20
Oct. 1929): 486 96.
3
For various iterations of this argument, see Werner Conze, “Die Krise des Parteienstaates
in Deutschland 1928/30,” Historische Zeitschrift 178 (1954): 47 83; Lothar Albertin, “Die
Auflösung der bürgerlichen Mitte und die Krise des parlamentarischen Systems von


   , –

Overtures to Right-Wing Unity

The increasing paralysis of Germany’s parliamentary system clearly worked to
the advantage of the German Right. No organization on the German Right was
more eager to move into the vacuum created by the paralysis of Weimar
democracy than the Stahlhelm. The outcome of the 1928 Reichstag elections
and the formation of a new national government under Social Democratic
leadership had produced a backlash against those within the Stahlhelm who
had staked their organization’s future on the cultivation of close ties with the
various right-wing parties. Seldte, the more moderate of the Stahlhelm’s two
national leaders, signaled that he had lost all hope in Stresemann’s leadership
of the DVP and that he no longer saw any point in trying to work with the
German Foreign Minister.4 At the same time, the activists around Duesterberg
had grown increasingly frustrated with their organization’s political ineffect-
iveness and were pressing for a more aggressive stance in the struggle against
democracy and the legacy of the November Revolution.5 The growing radical-
ization of the Stahlhelm in the wake of the 1928 Reichstag elections could be
seen not only in Morosowicz’s infamous “Fürstenwald Hate Declaration” but
also in the widespread sympathy that Hugenberg’s bid for the DNVP party
chairmanship enjoyed among the more militant elements in the Stahlhelm
organization.
In an attempt to channel the frustration of those within the Stahlhelm who
advocated a more aggressive course of action, the Stahlhelm executive com-
mittee decided at a meeting in late September 1928 to initiate a popular
referendum for a revision of the Weimar Constitution.6 The author of this
proposal was Heinz Brauweiler, a Catholic conservative who had joined the
Stahlhelm in 1926 to become the editor of its national newspaper before being
appointed head of the Stahlhelm’s political division a year or so later.7 A neo-
conservative activist with close ties to the Ring Movement, Brauweiler had
championed a reform of the Weimar Constitution along corporatist lines in

Weimar,” in Demokratie in der Krise. Parteien im Verfassungssystem der Weimarer

Republik, ed. Eberhard Kolb and Walter Mühlhausen (Munich, 1997), 59 111; and
Andreas Wirsching, “Koalition, Opposition, Interessenpolitik. Probleme des Weimarer
Parteienparlamentarismus,” in Parlamentarismus in Europa. Deutschland, England und
Frankreich, ed. Marie Luise Recker (Munich, 2004), 41 64.
4
Wegener to Hugenberg, 31 Aug. 1928, BA Koblenz, NL Wegener, 65/295 96.
5
For example, see Loewe to the Berlin headquarters of the Stahlhelm, 11 July 1928, and
Borck to Seldte and Duesterberg, 11 July 1928, StA Mönchen Gladbach, NL Brauweiler,
117, as well as Lüninck to Brauweiler, 11 Aug. 1928, VWA Münster, NL Lüninck, 769.
6
Minutes of the Stahlhelm executive committee, 22 23 Sept. 1928, BA Berlin, R 72, 9/
90 95. For further details, see Klotzbücher, “Der politische Weg des Stahlhelm,” 169 86,
and Berghahn, Stahlhelm, 103 22.
7
Brauweiler, “Meine Tätigkeit im ‘Stahlhelm’,” 22 Dec. 1965, StA Mönchen Gladbach, NL
Brauweiler, 110.
    -  

the early years of the Weimar Republic and in 1925 had outlined a compre-
hensive proposal for the reorganization of state, society, and economy in his
book Berufsstand und Staat.8 Brauweiler’s proposed reform of the Weimar
Constitution had two central features: first, a call to strengthen the powers of
the Reich President by vesting him with the authority to appoint the chancel-
lor without the consent of the Reichstag and, second, a proposal to lift the
immunity of deputies charged with high treason.9 To be sure, all of this fell far
short of the sweeping constitutional reforms that Brauweiler had originally
envisaged in his publications from the early 1920s, but it nevertheless repre-
sented the common denominator upon which not just the various factions
within the Stahlhelm but all of the right-wing parties and organizations that
the Stahlhelm hoped to bring together could agree.
The strategic objective that lay at the heart of Brauweiler’s proposal was to
place the Stahlhelm at the head of the national movement and to establish it as
the focal point around which the various organizations that belonged to the
national movement would revolve. Even the more activist elements around
Duesterberg and Morosowicz lined up in support of Brauweiler’s proposal,
and on 22–23 September 1928 the Stahlhelm executive committee issued a
resolution announcing its plans to initiate a referendum for a reform of the
Weimar Constitution.10 The leaders of the Stahlhelm immediately entered into
negotiations with other organizations on the German Right to determine to
what extent they were willing to join the Stahlhelm in launching a referendum
for a revision of the constitution.11 On 18 October Seldte, Duesterberg, and
Brauweiler met with Schiele, Hepp, and Arno Kriegsheim from the National
Rural League and received tentative commitments of support for the proposed
referendum.12 In a parallel move, the leaders of the Stahlhelm took steps to

8
Heinz Brauweiler, Berufsstand und Staat. Betrachtungen über eine neuständische Verfas
sung des deutschen Staates (Berlin, 1925). See also Brauweiler, “Parlamentarismus und
berufsständische Verfassungsreform,” Preußischer Jahrbücher 202, no. 1 (Oct. 1925):
58 72.
9
Brauweiler before the Stahlhelm executive committee, 22 23 Sept. 1928, BA Berlin, R 72,
9/90 95. For further details, see Simon, “Brauweiler,” 221 30, as well as Volker
R. Berghahn, “Das Volksbegehren gegen den Young Plan und die Ursprünge des Präsi
dialregimes, 1928 1930,” in Industrielle Gesellschaft und politisches System. Beiträge zur
politischen Sozialgeschichte. Festschrift für Fritz Fischer zum siebzigsten Geburtstag, ed.
Dirk Stegmann, Bernd Jürgen Wendt, and Peter Christian Witt (Bonn, 1978), 431 46.
10
In this respect, see Friedrich Everling, Warum bekämpfen wir den Parlamentarismus?,
Stahlhelm Flugschrift, no. 1 (n.p. [Berlin], n.d. [1929]), and Alexander Pache, Die Krisis
der Verfassung. Ein aufklärendes Wort zum Volksbegehren (Zwickau, n.d. [1929]).
11
Duesterberg to Seldte, 27 Sept. 1928, BA Berlin, R 72, 300/4. See also Duesterberg to
Wagner, 26 Sept. 1928, ibid., 300/30 31.
12
Protocol of a meeting between leaders of the Stahlhelm and RLB, 18 Oct. 1928, BA Berlin,
R 72, 49/25 33. See also Kriegsheim to the RLB district and local offices, 13 Oct. 1928, BA
Berlin, R 8034 I, 74/2.
   , –

repair its relations with the DVP through the offices of Erich von Gilsa, a
member of the DVP Reichstag delegation who also belonged to the Stahlhelm
and enjoyed good relations with its leaders.13 Of the organizations with which
Brauweiler and the leaders of the Stahlhelm established contact in the fall of
1928, only the Young German Order refused to make so much as a tentative
commitment to the Stahlhelm’s proposed referendum, with the result that
relations between the two organizations were on the brink of an open break.14
In the meantime, Seldte traveled extensively throughout the country lining
up commitments from prominent businessmen and industrialists, not the least
of whom was Wilhelm Cuno, the former chancellor and currently chief
executive of the Hamburg-American Shipping Lines (Hamburg-Amerika-
nische Packetenfahrt-AG or HAPAG) in Hamburg.15 Cuno had maintained
a low profile ever since his resignation as chancellor in the late summer of
1923. But after the dismal showing of Germany’s right-wing parties in the
1928 national elections, Cuno launched a political comeback that his support-
ers hoped would end in his election to the Reich presidency.16 In October
1928 Cuno invited representatives of various right-wing organizations from
northern Germany for a steamer trip on the Elbe. The outing was organized
under the auspices the Hamburg National Club of 1919 (Hamburger Natio-
naler Klub von 1919), and its purpose was to discuss what could be done to
restore the unity and striking force of the German Right. The participants
represented a cross-section of Germany’s conservative elite and included
spokesmen for the National Club’s sister organizations in Augsburg, Berlin,
and Saxony, the German Gentlemen’s Club in Berlin and its affiliated societies,
or Herrengesellschaften, from throughout the Reich, as well as a delegation
from the United Patriotic Associations of Germany under the leadership of
Count Rüdiger von der Goltz. Most of those in attendance were committed to
a restoration of the monarchy, although for some this was more a goal for the
distant rather than the immediate future. Setting aside whatever differences
there may have been on the appropriate form of government, the participants
not only agreed to support Cuno’s candidacy for the Reich Presidency but also
encouraged the immediate creation of a nonpartisan “Reich Committee of
German Men from the Parties of the Right and Middle” to counter the
splintering of Germany’s bourgeois forces.17

13
Wagner to Czettritz, 27 Oct. 1928, BA Berlin, R 72, 35/28 29.
14
Ibid.
15
Seldte to Wegener, 19 Nov. 1928, BA Koblenz, NL Wegener, 28/49.
16
On Cuno’s activities in the late Weimar Republic, see Gerhard Granier, Magnus von
Levetzow. Seeoffizier, Monarchist und Wegbereiter Hitlers. Lebensweg und ausgewählte
Dokumente (Boppard, 1982), 129 70.
17
On the outing on the Elbe, see the report by Holten (?), n.d. [May June 1930], BA MA
Freiburg, Nachlass Magnus von Levetzow, 54/28 34, and Levetzow to Wildgrube, 8
Oct. 1928, ibid., 51/187. See also Manfred Asendorf, “Hamburger Nationalklub,
    -  

A particularly important player in the efforts to unify the German Right in

the late 1920s was the retired admiral Magnus von Levetzow. Levetzow
enjoyed close ties to the imperial household in Doorn, and in October
1928 he began to receive regular subsidies from the exiled Kaiser for the
support of patriotic projects as part of a plan to lay the groundwork for a
return of the monarchy.18 Though unequivocally committed to the restoration
of the monarchy, Levetzow did not believe that this lay in the Germany’s
immediate future and believed that in the interim he should concentrate his
energies on the unification of the German Right.19 By the fall of 1928 Cuno,
Levetzow, and the VVVD’s Goltz had developed a close working relationship
in establishing a broadly based alliance of all right-wing organizations in
Germany. Among other things, Levetzow helped Cuno gain access to Bavarian
monarchist circles, although a meeting in Munich of Cuno and his entourage
with representatives of the south Germany’s landed aristocracy in early
December 1928 to solicit their support for the creation of a national umbrella
organization for the German Right foundered on the latter’s particularist
sympathies. Still, the two groups affirmed a far-reaching consensus on most
other political issues, including the possibility of a Cuno candidacy for the
Reich Presidency.20
The efforts of Cuno, Levetzow, and Goltz paralleled those of the Stahlhelm.
In late September 1928 Levetzow established contact with Seldte and apprised
him of the plans for the creation of an umbrella organization for the entire
German Right.21 Levetzow had taken notice of the “Fürstenwald Hate Declar-
ation” and the Stahlhelm’s plans to initiate a popular referendum for a revision
of the Weimar Constitution and looked upon the Stahlhelm as a potential
ally in his efforts to unify the German Right.22 Seldte, Duesterberg, and
Brauweiler took part in the second meeting of the Cuno circle in Hamburg
in late November 1928. Seldte and Duesterberg were appointed to the
steering committee that took shape in January 1929 under the chairmanship
of the VVVD’s Goltz to lay the foundation for the creation of a large
national committee embracing all of the political parties, economic interest

Keppler Kreis, Arbeitsstelle Schacht und der Aufstieg Hitlers,” 1999. Zeitschrift für
Sozialgeschichte des 20. und 21. Jahrhunderts 2 (1987): 106 50, esp. 106 16.
18
On the terms of Levetzow’s support, see Sell to Levetzow, 24 Aug. 1928, BA MA Freiburg,
NL Levetzow, 51/159 60. See also Holger H. Herwig, “From Kaiser to Führer: The
Political Road of a German Admiral, 1923 33,” Journal of Contemporary History 9
(1974): 107 20.
19
See Levetzow to Hugenberg, 23 Oct. 1928, BA MA Freiburg, NL Levetzow, 51/207, and
Sell, 27 Oct. 1928, ibid., 51/214 15.
20
Holten’s report, May June 1930, ibid., 54/28 34.
21
Ibid.
22
Levetzow to Donnersmark, 27 Oct. 1928, BA MA Freiburg, NL Levetzow, 82/103 05.
   , –

organizations, patriotic associations, and political clubs that sought a change

in the existing political system.23 At its first meeting on 11 January the
committee discussed the Stahlhelm’s proposed referendum for a revision of
the Weimar Constitution but made its participation contingent upon that of
the National Rural League and DNVP.24 Although Seldte had sought good
relations with Hugenberg following the latter’s election to the DNVP party
chairmanship in late October 1928,25 the leaders of the Stahlhelm were
apprehensive that the DNVP might try to preempt their referendum for a
revision of the Weimar Constitution by coming out with their own proposals
for constitutional reform.26

A Modest Proposal
The Stahlhelm’s negotiations with the DNVP both before and after
Hugenberg’s election to the party chairmanship proved far more difficult than
its leaders had ever anticipated. In the lead-up to the election of the new party
chairman, Westarp had sought an alliance that was closer than the leaders of
the Stahlhelm were willing to accept and remained cool to their idea of a
referendum for constitutional revision.27 After his election as DNVP party
chairman, Hugenberg expressed initial support for the Stahlhelm’s referen-
dum28 but began to waver about making a formal commitment as the date for
publication of the appeal drew near. The Stahlhelm chose 13 November 1928,
the tenth anniversary of the Stahlhelm’s founding in Magdeburg, to present
the formal text of the proposed referendum and announced that it would form
a National Committee for the Referendum (Reichsausschuß für das Volksbe-
gehren) in which all of those organizations that supported the campaign for a
revision of the Weimar Constitution would be represented.29 The Stahlhelm
officially launched the campaign at a national leadership conference (Reichs-
führertagung) in Magdeburg on 19 January 1929, the tenth anniversary of the
elections to the Weimar National Assembly and the symbolic birth date of the

23
For Goltz’s objectives, see Goltz, “Was wollen die Vereinigten vaterländischen Verbände
Deutschlands,” 24 July 1929, BA Berlin, Zsg 1, E87.
24
Holten’s report, May June 1930, BA MA Freiburg, NL Levetzow, 54/28 34.
25
Correspondence between Seldte and Wegener, 19 Oct. 16 Nov. 1928, BA Koblenz, NL
Wegener, 28/44 49.
26
Brauweiler to Seldte, 4 Oct. 1928, StA Mönchen Gladbach, NL Brauweiler, 117.
27
Ibid. See also Seldte to Brauweiler, 26 Sept. 1928, ibid. For Westarp’s assessment of the
proposed referendum, see his letter to Hiller von Gaertringen, 6 Feb. 1929, NL Westarp,
Gärtringen, VN 82.
28
Seldte to Wegener, 16 Nov. 1928, BA Koblenz, NL Wegener, 28/44 45.
29
Brauweiler’s remarks at a meeting of the Stahlhelm executive committee, 24 25
Nov. 1928, BA Berlin, R 72, 9/17 20.
    -  

Weimar Republic.30 But the flurry of activity that accompanied the official
promulgation of the referendum at the turn of the new year provoked a sharp
rebuke from a totally unexpected quarter, the DNVP. In late February
1929 Baron Axel von Freytagh-Loringhoven, a Hugenberg loyalist and the
party’s expert on constitutional affairs, caught everyone off guard when he
categorically rejected the proposed referendum before a large crowd of VVVD
supporters in Berlin.31 Although Hugenberg moved quickly to censor the
dissident DNVP deputy and thus prevent a further strain in his party’s
relations with the Stahlhelm,32 the prevailing sentiment within the DNVP
was that both the Stahlhelm and the National Rural League would have to
subordinate themselves to its leadership if the creation of a united German
Right and the struggle for a change in the existing political system were to be
successful.33
For the leaders of the Stahlhelm, what mattered the most was not so much
the actual language of the referendum itself as the sense of right-wing unity to
which they hoped the referendum campaign would give rise.34 In a memoran-
dum prepared for the leaders of the Stahlhelm in mid-March 1929, Brauweiler
reviewed the progress the Stahlhelm had made in securing commitments from
the parties and organizations on the German Right. According to Brauweiler,
firm commitments of support had been received from twelve nationalist
associations, including the VVVD, the Pan-German League, the German
Noble’s Society, the German Gentlemen’s Club, the Reich Citizens’ Council,
and the National Association of German Officers. Only Mahraun’s Young
German Order and the Tannenburg League (Tannenburg-Bund) under the
leadership of Erich Ludendorff of World War I fame declined to take part. Of
the various political parties, both the DNVP and CNBLP promised their full
support, while negotiations with spokesmen for the DVP, the Business Party,
the German-Hanoverian Party (Deutsch-Hannoversche Partei), and the Bav-
arian People’s Party were still under way. Brauweiler also noted that the
National Socialists had expressed reservations about the proposed referendum
and were apparently fearful that its defeat might have a negative impact upon
their movement’s prospects. Of the various economic interest organizations,
both the National Rural League and the Rhenish and Westphalian peasant

30
W[ilhelm] K[leinau], “Reichsführertagung des Stahlhelms,” Die Standarte 4, no. 4 (26
Jan. 1929): 75 76. See also the two flyers “Warum Stahlhelm Volksbegehren? Ein Wort
an Alle!,” n.d., and “Warum Stahlhelm Volksbegehren? Ein Wort an die Führer!,” n.d.,
both in the Hoover Institution Archives, Special Collections, Box 8, Folder 183.
31
Ausfeld to Marklowski, 20 Feb. 1929, BA Berlin, R 72, 55/82 83.
32
Ausfeld to Marklowski, 8 Mar. 1929, ibid., 55/75 77.
33
Leopold Reisner, Stahlhelm, Landbund und Deutschnationale Volkspartei, ed. Deutsch
nationale Volkspartei, Landesverband Frankfurt (Oder) (Landsberg a.W., n.d. [1929]).
34
Ausfeld to Marklowski, 8 Mar. 1929, BA Berlin, R 72, 55/75 77.
   , –

unions had committed their full support, but negotiations with the German
National Union of Commercial Employees had reached an impasse, in large
part because the DHV feared that support of the referendum might jeopardize
its ties to the Christian labor movement. The support of industry, Brauweiler
continued, was contingent upon the position of the DVP, although Cuno had
promised to use his contacts with Germany’s industrial leadership on behalf of
the referendum.35
Brauweiler and the leaders of the Stahlhelm planned to announce the
composition of the National Committee for the Referendum by the middle
of March. But differences with the National Rural League over the wording of
the statement that was to be released in conjunction with the appointment of
the committee made it impossible for the leaders of the Stahlhelm to meet this
deadline.36 To maintain a sense of momentum, the leaders of the Stahlhelm
decided to go ahead with the publication of an appeal that would carry the
signatures of prominent individuals who supported the referendum but with-
out listing the various organizations that would constitute the National Refer-
endum Committee.37 In the meantime, negotiations with the German People’s
Party drew to a standstill despite Gilsa’s efforts to repair the damage that the
“Fürsterwald Hate Declaration” had done to its relations with the Stahlhelm.38
A far more serious obstacle, however, was the attitude of the National Social-
ists and their leader Adolf Hitler. In late April 1929 Hitler sent the Stahlhelm a
twenty-six page position paper in which he outlined in great detail the
NSDAP’s reasons for not supporting the proposed referendum. With charac-
teristic scorn, Hitler argued that the proposal to strengthen the powers of the
Reich Presidency could easily benefit the Social Democrats if they were ever to
regain control of the presidency. Hitler also expressed doubts that the cam-
paign for a revision of the Weimar Constitution could ever generate the
emotional momentum necessary for success. Even should it succeed, he
continued, its effect would only be to distract the national opposition from
the struggle for a fundamental and indeed revolutionary change in the system
of government to which the German people were now subject.39

35
Brauweiler, “Betrifft: Stahlhelm Volksbegehren,” 12 Mar. 1929, BA MA Freiburg, NL
Levetzow, 52/92 96.
36
Wagener to Levetzow, 21 Mar. 1929, BA MA Freiburg, NL Levetzow, 52/103. See also
Brauweiler’s remarks before of the Stahlhelm executive committee, 16 17 Feb. 1929, BA
Berlin, R 72/11/240 41, as well as Seldte and Duesterberg to an unidentified recipient, 21
Mar. 1929, appended to Friedrichs (VVVD) to Levetzow, 22 Mar. 1929, BA MA Freiburg,
NL Levetzow, 53/112 13.
37
Brauweiler to Lüninck, 21 Mar. 1929, VWA Münster, NL Lüninck, 769.
38
Gilsa to Seldte, 16 Mar. 1929, BA Berlin, R 72, 35/55.
39
Hitler to the Stahlhelm leadership, n.d. [Apr. 1929], BA Berlin, NS 26, 863. See also Hess
to the Stahlhelm leadership, 27 Apr. 1929, StA Mönchen Gladbach, NL Brauweiler, 114.
    -  

Stunned by the substance and tone of Hitler’s statement,40 the leaders of the
Stahlhelm refused to let this deter them from their plans to initiate a popular
referendum for a revision of the Weimar Constitution. On 17 May Hugenberg
reached agreement with the RLB’s Martin Schiele and the leaders of the
Stahlhelm on the creation of the National Referendum Committee.41 Six days
later Seldte announced that their organizations, along with the Christian-
National Peasants and Farmers’ Party and the United Patriotic Leagues, had
come together to form the National Referendum Committee and invited
prominent politicians from a wide array of right-wing parties, interest groups,
and patriotic associations to join the committee and sign a public appeal in
support of its to referendum for constitutional reform.42 But Hitler’s argu-
ments against the Stahlhelm’s referendum had struck a responsive chord not
just among the Stahlhelm rank and file43 but also with Hugenberg and the
leaders of the DNVP. Insisting that a referendum for a revision of the Weimar
Constitution lacked the emotional charge necessary to galvanize the German
Right into a cohesive political force, Hugenberg used a meeting of the DNVP
executive committee on 15 June 1929 to propose that the forces of the German
Right use the referendum provisions of the Weimar Constitution not to seek a
revision of the constitution but to force a change in the conduct of German
foreign policy. Specifically Hugenberg recommended the introduction of a
popular referendum to block ratification of an international treaty that
Stresemann was negotiating with the Allies for a revision of the Dawes Plan
be followed by a referendum aimed at the revocation of the War Guilt Clause
of the Versailles Treaty.44 Hugenberg and his supporters hoped to reignite
their campaign against Weimar parliamentarism by using those emotionally
charged foreign policy issues upon which the various factions on the German
Right could all agree and with which the fate of Germany’s republican system
of government had become inextricably intertwined.
The leaders of the Stahlhelm were incensed by the way in which they had
been blindsided by Hugenberg and the DNVP party leadership. But what

40
Wagner to Levetzow, 28 Apr. 1929, BA MA Levetzow, 52/239. See also Allesandro
Salvador, “The Political Strategies of the Stahlhelm Veterans’ League and the National
Socialist German Workers’ Party, 1918 1933,” in Movements and Ideas of the Extreme
Right in Europe: Positions and Continuities, ed. Nicola Kristina Karcher and Anders
G. Kjøstvedt (Frankfurt a.M., 2012), 57 78.
41
Draft of an agreement between Hugenberg, Schiele, Duesterberg, and Seldte, 17 May
1929, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, II/37. See also excerpts from the minutes of the RLB
executive committee, 1 May 1929, BA Berlin, R 8034 I, 120/213 17.
42
Invitation from Seldte, 23 May 1929, StA Mönchen Gladbach, NL Brauweiler, 114. For
the strategic objectives behind the appeal, see Sell to Levetzow, 9 May 1929, BA MA
Freiburg, NL Levetzow, 52/274 76,
43
Lenz to the Stahlhelm, 24 June 1929, StA Mönchen Gladbach, NL Brauweiler, 114.
44
Unsere Partei 7, no. 13 (1 July 1929): 207 09.
   , –

made their situation even more awkward was the fact that Hugenberg then
proceeded to constitute a new committee of his own, the National Committee
for the German Referendum (Reichsausschuß für das deutsche Volksbegeh-
ren), to oversee the crusade he planned to launch against Stresemann and the
policy of fulfillment.45 The Stahlhelm tried to save face by agreeing to post-
pone its referendum for a revision of the Weimar Constitution in order to
clear the way for Hugenberg’s initiative on the conduct of German foreign
policy.46 Even then, this was a bitter pill for Seldte, Brauweiler, and the more
moderate forces in the Stahlhelm to swallow.47 For while the leaders of the
Stahlhelm clearly recognized the importance of the campaign against Strese-
mann’s foreign policy, they were embittered by how first Hitler had dismissed
their plans for a revision of the Weimar Constitution and then Hugenberg had
bypassed their referendum committee to create one of his own.48 What this
reflected was a dramatic radicalization in the politics of the Germany’s anti-
parliamentary Right. The Stahlhelm’s referendum for a revision of the Weimar
Constitution was originally conceived as an attempt to contain the more
radical elements in the Stahlhelm, but the initiative in using the referendum
provisions of the Weimar Constitution had now passed into the hands of those
looked upon the popular referenda as a way of radicalizing and polarizing the
German public. A referendum against Stresemann’s conduct of German
foreign policy would not only preclude cooperation with the German People’s
Party and the more moderate groups that might have supported the Stahl-
helm’s campaign for a revision of the Weimar Constitution, but also shift the
balance of power among the organizers of the referendum from the Stahlhelm
to Hugenberg and the National Socialists.

Against the Young Plan

On 16 September 1928 Germany and the Allies agreed at Geneva to open
negotiations for a revision of the Dawes Plan and a final settlement of
Germany’s reparations obligations. These negotiations would take place sim-
ultaneously with negotiations for an end to the Allied occupation of the
Rhineland, although the German government stipulated that the two issues
were to be handled separately and that there was to be no quid pro quo

45
Brauweiler to the members of the Stahlhelm executive committee, 2 Aug. 1929, BA Berlin,
R 72, 43/37 41.
46
For example, see Morocowicz to Blank, 27 July 1929, RWWA Cologne, Abt. 130, NL
Reusch, 4001012024/6.
47
Goltz to Cuno, 22 June 1929, BA MA Freiburg, NL Levetzow, 52/348 51.
48
Brauweiler to the members of the Stahlhelm executive committee, 2 Aug. 1929, BA Berlin,
R 72, 43/37 41. For further details, see Simon, “Brauweiler,” 233 35.
    -  

between a settlement of the reparations question and the evacuation of the

Rhineland.49 Stresemann was optimistic that a new agreement on reparations
would bring Germany substantial benefits, including an end to the Allied
occupation of the Rhineland before the deadlines stipulated in the Versailles
Peace Treaty and Locarno accords of 1925. At the same time, German industry
and its supporters on the DVP’s right wing were hopeful that such an
agreement would provide a measure of relief from the increasingly heavy
burden of its unemployment insurance program.50 Accordingly, the Müller
cabinet appointed Albert Vögler from the United Steel Works and the RDI’s
Ludwig Kastl to the committee of experts responsible for drafting the new
reparations plan that would replace the Dawes Plan. Vögler enjoyed close
relations with Hugenberg, and Stresemann obviously hoped that his appoint-
ment, along with that of Kastl, would create “a wall of personalities capable of
withstanding the storm of the Hugenberg press.”51 But Vögler resigned from
the committee of experts on 23 May once it became clear that the new round
of negotiations would not provide the government the fiscal latitude it needed
to trim management’s contributions to the government’s unemployment
insurance program. This was an embarrassing public relations setback for
Stresemann and the Müller cabinet, but neither Vögler’s resignation nor the
bizarre negotiating tactics of Reichsbank president Hjalmar Schacht, the most
prominent member of the German delegation, kept the German authorities
from accepting the terms of the new plan – now known as the Young Plan –
on 31 May or initialing the final text of the agreement on 7 June 1929.52
The German Right would fire its first salvo in what would quickly develop
into a general broadside against Stresemann’s foreign policy long before the
official start of negotiations in Paris in the early spring of 1929. In September
1928 the DNVP, Stahlhelm, and other patriotic associations organized a
demonstration in Berlin to protest the Geneva agreement. Speaking before
an estimated 12,000 participants, Westarp denounced the bankruptcy of
Stresemann’s foreign policy and the Geneva accord as a painful reminder of

49
Peter Krüger, Die Aussenpolitik der Republik von Weimar (Darmstadt, 1985), 428 43.
50
Jorg Otto Spiller, “Reformismus nach rechts. Zur Politik des Reichsverbandes der
Deutschen Industrie in den Jahren 1927 1930 am Beispiel der Reparationspolitik,” in
Industrielles System und politische Entwicklung in der Weimarer Republik. Verhandlungen
des Internationalen Symposiums in Bochum vom 12. 17. Juni 1973, ed. Mommsen,
Petzinna, and Weisbrod (Düsseldorf, 1974), 593 602.
51
Stresemann to Silverberg, 4 Jan. 1929, PA AA Berlin, NL Stresemann, 76/168925 26. See
also the correspondence between Vögler and Stresemann, 23 28 December 1928, ibid.,
75/168814 15, 168829 31, as well as Silverberg to Stresemann, 31 Dec. 1928, ibid., 75/
168864 68. For further details, see Wright, Stresemann, 444.
52
Krüger, Aussenpolitik, 476 83. On Schacht’s antics, see Christopher Kopper, Hjalmar
Schacht. Aufstieg und Fall von Hitlers mächtigsten Bankier (Munich and Vienna, 2006),
141 57.
   , –

the humiliation that Germany had suffered at Allied hands.53 In a speech to

the Reichstag two months later Westarp hailed the end of the Locarno era and,
after listing the dangers that lurked in the new round of reparations negoti-
ations, called for an “strong, steadfast no” to Allied demands that Germany
commit itself to a firm and binding schedule for the payment of reparations.
Westarp ended his speech with a call for a new German offensive on
reparations, the revision of Germany’s eastern boundaries, and the revocation
of the War Guilt Clause.54 In a similar vein, DNVP Reichstag deputy Reinhold
Quaatz denounced the new reparations plan as a “second Dawes Plan” that
only perpetuated the war guilt lie, while Paul Bang, like Quaatz one of
Hugenberg’s strongest supporters in the DNVP Reichstag delegation, focused
on the enormous economic devastation that would almost certainly result
from implementation of the new reparations plan.55 The attacks intensified
as the recommendations of the Young committee of experts were published in
early 1929. By now, however, the Nationalists had begun to focus more and
more attention on the economic and fiscal implications of the new plan with
specific emphasis on whether or not the German economy was sufficiently
strong to meet the fiscal burden imposed by the new reparations plan. As Bang
argued in an article from April 1929, the committee of experts had greatly
overestimated Germany’s capacity to pay. Compliance with the reparations
provisions of the Young Plan, he concluded, would result in the complete
collapse of the German economy.56
Against the background of these developments, Hugenberg decided to go
ahead with the referendum against the Young Plan and to give it priority over
the Stahlhelm’s proposed referendum for a revision of the Weimar Consti-
tution. On 15 June 1929 the DNVP executive committee decided by a near
unanimous vote – only DNVP labor leader Emil Hartwig dissented – to take
up the struggle against the Paris tribute plan, as the Nationalists frequently
referred to the Young Plan, in accordance with the procedure outlined in
Articles 72 and 73 of the Weimar Constitution.57 The goal of this initiative
would be to block implementation of the reparations plan that Germany and
the Allies had approved in Paris, though not as a single party acting on its own

53
Kuno von Westarp, Die deutschnationale Reichstagsfraktion und die Pariser Tributver
handlungen (Berlin, n.d. [1929]), 8 11.
54
Westarp, “Kriegsschuldlüge, Kriegsächtungspankt und Tributverhandlungen,” 12
Feb. 1929, ibid., 27 29. See also Die Deutschnationalen und die Kriegstribute (Berlin,
1928), 15 33.
55
Ibid., 34 73.
56
Bang, “Angebliche Leistungsfähigkeit Deutschlands,” Unsere Partei 7, no. 7 (1 Apr. 1929):
109 10.
57
Entry in Quaatz’s diary, 18 June 1929, BA Koblenz, NL Quaatz, 16. On Hartwig’s dissent,
see his correspondence with Mumm, 6 16 July 1929, BA Berlin, NL Mumm, 283/
143, 156.
    -  

but as a member and strongest parliamentary representative of the national

movement.58 After three weeks of furious negotiations, Hugenberg and the
leaders of the “national opposition” met on 9 July 1929 in the former upper
house, or Herrenhaus, of the Prussian state legislature in Berlin to announce
the creation of the National Committee for the German Referendum and the
beginning of their crusade against the Young Plan. In addition to Hugenberg
and the Stahlhelm’s Franz Seldte, the list of speakers included RLB president
Martin Schiele, the VVVD’s Count Rüdiger von der Goltz, the NSDAP’s Adolf
Hitler, the CNBLP’s Albrecht Wendhausen, Paul Rüffer as a representative of
the nationalist workers’ movement, Annagrete Lehmann from the DNVP’s
National Women’s Committee, and Ruhr industrialist Fritz Thyssen.59
Conspicuous by his absence was Wilhelm Cuno, who had hoped to use the
referendum to launch his campaign for the Reich Presidency but whom the
organizers of the Herrenhaus demonstration had not invited for fear that this
might lend his bid for the presidency a semi-official stamp of approval they
were not prepared to give.60
The demonstration in the Herrenhaus concluded with the publication of a
two paragraph resolution that announced first that the National Committee
for the German Referendum had assumed responsibility for the Stahlhelm’s
referendum for a revision of the Weimar Constitution and second that its first
priority would be to use all legal at its disposal, but particularly the referendum
provisions of the Weimar Constitution, to prevent implementation of the Paris
tribute plan.61 The presidium that was to provide strategic oversight of the
referendum campaign included representatives from all of the participating
organizations from the DNVP and NSDAP to the Stahlhelm, the Unitied
Patriotic Leagues, and Pan-German League as well as the National Rural
League and the Christian-National Peasants and Farmers’ Party. They were
complemented by Thyssen as a spokesman for Ruhr heavy industry, Baron
Ludwig von Gebsattel and Baron Hermann von Lüninck as representatives of
the Bavarian and Rhenish aristocracy respectively, and a yet to be named
representative for university students.62 A task force, or Arbeitsausschuß, with
considerable overlap in personnel with the presidium was also created to deal

58
Unsere Partei, 7, no. 13 (1 July 1929): 208 09.
59
Unsere Partei 7, no. 14 (15 July 1929): 230 33. See also the circular from Hugenberg,
11 July 1929, BA Berlin, R 8048, 262/11 12, as well as the memorandum from Brauweiler
to members of the Stahlhelm executive committee, 2 Aug. 1929, BA Berlin, R 72/37 41.
On Hitler’s role, see Claß’s unpublished memoirs, “Wider den Strom,” BA Berlin, NL
Claß, 3/Anhang, 37 41.
60
Entry in Quaatz’s diary, 9 July 1929, BA Koblenz, NL Quaatz, 16.
61
Unsere Partei 7, no. 14 (15 July 1929): 233.
62
Undated memorandum on the composition of the committee’s presidium, BA Berlin,
R 8048, 262/59.
   , –

with the tactical and organizational aspects of the anti-Young Plan crusade.63
In addition, there were three subcommittees: a finance committee under the
chairmanship of the Stahlhelm’s Erich Lubbert, a judicial committee chaired
by the Stahlhelm’s Heinz Brauweiler, and a propaganda committee under the
direction Max Weiß and Hans Brosius from the DNVP.64 Overseeing the day-
to-day operations of the National Referendum Committee was retired army
officer Jenó von Egan-Krieger, a Hugenberg loyalist who enjoyed close ties to
the Stahlhelm. Egan-Krieger’s role in the referendum campaign was to prove
critical. For although leadership of the referendum campaign clearly lay in the
hands of the Stahlhelm and DNVP, Seldte and the leaders of the Stahlhelm
were still angry over the way in which they had been shunted aside by
Hugenberg and remained wary of the DNVP’s chairman increasing depend-
ence upon Hitler and the National Socialists.65
From the outset, Hugenberg attached great value to the participation of the
National Socialists in the crusade against the Paris tribute plan. Accordingly,
the NSDAP’s Reich organizational leader Gregor Strasser was co-opted into
the subcommittees for finance and propaganda and Wilhelm Frick into the
judicial committee.66 All of this ran counter to the reserve with which the
DNVP had historically treated the NSDAP. In the 1928 Reichstag elections
the Nationalists had portrayed Hitler as a petty demagogue whose agitation
only contributed to the fragmentation of Germany’s national bourgeoisie and
denounced the NSDAP as a party of self-styled revolutionaries that must “be
opposed with all sharpness.”67 But Hugenberg and his supporters in the Pan-
German League looked beyond the NSDAP’s social radicalism to the national
values they believed to be at the core of Hitler’s political Weltanschauung and
were prepared to make far-reaching concessions to keep the National Social-
ists in the “national front.”68 Hugenberg not only cleared early drafts of the

63
Unsere Partei 7, no. 14 (15 July 1929): 233.
64
Brauweiler’s circular to the Stahlhelm executive committee, 2 Aug. 1929, BA Berlin, R 72,
43/37 41. See also Blank to Springorum, 22 July 1929, RWWA Cologne, Abt. 130, NL
Reusch, 4001012924/6.
65
Brauweiler, memorandum entitled “Bemerkungen zur Lage” for Duesterberg, Czettritz,
and Wagner, 23 Aug. 1929, StA Mönchen Gladbach, NL Brauweiler, 114, also in BA
Berlin, R 72, 43/121 25. On the tension between Hugenberg and the Stahlhelm, see
Hugenberg to Claß, 13 July 1929, BA Berlin, R 8048, 262/24 25, and Seldte, ibid., 26 27,
as well as Brauweiler’s circular to the Stahlhelm executive committee, 2 Aug. 1929, BA
Berlin, R 72, 43/37 41.
66
Hitler, declaration of 26 July 1929, in Adolf Hitler, Reden, Schriften, Anordnungen.
Februar 1925 bis Januar 1933, ed. Institute für Zeitgeschichte, 5 vols. in 12 parts (Munich,
London, New York, and Paris, 1992 98) vol. 3, pt. 2, 303.
67
[Deutschnationale Volkspartei], Nationalsozialistische Arbeiterpartei, Deutschnationales
Rüstzeug, no. 11a (Berlin, 1928), esp. 14 1PP5.
68
For example, see the letters from the Pan German publicist F. J. Lehmann to Claß, 13
Aug. 1929, BA Berlin, R 8048, 262/165 66, and the VVVD, 17 Aug. 1929, BA MA
    -  

referendum with the Nazi party leader before presenting them to the
National Referendum Committee,69 but he hoped to launch the crusade
against the Young Plan by staging a major rally with Hitler as his co-speaker
at the Hermann Monument near Detmold, the historic site of the battle
where the Germans defeated the Roman legions of Varus at the battle of
the Teutoburg forest in AD 9.70 Hitler, on the other hand, had problems in
his own party as a result of his alliance with “social reactionaries” like
Hugenberg and Claß, and it only with great difficulty that he and Strasser
were able to justify their participation in the National Referendum Commit-
tee to those on the NSDAP’s left wing.71 At the same time, Hugenberg’s
deference to the Nazi party leader rankled the leaders of the Stahlhelm and
met with widespread skepticism within the ranks of his own DNVP, not the
least among those with close ties to organized agriculture and the Christian-
national labor movement.72
In the meantime, Hugenberg had begun to experience difficulties of his own
with his financial backers in German industry. The leaders of Ruhr heavy
industry were concerned about the fiscal and economic implications of the
new reparations plan and sought a way to highlight its “economic impossibility
[Untragbarkeit]” without compromising the position of the German govern-
ment in its negotiations with the Allies.73 The annual meeting of the Langnam-
verein scheduled for 8 July 1929 was carefully orchestrated by its chairman Paul
Reusch and executive secretary Max Schlenker to give both supporters and
opponents of the new plan – in the latter case Vögler – an opportunity to
present their respective positions for fear that their silence might otherwise be

Freiburg, NL Levetzow, 53/96 97. See also Claß’s recollections of the struggle against the
Young Plan in “Wider den Strom,” BA Berlin, NL Claß, 3/900 07. For the attitude of the
Stahlhelm, see Brauweiler, “Stahlhelm und Nationalsozialisten,” Norddeutsche Blätter.
Nationale Monatsschrift 9, no. 2 (Sept. 1929): 237 42. For further details, see Jackisch,
Pan German League, 160 69, and Hofmeister, “Between Monarchy and Dictatorship,”
341 61.
69
Hugenberg to Hitler, 14 Aug. 1929, in BA Berlin, Sammlung personenbezogener Unter
lagen bis 1945, Bestand R 9354, 647.
70
Ibid. For Hitler's refusal, see Hess to Hugenberg, 13 Aug. 1929, ibid.
71
For example, see Strasser to Reinhardt, 12 Aug. 1929, BA Berlin, Sammlung Schumacher,
Bestand R 187, 206.
72
Patch, Christian Trade Unions, 149 50. For the most important secondary literature on
the DNVP party crisis, see the unpublished dissertation by Elisabeth Friedenthal, “Volks
begehren und Volksentscheid über den Young Plan und die deutschnationale Sezession”
(Ph.D. diss., Universität Tübingen, 1957), as well as Attila A. Chanady, “The Disinte
gration of the German National People’s Party, 1924 1930,” Journal of Modern History
39 (1967): 65 91, and Denis Walker, “The German Nationalist People’s Party: The
Conservative Dilemma in the Weimar Republic,” Journal of Contemporary History 14
(1979): 627 47.
73
Schlenker to Reusch, 26 June 1929, RWWA Cologne, Abt. 130, NL Reusch, 400101221/9.
   , –

interpreted as acceptance.74 Despite their strong reservations about the fiscal

and economic consequences of the new reparations plan,75 Reusch and most of
his associates in Ruhr heavy industry remained decidedly cool to Hugenberg’s
National Committee for the German Referendum and its plans for a referen-
dum against the Young Plan.76 Writing to his Berlin associate Martin Blank on
24 July 1929, Reusch denounced the proposed referendum as a “great stupidity”
and stated with characteristic bluntness that he had no intention of giving so
much as “a single farthing [einen roten Heller]” to the referendum campaign.77
Acting on Reusch’s explicit instructions, Blank resigned from the finance
subcommittee of the National Committee for the German Referendum with
immediate repercussions on industry’s willingness to underwrite the costs of
Hugenberg’s crusade against the Young Plan.78 Of Germany’s more prominent
industrial leaders, only Thyssen and Emil Kirdorf were prepared to put their
names and fortune behind Hugenberg’s referendum.79 And Albert Vögler, an
outspoken and uncompromising opponent of the Young Plan in the form that it
had taken by the summer of 1929,80 was furious with the way in which
Hugenberg had orchestrated the campaign against the Young Plan, although
he refrained from going so far as to follow the example of his fellow industrialist
Ernst Poengsen by resigning from the National Referendum Committee.81 The
disaffection of the more conservative elements in the German industrial estab-
lishment from Hugenberg’s crusade against the Young Plan did not augur well
for the crusade’s ultimate success.

74
Ibid. See also Schlenker to Silverberg, 25 June 1929; Vögler to Schlenker, 27 June 1929;
and Vögler to Reusch, 1 July 1929, all in BA Koblenz, NL Silverberg, 415/205 09. See also
Weisbrod, Schwerindustrie in der Weimarer Republik, 457 77.
75
For example, see August Heinrichsbauer, “Die Konzequenzen aus dem Young Plan,”
Ruhr und Rhein 10, no. 27 (5 July 1929): 868 73.
76
For example, see Springorum to Hugenberg, 22 June 1929, RWWA Cologne, Abt. 130,
NL Reusch, 4001012024/5b.
77
Reusch to Blank, 24 July 1929, RWWA Cologne, Abt. 130, NL Reusch, 4001012024/6. For
an elaboration of Reusch’s reasons, see his letter to Miguel, 27 July 1929, ibid.,
400101293/9a.
78
Reusch to Blank, 24 July 1929, RWWA Cologne, Abt. 130, NL Reusch, 4001012024/6. See
also Wilmowsky to Reusch, 15 Aug. 1929, HA Krupp Essen, FAH, 23/503.
79
See the text of Thyssen’s speech at the Herrenhaus demonstration on 9 July 1929 in Fort
mit dem Pariser Tributplan, Kampfschrift no. 1, Berlin, 1 Aug. 1929, 6 8, a copy of which
is to be found in NL Hiller, Gärtringen. See also Thyssen to the RDI, 28 May 1929,
RWWA Cologne, Abt. 130, NL Reusch, 400102220/6b. On Thyssen, see Carl Friedrich
Baumann, “Fritz Thyssen und der Nationalsozialismus,” Zeitschrift des Geschichtsvereins
Mühlheim a.d. Ruhr 70 (1998): 139 54. On Kirdorf, see Henry Ashby Turner, Jr., “Emil
Kirdorf and the Nazi Party,” Central European History 1 (1968): 324 44.
80
Vögler to Schlenker, 27 June 1929, BA Koblenz, NL Silverberg, 415/207 08.
81
Krupp to Wilmowsky, 28 Sept. 1929, HA Krupp Essen, FAH 23/503.
    -  

A Fragile Consensus
Flanked by the ADV’s Rudolf von Xylander and the Stahlhelm’s Siegfried
Wagner, Hugenberg launched the campaign against the Young Plan on
1 September 1929 with a speech at the monument in the Teutoburg forest
that had been constructed in the 1840s to commemorate the German hero
Arminius and his defeat of the Roman legions. Pointing to Arminius’s sword,
Hugenberg claimed that Germany’s sword had been taken but would be
returned when German hearts were once strong again. It was now the task
of the German people, he continued, to assume the mantle of Arminius and
take up the struggle against foreign domination by rejecting the Young Plan.
Not only would the new tribute plan destroy Germany economically, but even
more importantly, Hugenberg argued, it would sap the spiritual strength and
vitality of the German people. Then, in a purely rhetorical gesture, Hugenberg
asked if the German people were willing to accept the consequences of the
Paris tribute plan – the terrible spiritual affliction, the new bondage, the
economic ruin, the unemployment, and new currency convulsions.82 Yet for
all of the fanfare with which Hugenberg opened his crusade against the new
reparations plan, the campaign revealed incipient fault lines within the anti-
Young Plan coalition from the very outset. For not only did Hitler decline to
join Hugenberg at the rally in the Teutoburg forest,83 but the Stahlhelm held a
separate demonstration in Brunswick, where Duesterberg, Morosowicz, and
Wagner spoke before an estimated 15,000 loyalists in support of the referen-
dum against the Young Plan.84 Annoyed by Duesterberg’s decision to hold a
separate demonstration for the Stahlhelm, Hugenberg blamed Brauweiler for
sabotaging the unity of the German Right.85 Even the Pan-Germans held a
demonstration of their own at Würzburg, where the ADV chairman Heinrich
Claß and DNVP Reichstag deputy Paul Bang denounced the Paris tribute plan
as an Allied ploy to perpetuate the enslavement of the German people.86
In the meantime, Hugenberg and his associates were hard at work on the
text of the law that would take effect if the referendum proved successful.
Hugenberg’s modus operandi was to involve as few people as possible in
preparing the text of the law – provocatively entitled the “Law against the
Enslavement of the German People (Gesetz gegen die Versklavung des
deutschen Volkes)” but more commonly known as the “Freedom Law

82
On the demonstration at the Hermann Monument, see the report in the Berliner Lokal
Anzeiger, 2 Sept. 1929, no. 413.
83
Hess to Hugenberg, 13 Aug. 1929, BA Berlin, R 9354, 647.
84
Volksbegehren. Pressedienst des Reichsausschusses, ed. J. von Egan Krieger, 8 Sept. 1929,
no. 8. See also Duesterberg to Hugenberg, 15 Aug. 1929, BA Berlin, R 8048, 262/187, as
well as his unpublished memoirs, BA Koblenz, NL Duesterberg, 46/144.
85
Hugenberg to Claß, 16 Aug. 1929, BA Berlin, R 8048, 262/186.
86
Berliner Lokal Anzeiger, 2 Sept. 1929, no. 413.
   , –

(Freiheitsgesetz)” – and to circulate it to a small circle of associates before

sending it to the presidium of the National Committee for the German
Referendum for review at its first meeting in Nuremberg on 28 August
1929.87 In this way, Hugenberg sought not only to bypass the National
Referendum Committee’s judicial subcommittee under Brauweiler but also
to present a united front in the referendum committee against those in the
RLB and CNBLP who might have counseled a less confrontational course of
action. Brauweiler protested against his committee’s exclusion from the prep-
aration of the bill but was unable to overcome Hugenberg’s refusal to submit
the text of his proposed “Freedom Law” to the scrutiny of his committee.88
Hugenberg, however, did send a copy of his draft to Westarp,89 who as
chairman of the DNVP Reichstag delegation had been left off the presidium
of the National Referendum Committee on the pretext that its composition
was already too heavily weighted in favor of the DNVP to justify the addition
of still another Nationalist.90 Westarp responded with a long letter that
contained a number of specific recommendations for changes in the text of
the proposed law, not the least of which was that Hugenberg drop a paragraph
demanding that Reich authorities responsible for signing the Paris tribute plan
should be tried for high treason (Landesverrat) and imprisoned according to
the provisions of the federal penal code. In Westarp’s words, such a provision
was simply “impossible.”91
In response to Westarp’s carefully argued criticism, Hugenberg replied that
he might be willing to drop the imprisonment paragraph from the text of the
proposed “Freedom Law.”92 In the meantime, a group of Stahlhelm leaders
including Duesterberg, Brauweiler, and Wagner met in Halle on 27 August
and agreed not only that the imprisonment paragraph should be dropped but
also that the wording of the proposed referendum required the unanimous
consent of all the groups in the National Referendum Committee.93 But at its
meeting in Nuremberg on 28 August the presidium of the referendum com-
mittee formally approved the text of Hugenberg’s “Law Against the

87
In this respect, see Hugenberg to Hitler, 14 Aug. 1929, BA Berlin, R 9354, 647, as well as
Hugenberg to Claß, 16 Aug. 1929, BA Berlin, R 8048, 262/189.
88
On Brauweiler’s overtures to Hugenberg, see his “Bericht über Kissingen,” 19 Aug. 1929,
BA Berlin, R 72, 43/131 35. See also Brauweiler to Hugenberg, 15 Aug. 1929, BA Berlin,
R 8048, 262/190, and 23 Aug. 1929, StA Mönchen Gladbach, NL Brauweiler, 114.
89
“Gesetz gegen die Versklavung des Deutschen Volkes. Entwurf 21.8.29,” appended to
Hugenberg to Westarp, 21 Aug. 1929, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, VN 122.
90
Hugenberg to Westarp, 1 Aug. 1929, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, VN 122. See also Westarp
to Hugenberg, 11 July and 19 Aug. 1929, ibid.
91
Westarp to Hugenberg, 22 Aug. 1929, ibid.
92
Hugenberg to Westarp, 23 Aug, 1929, ibid.
93
Brauweiler, “Historischer Bericht über die Verhandlungen betr. das Volksbegehren,” 15
Sept. 1929, StA Mönchen Gladbach, NL Brauweiler, 112.
    -  

Enslavement of the German People,” including the imprisonment paragraph

to which Westarp had raised such strong objection. Illness prevented Hitler
from attending the meeting, and Hugenberg was unwilling to drop the
offending paragraph without first securing the consent of the Nazi party
leader. The other provisions of the proposed “Freedom Law” renounced
Germany’s acceptance of sole responsibility for the war, stipulated that Allied
evacuation of Germany’s occupied territories should not be contingent upon
the liquidation of its reparations burden, and rejected the Young Plan on the
grounds that German authorities should sign no new treaties or undertake no
new obligations based upon the “War Guilt Clause.” At the same time, the
presidium voted that the text of the proposed referendum should not be
referred to the judicial committee of the National Referendum Committee
for review and possible revision.94
Brauweiler was furious when he learned not only that the imprisonment
paragraph had not been dropped against the express wishes of the Stahlhelm
leadership but also that his committee would not be given an opportunity to
review the text of the proposed referendum. Brauweiler immediately convened
a meeting of the National Referendum Committee’s judicial subcommittee to
register its opposition to the wording of the so-called Freedom Law and its
frustration over Hugenberg’s handling of the matter.95 On 6 September
Hugenberg traveled to Halle, where he met with the leaders of the Stahlhelm
to inform them that the publication of the “Freedom Law” would take place on
the following Thursday and that the National Socialists had made their
participation in the referendum campaign conditional upon retention of the
imprisonment paragraph. Brauweiler’s judicial subcommittee, he continued,
would be permitted to review the text of the proposed referendum but could
do no more than make technical recommendations for changes in the text of
the bill.96 In doing so, Hugenberg effectively swept aside the Stahlhelm’s
reservations against the inclusion of the imprisonment paragraph in the
so-called Freedom Law and coopted the leaders of Germany’s largest para-
military organization into a campaign that was considerably more radical than
anything they had envisaged when they first proposed a referendum for a
revision of the Weimar Constitution in the fall of 1928.

94
No record of the Nuremberg meeting of the presidium of the National Referendum
Committee on 28 August 1929 exists. For what transpired here, see Brauweiler to
Duesterberg, 5 Sept. 1929, StA Mönchen Gladbach, NL Brauweiler, 114, and Brauweiler,
“Historischer Bericht. . .,” 15 Sept. 1929, ibid., 112., as well as Hugenberg to Westarp, 29
Aug. 1929, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, VN 122. For the appeal issued at the close of the
meeting, see “Aufruf des Reichsassuchusses für das Deutsche Volksbegehren,” n.d. [28
Aug. 1929], BA Berlin, R 8034 I, 120/133.
95
Brauweiler to Duesterberg, 5 Sept. 1929, StA Mönchen Gladbach, NL Brauweiler, 114.
96
Brauweiler, “Historischer Bericht . . .,” 15 Sept. 1929, StA Mönchen Gladbach, NL
Brauweiler, 112.
   , –

The damage the Stahlhelm would have suffered by withdrawing from the
campaign against the Young Plan far outweighed the embarrassment of being
associated with the imprisonment paragraph, and its leaders acquiesced, albeit
begrudgingly, in Hugenberg’s fait accompli.97 Nor were Goltz, Levetzow, and
the leaders of the United Patriotic Leagues pleased with the way in which
Hugenberg’s action had effectively preempted their efforts to mobilize the
German Right in support of Cuno’s future candidacy for the Reich presi-
dency.98 Gebsattel and Cuno’s circle of supporters in Bavaria were particularly
incensed by Hugenberg’s action and regarded it as a “catstrophe.”99 Even more
serious difficulties had surfaced in Hugenberg’s relations with the leaders of
the National Rural League and the Christian-National Peasants and Farmers’
Party. Neither the RLB’s Schiele nor Karl Hepp or Friedrich Döbrich from the
CNBLP had attended the meeting of the presidium of the National Referen-
dum Committee on 28 August and therefore had no opportunity to prevent
the inclusion of the controversial imprisonment paragraph in the final text of
Hugenberg’s “Freedom Law.”100 On 4 September Hepp and the CNBLP’s
Günther Gereke met with Brauweiler to voice their opposition not only to
the imprisonment paragraph but also to the way in which Hugenberg had
deliberately bypassed the judicial subcommittee of the National Referendum
Committee in drafting the “Freedom Law.”101 Anxious to capitalize upon what
they expected to be another German diplomatic setback at The Hague,
Hugenberg and his allies pressed forward with their plans to release the text
of the referendum on 12 September.102 In the late afternoon of 11 September,
Schiele and the CNBLP’s Albrecht Wendhausen met with Hugenberg and
two of his closest associates, Schmidt-Hannover and Quaatz, in a desperate,
last-minute effort to block inclusion of the imprisonment paragraph in the
so-called Freedom Law, only to be rebuffed by Hugenberg with the explan-
ation that not only was it too late to make any alterations in the wording of the
referendum but also that the inclusion of the imprisonment paragraph was the
basis upon which the accord with Hitler had been reached.103

97
Wagner to Duesterberg, 23 Aug. 1929, StA Mönchen Gladbach, NL Brauweiler, 114.
98
Correspondence between Friedrichs and Levetzow, 2 20 Sept. 1929, BA MA Freiburg,
NL Levetzow, 53/106, 120 21.
99
Gebsattel to Levetzow, 23 Sept. 1929, BA MA Freiburg, NL Levetzow, 53/125.
100
Hugenberg to Westarp, 29 Aug. 1929, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, VN 122.
101
Brauweiler’s notes on his meeting with Hepp and Gereke, 4 Sept. 1929, StA Mönchen
Gladbach, NL Brauweiler, 110. See also Brauweiler to Duesterberg, 5 Sept. 1929,
ibid., 114.
102
Hugenberg to the members of the presidium of the National Committee for the German
Referendum, 10 Sept. 1929, BA Berlin, R 8048, 263/37 38.
103
Entry in Quaatz’s diary, 11 Sept. 1929, BA Koblenz, NL Quaatz, 16. See also Hugenberg
to the presidium of the National Committee for the German Referendum, 15 Sept. 1929,
BA Berlin, R 8048, 263/74 76. For conflicting accounts of this meeting, see Schiele to the
    -  

Undeterred by Schiele’s opposition to the inclusion of the imprisonment

paragraph in his “Law against the Enslavement of the German People,”
Hugenberg published the full text of the proposed law on the morning on
12 September 1929. On the following day, Schiele wrote to headquarters of the
National Committee for the German Referendum to reiterate the RLB’s strong
opposition to the imprisonment paragraph and called for an immediate
meeting of the referendum committee’s presidium to deal with the problems
that had been created by its inclusion in the published text of the “Freedom
Law.”104 Schiele and the leaders of the RLB were particularly concerned that
their support for a referendum that included the inflammatory language of the
imprisonment paragraph would seriously endanger their ties to the more
moderate groups in the newly created “Green Front” and undermine the
effectiveness with which it could represent the interests of the German agri-
cultural community.105 A serious strain could also be seen in relations between
the National Referendum Committee and the leaders of the CNBLP. Speaking
at a CNBLP rally in Dortmund on 15 September, Gereke sharply criticized the
imprisonment paragraph and warned that its wording was such that not even
Reich President von Hindenburg was exempt from the threat of imprison-
ment.106 Relations between the CNBLP and DNVP became increasingly frayed
as the latter insinuated that the CNBLP leadership had put economic self-
interest ahead of the national welfare.107 In response, CNBLP activists attacked
the DNVP for having failed to recognize the extent to which the German
farmer was part of the national movement or to appreciate the increasingly
desperate situation in which Germany’s rural population currently found
itself.108 Nor was the DNVP immune from the increasingly heated conflict

presidium of the National Committee for the German Referendum, 20 Sept. 1929, BA
Berlin, R 8034 I, 284/320 23, and Hugenberg to Schiele, 30 Sept. 1929, BA Koblenz, NL
Weilnböck, 16b.
104
Schiele to the presidium of the National Committee for the German Referendum, 13
Sept. 1929, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, VN 122. See also the statement of the RLB
presidium, “Stellungnahme gegen §4 des Gesetzvorschlages gegen die Versklavung des
deutschen Volkes,” 17 Sept. 1929, BA Berlin, R 8034 I, 284/324 28. For further details,
see Wilmowsky to Krupp, 14 Sept. 1929, HA Krupp Essen, FAH 23/503.
105
See the letter from Nicolas (Brandenburg Rural League) to Schiele, 8 Nov. 1929, BA
Berlin R 8034 I, 18/274 78, as well as Schiele to the DVP’s Alfred Zapf, 12 Oct. 1929, BA
Koblenz, NL Zapf, 37. For further details, see Andreas Müller, “Fällt der Bauer, stürzt der
Staat.” Deutschnationale Agrarpolitik 1928 1933 (Hamburg, 2003), 123 56, and
Gessner, Agrarverbände, 222 27, as well as Markus Müller, Landvolkpartei, 118 38.
106
Schulthess’ Europäischer Geschichtskalender, ed. Ulrich Thürauf (Munich, 1860ff.), 70
(1929): 166 67.
107
For example, see Georg Wilhelm Schiele Naumburg to his cousin Martin Schiele, 20
Sept. 1929, BA Berlin, R 8034 I, 266/576 77.
108
“Weshalb Christlich nationale Bauern und Landvolkpartei?,” Politische Wochenschrift
5, no. 39 (28 Sept. 1929): 921 24.
   , –

that had erupted within the ranks of the so-called national opposition.109 On
17 September Westarp wrote to Hugenberg to reiterate his opposition to the
inclusion of the imprisonment paragraph in the text of the “Freedom Law,”
adding pessimistically that the controversy over the paragraph had greatly
weakened the publicity value of the referendum. Westarp was particularly
sensitive to the danger the imprisonment paragraph posed to the party’s
standing in the German agricultural community and urged Hugenberg to
soften the offending language for the sake of a compromise that would satisfy
both parties.110
Hugenberg remained impervious to the storm of criticism that greeted
publication of the “Freedom Law” and refused to consider any changes in its
wording that might make it more palatable to Schiele, Westarp, and their
supporters.111 Infuriated by what he perceived as a deliberate attempt on the
part of Schiele and the RLB leadership to sabotage the unity of the “national
front,”112 Hugenberg traveled to Munich on 18 September to reassure himself
of Hitler’s support in the struggle over the form and substance of the “Free-
dom Law.”113 In the meantime, Westarp tried to defuse the deepening crisis
that threatened to tear his party apart by calling an emergency meeting of
party leaders on 20 September.114 But Hugenberg, who had just returned from
Munich where he had met with Nazi party leader Adolf Hitler, insisted on the
retention of the imprisonment paragraph with all of its objectionable language
and remained adamantly opposed to any change in the text of the proposed
Freedom Law that might endanger the unity of the “national front.”115 Later
that evening and then again on the following morning Hugenberg met with
CNBLP national chairman Erwin Baum and Reichstag deputy Friedrich
Döbrich in an attempt to repair relations between their respective organiza-
tions and to negotiate the terms of a compromise that would exempt Hinden-
burg from the threat of imprisonment. This would then make it possible for
the CNBLP and RLB to support the referendum against the Young Plan

109
See Schultz Bromberg to Westarp, 15 Sept. 1929, and Lindeiner Wildau to Westarp, 17
Sept. 1929, both in NL Westarp, Gärtringen, VN 122.
110
Westarp to Hugenberg, 17 Sept. 1929, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, VN 122.
111
Hugenberg to the presidium of the National Committee for the German Referendum, 15
Sept. 1929, BA Koblenz, NL Weilnböck, 50.
112
See Hugenberg to Duesterberg, 14 and 16, 1929, BA Berlin, R 8048, 263/56 59, 67 69.
113
Hugenberg’s remarks at a meeting of DNVP party leaders, 20 Sept. 1929, NL Westarp,
Gärtringen, II/35.
114
Invitation from Westarp, 18 Sept. 1929, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, II/35.
115
Westarp’s notes on a meeting of DNVP party leaders, 20 Sept. 1929, NL Westarp,
Gärtringen, II/35. In a similar vein, see Hugenberg to Nagel, 15 Sept. 1929, BA Berlin,
R 8048, 263/62 66, as well as the draft of Hugenberg’s unpublished article, “Zerfall der
nationalen Front,” n.d., BA Koblenz, NL Hugenberg, 115/65.
    -  

despite the retention of the imprisonment paragraph in the text of the

“Freedom Law.”116 While Schiele’s last-ditch effort to have the obnoxious
paragraph deleted from the text of the “Freedom Law” was voted down at a
meeting of the executive committee of the National Referendum Committee
despite the strong support he received from the leaders of the Stahlhelm,117
Hugenberg did at least agree to an amendment in the language of the impris-
onment paragraph so that it no longer pertained to the person of the Reich
President.118
The meeting of the presidium of the National Referendum Committee on
21 September 1929 did little more than restore a façade of right-wing unity in
the struggle against the Young Plan. Unable to shake Hugenberg’s control of
the presidium yet unwilling to incur the odium of abandoning the anti-Young
Plan campaign altogether, the leaders of the CNBLP accepted Hugenberg’s
olive branch and issued a statement that despite their reservations about the
imprisonment paragraph they would “fight shoulder to shoulder” with the
other organizations of the National Referendum Committee in the struggle
against the Young Plan and the war guilt lie.119 Four days later the RLB
executive committee met in Berlin to reiterate not just the RLB’s opposition
to the imprisonment paragraph but, more importantly, its determination to
carry the crusade against the Young Plan to a successful conclusion.120 Still,
relations between Hugenberg and the RLB remained profoundly strained.
Hugenberg’s refusal to drop the controversial paragraph had come as a sharp
rebuff to Schiele and the leaders of the RLB, who complained bitterly about the
way in which the matter had been misrepresented in the Hugenberg press and
how their legitimate concerns about the political implications of the imprison-
ment paragraph had been brushed aside by Hugenberg and his allies.121
Schiele nevertheless remained hopeful that an accommodation with Hugen-
berg might still be possible and urged his followers to stay the course in the

116
Copy of a letter from Pf[eil] to the CNBLP executive committee and to Hepp, Wend
hausen, and Oheimb, 22 Sept. 1929, records of the CNBLP, BA Berlin, Bestand R 8001,
1/32 33. See also Müller, Landvolkpartei, 118 30.
117
Entry in Quaatz’s diary, 21 and 23 Sept. 1929, BA Koblenz, NL Quaatz, 16. See also
DNVP, Mitteilungen no. 40, 24 Sept. 1929, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, VN 82, as well as
the minutes of the judicial subcommittee of the National Referendum Committee, 19
Sept. 1929, BA Berlin, R 8048, 263/109 14.
118
Resolution of the presidium of the National Committee for the German Referendum, n.
d. [21 Sept. 1929], appended to the letter cited in n. 117, BA Berlin, R 8001, 1/35.
119
Ibid.
120
Resolution of the RLB executive committee, 25 Sept. 1929, BA Koblenz, NL Weilnböck,
16b. See also the report in the Neue Preußische (Kreuz )Zeitung, 26 Sept. 1929, no. 310.
121
In this respect, see the correspondence between Schiele and Hugenberg, 25 Sept. 4
Oct. 1929, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, VN 122.
   , –

campaign against the Young Plan.122 In the meantime, Hugenberg had begun
to mobilize his own supporters within the RLB in an attempt to undercut
Schiele’s position as the organization’s national chairman, with the result that
the unity of the RLB itself was threatened by the conflict between those who
supported Schiele and his brand of conservative pragmatism and those who
remained loyal to Hugenberg’s wholesale assault against the Weimar system
and the policy of fulfillment.123

A Pyrrhic Victory?
The controversy over the imprisonment paragraph of the “Law against the
Enslavement of the German People” severely handicapped the effectiveness of
Hugenberg’s crusade against the Young Plan from the very outset. In order for
the “Freedom Law” to go forward, it required the signatures of ten percent of
the eligible German electorate, in this case approximately 4,127,800 voters.
Those who supported the proposed law had two weeks from 16 to 29 October
1929 in which they could attach their signatures to a referendum that, if
successful, would require the Reichstag to debate and vote on the “Freedom
Law.” Then, if the Reichstag rejected the proposed law, it would go back to the
electorate in the form of a plebiscite, or Volksentscheid, that would become law
with the support of fifty percent of the German electorate. By the first week of
October, the campaign was in full swing, as all of the organizations repre-
sented in the National Committee for the German Referendum mobilized
their followers to register for the referendum in what was a massive propa-
ganda campaign against the Young Plan, the war guilt lie, and Stresemann’s
foreign policy.124 To be sure, Hugenberg set the tone by speaking on every
second day and traveling from one end of the country to the other during the
two-week registration period.125 But he was joined in this effort by the leaders
of the Stahlhelm, who hoped that the campaign for the referendum against the
Young Plan would solidify ties between the organizations of the German Right

122
Wilmowsky to Krupp, 25 Sept. 1929, HA Krupp Essen, FAH 23/503. See also Schiele,
“Vorwärts mit aller Kraft für das Volksbegehren,” Sächsische Bauern Zeitung 36, no. 42
(20 Oct. 1929): 424 25.
123
See minutes of the RLB executive committee, 1 Nov. 1929, BA Berlin, R 8034 I, 120/
123 37, also in Dieter Gessner, “‘Grüne Front’ oder ‚’Harzburger Front.’ Der
Reichs Landbund in der letzten Phase der Weimarer Republik zwischen wirtschaftlicher
Interessenpolitik und nationalistischem Revisionsanspruch,” Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitge
schichte 29 (1981): 110 23, here 116 23.
124
For an optimistic assessment of the campaign’s initial successes, see the report by the
Stahlhelm district leaders to the Stahlhelm executive committee, 1 2 Oct. 1929, BA
Berlin, R 72, 11/51 57.
125
See the manuscripts of Hugenberg’s speeches in the last half of October 1929, BA
Koblenz, NL Hugenberg, 116/89 154.
    -  

and shared the podium whenever they could with representatives from the
other organizations in the National Referendum Committee.126
The National Socialists, on the other hand, were under specific instructions
from the party leadership not to participate in demonstrations where other
representatives of the National Referendum Committee were involved and to
wage their campaign against the Young Plan at a discreet distance from the
rest of the national front.127 Hitler himself maintained a conspicuously low
profile throughout the campaign, speaking only once when he and Hugenberg
took part in a rally in Munich toward the very end of the registration
period.128 The official explanation for Hitler’s absence from the early stages
of the campaign was that the Nazi party leader was nursing a sore throat that
had made it difficult for him to speak.129 Hitler’s reticence, however, did not
prevent other high-ranking Nazi officials such as Gregor Strasser or Joseph
Goebbels from doing their part,130 although here the intention was less to
prevent the Young Plan from becoming law than to secure a breakthrough
into the ranks of the other parties on the moderate and radical Right.131 No
doubt this was also what the party leadership had in mind when it invited
Duesterberg and Goltz to appear as honored guests at the Nazi party congress
in Nuremberg at the beginning of August 1929.132
All of this was accompanied by a veritable flood of anti-Young Plan
propaganda in the form of handouts, placards, brochures, and even a film
that crested in the last two weeks of October 1929.133 The central theme
around which Hugenberg and the leaders of the National Referendum

126
See Seldte’s speech in the Herrenhaus demonstration, 9 July 1929, reported in Fort mit dem
Pariser Tributplan, Kampfschrift no. 1, 1 Aug. 1929, 2 3, as well as the report of a
demonstration in the Berlin Sports Palace in late September 1929 where the featured
speakers were Duesterberg and Hugenberg, Der Stahlhelm 11, no. 39 (29 Sept. 1929): 1 2.
127
Entries for 5 and 12 July 1929 in Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels, ed. Elke Fröhlich,
Part I: Aufzeichnungen 1924 1941, 5 vols. (Munich and New York, 1987 2004), vol. 1/III,
280 81, 284 85. See also Otmar Jung, “Plebizitärer Durchbruch 1929? Zur Bedeutung
von Volksbegehren und Volksentscheid gegen den Youngplan für die NSDAP,”
Geschichte und Gesellschaft 15 (1989): 489 510, here 492.
128
Hitler, “Rede auf Kundgebung des bayerischen Landesausschusses für das deutsche
Volksbegehren in München,” 25 Oct. 1929, in Hitler, Reden, Schriften, Anordnungen,
vol. 3, pt. 2, 411 20.
129
Hess to Hugenberg, 13 Aug. 1929, BA Berlin, R 9354, 647.
130
For example, see Gregor Strasser, 58 Jahre Young Plan! Eine quellenmäßige Betrachtung
über Inhalt, Wesen und Folgen des Young Plans (Berlin, n.d. [1929]), and Joseph
Goebbels, Der Kampf gegen Young eine Sache des deutschen Arbeiters. Rede gehalten
am 26. September 1929 im Kriegervereinshaus Berlin (Berlin, 1929).
131
Jung, “Plebizitärer Durchbruch 1929?,” 502 09.
132
Völkischer Beobachter, 5 Aug. 1929, no. 180.
133
In this respect, see “Überblick über die Agitation der Rechtsparteien gegen den Young
Plan zusammengestellt auf Grund der Berichte der Landesabteilungen durch die
Reichszentrale für Heimatsdienst,” 14 Oct. 1929, records of the Reich Ministry of
   , –

Committee crafted their campaign was the theme of enslavement. Not only
was the Young Plan based upon the war-guilt lie of the Versailles Treaty, but it
contained a schedule for the payment of reparations that perpetuated the
enslavement of the German people for another sixty years.134 The burden
the Young Plan imposed upon the German economy, so argued Hugenberg
and his supporters, was even more onerous than that of the Dawes Plan, whose
adoption in 1924 had sacrificed the economic welfare of the German people to
the vindictiveness of the Allies at the same time it had left a deep rift within the
ranks of the nationalist Right.135 By rejecting the Young Plan, the German
people would be taking the first step toward regaining its freedom from Allied
domination and restoring its sense of national honor.136 Acceptance of the
Young Plan, on the other hand, meant economic disaster not just for German
industry but for broad sectors of the German populace, but most of all for the
already beleaguered German farmer and the independent middle class.137
This, insisted the architects of the anti-Young Plan campaign, was tantamount
to nothing less than a new act of treason by those politicians who had betrayed
the German people in 1918 and whose treachery now manifested itself in their
determination to perpetuate Germany’s economic enslavement through the
imposition of a new tribute plan that promised relief and security but delivered
only suffering and hardship.138
The National Referendum Committee’s campaign against the Young Plan
combined highly charged appeals to German national feeling with a picture
of Germany’s economic future that was intentionally designed to instill fear
and a sense of desperation in the hearts of the average German if the new
plan were to take effect. Yet for all of its emotional power, the crusade
against the Young Plan failed to strike a responsive chord with the German
electorate. At least four factors accounted for this failure. In the first place,
the lingering resentment that Schiele and the RLB leadership felt over the

Interior, Bundesarchiv Berlin, Bestand R 1501, 125717a/114 23, reprinted in Das Kabi
nett Müller II, ed. Vogt, 2: 1035 40.
134
Reichsausschuß für das deutsche Volksbegehren, “Soll das wahr werden?,” Flugblatt
no. 8, NL Hiller, Gärtringen.
135
Die Wahrheit über den Young Plan. Nach Aufsätzen von Dr. Graf Brockdorff und Dr.
Quaatz, M.d.R., ed. Landesverband Baden der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei (Freiburg
im Breisgau, n.d. [1929]), esp. 18 20. See also Westarp, “Dawes Plan oder Young Plan,”
Neue Preußische (Kreuz )Zeitung, 20 Sept. 1929, no. 304.
136
Reichsausschuß für das deutsche Volksbegehren, “Durch Volksbegehren und
Volksentscheid zur deutschen Freiheit!,” n.d., Flugblatt no. 21, NL Hiller, Gärtringen.
137
Reichsausschuß für das deutsche Volksbegehren, “Landleute,” Flugblatt no. 5, and
“Pariser Tributplan und deutscher Mittelstand,” Flugblatt no. 10, both in NL Hiller,
Gärtringen.
138
Rudolf von Xylander, Deutschland und der Youngplan (Munich, n.d. [1929]), 11 12.
    -  

Figure 12. Placard designed by an unidentified graphic artist in support of the

referendum against the Young Plan, 1 October 1929. Reproduced with permission from
the Bundesarchiv Berlin, Plakat 002 015 019

way in which they had been manipulated into supporting a referendum with
whose language they did not agree undermined its willingness to support
Hugenberg’s campaign against the Young Plan. Nothing revealed the disillu-
sionment of the RLB’s more moderate elements with the campaign than the
   , –

Figure 13. Placard designed by Herbert Rothgaengel, in support of the referendum

against the Young Plan, October 1929. Reproduced with permission from the
Bundesarchiv Berlin, Plakat 002 015 020
    -  

resignation of Baron Tilo von Wilmowsky, chairman of the RLB’s regional

affiliate in provincial Saxony and the RLB’s principal liaison to Ruhr heavy
industry, from the National Referendum Committee on 11 October.139 Sec-
ondly, Germany’s industrial leadership remained cool to the referendum and
refused to commit the financial resources upon which Hugenberg had been
counting. The National Referendum Committee was always short of money,
and Hugenberg had to dip into his own pockets on at least one occasion to
help cover the committee’s operational expenses.140 The campaign also lost
much of its emotional impetus when on 3 October 1929 German Foreign
Minister Gustav Stresemann died of a stroke after a Herculean effort to
rally his badly divided German People’s Party behind a compromise on
unemployment insurance that temporarily ensured the survival of the Müller
cabinet.141 The predicament in which the architects of the anti-Young Plan
crusade found themselves after Stresemann’s death was further complicated
by the Hindenburg’s refusal to support the “Freedom Law” even after the
objectionable language threatening him with trial and imprisonment had
been removed from its text. Hindenburg was convinced that despite all of
its shortcomings the Young Plan represented an improvement on the Dawes
Plan and steadfastly resisted pressure from the leaders of the Stahlhelm and
other elements on the German Right to assume a more public role in the
struggle against its ratification. On 16 October Hindenburg issued a public
statement dissociating himself from the agitation of the National Referendum
Committee and asserting his neutrality in the conflict over the Young
Plan.142
Fully cognizant of the threat that the campaign against the Young Plan
posed to the stability of Germany’s republican order, the governments in the
Reich and Prussia responded with a vigorous counter-offensive of their
own.143 Responsibility for coordinating the various aspects of the govern-
ment’s counter-offensive was placed in the hands of Carl Severing, the Social

139
Wilmowsky to Hugenberg, 11 Oct. 1929, BA Berlin, R 8034 I, 120/148 49. See also
Zollitsch, “Das Scheitern der ‘gouvernementalen’ Rechten,” 259 61.
140
On the campaign’s financial difficulties, see Lord to Wagner, 10 Aug. 1929, BA Berlin,
R 72, 40/247 49, as well as the minutes of the budget committee of the National
Referendum Committee, 10 Oct. 1929, BA Berlin, R 8048, 263/139.
141
Minutes of the DVP national committee, 30 Sept. 1929, in Nationalliberalimus in der
Weimarer Republik, ed. Kolb and Richter, 2:837 63.
142
Hindeburg to Müller, 16 Oct. 1929, in Das Kabinett Müller II, ed. Vogt, 2:1043 44. See
also Hindenburg to Schröder, 4 Nov. 1929, BHStA Munich, Abt. V, NL Dziembowksi,
19. On the Stahlhelm’s overtures to Hindenburg, see Duesterberg’s unpublished
memoirs, BA Koblenz, NL Duesterberg, 46/147 49.
143
For further details, see “Plan für die Aufklärungsarbeit anläßlich des Volksbehrens,” n.d.,
appended to a memorandum from Abegg to the Prussian provincial presidents and
Berlin police chiefs, 12 Oct. 1929, BA Berlin, R 1501, 125717a/80 83.
   , –

Democratic minister of interior in the Müller cabinet. The Müller cabinet

placed nearly 495,000 marks at Severing’s disposal to combat the propaganda
of the National Referendum Committee and authorized a vigorous campaign
that included, among other things, the extensive use of the radio by cabinet
officers and other high-ranking government officials.144 The government also
organized an appeal in support of the Young Plan that carried the signatures of
all the cabinet officers and other well-known public figures, including indus-
trialist Robert Bosch, Albert Einstein and Max Planck from the German
scientific community, historians Hermann Oncken and Friedrich Meinecke,
dramatist Gerhard Hauptmann, and Nobel laureate Thomas Mann.145 The
fact, however, that a number of prominent industrialists, including Carl
Duisberg and Carl Friedrich von Siemens, as well as former chancellor Hans
Luther declined to sign the appeal despite their opposition to the tone and
substance of Hugenberg’s referendum revealed a reluctance to become pub-
licly identified with a campaign that, in their eyes at least, had been monopol-
ized by the Social Democrats at the expense of the government’s nonsocialist
supporters.146 Lacking the resources at the government’s disposal, the various
nonsocialist parties that supported the Müller cabinet confined their role to
issuing public statements denouncing the so-called Freedom Law as a “laugh-
able miscarriage [lächerlicher Mißgeburt)” that sought only to divide rather
than unite the German people.147
As the registration deadline for the referendum against the Young Plan
drew near, not even its most vigorous supporters were confident of success. As
late as 31 October the NSDAP’s Joseph Goebbels noted in his diary: “Defeat.
Most likely instead of the prescribed 10 percent only 8 percent.”148 Even as the
final tally was being taken on 3 November Goebbels was still in doubt as to
the outcome of the referendum.149 When the final tally was announced, the
referendum had, to the surprise of all but a handful of Hugenberg diehards,
succeeded with the signatures of 10.02 percent of Germany’s eligible voters.

144
Minutes of the ministerial conference, 3 Oct. 1929, in Das Kabinett Müller II, ed. Vogt,
2:998 1001. See also the summary of the government’s campaign finances dated 15
Jan. 1930, BA Berlin, R 1501, 125717d/87.
145
See the text of the appeal dated 10 Oct. 1929, in Das Kabinett Müller II, ed. Vogt,
2:1032 34.
146
For example, see Siemens to Severing, 15 Oct. 1929, BA Berlin, R 1501, 125717b/91 93;
Duisberg to Severing, 12 Oct. 1929, ibid., 105; and Luther to Severing, 15 Oct. 1929, ibid.,
106. See also Koch Weser to Müller, 17 Oct. 1929, in Das Kabinett Müller II, ed. Vogt,
2:1044 45.
147
Koch Weser’s speech at the DDP’s Mannheim party congress, 4 Oct. 1929, in Der
Demokrat. Organ der Deutschen Demokratischen Partei 10, no. 20 (20 Oct. 1929):
486 96, here 491.
148
Entry for 31 Oct. 1929, in Goebbels Tagebücher, ed. Fröhlich, 1/3, 361.
149
Entry for 3 Nov. 1929, ibid., 363.
    -  

But this was hardly a cause for celebration. Not only had the referendum
carried by the narrowest of margins with only 9,925 more votes than the
10 percent required to send the “Freedom Law” to the Reichstag, but the
number of registrants fell more than a million short of the combined total of
5,191,690 votes the DNVP and NSDAP had received in the 1928 Reichstag
elections. The referendum’s success was confined almost entirely to traditional
conservative strongholds east of the Elbe. In Pomerania, East Prussia and
Mecklenburg, for example, 32.9, 23.9, and 20.9 percent of the voters respect-
ively had registered for the referendum. In twelve other districts the referen-
dum received less than five percent of the signatures of the eligible electorate,
with its poorest showing in predominantly Catholic districts such as Cologne-
Aachen and Koblenz-Trier.150 If Hugenberg and the leaders of the National
Committee for the German Referendum had hoped to use the referendum
provisions of the Weimar Constitution to ignite a popular insurrection against
the Young Plan, the policy of fulfillment, and the hated Weimar system, this
had clearly failed to materialize.
The success of the referendum, in so far as it could be termed a success,
meant that the “Freedom Law” would now go to the Reichstag, where it faced
certain defeat. For Hugenberg, Hitler, and their associates, this would never-
theless afford them a welcome opportunity to continue and intensify their
agitation against the Young Plan and the system of government with which it
had become inextricably identified. As Goebbels noted in his diary with his
characteristic cynicism: “Now the dance goes on.”151

Hugenberg’s referendum against the Young Plan left a legacy that was both
irrevocable and of enormous consequence. Ever since the last years of the
Second Empire the German Right had embraced two fundamentally different
camps, one a governmental conservatism associated with the names of men
like Karl Helfferich, Oskar Hergt, and Martin Schiele and a radical Pan-
German nationalism represented by the likes of Alfred Hugenberg and the
ADV’s Heinrich Claß. In the early years of the Weimar Republic both were
housed within the German National People’s Party, where they had been fused
together by what DNVP moderate Hans Erdmann von Lindeiner-Wildau
called the “unity of the no.”152 But with the stabilization of the Weimar
Republic in the second half of the 1920’s and the DNVP’s two experiments
at government participation, Lindeiner’s “unity of the no” began to lose its

150
The statistics upon which this analysis is based have been taken from Falter, Linden
berger, and Schumann, Wahlen und Abstimmungen, 41, 71, 80.
151
Entry for 3 Nov. 1929, in Goebbels Tagebücher, ed. Fröhlich, 1/3, 363.
152
Hans Erdmann von Lindeiner Wildau, “Konservatismus,” in Volk und Reich der
Deutschen, ed. Bernhard Harms, 3 vols. (Berlin, 1929), 2:35 61, here 58 61.
   , –

integrative force. The referendum against the Young Plan, with all its attend-
ant feuding over strategy and tactics, only exacerbated the tensions within the
DNVP and drove a wedge deep into the ranks of the German Right. Whether
or it might still be possible to repair this rift not just within the DNVP but
within the German Right as a whole remained to be seen.
 16

Schism and Fragmentation

For all of its heat and passion, the campaign against the Young Plan was little
more than a side-show in the second half of 1929. By far the most important
problem challenging Germany’s political leadership was the deteriorating
economic situation and the strain it placed upon public finances. Increases
in unemployment, though modest for the period from January to December
1929, greatly exceeded the projections that had been incorporated into the
1927 Unemployment Insurance Law, with the result that whatever financial
benefits Germany’s political leaders had hoped to reap from the Young Plan
fell far short of what was needed to restore fiscal stability. At the same time,
Stresemann’s death in early October 1929 had created an irreparable void in
the ranks of Germany’s political leadership and robbed the Weimar Republic
of one of its most ardent defenders at the precise moment that his talents as a
champion of liberal democracy were most urgently needed. But the crisis that
descended upon Germany in the fall and early winter of 1929 found the forces
of the anti-parliamentary Right more divided than ever. Hugenberg’s crusade
to unite the various parties, interest organizations, and patriotic associations
that made up the German Right into a powerful phalanx that would sweep
away the institutions of Weimar democracy in favor of a more authoritarian
system of government only exacerbated the divisions that already existed in
the ranks of the German Right. As the campaign against the Young Plan so
clearly revealed, Hugenberg’s political agenda set him on a collision course
with the special economic interests that constituted the DNVP’s material base
and that were prepared to work within the framework of the existing system of
government in order to defend the vital interests of their constituencies. Now
that the first stage of the referendum process was over and Hugenberg’s
“Freedom Law” made its way to the Reichstag, the unity of the DNVP was
once again at risk.

The Hardening of Dissent

Disclaimers to the contrary notwithstanding, the founding of the Christian-
Social Reich Union in August 1928 was the first step toward the creation of a
new party by the leaders of the DNVP’s Christian-Social faction and

   , –

sympathizers who stood outside the immediate orbit of the DNVP.1 The
presence of outspoken social reactionaries like Paul Bang and Gustav Hartz
in Hugenberg’s immediate entourage only fueled Christian-Social fears that
the social and economic achievements of the previous decade were under
siege. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the sharp attack that Gustav
Hülser, a member of the DNVP Reichstag delegation and a leading spokesman
for the party’s Christian-Social faction, levelled against Hartz – and against
Hugenberg by association – at the Frankfurt congress of the Christian Labor
Unions in mid-September 1929.2 Hülser would become one of the driving
forces in the struggle against Hugenberg and in efforts to organize Christian-
Socials throughout the country into a new party of their own. Having once
belonged to the Young German Order, Hülser was on close personal terms
with its high master Artur Mahraun and made no secret of his sympathy for
the “People’s National Action” that the Young Germans had launched with
such fanfare earlier that spring.3 Still, Hülser and his associates were reluctant
to break away from the DNVP despite increasing pressure from local Evan-
gelical parties in Baden and Württemberg to join them in the creation of a new
Christian-Social party.4
All of this would come to a head at the CSRV’s second national congress in
Bielefeld in early August 1929. Although Treviranus had succeeded in dis-
suading Hülser from threatening Hugenberg and the DNVP with the founding
of a Christian-Social party,5 this did not keep Hülser and the Young National
Ring’s Heinz Dähnhardt, the two principal speakers at Bielefeld, from openly
criticizing the DNVP leadership’s indifference to the aspirations of the
Christian-Social movement. In deference to Treviranus, they drew the line at
founding a new Christian-Social Party for fear that this would compress
the movement into an organizational mold that would cripple its overall

1
On the founding of the CSRV, see the protocol of the Bielefeld national congress (Reichs
treffen) of the Christian Socials, 19 Aug. 1928, BA Berlin, NL Mumm, 282/181 85. On the
CSRV’s goals, see Heinz Dietrich Wendland, Christlich soziale Grundsätze. Gedanken zu
einem neuen christlich sozialen Programm (Berlin, 1929).
2
Hülser, “Die Sozialpolitik und ihre Gegner,” in Niederschrift der Verhandlungen des 12.
Kongresses der christlichen Gewerkschaften Deutschlands. Frankfurt a. Main 15. bis 18.
September 1929 (Berlin Wilmersdorf, n.d. [1929]), 249 67.
3
See Hülser, “Christlich soziale Realpolitik,” Der Deutsche, 24 July 1929, no. 171, and
Hülser, “Christlich sozialer Aufbruch,” Der Jungdeutsche, 30 July 1929, no. 175. I am
further indebted to Hülser for his letter of 24 August 1967 and information on his ties to
Mahraun and the Young Germans.
4
See Mumm, “Wir Christlich sozialen und die Parteikrise in der Gegenwart,” n.d. [July
1929], BA Berlin, NL Mumm, 283/157 62, as well as Mumm to Dähnhardt, 21 Oct. 1929,
ibid., 283/325 26. See also Kandzia, “Die Christlich soziale Reichsvereinigung,” Kölnische
Zeitung, 2 Aug. 1929, no. 419a, and Hülser, “Politische Umgruppierung,” Politische
Wochenschrift, 5, no. 31 (3 Aug. 1929): 733 34.
5
Treviranus to Westarp, 10 Aug. 1929, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, II/37.
    

effectiveness. In the ensuing discussion, Count Leopold von Baudissin from

the Bodelschwingh Institutes in Bethel triggered a lively and often heated
discussion when he called for a complete break with the existing political
parties and the consolidation of all Christian-Social forces in a separate
organization of their own. Baudissin’s remarks, which found strong support
among the more than 200 delegates attending the convention, prompted
DNVP parliamentarians like Mumm, Lambach, and Hartwig to intervene in
order to prevent an open break with the DNVP.6 Over the course of the next
several months, the leaders of the CSRV would struggle to define their
relationship to Christian-Social groups throughout the rest of the country.7
The unexpectedly strong showing of the Evangelical People’s Service
(Evangelischer Volksdienst) in the Baden state elections on 27 October 1929
would only aggravate the dilemma in which the leaders of the DNVP’s
Christian-Social faction found themselves.8 The was no less true of the agita-
tion of the Christian People’s Service (Christlicher Volksdienst or CVD) in the
Rhineland and Westphalia in preparation for municipal elections that were
scheduled to take place throughout Prussia on 17 November.9
This conflict inevitably spilled over into the DNVP Evangelical Reich
Committee, where Hugenberg and his supporters began to press for a full-
scale attack against the Christian People’s Service and its sister organizations
throughout the country.10 The conflict reached a climax at the end of October,
when Reinhard Mumm, the committee chairman and a Lutheran pastor who
had been at the forefront of the Christian-Social movement since before the
war, and Magdalene von Tiling, a prominent Lutheran theologian who had
served in the DNVP delegation to the Prussian Landtag since 1921, squared off
at a closed meeting of over a hundred committee members in Berlin on 30
October. Whereas Tiling accused Mumm of pursuing Evangelical interest
politics and called for a strict separation of Christianity and politics, Mumm
vigorously reaffirmed his commitment to infusing all aspects of German life –
and in particular the political – with the spirit of the Evangelium.11 Like most

6
DNVP, Mitteilungen, no. 36, 30 Aug. 1929, BA Berlin, NL Mumm, 291/138 47. See also
the reports in the Christlicher Volksdienst, 10 and 17 Aug. 1929, nos. 32 33.
7
Minutes of the meeting of the CSRV executive committee, 15 Sept. 1929, BA Berlin, NL
Mumm, 283/293 98.
8
On the results in Baden, see Kraus’s remarks to the DNVP’s Evangelical Reich Commit
tee, 30 Oct. 1929, BA Berlin, R 8005, 458/26 33.
9
See Karl Dudey of the Christian Metal Workers’ Union (Christlicher Metalarbeiter
Verband) to Mumm, 25 Sept. 1929, BA Berlin, NL Mumm, 283/299 301.
10
See Bartelheim’s remarks before the executive committee of the DNVP’s Evangelical
Reich Committee, 11 Sept. 1929, BA Berlin, R 8005, 465/82 88, as well as Thadden to
Mumm, 7 Aug. 1929, ibid., 465/25.
11
Report of the meeting of the Evangelical Reich Committee, 30 Oct. 1929, in Der Reichs
bote, 31 Oct. 1929, no. 261. See also the minutes of the CSRV executive committee, 29
   , –

of the women in the DNVP leadership, Tiling had lined up behind Hugenberg
in his struggle with the party moderates and strongly supported his efforts to
return the DNVP to a course of uncompromising opposition to the Weimar
Republic. Her altercation with Mumm was only one more sign of the
deepening rift within the ranks of the DNVP’s Evangelical supporters and
that a parting of the ways was imminent.12
Whatever reluctance the DNVP’s Christian-Social faction might have felt
about a break with the DNVP quickly evaporated during the referendum
against the Young Plan in the fall of 1929. In September an organization
identifying itself as the Young National Ring (Jungnationaler Ring) published
a pamphlet entitled Der Niedergang der nationalen Opposition in which it
attacked Hugenberg as an aspirant dictator whose extremism only guaranteed
the continuation of Stresemann’s disastrous foreign policies. The only solution
to the catastrophic situation in which the German political system found itself,
argued the pamphlet’s author, lay in the consolidation of the German Right
behind the banner of Reich President von Hindenburg in a new conservative
party that, like the fabled phoenix of classical mythology, would rise from the
ashes of the old DNVP to lead the way to a rebirth of the German nation and
the historic values it embodied.13 Such sentiments resonated with the moder-
ates on the DNVP’s left wing, who by the end of October had begun to
coalesce under the leadership of Lindeiner-Wildau and Treviranus with an
eye toward using Hugenberg’s anticipated defeat in the referendum against the
Young Plan to force his removal as DNVP party chairman.14 By now, the
dissidents were in close contact with elements in the Reichswehr, the Christian
labor movement, and the German industrial establishment that strongly

Oct. 1929, BA Berlin, NL Mumm, 283/339 43. For further details, see Norbert Friedrich,
“‘National, Sozial, Christlich’. Evangelischer Reichsausschuß der Deutschnationalen
Volkspartei in der Weimarer Republik,” Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte 6 (1993): 290 311, here
306 08.
12
Gury Schneider Ludorff, Magdalene von Tiling. Ordnungstheologie und Geschlechterbe
ziehungen. Ein Beitrag zum Gesellschaftsverständnis des Protestantismus in der Weimarer
Republik (Göttingen, 2001), 213 15. On Hugenberg’s support from the party’s women
leaders, see Heinsohn, Konservative Parteien, 206 13.
13
Der Niedergang der nationalen Opposition. Ein Warnruf aus den Reihen der Jugend, ed.
Jungnationaler Ring (Berlin, n. d. [1929]), esp. 34 39.
14
See Westarp’s recollection of a conversation with Lindeiner Wildau in late October
1929 in an untitled twenty four page memorandum on the DNVP party crisis in
November December 1929 (hereafter cited as Westarp, “Niederschrift über die DNVP
Parteikrise”), NL Westarp, Gärtringen, II/61. See also the detailed report from Blank to
Reusch, 30 Oct. 1929, RWWA Cologne, Abt. 130, NL Reusch, 4001012024/6, as well as
Mumm to Rippel, 19 Nov. 1929, BA Berlin, NL Mumm, 139/211. The most detailed
treatment of the DNVP party crisis in 1929 30 remains the unpublished dissertation by
Elizabeth Friedenthal, “Volksbegehren und Volksentscheid über den Young Plan und die
deutschnationale Sezession (Ph.D. diss., Universität Tübingen, 1957).
    

supported efforts to force a change in the DNVP party leadership and initiate a
fundamental realignment of forces on the German Right.15 Not even the fact
that the referendum had defied all expectations in receiving the more than four
million signatures that were required to bring the “Freedom Law” to the floor
of the Reichstag would deter them.
Throughout all of this, the leaders of the DNVP’s agrarian wing continued
to bide their time. Although the leaders of the party’s agrarian wing had
become increasingly critical of Hugenberg and the DNVP party leadership,16
Schiele did not think that the time or pretext for a break with the DNVP had
arrived and recused himself from an active role in the preparations for a
secession on the party’s left wing.17 In the meantime, Hugenberg and his
associates were busy at work rallying their supporters for a showdown with
the dissidents at the upcoming party congress that was to take place in Kassel
in the last week of November. From their perspective, what the DNVP most
needed was an ideological cement that could bind the party together at the
precise moment it seemed to be falling apart. If the Center had succeeded in
insulating itself against the centrifugal forces that were at work within the
other bourgeois parties by reaffirming its commitment to the social and moral
values of the Catholic faith, what might the DNVP use as its ideological
cement? Moreover, what sort of appeal might enable the DNVP to reach
across existing party lines and close ranks with parties and groups outside
its immediate orbit in a common effort to change once and for all the direction
in which the ship of state seemed to be heading?

The Kassel Debacle

In his quest for a magic formula that would enable him to reassert his control
over a badly fractured DNVP, Hugenberg fell back on a bromide that had
worked well in the past: anti-Marxism. Here the initiative seems to have come
from retired naval officer Wilhelm Widenmann, who in his capacity as DNVP
party treasurer had begun to solicit the support of Vögler, Poengsen, and other
Hugenberg backers in the German industrial community for the creation of
anti-Marxist front that would also include the Center, the DVP, and the

15
On Schleicher, see Gottfried R. Treviranus, “Zur Rolle und zur Person Kurt von Schlei
chers,” in Staat, Wirtschaft und Politik in der Weimarer Republik. Festschrift für Heinrich
Brüning, ed. Ferdinand A. Hermens and Theodor Schieder (Berlin, 1967), 363 82, here
371. See also Brüning to Gehrig, 1 Nov. 1929, ACDP Sankt Augustin, NL Gehrig, I 087/
001/2; and the correspondence between the RDI’s Duisberg and Baron Werner von
Alvensleben, 28 Nov. 3 Dec. 1929, Bayer Archiv Leverkusen, Autographen Sammlung
Duisberg.
16
For example, see Lind to Hugenberg, 6 May 1929, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, VN 83, and
Richthofen Boguslawitz to Westarp, 6 May 1929, ibid., VN 102.
17
Westarp, “Niederschrift über die DNVP Parteikrise,” NL Westarp, Gärtringen, II/61.
   , –

various middle-class splinter parties that stood to the left of the DNVP. The
purpose of such a front, as Widenmann explained to the Bavarian Minister of
Justice Franz Gürtner, would be to lay the foundation for a change of govern-
ment in both the Reich and Prussia that would effectively exclude the Marx-
ists – namely, the Social Democrats – from any role whatsoever in Germany’s
political future.18 Vögler warmed quickly to Widenmann’s proposal, as did
Hugenberg after meeting with Gürtner and a Vögler confidant during his
summer retreat in Bad Kreuth.19 It was also in this context that Hugenberg
wrote to the Center party chairman Ludwig Kaas on 20 November 1929. After
a brief allusion to a speech in which Kaas had voiced reservations about the
wisdom of a long-term alliance with the Social Democrats, Hugenberg wrote
“that from the core of my own being I regard a strong anti-Marxist bloc with
the capacity to assume the reins of government as the accepted course of
future development and as the foundation for order and a healing of German
affairs as long as this extends to Prussia as well and carries within it a
guarantee of permanence.” Such a front, Hugenberg continued, was all the
more necessary in light of the enormous burden that acceptance of the Young
Plan would impose upon all sectors of German society and how this would
impact the process of forming a new government. All of this, concluded the
DNVP party chairman, would only intensify the deep gulf that already existed
between management and labor and push the realization of a true German
Volksgemeinschaft decades into the future.20
The DNVP’s Kassel party congress convened on 21 November
1929 amidst widespread speculation that Hugenberg’s opponents would
use the congress as a forum for staging their exodus from the party.21
Hugenberg did little to help the situation when at a meeting of the DNVP
executive committee on the first day of the congress he introduced a
resolution stipulating that all organs of the party, including the Reichstag
delegation, must support the proposed Freedom Law in its entirety and that
any member of the delegation who either voted against the controversial
imprisonment paragraph or abstained from voting on it would be subject to
disciplinary action.22 This came as a sharp rebuff to Westarp, who had
struggled valiantly as chairman of the DNVP Reichstag delegation to

18
Widenmann to Gürtner, 7 Nov. 1929, BA MA Freiburg, Nachlass Wilhelm Widenmann,
17/82 84. In a similar vein, see Gerhard Raab, Konservativismus. Bemerkungen über Idee
und Weg der deutschen Rechten (Wetzlar an der Lahn, 1929), esp. 13 19.
19
Widenmann to Poengsen, 8 Nov. 1929, BA MA Freiburg, NL Widenmann, 17/75 77. See
also Widenmann to Vögler, 10 Nov. 1929, ibid., 17/71.
20
Hugenberg to Kaas, 20 Nov. 1929, BA Koblenz, NL Hugenberg, 192/389 91.
21
Blank to Reusch, 30 Oct. 1929, RWWA Cologne, Abt. 130, NL Reusch, 4001012024/6.
22
Hugenberg’s speech before the DNVP executive committee, 21 Nov. 1929, BA Berlin,
R 8005, 54/3 5.
    

salvage what remained of party unity and sharply criticized Hugenberg’s

resolution.23 But Hugenberg’s supporters on the DNVP party executive
committee, many of whom were intent upon driving Hugenberg’s oppon-
ents from the party,24 rallied behind the beleaguered party chairman and
rejected Westarp’s efforts at mediation by a decisive, if not overwhelming,
margin.25 The committee then turned its attention to an incident involving
Treviranus, a one-time Hugenberg protégé who had emerged as a leader of
the anti-Hugenberg faction on the party’s left wing. In a letter written
earlier that November to a long-time family friend in Bremen, Treviranus
had sharply criticized Hugenberg’s leadership of the party and alluded to
the growing interest of civil servants, industrialists, and white-collar
employees in a secession from the DNVP. Treviranus suggested that if a
change in the DNVP party leadership was no longer possible, it would be
necessary to find “a new form from which a progressive conservative
politics that is not afraid to call itself conservative could be pursued.”26
Through an indiscretion Treviranus’s letter had fallen into the hands of a
Hugenberg confederates and led to the introduction of expulsion proceed-
ings against the disgruntled deputy. Westarp objected vehemently to the
use of a private letter in a situation like this and urged all parties to accept a
compromise on the imprisonment paragraph that would preserve party
unity in the upcoming vote on the referendum against the Young Plan.27
Once again Hugenberg and his supporters ignored Westarp’s admonitions
and went ahead with proceedings to expel Treviranus from the party.28
The meeting of the DNVP executive committee on the eve of the Kassel
party congress did little to ease the tensions that had been building within the
party. If anything, the meeting revealed how deep the gulf separating Hugen-
berg from his critics on the party’s left wing actually was. In his keynote
address on the following evening Hugenberg stressed first and foremost the

23
Westarp’s first statement before the DNVP executive committee, 21 Nov. 1929, NL
Westarp, Gärtringen, II/61. See also Jones, “German Conservatism at the Crossroads,”
157 60.
24
Resolution adopted by the DNVP district executive committee (Landesvorstand) in
Potsdam II, 6 Nov. 1929, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, 1929, II/35.
25
Westarp to Wallraf, 26 Nov. 1929, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, II/37.
26
Treviranus to Ahlefeld, 1 Nov. 1929, BA Koblenz, NL Schmidt Hannover, 73, also in
G. R. Treviranus, Rückblick (n.p., n.d. [1930]), 4, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, as well as in
VWA Münster, NL Lüninck, 823. See also Horst Möller, “Gottfried Reinhold Treviranus.
Ein Konservativer zwischen den Zeiten,” in Um der Freiheit Willen. Eine Festgabe für und
von Johannes und Karin Schauff zum 80. Geburtstag, ed. Paulus Gordan (Pfullingen,
1983), 118 46.
27
Westarp’s second statement before the DNVP executive committee, 21 Nov. 1929, NL
Westarp, Gärtringen, II/61.
28
Treviranus, “Rückblick,” 7. For Hugenberg’s position, see Traub to Tirpitz, 2 Jan. 1930,
BA MA Freiburg, NL Tirpitz, 221/8 9.
   , –

need for unity not only if the campaign against the Young Plan was to succeed
but even more ominously if it should fail. Here Hugenberg highlighted the
theme of anti-Marxism as the ideological axis around which the unification of
the national opposition should take place. It was only through the creation of a
strong and effective anti-Marxist front, Hugenberg insisted, that Germany
could free itself from the yoke of foreign domination and deal with the
enormous economic consequences of the Young Plan should it be accepted.29
Over the course of the next several days Hugenberg’s supporters would return
to the theme of anti-Marxism time and time again: Magdalene von Tiling in
her speech on what Christianity had to say to Marxism,30 Christian-Social
pastor and CSRV chairman Karl Veidt in his speech on the new Kulturkampf
between Christianity and Marxism,31 and World War I veteran Otto Schmidt-
Hannover in his speech on the role of the front generation and youth in the
struggle against Marxism.32 Even Emil Hartwig, chairman of the German
National Workers’ League and a leading spokesman for the Christian-Social
movement, delivered an impassioned speech in which he too identified the
crusade against Marxism as the highest priority of the German Right, though
tempered with a warning that fratricidal conflicts like that over the imprison-
ment paragraph only sewed disunity within the ranks of the national oppos-
ition and robbed it of the cohesiveness it needed to carry the struggle against
Marxism to victory.33
None of this did much to assuage the depression of Westarp, who,
according to one observer, sat through Hugenberg’s speech with a face full
of the greatest concern and deep solemnity. Only once did Westarp do so
much as to applaud silently during the standing ovations that were being
orchestrated by Hugenberg’s confederates.34 In reflecting back upon the Kassel

29
Alfred Hugenberg, Klare Front zum Freiheitskampf! Rede gehalten auf dem 9. Reichs
parteitag der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei in Kassel am 22. November 1929, Deutsch
nationale Flugschrift, no. 339 (Berlin, 1929), esp. 7 8. For the official record of the Kassel
party congress, see Unsere Partei 7:23 (1 Dec. 1929): 389 413.
30
Magdalene von Tiling, Was hat das Christentum zum Marxismus zu sagen? Rede,
gehalten auf dem 9. Reichsparteitag der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei in Kassel am 22.
November 1929, Deutschnationale Flugschrift, no. 341 (Berlin, 1929).
31
Karl Veidt, Der Kulturkampf unserer Zeit: Christentum und Marxismus. Rede, gehalten
auf dem 9. Reichsparteitag der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei in Kassel am 22. November
1929, Deutschnationale Flugschrift, no. 338 (Berlin, 1929).
32
Otto Schmidt Hannover, Frontgeneration und Jugend im Freiheitskampf gegen den
Marxismus. Rede, gehalten auf dem 9. Reichs Partei Tage der D.N.V.P. in Kassel am
23. November 1929 (Berlin, 1929).
33
Hartwig’s speech before the DNVP party congress, Kassel, 22 Nov. 1929, BA Berlin,
R 8005, 55/44 53.
34
Breuer, “Bericht über den deutschnationalen Parteitag in Kassel vom 21. 23.11.1929,” BA
Berlin, R 43 I, 2654/288 96.
    

congress, Westarp lamented the lack of support that his efforts on behalf of
party unity had received from the DNVP party leadership and criticized
Hugenberg in particular for his refusal to drop expulsion proceedings against
Treviranus.35 In point of fact, the Kassel party congress did little to heal the
divisions that had developed within the DNVP during the campaign against
the Young Plan. Even though the Christian-Socials, including Hülser and
Hartwig, had gone to great lengths to reaffirm their loyalty to the DNVP
and its struggle against Marxism in the report the German National Workers’
League presented to the congress on 22 November,36 they remained bitterly
opposed to Hugenberg’s leadership of the party and seemed resolved to use the
conflict over the imprisonment paragraph as the pretext for leaving the party
once it was clear that a change in the party leadership could no longer be
expected. By the same token, Hugenberg’s refusal to drop expulsions proceed-
ings against Treviranus meant that any secession on the DNVP’s left wing
would not be confined to the Christian-Socials but would most likely involve
the party’s young conservative faction as well. Throughout all of this, the
leaders of the DNVP’s agrarian wing continued to bide their time, no doubt
the outcome of the crisis with an eye on the Christian-National Peasants and
Farmers’ Party as a likely refuge if the situation in the DNVP did not resolve
itself in their favor.

The December Secession

As the parliamentary debate on the “Freedom Law” drew near, a group of
approximately twenty dissidents from the DNVP’s left wing met under Lin-
deiner-Wildau’s leadership in Berlin’s Hotel Continental on the evening of
27 November to formulate a strategy for the upcoming vote in the Reichstag.
The participants also included Westarp, who as chairman of the DNVP
Reichstag delegation hoped that the deputies who refused to support the
controversial imprisonment paragraph – here the estimates ranged from a
dozen or so to more than thirty – could be prevented from leaving the party by
allowing them to read a statement to the Reichstag in which they explained the
reasons for their action. Westarp, however, rejected a draft statement that had
been prepared for this purpose by Lindeiner-Wildau on the grounds that it
was too incendiary and highlighted the reasons for opposing the imprison-
ment paragraph without underscoring the extent to which the dissidents too
were opposed to the Young Plan and the policy of fulfillment. At the same

35
Westarp to Wallraf, 26 Nov. 1929, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, II/37.
36
Von Bielefeld bis Kassel. Bericht der Bundesleitung des Deutschnationalen Arbeiterbundes,
erstattet auf der 9. Reichstagung in Kassel am 21. November 1929, ed. Bundesvorstand des
Deutschnationalen Arbeiterbundes, Arbeiterbundschriften, no. 15 (Berlin, 1929), 11.
   , –

time, Westarp announced his intention to vote for the “Freedom Law” in its
entirety and urged those who opposed the imprisonment paragraph to remain
in the party despite their differences with the party chairman. Westarp then
fashioned a statement for the dissidents that stressed their unequivocal oppos-
ition to the Young Plan despite differences over the language of the imprison-
ment paragraph in the hope that this might be acceptable to all factions in the
party.37
Westarp’s efforts at a compromise received strong support from Schiele,
who had decided that he would not take part in the vote on the imprisonment
paragraph but would explain his action in a statement to the Reichstag. In a
private conversation with Schiele on 29 November Hugenberg indicated that
he was amenable to this solution as long as the dissidents supported all other
provisions of the “Freedom Law” and did not vote against the imprisonment
paragraph but simply absented themselves from the Reichstag when the
decisive vote took place.38 When this proposal had been floated at a meeting
of the DNVP Reichstag delegation on the previous evening, it had provoked a
storm of criticism from Hugenberg’s confederates, most of whom seemed
more intent upon purging the party of its unreliable elements than salvaging
party unity. This was particularly true of Hugenberg’s close associate Reinhold
Quaatz, who attacked Westarp not just for having taken part in meetings
with the dissidents but also for having consistently failed to preserve the unity
of the delegation at critical points in the party’s history. What began as
criticism of Westarp’s efforts to placate the anti-Hugenberg elements on the
DNVP’s left wing quickly escalated into a full-scale attack upon Westarp’s
performance first as the party’s national chairman and then as its leader in
the Reichstag.39 Westarp’s efforts to prevent a secession on the DNVP’s
left wing were further undercut by the unresolved status of the Treviranus
affair. At the meeting of the DNVP Reichstag delegation on 28 November
Treviranus had taken the floor to defend his indiscretion as a purely private
remark to a personal associate and denied any involvement in preparations for
the founding of a new party.40 But Treviranus’s disclaimer only infuriated
the pro-Hugenberg elements on the party’s right wing and did nothing to ease
tensions within the party.
When the DNVP Reichstag delegation resumed its deliberations on the
morning of 29 November, Hugenberg’s supporters intensified their attacks

37
Westarp, “Niederschrift über die DNVP Parteikrise,” NL Westarp, Gärtringen, II/61.
38
Ibid. See also Mumm to Rippel, 28 Nov. 1929, BA Berlin, NL Mumm, 139/218. On
Westarp’s efforts to avoid a split, see Gasteiger, Westarp, 352 55. See also Mergel, “Das
Scheitern des deutsche Tory Konservatismus,” 351 55.
39
Westarp, “Niederschrift über die DNVP Parteikrise,” NL Westarp, Gärtringen, II/61. See
also the entry in Quaatz’s diary, n.d. [29 Nov. 1929], BA Koblenz, NL Quaatz, 16.
40
Ibid. See also Treviranus, “Rückblick” (see n. 26), 7 9.
    

against the dissidents and their plans to release a statement explaining their
reasons for not supporting the controversial imprisonment paragraph. At the
urging of Westarp and Schiele, all of the dissidents with the exception of
Hülser relented and agreed simply to absent themselves during the critical vote
without issuing an explanation of their behavior. This represented a modest
victory for Westarp and Schiele, who earned expressions of gratitude from
Hugenberg and several of his supporters for their efforts on behalf of party
unity.41 This arrangement, however, fell apart when after the decisive vote on
the so-called Freedom Law on the morning of 30 November – a vote in which
thirteen Nationalist deputies including Treviranus and Lindeiner-Wildau
abstained from voting, while another ten, some for reasons of poor health,
missed the session altogether – Hartwig, Hülser, and Lambach released a
statement in which they identified themselves with the position taken by
Schiele, declared their solidarity with Treviranus, and criticized the DNVP
party leadership for its inability to tolerate differences of political opinion.42
The release of this statement was a clear breach of the arrangement to which
Hugenberg had reluctantly assented, whereupon the DNVP party chairman
called an emergency session of the DNVP executive committee on 3 December
for the purpose of initiating explusion proceedings against the three renegade
deputies.43
Over the weekend Westarp negotiated furiously with all concerned parties
in an attempt to prevent the crisis from developing into a major secession on
the DNVP’s left wing. But he was repeatedly frustrated not just by the
intransigence of both Hugenberg and the Christian-Socials but also by the
lingering uncertainty regarding the disposition of the Treviranus affair.44
Consequently, when the DNVP executive committee convened on the morn-
ing of 3 December to deal with the consequences of the split in the vote on the
“Freedom Law,” the lines had hardened to the point where compromise was
no longer possible.45 Hugenberg opened the meeting with a motion calling for
the expulsion of three Christian-Socials for having damaged the image of the
party.46 At this point Hartwig took the floor to announce that he already
considered himself expelled from the party, offered an impassioned defense of

41
Westarp, “Niederschrift über die DNVP Parteikrise,” NL Westarp, Gärtringen, II/61.
42
For the text of this statement, see Klärung und Sammlung. Der Wortlaut der wichtigeren
Veröffentlichungen gelegentlich der Klärung im deutschnationalen Lager. Als Handschrift
gedruckt (N.p., n.d. [1929 30]), 8.
43
Ibid., 8.
44
Westarp, “Niederschrift über die DNVP Parteikrise,” NL Westarp, Gärtringen, II/61.
45
See the article by Lambach, “Gegen Erstarrungserscheinungen im politischen Leben,”
Berliner Börsen Zeitung, 2 Dec. 1929, no. 562, reprinted in Klärung und Sammlung, 3 6,
as well as the entry in Quaatz’s diary, 2 Dec. 1929, BA Koblenz, NL Quaatz, 16.
46
Klärung und Sammlung, 9. For the perspective of the DNVP party leadership, see DNVP,
Mitteilungen, no. 51, 5 Dec. 1929, FZH Hamburg, NL Diller, 10.
   , –

the statement he and his colleagues had issued in the Reichstag, and com-
plained bitterly about the way in which the so-called Freedom Law had come
into existence without the cooperation or involvement of the DNVP Reichstag
delegation. All of this, concluded Hartwig, underscored the lack of genuine
leadership skills on the part of the DNVP party chairman who had failed to
build the necessary consensus for an action as ambitious as the referendum
against the Young Plan.47 In response, Westarp expressed disappointment
with the dissidents’ decision to issue a public statement in defense of their
vote, for in his mind this left the party leadership with no alternative but to
introduce expulsion proceedings against them. Drawing a parallel to the
situation before and during World War I when the splintering of the German
Right had resulted in its total impotence, Westarp implored the party leader-
ship and the dissidents to resolve their differences for the sake of party unity.48
Such entreaties were to little avail, as Hugenberg and his supporters prevailed
by a 65 to 9 margin with three abstentions, including that of Westarp, to
initiate expulsion proceedings against the three Christian-Socials and Trevira-
nus for the damage they had allegedly done to the image of the party and the
unity of the national front.49
All of this represented a clear repudiation of the strategy that Westarp had
pursued since the beginning of the crisis. At a meeting of the DNVP
Reichstag delegation later that afternoon Westarp appealed once again for
the various factions within the party to set aside their differences for the sake
of party unity in the struggle against the Young Plan.50 As in the past,
Westarp’s words went unheeded, this time by the Christian-Socials, who
were determined to bolt the party and were no longer interested in any
compromise that might save party unity. Immediately after the end of the
meeting, Hülser and Lambach announced their resignation from the party
and the DNVP Reichstag delegation, to be followed shortly thereafter by
Mumm and Behrens in a demonstration of solidarity with their Christian-
Social colleagues.51 Over the next twenty-four hours they were joined by
eight other DNVP Reichstag deputies, among them several of Westarp’s
most trusted associates in the party. In addition to Treviranus,
Lindeiner-Wildau, and Hartwig, the secessionists also included industrialist
Moritz Klönne, foreign policy expert Otto Hoetzsch, former interior minister

47
Hartwig’s speech before the DNVP executive committee, 3 Dec. 1929, BA Berlin, R 8005,
55/19 27, reprinted in Klärung und Sammlung, 9 18.
48
Westarp’s speech before the DNVP executive committee, 3 Dec. 1929, NL Westarp,
Gärtringen, II/61.
49
DNVP, Mitteilungen, no. 51, 5 Dec. 1929, FZH Hamburg, NL Diller, 10.
50
Westarp to Wallraf, 5 Dec. 1929, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, II/37.
51
Mumm, “Zum 30. November 1929,” BA Berlin, NL Mumm, 283/359 61.
    

Walther von Keudell, farm leader Hans Schlange-Schöningen, and the Cath-
olic young conservative Paul Lejeune-Jung.52
The number of deputies leaving the party might very well have been much
greater had not Schiele decided to remain with the DNVP in the hope that it
still might be possible to force a change in the party’s national leadership.53 As
it was, Westarp felt that his efforts to salvage party unity had received so little
support from Hugenberg and his supporters that he had no choice but to
resign as chairman of the DNVP Reichstag delegation.54 Westarp was suc-
ceeded in this capacity by Ernst Oberfohren, a Hugenberg confederate who
strongly supported the so-called Freedom Law as the first step toward freeing
Germany from Allied bondage.55 In the meantime, however, the secessionists’
hopes of triggering a full-scale rebellion against Hugenberg at the grassroots of
the DNVP party organization failed to materialize as the leaders of one district
organization after another rallied to Hugenberg’s support.56 This was due in
large part to the aggressive campaign that Hugenberg’s Pan-German allies had
waged for control of the party’s local organizations, with the result that the
party’s moderates no longer enjoyed the support they once had at the local and
district levels of the DNVP party organization.57 For Hugenberg and his
confederates, the secession was less a leadership crisis than a purge by which
the DNVP had cleansed itself of unreliable elements that were superfluous in
the struggle for a fundamental change in the existing political order.58

52
Blank to Reusch, 5 Dec. 1929, RWWA Cologne, Abt. 130, NL Reusch, 4001012024/6. For
the text of their statements and resignation letters, see Klärung und Sammlung, 18 30,
and the official DNVP publication, Die Abtrünnigen. Die Geschichte einer Absplitterung,
die die Festigung einer Partei brachte, Deutschnationales Rüstzeug, no. 16 (Berlin, 1930),
13 20, as well as Lambach, “Gegen Erstarrungserscheinungen im politischen Leben,”
Berliner Börsen Zeitung, 2 Dec. 1929, no. 562, and Klönne, “Die deutschnationale Par
teikrise,” Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, 4 Dec. 1929, no. 562.
53
Wilmowsky to Krupp, 7 Dec. 1929, HA Krupp Essen, FAH 23/503.
54
Memorandum by Westarp, 14 Dec. 1929, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, VN 104. See also
Westarp to Pückler, 5 Feb. 1930, ibid., VN 20.
55
Ernst Oberfohren, Zum Freiheitsgesetz. Rede in der Sitzung des Reichstags vom 6. Dezem
ber 1929, Deutschnationale Flugschrift, no. 342 (Berlin, 1929).
56
“Kundgebung der deutschnationalen Führer,” Mitteilungen der Deutschnationalen Volks
partei, 6 Dec. 1929, in Unsere Partei 7, no. 24 (15 Dec. 1929): 417 28.
57
Claß to Wegener, 24 May 1929, BA Koblenz, NL Wegener, 23. See also Hilpert, “Mei
nungen und Kämpfe,” BHStA Munich, NL Hilpert, 20/4025 31.
58
See Seidlitz Sandreczki, chairman of the Central Association of German Conservatives, to
Westarp, 6 Dec. 1929, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, II/37, as Bang, “Nicht Führerkrise,
sondern Fraktionskrise,” Deutsche Zeitung, 7 Dec. 1929, no. 287. See also the accounts
of the secession by Hugenberg loyalists Lothar Steuer, Absplitterung von der D.N.V.P.,
Volk und Vaterland, nos. 160 62 (Kassel, 1930), 1 8, and Axel von Freytagh
Loringhoven, Deutschnationale Volkspartei (Berlin, 1931), 63 70.
   , –

The Quest for Conservative Unity

The crisis within the DNVP and the secession of twelve Reichstag deputies in
December 1929 was but one more symptom of the advanced state of disso-
lution in which the bourgeois party system found itself at the end of the
1920s. All of this posed a severe challenge to the political influence of
Germany’s conservative economic elites. Not only was Hugenberg’s style of
leadership directed against the role that organized economic interests had
played in the economic and political stabilization of the Weimar Republic,
but both agriculture and industry required a strong and cohesive political
Right to defend and assert their interests against those of organized labor.
But the situation for organized agriculture, which had already developed a
fallback position in the Christian-National Peasants and Farmers’ Party, was
not as ominous as it was for German industry. The Ruhr iron conflict in the
fall of 1928 marked the beginning of an intensified assault by Ruhr heavy
industry against the social and economic achievements of organized labor
since the end of World War I. Although the outcome of this conflict was
ambiguous at best, it was only the prelude to a renewed industrial offensive
against unemployment insurance in the fall and early winter of 1929. Ger-
many’s industrial leadership had hoped that adoption of the Young Plan
would bring a measure of relief from Germany’s reparations obligations
under the Dawes Plan and a reduction in industry’s tax burden. When this
failed to materialize, Germany’s industrial leadership took the position that
only through a thorough reorganization of public finances and a reduction in
public spending would it be possible for the German economy to fulfill the
terms of the Young Plan.59 At the same time, German industry remained
adamantly opposed to any increase in its mandatory contributions to the
state unemployment insurance program. But all of this, as industrialists of
varying political stripes clearly recognized, meant an end to the “Great
Coalition” in the Reich, if not also in Prussia, and a reorganization of the
national government on the basis of a broad coalition of parties from the
middle and moderate Right.60
The only real leverage that German industry enjoyed in the last months of
1929 was on the right wing of the German People’s Party, where Reusch and

59
Jakob Wilhelm Reichert, Young Plan, Finanzen und Wirtschaft (Berlin, 1930), esp.
66 68. For further details, see Weisbrod, Schwerindustrie in der Weimarer Republik,
415 77.
60
For further details, see Helga Timm, Deutsche Sozialpolitik und der Bruch der großen
Koalition im März 1930 (Düsseldorf, 1952) and Ilse Maurer, Reichsfinanzen und große
Koalition. Zur Geschichte des Kabinetts Müller (1928 1930) (Bonn and Frankfurt a.m.
Main, 1973), as well as James, German Slump, 39 109.
    

his factotum Erich von Gilsa were hard at work trying to bring about an end to
the DVP’s participation in the “Great Coalition.”61 Their chances of success,
however, depended to a large extent upon what happened in the DNVP. The
leaders of Germany’s industrial establishment followed developments in the
DNVP in the fall and early winter of 1929 closely but were divided in their
assessment of what should be done. Some like Albert Vögler and Ernst
Poengsen from the United Steel Works, as well as a sizable contingent within
the Ruhr coal industry, enthusiastically endorsed Hugenberg’s call for the
creation of an anti-Marxist front and had little sympathy for the aspirations
of the secessionists on the DNVP’s left wing.62 Others such as the Gutehoff-
nungshütte’s Paul Reusch, steel magnate Gustav Krupp von Bohlen und
Halbach, and RDI president Carl Duisberg were critical of Hugenberg’s
leadership style and sympathized with the secessionists in their efforts to
found a new conservative party.63 Both groups, however, lamented the frag-
mentation of the DNVP at a time when the battle over unemployment
insurance seemed to be drawing to a head. It was no accident when the
National Federation of German Industry prefaced the publication of its pro-
posal for economic and fiscal reform under the title “Aufstieg oder Nieder-
gang” in mid-December 1929 with an appeal for the “consolidation of all the
constructive forces of our nation [Sammlung aller aufbauenden Kräfte unseres
Volkes].”64
Although the more moderate elements within the German industrial estab-
lishment may have felt that the December secession had been premature and
regretted that it had not been more extensive,65 they were anxious that the
secessionists reconstitute themselves as a viable political force at the earliest
possible opportunity. To assist in this process, Duisberg provided the seces-
sionists with 20,000 marks from the RDI’s own resources through an

61
Peter Langer, “‘v. Gilsa an Reusch (Oberhausen)’: Wirtschaftsinteressen und Politik am
Vorabend der Großen Krise,” in Abenteuer Industriestadt. Oberhausen 1874 1999.
Beiträge zur Stadtgeschichte (Oberhausen, 2001), 103 24. See also Richter, Deutsche
Volkspartei, 595 604.
62
See the letters from Widenmann to Gürtner, 7 Nov. 1929; to Poengsen, 8 Nov. 1929; and
to Vögler, BA MA Freiburg, NL Widenmann, 17/82 84, 75 77, 71.
63
For example, see Wilmowsky to Krupp, 22 Nov. 1929, HA Krupp Essen, FAH 23/503.
64
Duisberg’s introductory remarks at an extraordinary meeting of the RDI membership, 12
Dec. 1929, Bayer Archiv Leverkusen, 62/10.9c. For the text of the RDI’s program, see
Aufstieg oder Niedergang? Deutsche Wirtschafts und Finanzreform 1929. Eine Denkschrift
des Reichsver bandes der Deutschen Industrie, Veröffentlichungen des Reichsverbandes
der Deutschen Industrie, no. 49 (Berlin, 1929). See also Jorg Otto Spiller, “Reformismus
nach rechts. Zur Politik des Reichsverbandes der Deutschen Industrie in den Jahren
1927 1930 am Beispiel der Reparationspolitik,” in Industrielles System und politische
Entwicklung, ed. Mommsen, Petzina, and Weisbrod, 593 602.
65
Wilmowsky to Krupp, 7 Dec. 1929, HA Krupp, FAH 23/503.
   , –

intermediary, Baron Werner von Alvensleben.66 Even more lucrative offers of

financial support came from the military, where General Kurt von Schleicher,
the Reichswehr’s political adjutant, offered Treviranus 300,000 marks to assist
in the founding of a new conservative party, an offer that was declined for fear
that it would compromise the new party’s freedom of movement.67 In order
for the secessionists to continue their parliamentary activity, it was imperative
that they find new allies in the Reichstag so that they would be recognized as a
delegation, or Fraktion, with its full complement of committee assignments
and related privileges. This problem was quickly solved when the twelve
secessionists joined the nine deputies from the CNBLP to form a parliamen-
tary delegation known as the Christian-National Coalition (Christlich-
nationale Arbeitsgemeinschaft) under the chairmanship of Treviranus.68 But
this was little more than a temporary expedient that did not solve the far more
serious problem of building a strong national organization that would make it
possible for them to continue their parliamentary activity beyond the current
legislative period. To be sure, the group around Treviranus and Lindeiner-
Wildau were anxious to hold the secessionists together in some form of loose
coalition until the organizational foundation for a comprehensive moderate
conservative party could be developed. But strong centrifugal forces were
already at work among the secessionists inasmuch as both the Christian-
Socials and leaders of the DNVP’s agrarian wing had begun to gravitate
toward different centers of political activity. This development constituted a
particularly ominous threat to the young conservatives, for without the sup-
port of organized agriculture or the Evangelical bloc their movement lacked a
solid sociological and organizational foundation.
Originally the young conservatives around Treviranus and Lindeiner-
Wildau had hoped to unite the Christian-Socials, the CNBLP, and the other
groups that had broken away from the DNVP into a loose federation of
conservative forces called the “German Right” as a short-term step leading
to the creation of a new moderate conservative party.69 The roots of such an
idea went back to the “Essen Program” that Stegerwald had outlined at the
tenth congress of the Christian trade unions in November 1920 and was
popular with young-conservative intellectuals such as Friedrich Glum, Hans

66
Duisberg to Alvensleben, 29 Nov. 1929, Bayer Archiv Leverkusen, Autographensamm
lung Duisberg.
67
Treviranus, “Schleicher” (see n. 15), 371.
68
Aufruf und Gründung, Volkskonservative Flugschriften, no. 1 (Berlin, 1930), 4 5. See also
Mumm to Rippel, 12 Dec. 1929, and 2 Jan. 1930, BA Berlin, NL Mumm, 284/79, 201 02.
69
Entry in Passarge’s diary, 5 Jan. 1930, BA Koblenz, NL Passarge, 2/9. See also Treviranus,
“Unsere Aufgabe,” Politische Wochenschrift 5, no. 50 (14 Dec. 1929): 981 82, and
Treviranus, “Das Fähnlein der Zwölf,” Das Staatsschiff, 1, no. 5 (16 Jan. 1930): 176 78.
See also Jonas, Volkskonservativen 1928 1933. Entwicklung, Struktur, Standort and staats
politische Zielsetzung (Düsseldorf, 1965), 57 63.
    

Zehrer, and Hermann Ullmann.70 Unlike their rivals on the radical Right, as
Lindeiner-Wildau reminded the Reichstag in a programmatic speech on 12
December, the young conservatives were committed to pursue a regeneration
of German political life within the framework of the existing form of govern-
ment, its obvious imperfections notwithstanding.71 It was precisely this strong
sense of loyalty to the state regardless of the form in which it existed that
separated the young conservatives from the obstructionist tactics of Hugen-
berg and his Pan-German allies. In their eyes, Hugenberg was a ‘hopeless
reactionary and the “grave-digger of German conservatism.” Out of the ruins
of the struggle against the Young Plan, so argued Hermann Ullmann in a
pamphlet aptly entitled Die Rechte stirbt – es lebe die Rechte!, would emerge a
new conservatism that reached across the boundaries of confession and class
to embrace conservative elements within Germany’s Catholic population and
the Christian-national labor movement. Only such a conservatism, and not the
sham conservatism offered by Hugenberg and his confederates, would lead the
German nation out of the depths of despair into which it had fallen.72
Initially the young conservatives had hoped to solicit at least five hundred
signatures for a public appeal calling for the founding of a comprehensive
conservative party committed to the preservation of the state against the forces
of social and political radicalism that were at work in the German nation. But
by the beginning of January 1930 efforts to consolidate the various conserva-
tive groups that had broken away from the DNVP into a new, united German
Right had drawn to a complete standstill as a result of strong resistance from
both the CNBLP and the Christian-Socials. Uncertain as to whether or not the
plans to this effect should be abandoned, Treviranus called a meeting of the
twelve secessionists and their closest political supporters on the afternoon of
9 January with the clear intention of placing them before an “either–or”
decision.73 In addition to the twelve secessionists, the meeting was attended

70
In this respect, see Friedrich Glum, Das geheime Deutschland. Die Aristokratie der
demokratischen Gesinnung (Berlin, 1930), 101 14; Hans Zehrer, “Grundriß einer neuen
Partei,” Die Tat 21, no. 9 (Dec. 1929): 641 61; Hermann Ullmann, Das werdende Volk.
Gegen Liberalismus und Reaktion (Hamburg, 1929), 97 103, 130 37. On Glum, see
Bernd Weisbrod, “Das ‘Geheime Deutschland’ und das ‘Geistige Bad Harzburg.’ Friedrich
Glum und das Dilemma des demokratischen Konservatismus am Ende der Weimarer
Republik,” in Von der Aufgabe der Freiheit. Politische Verantwortung und bürgerliche
Gesellschaft im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert. Festschrift für Hans Mommsen zum 5. November
1995, ed. Christian Jansen, Lutz Niethammer, and Bernd Weisbrod (Berlin, 1995),
285 308.
71
Hans Erdmann von Lindeiner Wildau, Erneuerung des politischen Lebens. Reichstagsrede
gehalten am 13. Dezember 1929, Schriften der Deutschnationalen Arbeitsgemeinschaft,
no. 1 (Berlin Charlottenburg, 1929), 7 8.
72
Hermann Ullmann, Die Rechte stirbt es lebe die Rechte! (Berlin, 1929), esp. 20 44.
73
Entry in Passarge’s diary, 5 Jan. 1930, BA Koblenz, NL Passarge, 2/10.
   , –

by a delegation from the DHV headed by its ch74ief political stratagist Max
Habermann. The largest of Germany’s white-collar unions with an estimated
380,000 members by the end of 1929,75 the DHV had long pursued its social,
economic, and political objectives through an elaborate network of interrela-
tionships, or Querverbindungen, with the various political parties that stood to
the right of Social Democracy only to see this network fall completely apart in
the wake of Hugenberg’s election to the DNVP’s party chairmanship.
Habermann and the DHV, however, rejected the proposal for a loose confed-
eration of conservative forces along the lines of Treviranus’s united German
Right and supported instead the creation of a “people’s conservative state
party.”76 This proposal ignited a heated debate that required all of Treviranus’s
talents as a mediator to keep the meeting from degenerating into a complete
debacle. The Christian-Socials not only rejected the DHV’s proposal outright
but refused to take part even in the more modest united German Right
advocated by Treviranus and his supporters. With no more than four of the
original twelve secessionists in support of the creation of a “people’s conserva-
tive state party,” the meeting closed on a note of bitterness that was particu-
larly strong among the leaders of the DHV.77
The outcome of the meeting on 9 January signaled the collapse of young-
conservative efforts to create either a new conservative party or a united
conservative front along the more modest lines of the “German Right.” Still
hopeful that some sort of an accommodation might be possible in the event
of new national elections, the young conservatives suspended plans for the
founding of a new political party and concentrated their efforts instead upon
launching a new organization entitled the People’s Conservative Association
(Volkskonservative Vereinigung or VKV). The official founding of the VKV
took place in Berlin on 28 January and was attended by more than 200 sup-
porters and interested guests. According to its founding charter, the primary
purpose of the new organization was “to bring the Christian and conserva-
tive elements in the German nation to greater effectiveness in politics,
legislation, and administration at all levels of government in order to

74
On Habermann, see Peter Rütters, “Max Habermann und der gewerkschaftliche Wider
stand gegen den Nationalsozialismus. Probleme einer biographischen Rekonstruktion,”
Historisch politische Mitteilungen 20 (2013): 37 70, esp. 42 47.
75
Walther Lambach, “Deutschnationaler Handlungsgehilfenverband (DHV),” in Interna
tionales Handwörterbuch des Gewerkschaftswesens, ed. Ludwig Heyde, 2 vols. (Berlin,
1931 32), 1:393 399, here 394.
76
In this respect, see Habermann “Der Deutschnationale Handlungsgehilfen Verband im
Kampf um das Reich,” DHV Archiv, Hamburg, as well as the unpublished biography by
Albert Krebs, “Max Habermann. Eine biographische Studie,” FZH Hamburg, 12/H.
77
Entry in Passarge’s diary, 12 Jan. 1930, ibid., 2/16 18.
    

promote the cause of national independence abroad and inner renewal at

home.”78 As the convention’s keynote speaker and the newly elected chair-
man of the VKV, Treviranus elaborated upon the movement’s political
objectives as well as on its relationship to other conservative groups. Trevir-
anus stressed that the VKV was not a political party but a bipartisan
association of like-minded men and women dedicated to a consolidation
of all conservative forces in a greater German Right without regard to their
current party affiliation.79 The Christian-National Coalition that had just
been created in the Reichstag, Treviranus continued, represented in micro-
cosm what the People’s Conservative Association hoped to achieve on a
broader basis, namely the unification of all conservative forces – peasant,
worker, artisan, and intelligentsia – on the basis of positive action within the
existing system of government.80 The goal of positive action, as opposed to
Hugenberg’s nihilistic obstructionism, was stressed even more emphatically
by Otto Hoetzsch in the final speech of the day. Comparing the goals of the
young-conservative movement with those of the British Conservative Party,
Hoetzsch proclaimed: “We want to be the German ‘Tory Democracy’ – with
all of the national, civic, and social connotations that are associated with this
concept.”81
Although its founders insisted that the VKV was not a political party but a
movement that transcended existing party lines, they hoped that the new
organization, presumably in close cooperation with the CNBLP and CSVD,
would be able to run its own slate of candidates in any future elections.82 At
the VKV’s official founding in Berlin, both the CNBLP’s Günther Gereke and
the CSVD’s Franz Behrens pledged their full support and willingness to

78
Aufruf und Gründung, Volkskonservative Flugschriften, no. 1 (Berlin, 1930), 3 5. For
comprehensive reports on the founding of the VKV, see Volkskonservative Stimmen, 1
Feb. 1930, no. 1, and Neue Preußische (Kreuz )Zeitung, 30 Jan. 1930, no. 31.
79
Lambach to Classen, 23 Jan. 1930, BA Koblenz, NL Lambach, 2. See also Hans Peter
Müller, “Sammlungsversuche charaktervoller Konservativer. Die Volkskonservativen in
Württemberg 1930 1932,” Zeitschrift für Württembergische Landesgeschichte 64 (2005):
339 54.
80
Treviranus, Auf neuen Wegen, Volkskonservative Flugschriften, no. 2 (Berlin, 1930), 3 8.
On the VKV’s attitude toward the republican form of government, see Treviranus,
“Konservatismus in der Demokratie,” Volkskonservative Stimmen. Zeitschrift der Volks
konservativen Vereinigung, 26 Apr. 1930, nos. 12 13. See also Walther Lambach, “Volks
konservative Vereinigung (Konservative Volkspartei).” in Internationales Handwörterbuch
des Gewerkschaftswesens, ed. Ludwig Heyde, 2 vols. (Berlin, 1931 32), 2:1930 32.
81
Hoetzsch, “Deutsche Tory Demokratie,” Politische Wochenschrift 5, no. 6 (8 Feb. 1930):
56 58. For a fuller statement of Hoetzsch’s views on the solutions to the problems
confronting Germany, see Otto Hoetzsch, Germany’s Domestic and Foreign Policies
(New Haven, CT, 1929).
82
Lambach to Classen, 23 Jan. 1930, BA Koblenz, NL Lambach, 2.
   , –

cooperate in the struggle for the realization of conservative values.83 The

young conservatives were particularly interested in on the establishment of
close ties with the CNBLP and relied heavily upon the services of Hans
Schlange-Schöningen, one of the twelve secessionists who officially joined
the CNBLP on the day after the founding of the VKV.84 Deeply committed
to the idea of a progressive conservative party supported by all sectors of the
population, Schlange realized that the prospects of the VKV and the greater
German Right for which it stood were virtually non-existent without the
support of German agriculture.85 But the young conservatives’ dependence
upon the financial and organizational support of the DHV severely handi-
capped their efforts to attract a diversified popular base. Nowhere was the
extent of this support more apparent than when the VKV executive committee
was elected in the middle of February, no less than twelve of its fifteen
members were affiliated either directly or indirectly with the white-collar
union.86 That the DHV was so heavily involved in the founding of the VKV
did not augur well for its efforts to develop a united conservative front that
transcended the social and economic cleavages that were so deeply embedded
in the fabric of Germany’s national life.

Realignment in the Countryside

Nowhere were the centrifugal forces at work in the German party system more
apparent than in the German agricultural community, where in early 1928 two
new agrarian splinter parties, the German Peasants’ Party and the decidedly
more conservative Christian-National Peasant and Farmers’ Party, made their
appearance on the political stage.87 The founding of the CNBLP constituted a
direct threat to the DNVP’s position in the countryside, and in the May
1928 Reichstag elections the party received over 580,000 votes and elected
nine deputies to the Reichstag. The CNBLP’s hopes of establishing a parlia-
mentary alliance, or Frationsgemeinschaft, with the more democratically
oriented German Peasant’s Party, however, collapsed when Anton Fehr, the
chairman of the Peasants’ Party, opted in favor of a coalition with the Business
Party.88 The CNBLP’s resultant isolation in the Reichstag, however, did not

83
Volkskonservative Stimmen, 1 Feb. 1930, no. 1.
84
Entry in Passarge’s diary, 30 Jan. 1930, BA Koblenz, NL Passarge, 2/25 26.
85
Volkskonservative Stimmen, 1 Feb. 1930, no. 1.
86
Entry in Passarge’s diary, 22 Feb. 1930, BA Koblenz, NL Passarge, 3/51 52, 55 57.
87
For an overview, see Larry Eugene Jones, “Crisis and Realignment: Agrarian Splinter
Parties in the Late Weimar Republic, 1928 33,” in Peasants and Lords in Modern
Germany: Recent Essays in Agricultural History, ed. Robert G. Moeller (Boston, 1986),
198 232. On the CNBLP, see Markus Müller, Landvolkpartei, 23 70.
88
Die grüne Zukunft. Zeitschrift für Deutsche Bauernpolitik, 1, no. 2 (Nov. 1928): 28.
    

lead to an improvement in its relations with the DNVP despite repeated

overtures from the Nationalists.89 In the meantime, the rivalry between the
DNVP and CNBLP had become so intense by the end of the summer that the
National Rural League found it necessary to undertake a major overall of its
internal leadership structure that placed responsibility for charting the RLB’s
political course in the hands of a three-man presidium consisting of the
DNVP’s Martin Schiele, the CNBLP’s Karl Hepp, and the ostensibly neutral
Albrecht Bethge.90 The appearance of RLB director Heinrich von Sybel at the
CNBLP’s national delegate congress (Reichsvertretertag) in Hanover on 8–9
September 1928 and Hepp’s vigorous defense of the CNBLP’s independence
vis-à-vis Germany’s other political parties in his keynote address on the first
day of the congress could only have reinforced Nationalist fears that the new
party was headed in a direction that did not bode well for the future of their
own party.91
Efforts to “depoliticize” the National Rural League and thus insulate it from
the conflict between the DNVP and CNBLP all but collapsed in the wake of
Hugenberg’s election to the chairmanship of the DNVP, with the result that
the balance in the RLB now began to swing toward the CNBLP. The creation
of the “Green Front” in the spring of 1929 reflected a further deterioration of
the DNVP’s traditional ties with the German agricultural community and gave
new impetus to the CNBLP’s campaign on behalf of a united agrarian party.92
Efforts to create a new agrarian party organized along corporatist and voca-
tional lines received another boost in the summer of 1929 when Günther
Gereke, founder and president of the German Association of Rural
Municipalities (Deutscher Landgemeindetag), resigned from the DNVP to
join the CNBLP.93 Gereke, whose bid for reelection to the Reichstag in May
1928 had ended in disappointment both for him and his backers in the

89
For example, see Richthofen to Hepp, 7 July 1928, and to Westarp, 7 and 19 July 1928, NL
Westarp, Gärtringen, VN 100, as well as Joseph Kaufhold, “Die Christlich nationale
Bauernpartei,” Unsere Partei, 4, no. 27 (15 Dec. 1928): 386 88.
90
Reichs Landbund, 8, no. 31 (4 Aug. 1928): 351 52.
91
Report on the CNBLP’s Hanover delegate conference, 8 9 Sept. 1928, BA Berlin, R 8034
I, 50/78 84. See also the press reports in the Thüringer Landbund 9, no. 73 (12
Sept. 1928), and the Nassauische Bauern Zeitung, 15 Sept. 1928, no. 214.
92
See Sybel to Kurzrock, 26 Mar. 1929, BA Berlin, R 8034 I, 152/42 44. For further details,
see Andreas Müller, “Fällt der Bauer,” 110 12, 123 39.
93
Gereke to Westarp, 28 June 1929, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, II/35. On Gereke’s motives,
see Westarp to Oppenfeld, 25 Oct. 1929., ibid., VN 102. For Gereke’s account of his
activities, see the “Lebenslauf” he prepared in connection with his 1933 trial in the
records of the Generalstaatsanwaltschaft, Prozeßakten Gereke, Landesarchiv Berlin (here
after cited as LA Berlin), Repertorium A, 358 01, 76, 14, as well as the less reliable
account in Günther Gereke, Ich war königlich preußischer Landrat (Berlin, 1970),
91 105, 122 28, 148 53.
   , –

German agricultural community,94 was a capable organizer who used his

extensive contacts in central and eastern Germany to help establish and
finance a CNBLP organization in East Prussia, Saxony, Thuringia, and other
areas previously dominated by the DNVP.95 Not only did Gereke’s efforts to
broaden the CNBLP’s organizational base at the expense of the DNVP receive
financial support from steel magnate Gustav Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach
and the directorate of I. G. Farben, but he also received considerable encour-
agement from General Kurt von Schleicher, the Reichswehr’s chief political
strategist and a determined opponent of Hugenberg.96
By the end of the summer DNVP party leaders were becoming increasingly
annoyed by the agitation of the CNBLP and its affect upon their party’s rural
electorate.97 It was almost inevitable that Gereke’s activities should lead to a
clash with the DNVP, and in August 1929 he came under a sharp attack from
Georg Wilhelm Schiele, chairman of the DNVP provincial organization in
Halle-Merseburg and one of Hugenberg’s strongest supporters in his conflict
with the DNVP’s left wing.98 An even more serious source of friction was the
reluctance with which Gereke and other CNBLP leaders supported the infam-
ous imprisonment paragraph of the so-called Freedom Law.99 Last-minute
efforts by Schiele and the CNBLP’s Albrecht Wendhausen to prevent the
inclusion of the imprisonment paragraph in the final text of the “Freedom
Law” were to no avail, so that the full text of the proposed law was published
on the morning of 12 September without RLB and CNBLP consent.100 At a
CNBLP rally in Dortmund on 15 September, Gereke sharply criticized the
imprisonment paragraph and warned that the language of the “Freedom Law”
was so indiscriminate that not even Reich President von Hindenburg was
exempt from the threat of imprisonment.101 CNBLP national chairman Erwin

94
On the Gereke candidacy, see the detailed letter from Schellen to Westarp, 17 July 1928,
NL Westarp, Gärtringen, VN 67.
95
For example, see the reports in Der Landbürger. Kommunalpolitisches Organ der
Christlich nationalen Bauern and Landvolkpartei, 4, no. 15 (2 Aug. 1929): 225; no. 17
(2 Sept. 1929): 258; and no. 29 (2 Oct. 1929): 290. On the financial support that Gereke
steered to the CNBLP’s district organizations, see the correspondence in LA Berlin,
Prozeßakten Gereke, Rep. A, 358 01, 76/16, Anlage 2.
96
Gereke, Ich war königlich preußischer Landrat, 153 55.
97
For example, see Boedicker to Westarp, 9 Aug. 1929, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, II/35.
98
DNVP, Mitteilungen no. 36, 30 Aug. 1929, FZH Hamburg, NL Diller, 10. See also Der
Landbürger, 4, no. 17 (2 Sept. 1929): 257.
99
See Brauweiler’s notes on his meeting with Hepp and Gereke, 4 Sept. 1929, StA
Mönchen Gladbach, NL Brauweiler, 110, as well as a speech by Gereke in Hamm,
n.d., reported in Der Landbürger, 4, no. 19 (2 Oct. 1929): 289 90. See also Müller,
Landvolkpartei, 118 30
100
Entry in Quaatz’s diary, 11 Sept. 1929, BA Koblenz, NL Quaatz, 16.
101
Schulthess’ Europäischer Geschichtskalender, ed. Ulrich Thürauf (Munich, 1859ff.), 70
(1929): 166 67.
    

Baum and Reichstag deputy Friedrich Döbrich met with Hugenberg on the
evening of 21 September and then again the following morning in an effort to
negotiate a compromise that would have exempted Hindenburg from the
threat of imprisonment.102 In a rare and indeed uncharacteristic retreat from
his hand-line position, Hugenberg took it upon himself to approve an amend-
ment in the language of the “Freedom Law” that removed the Reich President
from the threat of imprisonment and, in so doing, secured the CNBLP’s
agreement to support the referendum.103
Throughout all of this, the CNBLP continued to attack the DNVP for an
“all-or-nothing” strategy that failed to appreciate the increasingly desperate
situation in which the German farmer found himself.104 The conflict between
the two parties reached a climax in the weeks before the elections to the
provincial, county, and municipal parliaments throughout Prussia on Novem-
ber 17. In a particularly sharp attack against the DNVP a week before the
elections, Gereke asserted that the real issue was not so much the struggle
against the Weimar Republic as the fact that German agriculture stood little to
gain from a policy of uncompromising opposition, jingoistic fantasies, and
political machinations that only polarized the nation at a time when solidarity
was the order of the day.105 What the CNBLP had to offer, on the other hand,
was a sober, objective Realpolitik aimed at improving the material welfare of
the German farmer in the hope that parity between town and country might
eventually be achieved. The leaders of the CNBLP maintained that the course
of German economic development since the middle of the previous century
had consistently favored the large urban areas at the expense of Germany’s
rural population. Not only the existing system of taxation, but also the current
method of financing public education discriminated against the German
farmer, a situation the leaders of the CNBLP hoped to correct through greater
austerity on the part of local governments and the introduction of a tax reform
aimed at distributing the burden of government financing more equitably
among the different sectors of the population.106 Skeptical as to whether this

102
Copy of a letter from Pf[eil] to the CNBLP executive committee and to Hepp, Wend
hausen, and Oheimb, 22 Sept. 1929, records of the CNBLP, BA Berlin, Bestand R 8001,
1/32 33.
103
Resolution of the presidium of the National Committee for the German Referendum, n.
d. [21 Sept. 1929], appended to the letter cited in n. 102, BA Berlin, R 8001, 1/35.
104
“Weshalb Christlich nationale Bauern und Landvolkpartei?,” Politische Wochenschrift
5, no. 39 (28 Sept. 1929): 921 24.
105
Der Landbürger, 4, no. 2 (16 Nov. 1929): 342.
106
Weshalb Landvolkpartei? Richtlinien und Arbeitsmethoden, ed. Landbürger Verlag
(Berlin, n.d. [1929]), esp. 7 16, 18 19. See also “Einfachheit und Sparsamkeit. Die
kommunalpolitische Richtlinien der Christlich nationalen Bauern und Landvolkpar
tei,” Der Landbürger, 4, no. 19 (16 Oct. 1929): 306 10, as well as Gereke’s speech in
Querfurth, 10 Nov. 1929, in Der Landbürger, 4, no. 22 (16 Nov. 1929): 341 42.
   , –

could be accomplished on the basis of the existing party system, the leaders of
the CNBLP saw their own party’s growth as part of a far more fundamental
transformation in the very structure of the German party system.107
The Prussian municipal elections on 17 November 1929 and the Thuringian
Landtag elections three weeks later resulted in substantial CNBLP gains at the
expense of the DNVP. The election results also revealed that in areas like
Schleswig-Holstein and Thuringia where rural discontent was particularly
strong the CNBLP’s chief rival was no longer the DNVP, but the more radical
National Socialist German Worker’s Party. The leaders of the CNBLP were
quick to take notice of the threat that the NSDAP’s growing appeal presented
to their own party’s political prospects, and in the late summer of 1929 the
Thuringian Rural League – an organizational bulwark of the CNBLP ever since
the party’s founding in 1928 – published a sharply worded pamphlet entitled
Nationalsozialismus und Bauerntum in which the NSDAP was denounced as a
“socialist workers’ party” whose social and economic program was inimical to
the interests of the German farmer.108 But for the most part the CNBLP
leadership concentrated their attention instead on building up their own party
organization in former Nationalist strongholds such as Saxony and East
Prussia.109 Even then, most of the DNVP’s farm leaders did not take part in
the secession of December 1929 and chose to follow the lead of RLB president
Martin Schiele, who thought the secession was premature and believed that it
still might be possible to force a change in the leadership of the party.110 The
lone exception to this trend was Hans Schlange-Schöningen, a Pomeranian
landowner and one-time Hugenberg protégé who left the DNVP to affiliate
himself with the CNBLP. Unlike most of those in the new party’s leadership,
Schlange favored the cultivation of close ties with the other groups that had
broken away from the DNVP and took part in the founding of the People’s
Conservative Association in late January 1930.111
Immediately after the conclusion of the third stage in the referendum
process – a national plebiscite on 22 December 1929 in which the “Freedom

107
Speech by Döbrich, 11 Nov. 1929, in Der Landbürger, 4, no. 23 (2 Dec. 1929): 357 58.
108
Nationalsozialismus und Bauerntum. Ein Handbuch zur Klärung der nationalsoziali
stischen Frage, ed. Otto Weber (Weimar, 1929).
109
Report by Gereke before the Saxon provincial organization of the CNBLP, 21 Dec. 1929,
in Der Landbürger, 5, no. 1 (2 Jan. 1930): 2.
110
Wilmowsky to Krupp, 7 Dec. 1929, HA Krupp, FAH 23/503. See also Schiele to Traub, 4
Feb. 1930, BA Koblenz, NL Traub, 67/106 07.
111
See Schlange’s speech at the founding of the VKV in Volkskonservative Stimmen, 1
Feb. 1930, no. 1. On his negotiations with the CNBLP, see the entry in Passarge’s diary,
30 Jan. 1930, BA Koblenz, NL Passarge, 2/25 26. See Günter J. Trittel, “Hans Schlange
Schöningen. Ein vergessener Politiker der ‘Ersten Stunde’,” Vierteljahrshefte für Zeit
geschichte 35 (1987): 25 63, esp. 28 30.
    

Law” received the support of over 5,800,000 voters but still fell far short of
what was needed to be enacted into law112 – the National Rural League
announced its resignation from the National Referendum Committee and
claimed that the committee’s work was done.113 In January 1930 the CNBLP
followed suit, thus severing its organizational ties to Hugenberg and the forces
of the radical Right.114 But aside from Schlange-Schöningen and Gereke there
was little interest in the CNBLP leadership for close organizational ties with
the other groups that had broken away from the DNVP. The most outspoken
critic of such ties was Karl Hepp, who at a party rally in Münster in late
February 1930 stressed that in light of the profound structural transformation
that was taking place throughout the German party system the CNBLP should
not risk diluting its unique vocational orientation by affiliating itself with
groups of a different ideological persuasion.115 The CNBLP continued to insist
that the Christian-National Coalition it had formed with the twelve National-
ist secessionists in December 1929 was nothing more than a short-term
expedient necessitated by the parliamentary weakness of the two groups. In
no way, CNBLP strategists insisted, did this arrangement compromise the
CNBLP’s distinctive ideological orientation or infringe upon its organizational
integrity.116 Throughout all of this, the CNBLP continued to win new recruits
from the ranks of the DNVP’s agrarian wing as disgruntlement over Hugen-
berg’s leadership of the party continued to fester through the spring of 1930.117

Christian-Socials in Revolt
At the same time that the DNVP’s agrarian leaders began to regroup along
vocational and corporatist lines, the party’s Christian-Social wing moved in
the direction of closer ties with the various Evangelical circles that had broken
away from the DNVP over the course of the previous decade. Disillusionment
with the DNVP had been strong in Evangelical circles ever since the early
1920s, but it was not until the spring of 1924 that an open break materialized
in the form of a public appeal from Samuel Jaeger, pastor of the Evangelical

112
Falter, Lindenburger, and Schumann, Wahlen und Abstimmungen, 47.
113
Bethge, Schiele, and Hepp to the presidium of the National Committee for the German
Referendum, 23 Dec. 1929, BA Berlin, R 8034 I, 120/104 05. This decision was
reaffirmed at a meeting of the RLB executive committee on 15 Jan. 1930, ibid., 120/
60 67. See also the report in Reichs Landbund 10, no. 3 (18 Jan. 1930): 28 29.
114
Höfer to the National Referendum Committee, 14 Jan. 1930, cited in Otto Schmidt
Hannover “DNVP und nationale Organisationen,” June 1932, BA Koblenz, NL Schmidt
Hannover, 72/38.
115
Der Landbürger, 5, no. 6 (16 Mar. 1930): 83.
116
Remarks by Gereke, 21 Dec. 1929, in Der Landbürger, 5, no. 1 (2 Jan. 1930): 2.
117
In this respect, see Der Landbürger, 5, no. 7 (16 Mar. 1930): 83, and no. 7
(2 Apr. 1930): 98.
   , –

theological seminary in Bethel, for the founding of Christian-Social Faith

Communities, or Gesinnungsgemeinschaften, as the first step towards infusing
German public life with the spirit of the Evangelium.118 Although the leaders
of the DNVP’s Christian-Social faction remained cool to Jaeger’s appeal, it
evoked considerable interest outside official party circles. Interest was particu-
larly strong in Württemberg, where a small Evangelical group under the
leadership of Paul Bausch and Wilhelm Simpfendörfer were quick to establish
contact with Jaeger and founded a Christian-Social Faith Community for
Stuttgart and its environs in April 1924.119 A similar group calling itself the
Christian People’s Service (Christlicher Volksdienst) was founded in Nurem-
burg shortly thereafter under the chairmanship of Hans Oberdörfer, who in
1925 had been elected to the city council on a separate Evangelical ticket.120
Still, efforts to consolidate these and other Evangelical groups into a national
organization foundered until the fall of 1927 when the Evangelical movement,
under Bausch and Simpfendörfer, formally reconstituted itself as the Christian
People’s Service at a national congress of the Christian-Social Faith Commu-
nities in Nuremburg.121
Although the outcome of the Nuremburg congress represented an import-
ant step towards the creation of a national organization with the potential of

118
Samuel Jaeger, Gott allein die Ehre! Gesammelte Aufsätze, ed. Theodor Schlatter (Bethel
bei Bielefeld, 1930), 108 09. In particular, see Jaeger’s appeal, “Christlich soziale Gesin
nungsgemeinschaften,” 13 Mar. 1924, and his essay, “Gottesherrschaft im öffentlichen
Leben,” n.d. [Apr. 1924], BA Koblenz, Nachlass Paul Bausch, BA Koblenz, 7. See also
Bausch’s memoirs, Lebenserinnerungen und Erkenntnisse eines schwäbischen Abgeord
neten (Korntal, n.d. [1970]), 299 300. The following account has been supplemented by
materials in the possession of the late Wilhelm Simpfendörfer. The originals of some of
these documents have been lost, but copies in the author’s possession have been
deposited in Landesarchiv Baden Württemberg, Hauptstaatsarchiv Stuttgart (hereafter
cited as HStA Stuttgart) Nachlass Wilhelm Simpfendörfer, Bestand Q 1/14. See also
Günther Opitz, Der Christlich soziale Volksdienst. Versuch einer protestantischen Partei
in der Weimarer Republik (Düsseldorf, 1969).
119
On developments in Württemberg, see Bausch and Simpfendörfer to Jaeger, 15 Mar. and
28 Apr. 1924, as well as Bausch to Schlatter, 20 Mar. 1924, and Jaeger, 13 Apr. 1924, all
in BA Koblenz, NL Bausch, 7. See also Bausch, Lebenserinnerungen, 70 73.
120
Simpfendörfer, “Über Entstehung, Entwicklung und Arbeit des Volksdienstes,” HStA
Stuttgart, NL Simpfendörfer, 374. On similar developments in Frankfurt and Hesse
Nassau, see Oberschmidt, “Der Evangelische Volksdienst,” in Evangelischer Volkstag
Frankfurt a.M. 6. Sept. 1925, ed. Evangelischer Volksdienst (Frankfurt a.M., n.d. [1925]),
88 92.
121
Opitz, Volksdienst, 45 62, 80 85. See also Bausch, Lebenserinnerungen, 75 78, and
Simpfendörfer, “Über Entstehung, Entwicklung und Arbeit des Volksdienstes,” HStA
Stuttgart, NL Simpfendörfer, 374. On the CVD’s political orientation, see “Vorausset
zungen und Ziele der Arbeit des Christlichen Volksdienstes. Beschlossen auf der Nürn
berger Tagung des Christlichen Volksdienstes vom 12. und 13. November 1927,” BA
Koblenz, NL Bausch, 8.
    

developing into a new political party, the founders of the Christian People’s
Service were adamant that their organization was not another political party
but represented the beginnings of a popular movement inspired by the social
teachings of Jesus Christ and dedicated to a spiritual reformation of Ger-
many’s political life.122 On the question of Germany’s form of government, the
leaders of the CVD criticized the anti-republican fulminations of both the
DNVP and the established Lutheran Church and called for a policy of
constructive cooperation within the new republican order as the best means
of serving the German nation and God’s divine plan.123 Their endorsement of
the Weimar Republic notwithstanding, the leaders of the CVD were highly
critical of the existing party system and categorically rejected the practice of
interest representation as an activity wholly incompatible with the political
responsibilities of a devout Christian. By the same token, the People’s Service
steadfastly refused to associate itself with the schemes of big business and
other propertied interests for the creation of an anti-Marxist front that was
little more than an ill-disguised attempt to exclude the German worker from
his rightful role in Germany’s political life. Although the CVD was no less
anti-Marxist than the other groups on the German Right, it maintained that
the spread of Marxism could be checked only through the full integration of
the German worker into the social and political fabric of the nation. “Neither
socialist nor bourgeois, but Christian” was the slogan that inspired the CVD in
its efforts to emancipate the German worker from the influence of Marxism
and to secure not only for the worker, but for all of those who comprised the
German nation their rightful place in its political and economic life.124
The founding of the Christian People’s Service came under sharp criticism
from Mumm, Veidt, and the leaders of the DNVP’s National Evangelical
Committee on the grounds that it presaged a further splintering of Germany’s
Evangelical forces.125 The CVD did not take part in the 1928 Reichstag

122
Was will der Christliche Volksdienst?, Schriften des Christlichen Volksdienstes, no. 1
(Korntal Stuttgart, n.d. [1927]), 5 21. In a similar vein, see Heinrich Mosel, Christen an
die Front! Vortrag auf der Hauptversammlung des Landesverbandes Berlin Brandenburg
des Christlichen Volksdienstes am 27. Januar 1928 in Berlin (Berlin, 1928), and Adolf
Schlatter, Was fordert die Lage unseres Volkes von unserer evangelischer Christenheit?
(Korntal Stuttgart, 1929).
123
Simpfendörfer, “Von Politik, von politischen Programmen und vom politischen Weg
des Christlichen Volksdienstes,” Christlicher Volksdienst. Evangelisch soziales Wochen
blatt Süddeutschlands, 17 Mar. 1928, no. 11.
124
Paul Bausch, Der Kampf um die Freiheit des evangelischen Christen im politischen Leben.
Sozialistisch? Bürgerlich? Oder Christlich?, Schriften des Christlichen Volksdienstes, no. 4
(Korntal Stuttgart, n.d. [1929]), 20 29.
125
For example, see Reinhard Mumm, Christlich soziale und deutschnational! Ein Wort
gegen die Zersplitterungssucht, and Karl Veidt, Eine evangelische Partei? Ein offenes Wort
an den “Christlichen Volksdienst” und andere Leute, Deutschnationale Flugschrift,
no. 315 (Berlin, 1928).
   , –

elections due to strong opposition from Simpfendörfer and the Württemberg

CVD to any national campaign until an adequate organizational structure had
been developed.126 After the elections the leaders of the Württemberg CVD
traveled extensively throughout Germany in an attempt to establish closer ties
with other Evangelical groups and to build up the CVD’s national organiza-
tion. In Baden this led to the founding of the Evangelical People’s Service
(Evangelischer Volksdienst), which in the state elections on 27 October 1929
surprised even its most ardent supporters by polling more than 35,000 votes
and electing three deputies to the state parliament.127 By the same token, the
CVD and affiliated Evangelical groups managed to score impressive gains in
the Prusssian municipal elections on 17 November even though their efforts
were handicapped by strong opposition from the local Evangelical clergy,
inadequate financial support, and the lack of experienced leadership.128
The leaders of the Christian People’s Service were also at work cultivating
closer ties to the Christian-Social faction within the DNVP. But, as the outcome
of the Bielefeld congress of the Christian-Social Reich Union in early August
1928 revealed, none of the prominent Nationalists affiliated with the Christian-
Social movement were prepared to leave the DNVP despite the outspoken
sympathy of many with the CVD’s goals and aspirations.129 This would all
change with the crisis over the imprisonment paragraph of Hugenberg’s so-
called “Freedom Law,” as the leaders of the DNVP’s Christian-Social faction
began to show less restraint in their criticism of Hugenberg and moved closer to
leaving the DNVP should efforts to depose him as party chairman fail.130 When
Hartwig, Hülser, and Lambach ignited the secession of some of the party’s
leading moderates in early December 1929, their action enjoyed the full support
of the Christian-Social Reich Union, which met in Berlin on the evening of
30 November to discuss the situation within the DNVP.131 After the first wave
of Christian-Social resignations on 3–4 December that included the venerable
Mumm,132 Hülser and Veidt traveled to Stuttgart to meet with the leaders of
the Evangelical movement from Württemberg and Baden on 6 December.133

126
Simpfendörfer, “Der Christliche Volksdienst und die Reichstagswahlen,” Christlicher
Volksdienst. Evangelisch soziales Wochenblatt Süddeutschlands, 5 May 1928, no. 18.
127
Christlicher Volksdienst, 2 Nov. 1929, no. 44.
128
Christlicher Volksdienst, 23 Nov. 1929, no. 47.
129
DNVP, Mitteilung No. 36, 30 Aug. 1929, FZH Hamburg, NL Diller, 10.
130
Mumm, “Wir Christlich sozialen und die Parteikrisis in der Gegenwart,” n.d. [July
1929], BA Berlin, NL Mumm, 283/157 62. See also Hartwig to Mumm, 16 July 1929,
ibid., 283/156.
131
Christlicher Volksdienst, 7 Dec. 1929, no. 49.
132
Mumm to Westarp, 4 Dec. 1929, BA Berlin, NL Mumm, 284/61. See also Reinhard
Mumm, Die christich soziale Fahne empor! Ein Wort zur gegenwärtigen Lage
(Siegen, 1930).
133
Kling to Keudell, 6 Dec. 1929, BA Berlin, NL Mumm, 284/15.
    

Nine days later a second meeting with more than twenty representatives from
the two groups in attendance took place in Frankfurt, where they reached
agreement on virtually every major issue with the exception of monarchism.134
The fact that illness prevented Mumm, Adolf Stoecker’s son-in-law and the
most outspoken monarchist in the Christian-Social faction,135 from taking
part in the Frankfurt deliberations meant that Simpfendörfer and the leaders
of the Christian People’s Service were able to secure the adoption of a program
that was fully compatible with their republican sympathies and that avoided
any direct mention of monarchism.136 Confronted with what amounted to a
fait accompli, Mumm and his supporters decided that discretion was the better
part of valor and acquiesced at a joint demonstration of the two organizations
in Berlin on 27–28 December 1929 to found of a new political party calling
itself the Christian-Social People’s Service (Christlilch-sozialer Volksdienst
or CSVD).137
Over the course of the next several weeks, the founders of the CSVD
concentrated on building up a broad base of popular support among the
Evangelical working-class and white-collar elements still nominally affiliated
with the DNVP. But by the middle of January 1930 it had become clear that
Hartwig’s efforts to split the German National Workers’ League off from the
parent DNVP had run into serious legal complications,138 while Lambach’s
campaign to reorganize the DNVP’s working-class and white-collar constitu-
encies into a new organization entitled the Christian-National Self-Help

134
Christlicher Volksdienst, 21 Dec. 1929, no. 51. For the text of the preliminary agreement,
22 Dec. 1929, see BA Berlin, NL Mumm, 284/31. See also Mumm’s letters to Simpfen
dörfer, 13 Dec. 1929, ibid., 284/18 20, and Rippel, 18 and 20 Dec. 1929, ibid., 284/28, 42,
as well as Hülser, “Sammlung und Führung,” Aufwärts, 17 Dec. 1929, no. 295, and
Hülser, “Die neue christlichsoziale Bewegung,” Das Staatsschiff 1, no. 3 (17 Dec. 1929):
176 78.
135
For example, see Reinhard Mumm, Unser Programm. Christentum Vaterland Volks
gemeinschaft Kaisertum (Berlin, n.d. [1928]), 2 6. See also Bausch, Lebenserinnerun
gen, 87 89.
136
Reinhard Mumm, Der christlich soziale Gedanke. Bericht über eine Lebensarbeit in
schwerer Zeit (Berlin, 1933), 142. For Mumm’s position, see his letter to Dähnhardt,
20 Dec. 1929, BA Berlin, NL Mumm, 284/42. For further details, see Frei, “Die christlich
soziale Fahne empor!” 247 56.
137
For the stenographic record of this demonstration, see Um die neue Front. Die Vereini
gung der Stöckerschen Christlich sozialen (Christlich soziale Reichsvereinigung) mit dem
Christlichen Volksdienst. Ein Rückblick auf die Berliner Verhandlungen vom 27./28.
Dezember 1929, Schriften des Christlichen Volksdienstes, no. 5 (Korntal Stuttgart, n.d.
[1930]), 11 52. See also Gustav Hülser, “Christlich sozialer Volksdienst,” Internationales
Handwörterbuch des Gewerkschaftswesens, ed. Ludwig Heyde, 2 vols. (Berlin, 1931 32),
2:1922 23.
138
DNVP, Mitteilungen, no. 3, 25 Jan. 1930, FZH Hamburg, NL Diller, 10. For further
information, see DNVP, Mitteilungen, no. 53, 10 Dec. 1929, ibid., as well as the one
sided account in Die Abtrünnigen, 114 29.
   , –

(Christlich-nationale Selbsthilfe) had not progressed much beyond the initial

planning stage.139 Still, this did not prevent prominent Nationalist labor
leaders such as Wilhelm Lindner and Else Ulrich from defecting to the CSVD
in early 1930.140 In the meantime, Mumm hoped that the former Reich
minister of the interior Walther von Keudell could be persuaded to accept
the chairmanship of the new party in the hope that a man of his stature could
bring the various factions within the Christian-Social movement together.141
But the founders of the new party soon discovered that residual friction
between the CVD and CSRV made a merger of their respective organizations
a great deal more difficult than they had anticipated. As a result, it was not
until March 1930 that the Christian-Social Club (Christlich-sozialer Verein) in
Berlin and Brandenburg, a bastion of Stoeckerite sentiment in the Christian-
Social movement, finally agreed to join the CSVD.142
The leaders of the new party now turned their attention to the challenge of
ideological solidarity. The Christian-Social People’s Service did not conceive of
itself as a political party in the traditional sense of the word, but rather as a
spiritual movement that drew its inspiration from the social and political
teachings of Jesus Christ. Consequently, as CSVD’s new chairman Wilhelm
Simpfendörfer stressed in his keynote address at the CSVD’s first national
congress in Kassel over the 1930 Easter weekend, the leaders of the CSVD were
determined not to compromise the spiritual integrity of their movement
through close political and organizational ties with other German parties.143
This was particularly true of the CSVD’s attitude towards the efforts on behalf
of a united liberal party. Not only was the CSVD outspokenly anti-liberal in
matters of educational and cultural policy, but it explicitly rejected the indi-
vidualistic premises upon which the liberal conception of government was
based. At the same time, the leaders of the CSVD regarded the various appeals
from Hugenberg and other right-wing politicians for a united bourgeois front

139
Lambach to the members of the DNVP National Employee Committee, 6 Dec. 1929,
FZH Hamburg, NL Diller, 7. See also Gonschorek and Franke to the members of the
DNVP Employee Committee in Leipzig, n.d., and the letter from Gonschorek to the
DNVP’s white collar members in Saxony, 19 Dec. 1929, ibid.
140
Die Abtrünnigen, 24 30.
141
Mumm to Keudell, 18 Dec. 1929, BA Berlin, NL Mumm, 284/28, and to Rippel, 28
Mar. 1930, ibid., 139/178.
142
Minutes of the merger meetings between representatives of the Christian Social Club
and the CVD, 25 Jan. and 13 Mar. 1930, BA Berlin, NL Mumm, 332/80, 29 32.
143
Simpfendörfer, Politik aus Glauben und Gehorsam. Vortrag Über die grundsätzliche
Einstellung des Christlich sozialen Volksdienstes auf der Reichsvertretertagung in Kassel
zu Ostern 1930, Schriften des Christlich sozialen Volksdienstes, no. 6 (Korntal Stuttgart,
n.d. [1930]), 11 16. On the Kassel congress, see the Kölnische Zeitung, 22 25 Apr. 1930,
nos. 221 24.
    

against Marxism as little more than a conspiracy to harden existing class lines
at the expense of the German worker.144 The CSVD reserved its sharpest
criticism, however, for those who sought to effect a realignment of the German
party system along class and vocational lines and advocated the creation of a
separate occupational chamber in which the clash of antagonistic social
interests was to be resolved in the interests of national solidarity. The leaders
of the CSVD looked upon special-interest parties like the Business Party, the
CNBLP, the People’s Justice Party, and the Württemberg Peasant’s League as
manifestations of a materialistic egoism that was corrupting the fabric of
German political life and that was inimical to the spirit of the Christian
faith. What all of these efforts lacked, argued the CSVD’s Bausch in a lengthy
speech at Kassel, was the necessary spiritual cement. It was not on the basis of
economic self-interest or any of the pre-war ideologies such as liberalism or
conservatism, but only through a return to the Gospel and the social teachings
of Jesus Christ that a genuine consolidation of the German people could ever
take place.145

With the progressive dissolution of German society into a Hobbesian state of

bellum omnium contra omnes, the question confronting Germany’s political
leadership was not just whether the various elements to the right of Social
Democracy could be reunited into a cohesive political force but, more import-
antly, on which foundation and around which axis this would take place. That
the secession had not shaken Hugenberg’s control of the party dealt a severe
blow to those who still staked their hopes on the creation of a progressive
conservative party that could serve as a platform from which the more
moderate elements on the German Right could pursue a conservative agenda
within the framework of the existing system of government. By the same
token, the disunity of those who had broken away from the DNVP made
the task of bringing them back under the fold of a single political party all the
more difficult. This did not augur well for Germany’s political future as the
demise of the Müller cabinet and the transfer of power to the middle and
moderate Right appeared imminent.

144
Bausch, “Was fordert die politische Lage von uns?,” Christlicher Volksdienst, 25
Jan. 1930, no. 4. See also Simpfendörfer, “Um die neue Front,” ibid., 14 Dec. 1929,
no. 50.
145
Paul Bausch, Die politischen Gegenwartsaufgaben des Christlich sozialen Volksdienstes.
Vortrag gehalten auf der Reichsvertretertagung des Christlich sozialen Volksdienstes in
Kassel zu Ostern 1930, Schriften des Christlich sozialen Volksdienstes, no. 8 (Korntal
Stuttgart, n.d. [1930]), 7 9, 22 26.
 17

The Brüning Gambit

The most pressing question confronting Germany’s political leadership at the

end of 1929 and beginning of 1930 was whether a viable domestic consensus for
the formulation and conduct of national policy on the basis of the existing
system of government could still be found. Even though Hugenberg’s campaign
against the Young Plan had ended in a failure, the parties that belonged to the
Müller cabinet were still far from agreement over how the social and economic
cost of fulfilling the terms of the Young Plan was to be distributed among the
different sectors of German society. The fact that more than two million
German workers were without employment placed an enormous strain on state
finances and made the SPD’s left wing all the more intractable in its opposition
to any changes in the existing system of state unemployment insurance that
might further weaken the economic situation of the German worker. At the
same time, the German industrial establishment and its allies on the DVP’s right
wing had become increasingly insistent that implementation of the Young Plan
was possible only if it was accompanied by a far-reaching reform of German
finances and by a drastic reduction in the general level of public spending at all
levels of government. The situation was further complicated by a restrictive
credit policy on the part of the national bank that together with the collapse of
agricultural prices on the international market produced widespread insolvency
and an increasingly large number of foreclosures on properties belonging to
farmers who could no longer meet their financial obligations.1 The net effect of
these developments was the paralysis of German democracy and its inability to
produce a stable domestic consensus upon which the formulation and conduct
of national policy could take place. It was precisely this convergence of eco-
nomic and political crisis that gave the situation in Germany its fascist potential.

From Müller to Brüning

Against the background of these developments, both the Reichswehr and the
presidential palace would become more actively involved in the search for an

1
James, German Slump, 246 82.


  ü  

alternative to the “Great Coalition.” For the most part, the Reichswehr had
been a source of stability for the republic ever since its role in the suppression
of the Spartacist uprising in January 1919. The new cadre of military leaders
that rose to prominence in the wake of Germany’s defeat did not settle for the
“stab-in-the-back legend” as an explanation for the German defeat but also
placed blame on the antiquated command structure of the imperial army.
They had little desire to return to the way things had been done before
1914 but sought instead to provide Germany with the most modern and
professional armed force on the European continent. Nor were they wedded
to the monarchal form government or sympathetic to those who hoped for the
return of the Hohenzollerns. Still, they were frustrated by the restrictions that
Versailles had placed on the size and capacities of Germany’s military forces
and were committed to restoring to restore Germany’s sovereignty over its
military affairs through the peaceful revision of the Versailles Peace Treaty. In
the domestic political arena, the Reichswehr leadership refused to identify
itself with any single political party and was prepared to work with any party
or constellation of parties that might be used to promote its own interests, and
generally prided itself on its ability to remain above the fray of partisan
political conflict.2 Even then, the German military establishment was not
immune from the feelings of “fear and loathing” that had come to grip
Germany’s conservative intellectual elites at the turn of the 1930s.3
No one better epitomized the military’s willingness to adapt to the realities
of Weimar democracy than Wilhelm Groener, the former chief of the German
general staff during the last days of World War I who in January 1928 had
been called out of retirement to become minister of defense. Groener was a
convinced democrat from southwest Germany whose Achilles heel was his
faith in Hindenburg and his embrace of the Hindenburg myth to help stabilize
Germany’s fledgling republic. As he stated to the young British historian John
Wheeler-Bennett after his dismissal from office in 1932: “It was necessary that
one great German figure should emerge from the war free from all blame that
was attached to the General Staff. That figure had to be Hindenburg.”4 Behind
Groener the most influential person in the German military establishment was
Major General Kurt von Schleicher, who as chief of the newly created office for
ministerial affairs (Ministeramt) in the ministry of defense was responsible for
coordinating and implementing the Reichswehr’s strategy for dealing with the

2
William Mulligan, “The Reichswehr and the Weimar Republic,” in Weimar Germany, ed.
Anthony McElligott (Oxford, 2009), 78 101.
3
Emre Sencer, “Fear and Loathing in Berlin: German Military Culture at the Turn of the
1930s,” German Studies Review 37 (2014): 19 39.
4
John Wheeler Bennett, Knaves, Fools, and Heroes: Europe Between the Wars (London,
1974), 57. On Groener, see Johannes Hürten, Wilhelm Groener. Reichswehrminister am
Ende der Weimarer Republik (1928 1932) (Munich, 1993), esp. 199 306.
   , –

cabinet, the Reichstag, the various political parties, and, perhaps most import-
antly, the office of the Reich President.5 Schleicher’s ultimate goal was to
rebuild and modernize Germany’s military capacities and to restore Ger-
many’s sovereignty over its military affairs in so far as this was possible within
the limits imposed by the Versailles Peace Treaty. In late 1926 Schleicher and
his associates in the ministry of defense had toyed with the idea of using the
special emergency powers that Article 48 of the Weimar Constitution vested in
the office of the Reich presidency to install a cabinet whose mandate to govern
would depend not upon the authority of the Reichstag but upon that of the
Reich President.6 Although the formation of the fourth Marx government in
January 1927 made such an expedient unnecessary, Schleicher did not hesitate
to dust off plans for a presidential cabinet in preparation for the demise of the
Müller cabinet. Only this time, as Schleicher lamented in a private conversa-
tion with the Stahlhelm’s Siegfried Wagner in October 1928, the German
Right was far more fragmented than it had been at the end of 1926.7
As the paralysis of Germany’s parliamentary institutions became more and
more apparent in early 1930, Schleicher worked through Groener to mobilize
the resources of the presidential palace in support of his efforts to lay the
foundation for a new government based upon the parties of the middle and
moderate Right. For his own part, Hindenburg had become increasingly
disenchanted with the performance of the Müller cabinet and was already
involved in the search for an alternative to the “Great Coalition.”8 On 15 Janu-
ary 1930 Hindenburg met with Westarp to assess the situation in the DNVP
and to determine whether under Hugenberg’s leadership the Nationalists
might be willing to participate in a new coalition government that would
derive its legitimacy not from a majority in the Reichstag but from the
authority of the Reich President. Westarp responded that while the DNVP
would certainly welcome an end to the socialist presence in the national
government, he doubted that the DNVP would participate in a new govern-
ment as long as Hugenberg remained at the helm of the party – and, if so,
then only under conditions that the president would find difficult to accept.
Westarp added that he did not foresee a change in the DNVP leadership at any
time in the near future inasmuch as the recent secession from the DNVP
Reichstag delegation had only strengthened Hugenberg’s position as leader of

5
On Schleicher, see Peter Hayes, “‘A Question Mark with Epaulettes’? Kurt von Schleicher
and Weimar Politics,” Journal of Modern History 52 (1980): 35 65. On Schleicher and the
fall of the Müller cabinet, see Thilo Vogelsang, Reichswehr, Staat und NSDAP. Beiträge zur
Deutschen Geschichte 1930 1932 (Stuttgart, 1962), 65 75.
6
Josef Becker, “Zur Politik der Wehrmachtabteilung in der Regierungskrise 1926/27. Zwei
Dokumente aus dem Nachlass Schleicher,” Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 14 (1966):
69 78.
7
Wagner to Duesterberg, 4 Oct. 1928, BA Berlin, R 72, 264/30 33.
8
For further details, see Pyta, Hindenburg, 555 76.
  ü  

the party. In light of Hugenberg’s intractable opposition to any accommoda-

tion with the existing political system, Westarp saw little chance that the
DNVP would play any sort positive role in the political changes the Reich
President and Schleicher were contemplating.9
That Hugenberg could not be counted upon to take part in the realignment
of political forces that Hindenburg and Schleicher had in mind would become
a cardinal principle of Schleicher’s strategic thinking in the spring of 1930. In
fact, Hugenberg and his Pan-German acolytes had thoroughly disqualified
themselves for a role in the government by virtue of their relentless attacks
against the Young Plan and their adamant refusal to support any of the
measures required for its implementation.10 Speculation about Müller’s pos-
sible successor focus instead on three men: former chancellor Hans Luther,
Centrist Heinrich Brüning, and Ernst Scholz, Stresemann’s successor as DVP
party chairman. Luther had been staging a political comeback ever since his
election as chairman of the League for the Regeneration of the Reich at the
beginning of 1928 had given him a forum from which he could expound upon
his ideas for a reform and regeneration of German political life. After Strese-
mann’s death Luther emerged as a candidate for the DVP party chairmanship
and enjoyed strong support not just from the party’s industrial backers11 but
also from the reform-minded elements on the party’s left wing.12 But once it
became clear that Scholz had recovered from the ill health that had incapaci-
tated him in the fall of 1929, Luther withdrew as a candidate for the party
chairmanship and endorsed Scholz as Stresemann’s successor.13 It was only
when Luther agreed in early March to succeed Hjalmar Schacht as president of
the German Reich Bank that his candidacy for the chancellorship came to a
definitive end.14
Although Luther was the clear favorite of the German business community
to succeed Müller as chancellor, it is doubtful that he ever figured all that
prominently in the calculations of Schleicher and his entourage. By the time
that Luther removed himself from consideration, Schleicher had already begun

9
Memorandum by Westarp, 15 Jan. 1930, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, II/61. See also the
correspondence between Westarp and his son in law Berthold Freiherr Hiller von Gaer
tringen, Jan. 1930, ibid., II/51.
10
For example, see Heinrich Claß, Die außenpolitischen Wirkungen des neuen Tributsy
stems (Munich, 1930).
11
Reusch to Gilsa, 9 Nov. 1929, RWWA Cologne, Abt. 130, NL Reusch, 400101293/4. See
also Jones, German Liberalism, 348 49, and Richter, Deutsche Volkspartei, 590 92.
12
See Dieckmann to Luther, 28 Nov. 1929, as well as the memorandum of a conversation
between Luther, Hardt, and Schroeder, 30 Nov. 1929, BA Koblenz, NL Luther, 363.
13
Report on the meeting of the DVP national committee, 3 Dec. 1929, appended to Luther
to Kempkes, 4 Dec. 1929, RWWA Cologne, Abt. 130, NL Reusch, 400101290/29.
14
On Luther’s calculations, see Jänecke’s memorandum, 9 Mar. 1930, BA Koblenz, NL
Luther, 365.
   , –

to focus his attention on Brüning with Scholz as the fallback in the event that
Brüning’s candidacy ran into difficulty.15 Brüning’s assets as a candidate for
the chancellorship were obvious. As a veteran of the Great War, the forty-nine
year-old Brüning would be the first of the so-called front generation to serve as
chancellor, a fact that was not lost upon the Reich President.16 Moreover,
Brüning had received his political apprenticeship in the Christian trade-union
movement and enjoyed close ties to Adam Stegerwald and other prominent
Christian labor leaders from both the Center and other political parties.
Brüning had nurtured close ties with the young conservative movement in
the early years of the Weimar Republic and for several months in 1920–21 was
intensely involved in an ultimately unsuccessful effort to build bridges between
the Ring Movement and the Christian labor movement.17 In May 1924 Brü-
ning was elected to the Reichstag, where he quickly earned for himself a
reputation as one of the party’s most highly respected specialists in the fields
of taxation and finance. Within the Center Brüning distinguished himself as a
fiscal conservative whose views on the need to balance the budget through the
systematic reduction of government spending at the federal, state, and muni-
cipal levels made his candidacy for the chancellorship particularly attractive to
the leaders of Germany’s industrial establishment.18 After Stegerwald joined
the Müller cabinet in April 1929, Brüning succeeded him as head of the Center
Reichstag delegation, first in an interim capacity and then by a unanimous
vote of the entire delegation on 5 December 1929.19 The following month
Brüning resigned his post as secretary general of the German Trade-Union
Federation so that he could devote his full attention to his responsibilities as
chairman of the Center’s delegation to the Reichstag.20
It is unclear just when Brüning first caught Schleicher’s eye as Müller’s
possible successor. In his memoirs Brüning recalls a conversation with Schlei-
cher at Easter in 1929 where the latter outlined his views on the impending

15
On Schleicher’s strategy in the early spring of 1930, see the undated notes composed by
his aide Ferdinand Noeldechen, BA MA Freiburg, Nachlass Kurt von Schleicher, 29/1 3.
16
On Brüning’s youth, academic preparation, and early political career, see Patch, Brüning,
14 48, and Herbert Hömig, Brüning: Kanzler in der Krise der Republik. Eine Weimarer
Biographie (Paderborn, 2001), 27 114.
17
Brüning’s ties to the young conservative movement in the early Weimar Republic have
been discussed above in chapter 9. See also Peer Oliver Volkmann, Heinrich Brüning
(1995 1970). Nationalist ohne Heimat (Düsseldorf, 2007), 48 58.
18
See Heinrich Brüning, “Die Arbeit der Zentrumspartei auf finanzpolitischem Gebiet,” in
Nationale Arbeit. Das Zentrum und sein Wirken in der deutschen Republik, ed. Karl
Anton Schulte (Berlin and Leipzig, n.d. [1929]), 354 88. See also Rudolf Morsey, “Brü
nings Kritik an der Reichsfinanzpolitik 1919 1929,” in Geschichte Wirtschaft
Gesellschaft. Festschrift für Clemens Bauer zum 75. Geburtstag, ed. Erich Hassinger,
J. Heinz Müller, and Hugo Ott (Berlin, 1974), 359 73.
19
Minutes of 5 Dec. 1929, in Protokolle der Reichstagsfraktion, ed. Morsey, 348 49.
20
Hömig, Brüning, 131.
  ü  

political crisis and tried to enlist Brüning’s support for the formation of a
cabinet that would use the special emergency powers authorized by Article
48 of the Weimar Constitution. Schleicher also envisaged a far-reaching
revision of the Weimar Constitution that would strengthen the powers of
the executive at the expense of the legislature. By his own account, Brüning
expressed skepticism not so much about the thrust and intent of Schleicher’s
plans – the two supposedly even agreed on the ultimate desirability of restor-
ing the monarchy – as about the general’s sense of timing and warned that any
move in the direction of a constitutional reform would have to await ratifica-
tion of the Young Plan and evacuation of the last Allied troops from the Rhine.
In the meantime, Brüning continued, it would be best to proceed with the
necessary reforms in the areas of fiscal and economic policy on the basis of the
existing governmental coalition for as long as it could be held together.21
Although Schleicher remained in contact with Brüning through the summer
of 1929,22 it was not until after the secession on the left wing of the DNVP that
he resumed his efforts to enlist Brüning’s support for the plans he had outlined
the previous spring. Brüning had paid close attention to developments within
the DNVP, sympathized with the aspirations of the anti-Hugenberg elements
around Treviranus, and hoped that “clarification on the Right” would make it
possible to govern without the SPD.23 On 26 December Brüning met with
Schleicher, Treviranus, and Hindenburg’s state secretary Otto Meißner –
Groener had been invited but was unable to attend – in the Berlin home of
Schleicher’s close associate Baron Friedrich Wilhelm von Willisen. According
to Treviranus’s account of the meeting, Schleicher pressed his case for the
immediate formation of a presidential cabinet armed with Article 48 emer-
gency powers but was unable to overcome either Brüning’s deep sense of
loyalty to Müller or his visceral aversion to a departure from established
parliamentary procedures. Brüning insisted that the Müller cabinet should
remain in office at least until after the evacuation of the Rhineland later that
fall and predicted that a new right-wing government saddled with responsi-
bility for the unpopular fiscal and social reforms that were necessary for the
implementation of the Young Plan would almost certainly fail, as it had in
1925 and 1927–28.24
Brüning’s coolness toward Schleicher’s overtures at the end of 1929 meant
at the very least that no reorganization of the national government could be
expected until after ratification of the Young Plan. Brüning remained

21
Heinrich Brüning, Memoiren 1918 1934 (Stuttgart, 1970), 145 47.
22
For example, see Schleicher to Brüning, 14 Dec. 1929, BA MA Freiburg, NL Schleicher,
76/158.
23
Brüning to Gehrig, 1 Nov. 1929, ACDP Sankt Augustin, NL Gehrig, I 087/001/2.
24
Gottfried Reinhold Treviranus, Das Ende von Weimar. Heinrich Brüning und seine Zeit
(Düsseldorf and Vienna, 1968), 114 15. See also Brüning, Memoiren, 150 52.
   , –

committed to the maintenance of the Müller cabinet and used all the resources
at his disposal both within the Center and with the Social Democrats to build a
consensus for the passage of the fiscal reforms, including unpopular tax
increases, that would be necessary to stabilize Germany’s financial situation.25
In the meantime, Hugenberg and the National Committee for the German
Referendum were pressuring Hindenburg to use the influence of his office to
block ratification of the Young Plan.26 Hindenburg, however, remained reso-
lute in his determination to see the Young Plan enacted into law but expected
a reorganization of the national government as compensation for the odium
he had brought upon himself by virtue of his unpopular stand in support of
the new reparations plan. On 1 March 1930 Hindenburg met with Brüning for
the first time in an official capacity to overcome his resistance to ending the
“Great Coalition” and forming a new cabinet that rested upon the parties of
the middle and moderate Right. Brüning reiterated his party’s commitment to
the preservation of the existing governmental coalition and his reluctance to
undertake the task of fiscal, social, and economic reform without Social
Democratic participation. At the same time, Brüning indicated that the Center
would not turn its back on a patriotic appeal from the Reich President to take
part in the formation of a new government should the Müller cabinet prove
incapable of implementing the reforms that were essential for Germany’s
financial and economic recovery.27 By the time the two met for a second time
on 11 March, Brüning had emerged as the clear favorite to succeed Müller.
Hindenburg stipulated that ratification of the Young Plan would require more
than a narrow majority and that the support of the Center was therefore
necessary if he was going to sign it. Hindenburg also acknowledged the
legitimacy of the Center’s concerns regarding the fiscal reforms that were
necessary to implement the new plan and assured Brüning of his full support
in securing their passage.28

25
Breitscheid’s protocol of a conversation with Brüning, 1 Feb. 1930, reprinted in Rudolf
Morsey, “Neue Quellen zur Vorgeschichte der Reichskanzlerschaft Brünings,” in Staat,
Wirtschaft und Politik in der Weimarer Republik. Festschrift für Heinrich Brüning, ed.
Ferdinand A. Hermens and Theodor Schieder (Berlin, 1967), 207 31, here 210 12.
26
On Hindenburg’s meeting with Hugenberg and Oberfohren on 17 Feb. 1930, see his letter
to Müller, 18 Feb. 1930, in Das Kabinett Müller II, ed. Vogt, 2:1471 72. See also
Hugenberg’s report of this meeting in Claß, “Wider den Strom,” BA Berlin, NL Claß,
3/906, as well as the speeches by Hugenberg and Quaatz, Gegen die marxistisch liberale
Unterwerfungspolitik! Die Reden von Dr. Hugenberg und Dr. Quaatz, am 11. und 12.
Februar 1930 im Reichstag, DNVP Flugblatt, no. 538, BA Koblenz, NL Wegener, 31/
145 48.
27
Brüning’s protocol of 4 Mar. 1930 on his conversation with Hindenburg, 1 Mar. 1930, in
Morsey, “Neue Quellen,” in Staat, Wirtschaft und Politik, ed. Hermens and Schieder,
213 15.
28
“Wie es zur Regierung Brüning kam,” in Das Zentrum. Mitteilungsblatt der Deutschen
Zentrumspartei 1, no. 4 (Apr. 1930): 75 81, here 79 80.
  ü  

On the morning of 13 March 1930 Hindenburg signed the documents that

formally ratified the Young Plan and enacted its provisions into German law.
Later than afternoon the Reich President sent Müller a polite, yet forcefully
worded, letter in which he outlined his political agenda and insisted, among
other things, upon a reform of German finances with the goal of eliminating
the mounting deficit in the national budget.29 Over the course of the next
several weeks, the Müller cabinet wrestled with the implications of Hinden-
burg’s demarche before finally settling on a compromise that Brüning had
hammered out with an eye toward the incipient mutiny that was taking shape
among the pro-business elements on the DVP’s right wing. According to the
terms of this compromise, the government would loan 150 million marks to
the unemployment compensation fund while the premiums that German
business firms were required to pay into the fund would remain the same.
Not only did the cabinet, with the exception of the Social Democratic Labor
Minister Rudolf Wissel, approve the compromise at a meeting on 27 March,30
but Scholz surprised all pundits when in his keynote address at the DVP’s
Mannheim party congress in the third week of March he emphatically
reaffirmed the DVP’s commitment to the preservation of the existing govern-
mental coalition.31 But hopes that this might salvage the Müller cabinet were
definitively dashed when representatives of the socialist labor unions sided
with the leaders of the party’s left wing at a stormy session of the SPD
Reichstag delegation on 27 March to reject the Brüning compromise, thereby
sealing the fate of the Müller cabinet. On the following morning, the chancel-
lor submitted his resignation in a private audience with Hindenburg.32
Throughout the crisis Brüning had used all of the influence at his disposal to
salvage the “Great Coalition.” At no point during the course of the deliber-
ations that accompanied the collapse of the Müller cabinet did Brüning
advance a personal agenda or his candidacy for the chancellorship. Yet when
the dust had settled, Brüning had clearly emerged as the candidate most likely
to succeed Müller, and Hindenburg summoned him to his office on the
morning of 28 March to commission him with the task of forming a new
government. In doing this, the Reich president assured him of his willingness
to use the special emergency powers vested in his office by Article 48 of the

29
Hindenburg to Müller, 13 Mar. 1930, in Das Kabinett Müller II, ed. Vogt, 2:1580 82.
30
Minutes of a ministerial conference, 27 Mar. 1930, ibid., 2:1605 07. On Brüning’s efforts
to salvage the Müller cabinet, see Patch, Brüning, 67 71.
31
Scholz, “Deutsche Politik,” in 8. Reichsparteitag der Deutschen Volkspartei in Mannheim
vom 21. bis 23. März 1930, ed. Reichsgeschäftsstelle der Deutschen Volkspartei (Berlin, n.d.
[1930]), 3 5.
32
For further details, see Ilse Maurer, Reichsfinanzen und grosse Koalition. Zur Geschichte
des Reichskabinetts Müller (1928 1930) (Bern and Frankfurt a.M., 1973), 129 39, as well
as Donna Harsch, German Social Democracy and the Rise of Nazism (Chapel Hill, NC,
and London, 1993), 51 59.
   , –

Weimar Constitution to solve the enormous problems that confronted the

German state.33 The Brüning era had begun.

Brüning and the Hindenburg Mythos

The new chancellor was a profoundly conservative politician whose core
values were rooted in the twin wellsprings of his Catholic faith and the
Prusso-German tradition. He was clearly a man of the Right, though one
schooled in the principles of discipline and self-sacrifice associated with
Prussia’s national greatness and not in the nationalist fantasies of Hugenberg
and the Pan-Germans. Though a member of the Center Party, Brüning was in
every sense of the phrase a constitutional conservative who was committed to
a return of Germany to great power status through a systematic revision of the
Weimar Constitution, a sharp reduction of spending at all levels of govern-
ment, and, if possible, a negotiated end to Germany’s reparations obligations.
Brüning remained deeply suspicious of parliamentary democracy and its
ability to deal with the myriad problems that had descended upon Germany
with the outbreak of the great depression. At the same time, Brüning saw the
deepening economic crisis as an opportunity to bring about a fundamental
reorientation of German fiscal and economic policy and to convince the Allies
that Germany lacked the resources to fulfill the reparations burden it had
inherited from the lost war. But it was first necessary to decouple the exercise
of executive authority from the vicissitudes of the popular will as manifest in
the party configurations of the Reichstag by anchoring the ship of state to the
one person who stood above the troubled waters of German party politics,
Reich President Paul von Hindenburg.34
The fate of the Brüning experiment rested upon the strength of the new
chancellor’s relationship with the Reich President. Hindenburg’s place in the
politics of the German Right has long been one of the more vexing problems in

33
Brüning’s report to the executive committee of the Center Reichstag delegation, 27
Mar. 1930, in Protokolle der Zentrumsfraktion 1926 1933, ed. Morsey, 425 26. See also
Brüning’s account of this meeting in his Memoiren, 161 62.
34
This reading of Brüning is deeply indebted to Hans Mommsen, “Staat und Bürokratie in
der Ära Brüning,” in Tradition und Reform in der deutschen Politik. Gedenkschrift für
Waldemar Besson, ed. Gotthard Jasper (Frankfurt a.M., 1976), 81 137, and Hans Momm
sen, “Heinrich Brünings Politik als Reichskanzler: Das Scheitern eines politischen Allein
gangs,” in Wirtschaftskrise und liberale Demokratie. Das Ende der Weimarer Republik
und die gegenwärtige Situation, ed. Karl Holl (Göttingen, 1978), 16 45. See also Werner
Conze, “Die Reichsverfassungsreform als Ziel der Politik Brünings,” Der Staat 11 (1972):
209 17, and Josef Becker, “Heinrich Brüning und das Scheitern der konservativen
Alternative,” Aus Politik und Geschichte. Beilage zum Parlament, no. 22 (May 1980):
3 17. For more recent scholarship, see Patch, Brüning, 1 13; Hömig, Brüning, 224 29;
and Volkmann, Brüning, 110 74.
  ü  

the historical literature on the Weimar Republic. If the more traditional

literature tended to characterize Hindenburg as a prototypical representative
of the Prusso-German tradition with its emphasis upon the martial values of
Prussian military greatness,35 more recent work has focused on the cultivation
of a mythos that enabled Hindenburg to exercise a charismatic claim upon the
loyalties of the German people. According to this narrative, Hindenburg
had assiduously cultivated a public persona ever since the last years of World
War I that at one and the same time insulated him from responsibility for
Germany’s military defeat in 1918 and legitimated his return to German
public life with his election to the Reich presidency in 1925. Hindenburg
presumably personified the virtues that lay at the heart of Germany’s national
greatness in the decades before the outbreak of World War I and that
constituted the basis upon which the reconstruction of German public life
and Germany’s return to great power status would take place. Hindenburg
thus contrived to project an image of himself that transcended the partisan
cleavages of Weimar political life and that would serve as a beacon lighting the
way to Germany’s national rehabilitation.
Hindenburg’s careful and deliberate cultivation of a charismatic bond
between himself and the German nation stood in sharp contrast to the more
time-honored traditions of German conservatism associated with men like
Julius Friedrich Stahl and the two Gerlach brothers Ernst and Leopold.
Conservatives in this tradition such as Westarp, Hergt, and Schiele were
legitimists who remained committed to hereditary monarchy as the form of
government best suited to the traditions and character of the German people.
Hindenburg, on the other hand, had turned his back on the Kaiser in the last
days of World War I and was at best ambivalent about restoring the Hohen-
zollerns to the throne. Instead Hindenburg saw himself as a charismatic leader
whose bond with the German people superseded established political preroga-
tives and endowed him with the right, if not the duty, to assert the full weight
of his personality in times of acute crisis such as the one in which Germany
currently found itself.36
In his meeting with the Reich President on the morning of 28 March,
Brüning had received Hindenburg’s support for the formation of a new
cabinet that was not bound by formal commitments to the parties in the
Reichstag and received the president’s assurance that, if necessary, he would

35
For example, see Andreas Dorpalen, Hindenburg and the Weimar Republic (Princeton,
NJ, 1964), esp. 6 15.
36
Wolfram Pyta, “Paul von Hindenburg als charismatischer Führer der deutschen Nation,”
in Charismatische Führer der deutschen Nation, ed. Frank Möller (Munich, 2004),
109 47. See also Jesko von Hoegen, Der Held von Tannenberg. Genese und Funktion
des Hindenburg Mythos (Cologne, Weimar, and Vienna, 2007), esp. 77 156.
   , –

use the special emergency powers vested in his office to implement the new
chancellor’s fiscal and economic program. At the same time, the president
gave Brüning considerable latitude in the choice of his ministers with the
stipulation that he wished to see Schiele appointed as minister of agricul-
ture, Treviranus assigned to another cabinet post, and Groener and the
BVP’s Georg Schätzel retained at the defense and postal ministries respect-
ively.37 The key figure was Schiele, who as president of the National Rural
League was unequivocally committed to restoring the profitability of
German agriculture.38 On 20 March Schiele had met with Hindenburg to
outline an ambitious program of agrarian relief that envisaged tariff pro-
tection for cereal grains and meat products along with financial relief for
East Elbian agriculture through a reduction of interest on outstanding
indebtedness and a cut in taxes and other costs.39 In his subsequent
negotiations with Brüning, Schiele made his appointment as minister of
agriculture contingent upon an iron-clad agreement to implement his
program even if this required the use of presidential emergency powers.40
The conditions that Schiele attached to his entry into the cabinet and the
strong support he enjoyed from the Reich President severely limited the
new chancellor’s freedom of maneuver in dealing with the deepening
economic crisis. The implementation of Schiele’s program would almost
certainly require the diversion of funds that were needed to cover deficits in
other areas of the national budget. Not only did this severely restrict
Brüning freedom of movement in restoring fiscal sanity through a sharp
reduction in the overall level of government spending, but it also revealed
the extent to which the new government’s fiscal priorities were hostage to
the interests of Hindenburg’s peers in the East Elbian aristocracy.
Brüning’s goal was to form a cabinet that would command a majority in the
Reichstag yet remain free of formal political commitments to the parties that
supported it. A tried and proven parliamentarian who recognized the
strengths and weaknesses of parliamentary government, Brüning did not share
Schleicher’s appetite for decoupling the exercise of executive authority from
control of the Reichstag. Instead, Brüning hoped that his program for fiscal
and economic recovery would find sufficient support in the Reichstag that it

37
Brüning, Memoiren, 161 62. See also Breitscheid’s memorandum of his conversation
with Brüning, 29 Mar. 1930, in Morsey, “Neue Quellen,” 227 28.
38
Martin Schiele, Wie kann die Landwirtschaft wieder rentabel werden? Eine Rede (Berlin,
n.d. [1928 29]).
39
Schiele to Meissner, 20 Mar. 1930, BA Berlin, R 601, 777/68 74.
40
Schiele to Brüning, 29 Mar. 1930, BA Koblenz, NL Pünder, 131/231 34. A copy of this
letter was also sent to Hindenburg. See Schiele to Hindenburg, 29 Mar. 1930, BA Berlin,
R 601, 404/9 14. For further details, see Gessner, Agrarverbände, 183 218.
  ü  

would not be necessary to take the extraordinary step of invoking presidential

emergency powers.41 Over the two days following his meeting with Hinden-
burg, Brüning negotiated feverishly with various politicians before presenting
his cabinet to the Reich President on 30 March 1930. In many respects, the
new cabinet was not all that different from its predecessor. Not only did
Brüning keep Groener as his minister of defense, but he also retained the
services of the DDP’s Hermann Dietrich and Julius Curtius and Paul Molden-
hauer from the DVP at the economics ministry, foreign office, and finance
ministry respectively. The new cabinet was even more remarkable for its
additions. The appointments of Schiele to the ministry of agriculture, Trevi-
ranus to the ministry of occupied territories, the Business Party’s Johann
Victor Bredt to the ministry of justice represented a concerted overture to
those elements on the German Right that rejected the all-or-nothing politics of
the DNVP’s Hugenberg. At the same time, Brüning went out of his way to
preserve good relations with the Social Democrats by appointing Stegerwald
and Joseph Wirth, the nominal leader of the Center’s left wing, as his ministers
of labor and the interior respectively. That these appointments were designed
to reassure the Social Democrats did little to alter the fact that in terms of its
composition and political orientation the Brüning cabinet stood further to the
right than any other cabinet in the history of the Weimar Republic with the
exception of the fourth Marx cabinet of 1927–28.42
In his maiden speech as chancellor, Brüning identified the task of balancing
the budget as his government’s highest priority and threatened that if no
parliamentary majority for fiscal reform could be found, he would have no
alternative but to invoke presidential emergency powers under Article 48 of
the Weimar Constitution. A reform of German finances, Brüning insisted, was
necessary not just to facilitate implementation of the Young Plan but also to
provide industry and the commercial middle class with the relief they so
desperately needed and to alleviate unemployment in all sectors of the German
economy. At the same time Brüning honored his commitment to Hindenburg
and Schiele by promising a comprehensive program of agrarian relief that
included, among other things, special measures to alleviate the distress in
which agriculture east of the Elbe currently found itself. Though short on
details, Brüning’s speech underscored the urgency with which the problems

41
In this respect, see Brüning’s speech in the protocol of the information conference of the
executive committee of the German Center Party, 27 July 1930, ACDP Sankt Augustin,
VI 051, 280/58 67.
42
See Brüning’s account of these developments in his Memoiren, 163 68. See also Hömig,
Brüning, 149 56, as well as the introduction by Tilman Koops in Akten der Reichskanzlei:
Die Kabinette Brüning I u. II. 30. März 1930 bis 10. Oktober 1931. 10. Oktober 1931 bis 1.
Juni 1932, ed. Tilman Koops, 3 vols. (Boppard am Rhein, 1985 and 1989), 1:1 4.
   , –

that confronted the government would have to be solved before Germany’s

position both at home and abroad could be expected to improve.43

Tightening the Grip on the DNVP

The DNVP had just begun to recover from the effects of the December
secession when the installation of the Brüning government and Schiele’s
appointment as Reich minister of agriculture were announced. Hugenberg
and his associates had moved quickly to reassert their control over the DNVP
party organization but continued to meet with heavy resistance in certain
sectors of the party. In Saxony, for example, the leaders of the state DNVP
organization had stubbornly refused to give Hugenberg the vote of confidence
his supporters were seeking from the DNVP’s state and local organizations
throughout the country.44 In Bavaria, on the other hand, it was only with great
difficulty that Hans Hilpert, chairman of the state DNVP organization, was
able to win the support of three Reichstag deputies – Christian-Social Her-
mann Strathmann and two delegates from the Bavarian Rural League, Georg
Bachmann and Kurt Fromm – for a resolution endorsing Hugenberg’s pos-
ition in his struggle with the dissidents on the party’s left wing.45 Even then,
Hilpert had to withstand a furious attack from Hugenberg’s opponents in the
National Liberal State Organization of Bavaria (Nationalliberale Landesver-
band Bayern) that sought Hilpert’s removal from the state party leadership
and a repudiation of Hugenberg’s policies as DNVP national chairman.46 For
the most part, however, Hugenberg and his associates were able to isolate the
secessionists and prevent them from securing a significant breakthrough into
the ranks of the party faithful.
Over the course of the next several months Hugenberg’s supporters
redoubled their efforts to purge the DNVP’s state and local organizations of
those who sympathized with the secessionists and to complete the task of
transforming the DNVP into a compliant instrument of Hugenberg’s political
will.47 At the same time, they focused much of their attention on reviving three
of the DNVP’s special committees, or Fachausschuße, that had been

43
Brüning’s statement to the Reichstag, 1 Apr. 1930, in Heinrich Brüning, Zwei Jahre am
Steuer des Reichs. Reden aus Brünings Kanzlerzeit (Cologne, 1932), 9 12.
44
For further details, see Kurt Philipp to Albrecht Philipp, 13 Dec. 1929, SHStA Dresden,
NL Philipp, 20.
45
Minutes of the state executive committee of the Bavarian DNVP, 7 Dec. 1929, BHStA
Munich, NL Hilpert, 1/57 68. See also Hilpert, “Meinungen und Kämpfe,” ibid., 20/
4025 31.
46
Report in the Münchener Post, 18 Feb. 1930, no. 40. See also Kittel, “Zwischen völkischem
Fundamentalismus und gouvernementaler Taktik, 887 88, and Kiiskinen, DNVP in
Bayern, 339 41.
47
Steinhoff to Westarp, 24 Feb. 1930, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, VN 13.
  ü  

particularly hard hit by the December secession: the German National

Workers’ League, the DNVP’s Evangelical Reich Committee, and the DNVP’s
Reich Catholic Committee. In the case of the Workers’ League, the secession
had triggered a bitter legal battle for control of the organization between
DNAB chairman Emil Hartwig and Hugenberg loyalists Paul Rüffer, Gustav
Wischnövski, and Wilhelm Koch. Following the December secession, the
DNAB executive committee had come out in strong support of Hartwig and
his associates at a hastily convened meeting on 7 December 1929.48 Through
the remainder of December and into the first two weeks of January 1930, more
and more of the DNVP’s Evangelical labor leaders – most prominently
Wilhelm Lindner and Else Ulrich – chose to leave the party, reducing the
DNAB to a rump of what it had been before Hugenberg had assumed
chairmanship of the party.49 At a series of meetings in Berlin on 19 January
1930, Hugenberg’s supporters quickly reestablished control over what
remained of the DNAB. The resolution from the previous December was
officially rescinded, and the DNAB leadership was reconstituted with Wisch-
növski and Rüffer as chairman and secretary respectively.50 Although Hugen-
berg and his supporters were thus able to keep the DNAB falling into the
hands of the secessionists, the organization was but a shadow of its former self.
The situation was only slightly better in the DNVP’s two confessional
organizations. Like the DNAB, the Evangelical Reich Committee had been
hit hard by the December secession with the defection of one its most
prominent members, Reinhard Mumm, to the newly founded Christian-Social
People’s Service. Hugenberg’s supporters were anxious to isolate Mumm from
the rest of the organization and refused to let him use it as a forum for
explaining his reasons for leaving the party.51 At the same time, they closed
ranks behind their beleaguered party chairman by electing Karl Koch,
president of the Westphalian synod of the Evangelical Church, as its new
chairman with Magdalene von Tiling and Reinhold von Thadden as his two
co-deputies.52 Tiling, who had emerged as Mumm’s principal antagonist in the

48
See the report of the special meeting of the DNAB executive committee, 8 Dec. 1929, in
Unsere Partei 8, no. 1 (1 Jan. 1930): 3 4, as well as the account in Die Abtrünnigen. Die
Geschichte einer Absplitterung, die die Festigung der Partei brachte, Deutschnationales
Rüstzeug, no. 16 (Berlin, 1930), 115 17.
49
See Lindner to Winterfeld, 15 Jan. 1930, and Ulrich to Laverrenz, 10 Jan. 1930, in DNVP,
Die Abtrünnigen, 24 28.
50
See appendix 4 to Mitteilungen der DNVP Parteizentrale, no. 3, 25 Jan. 1930, FGZ
Hamburg, NL Diller, 10, as well as DNVP, Die Abtrünnigen, 127 29.
51
Nagel to Hugenberg, 7 Jan. 1930, BA Koblenz, NL Hugenberg, 38/121 24.
52
Minutes of the meeting of the DNVP’s Evangelical Reich Committee, 24 Jan. 1930, BA
Berlin, R 8005, 465/27 28. See also the circular from Koch to the DNVP’s state Evangel
ical Reich Committee, 19 Feb. 1930, ibid., 465/19, as well as Thadden, “Denkschrift über
die gegenwärtige politische Lage der Partei in bezug auf die evangelischen Kreise,” 27
   , –

months leading up to the December secession, proceeded to launch a full-scale

offensive against the concept of an Evangelical party. Tiling operated from the
perspective of a Lutheran theologian who rejected a self-conscious Evangelical
politics in the style of the CSVD in favor of professional competence by men
and women for whom faith was an important but by no means the sole factor.
The CSVD, Tiling asserted, was little more than a special-interest party intent
upon pursuing a sectarian agenda of its own without regard for the welfare of
the German nation as a whole.53 With arguments like these Hugenberg’s
supporters in the Evangelical Reich Committee hoped to neutralize the effects
of Mumm’s resignation and hold defections to the CSVD to a minimum. But
the committee no longer played an important role in the DNVP’s internal
affairs and served as little more than a vehicle for attacking the CSVD.54
A similar fate lay in store for the DNVP’s Reich Catholic Committee under
Baron Engelbert von Landsberg-Velen. The leaders of the DNVP’s Catholic
faction were still recoiling from the fall-out over Hugenberg’s refusal to
support the concordat between the Vatican and the Prussian government
and were just beginning to rebuild their organization when the fight over
the “Freedom Law” and the December secession struck.55 On 22–23 October
1929 Landsberg and his supporters traveled to Berlin, where they met under
Hugenberg’s chairmanship with Martin Spahn, Ludwig Schwecht, and the
leaders of the state Catholic committees from throughout the country. Much
to their surprise, Hugenberg demonstrated a remarkably conciliatory attitude
and agreed, despite constant sniping from Spahn and Schwecht, to an arrange-
ment that would return Landsberg to the leadership of the DNVP Reich
Catholic Committee and entrust him with its rejuvenation.56 Although the
general outlines of this arrangement were subsequently ratified at the DNVP’s
Kassel party congress in late November 1929,57 it quickly unraveled in the
wake of the December secession and the loss of one of the committee’s most
dedicated activists in Reichstag deputy Paul Lejeune-Jung.58

Jan. 1930, ibid., 465/34 38. For further details, see Norbert Friedrich, “‘National, Sozial,
Christlich.’ Der Evangelische Reichsausschuß der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei in der
Weimarer Republik,” Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte 6 (1993): 290 311, here 308 09.
53
Tiling, “Evangelische Partei oder nicht,” Unsere Partei 8, no. 4 (15 Feb. 1930): 34; no. 5 (1
Mar. 1930): 43 44; no. 6 (15 Mar. 1930): 55 57; and no. 8 (16 Apr. 1930): 80 81.
54
For example, see Die religiösen Grundanschauungen des Christlich Sozialen Volksdienstes.
Herrschaft Gottes oder Herrschaft des “Christlichen Gewissens”?, ed. Vorstand des Evan
gelischen Reichsausschusses der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei (Berlin, n.d. [1930]).
55
Brackel to Stotzingen, 24 Sept. 1929, BA Berlin, R 8005, 478a/1, and Brackel to Jaeckel, 14
Nov. 1929, ibid., 472/4 5. For further details, see Jones, “Catholics on the Right,” 252 55.
56
Minutes of the DNVP Reich Catholic Committee, 22 23 Oct. 1929, VWA Münster, NL
Landsberg, E1.
57
München Augsburger Abendzeitung, 2 Dec. 1929, no. 328.
58
On Lejeune Jung, see Franz Josef Weber, “Paul Lejeune Jung (1882 1944),” in Deutsche
Patrioten in Widerstand und Verfolgung 1933 1945. Paul Lejeune Jung Theodor
  ü  

On 6 January 1930 approximately thirty prominent Catholic politicians of

differing political persuasions met in the Kettelerhaus in Cologne to see if
there might not be some sort of common denominator upon which they could
all agree. The meeting had been called by Joseph Joos from the Center Party at
the suggestion of the most recent meeting of the German Catholic Congress
(Deutscher Katholikentag) in Freiburg.59 Those in attendance included
Lejeune-Jung, Prince Alois von und zu Löwenstein from the Center party,
and a sizable delegation from the DNVP led by Landsberg, Baron Hermann
von Lüninck, Max von Gallwitz, and Julius Doms. Emil Ritter, editor of Der
deutsche Weg and a prominent figure on the Catholic Right, opened the
meeting with remarks in which he lamented the political fragmentation of
German Catholics and intimated that the goal of those present should be the
creation of a united Catholic Center Party based upon the cultural heritage
that all Catholics held in common. This prompted an immediate response
from Gallwitz, who questioned the extent to which the Center would be able to
accomplish anything by itself in the areas of legislation, administration, and
wages and spoke in favor of cooperation with the Right and against fraterniza-
tion with the Left. Gallwitz’s comments triggered a heated discussion that only
confirmed how deeply divided the participants were on secular political issues.
At the heart of the dispute was the automatic equation of Catholic with Center,
an equation that clerics took for granted and that the Nationalists vigorously
disputed. It was only through the skillful intervention of Joos, a leader from
the Catholic workers’ movement who enjoyed the reputation of being a young
conservative, that a measure of harmony was finally restored.60 This, however,
did little to assuage the disappointment that Joos and Ritter felt over the way
in which the larger goal of Catholic unity had been subverted by the spirit of
partisanship and the deep-seated animosity that Catholics in the DNVP felt
toward their co-religionists in the Center.61
None of this augured well for the success of the DNVP’s efforts to infuse
new life into the party’s Reich Catholic Committee. In February Landsberg
drafted a program for the rejuvenation of the DNVP’s Reich Catholic
Committee that would have restored the committee to the quasi-independent
status it had enjoyed before the conflict over the Prussian concordat.
Landsberg’s proposal, however, placed greater emphasis upon the defense

Roeningh Josef Wirmer Georg Frhr. von Boeselager. Ein Gedenkschrift der Stadt
Paderborn, ed. Friedrich Gerhard Hohmann (Paderborn, 1986), 7 19.
59
Invitation from Joos, 28 Dec. 1929, Kommission für Zeitgeschichte, Bonn (hereafter cited
as KfZ Bonn), Nachlass Emil Ritter, C2/040.
60
Entry in Gallwitz’s diary, 6 Jan. 1930, BA MA Freiburg, NL Gallwitz, 42.
61
For Ritter’s disappointment, see the letter he wrote but never sent to those who had
attended the meeting, 7 Jan. 1930, KfZ Bonn, NL Ritter, C2/043 46. See also his corres
pondence with Loewenstein, 11 20 Jan. 1930, ibid., C2/047 48, 51, and Doms, 4
Feb. 1930, ibid., C2/049 50.
   , –

and representation of Catholic interests within the framework of the DNVP

than it did upon the recruitment of right-wing Catholics to the DNVP party
banner.62 This did not sit well with Hugenberg’s Catholic supporters, who
were primarily interested in using a revitalized committee to enhance the
effectiveness of the party’s recruitment of Catholic voters at the expense of
the Center. Hugenberg and his supporters continued to view the Center as the
greatest single obstacle to the success of their political strategy and regarded
neutralization as a viable political force an indispensable prerequisite for the
triumph of the radical Right.63 At no point did this reading of Germany’s
political situation seem more fraught with meaning than in the wake of
Brüning’s appointment as chancellor.

Hugenberg’s Dilemma
Schiele’s decision to enter the Brüning cabinet and the strong support his
efforts to rehabilitate East Elbian agriculture had received from the Reich
President confronted Hugenberg and the leaders of the DNVP with a difficult
dilemma. A political pragmatist who sought to accomplish what could be
accomplished on the basis of the existing governmental system, Schiele
remained deeply skeptical of both the style and substance of Hugenberg’s
all-or-nothing strategy.64 Schiele had protested vehemently against the lan-
guage of the imprisonment paragraph in the so-called Freedom Law but
stayed with the party through the December secession in the hope that it still
might be possible to force a change in the DNVP party leadership.65 As
executive president of the National Rural League, Schiele commanded enor-
mous respect on the DNVP’s agrarian wing, which looked to him for leader-
ship in the struggle to restore Germany’s badly battered agricultural sector to
economic and fiscal viability. Anxious to avoid a conflict of interests, Schiele
moved to extricate himself from any commitments that might compromise his
freedom of action as Reich minister of agriculture by resigning his seat in the
DNVP Reichstag delegation along with all other party offices. As Schiele
explained in a private letter to Hugenberg on 31 March, the increasingly
desperate situation of German agriculture and the president’s appeal to do
whatever was necessary to prevent its collapse had left him with no alternative
but to accept this heavy responsibility and to free himself from any commit-
ments that might interfere with his ability to fulfill this mandate.66

62
“Arbeitsprogramm für den Reichsausschuß der Katholiken in der Deutschnationalen
Volkspartei,” 1 Feb. 1930, WVA Münster, NL Landsberg, II.
63
For example, see Spahn to Hugenberg, 23 Apr. 1930, BA Koblenz, NL Spahn, 86.
64
Schiele to Traub, 4 Feb. 1930, BA Koblenz, NL Traub, 67/106 07.
65
Westarp, “Niederschrift über die DNVP Parteikrise,” NL Westarp, Gärtringen, II/61.
66
Schiele to Hugenberg, 31 Mar. 1930, BA Berlin, R 8005, 36/120 21.
  ü  

Schiele’s appointment to the Brüning cabinet played an important role in

Schleicher’s political calculations. Like the Reich President, Schleicher
harbored a deep-seated antipathy toward Hugenberg and was determined to
do what he could to break or weaken his control over the DNVP. Schiele’s
appointment was part of calculated strategy to pressure Hugenberg into
supporting the Brüning cabinet – in which case his credentials as the self-
anointed leader of the national opposition would have been severely com-
promised – or, failing that, to drive a wedge between him and the leaders of his
party’s agrarian wing, who for the most part had remained loyal to the
DNVP.67 The dilemma in which Hugenberg and the DNVP party leadership
found themselves became even more critical when the Social Democrats
greeted the installation of the Brüning cabinet with a motion of no-confidence
when the Reichstag reconvened on 1 April. In two heated sessions of the
DNVP Reichstag delegation on the following day, Hugenberg could muster
the support of only twenty-eight deputies for a resolution expressing support
for the Social Democratic motion, while another eighteen members, including
the leaders of the party’s agrarian faction, rejected the harsh wording of
Hugenberg’s resolution and called for a more conciliatory attitude toward
the Brüning cabinet.68 To complicate the situation even further, the executive
committee of the National Rural Union fanned the fire within the DNVP
Reichstag delegation by publishing a resolution of its own that expressed full
and unequivocal support of Schiele and his decision to join the Brüning
cabinet.69
On the morning of 3 April Ernst Oberfohren, Westarp’s successor as
chairman of the DNVP Reichstag delegation, met with Brüning, Schiele, and
Hermann Pünder from the Reich Chancery to present the chancellor with a
series of conditions that would have to be met before the DNVP would
support him against the Social Democrats. Not only did Brüning reject the
Nationalist demands, but he proceeded to inform Oberfohren that he and his
cabinet had every intention of enacting its program for agricultural relief by
the Easter recess with or without approval of the Reichstag.70 Oberfohren
returned to his delegation to report that the cabinet had accepted the Nation-
alist conditions in what was a clear misrepresentation of what had transpired

67
This is implicit in Noeldechen’s undated notes “Gedanken zur Politik,” [ca. Mar. 1930],
BA MA Freiburg, NL Schleicher, 29/1 3.
68
Entry in Quaatz’s diary, 2 Apr. 1930, BA Koblenz, NL Quaatz, 16. See also the minutes of
the DNVP Reichstag delegation, 2 Apr. 1930, BA Koblenz, NL Schmidt Hannover, 72a.
See also Blank to Reusch, 2 Apr. 1930, RWWA Cologne, Abt. 130, NL Reusch,
4001012024/6, For further details, see Müller, “Fällt der Bauer,” 158 76.
69
Reichs Landbund 10, no. 14 (1 May 1930): 162.
70
Memorandum prepared by Pünder, 1 May 1930, BA Berlin, R 43 I, 2654/217 20, as well
as the entry for 4 Apr. 1930, in Herman Pünder, Politik in der Reichskanzlei. Aufzeich
nungen aus den Jahren 1929 1932, ed. Thilo Vogelsang (Stuttgart, 1962), 47 48.
   , –

in the meeting with Brüning and Schiele.71 This, however, was sufficient to
prompt a tactical reverse by Hugenberg that made it possible for the DNVP to
support the new cabinet in the vote of confidence that took place in the
Reichstag later that afternoon on the pretext that this would provide Brüning
and Schiele the time they needed to prepare a comprehensive program of
agrarian relief.72
The DNVP’s support enabled the Brüning cabinet to survive the Social
Democratic motion of no-confidence by a comfortable margin of sixty-six
votes. Hugenberg and his supporters immediately claimed credit for having
saved the Brüning cabinet from certain defeat at the hand of the Social
Democrats and for having salvaged its emergency farm program.73 But all of
this blew up in Hugenberg’s face when Hitler reacted to the news of the
DNVP’s support for the Brüning cabinet with what Nazi propaganda chief
Joseph Goebbels called “a Scheißwut” and declared the NSDAP’s resignation
from the National Referendum Committee. After meeting with Hugenberg on
the morning of 4 April, Hitler softened his position and agreed to postpone
announcing his decision for fourteen days in order to give the DNVP party
chairman an opportunity to bring down the Brüning cabinet.74 Stunned by
these developments, Hugenberg and the DNVP party leadership resolved to
return their party to the policy of uncompromising opposition to any form of
collaboration with the existing system of government.75 But efforts at a
rapprochement between the DNVP and NSDAP fell apart when Gregor
Strasser, the putative leader of the NSDAP’s left wing and an outspoken critic
of the party’s collaboration with conservative right-wing elements like the
DNVP, broke party discipline and announced, much to Hitler’s irritation,
the NSDAP’s resignation from the National Referendum Committee in his
own organ.76
What Hugenberg failed to mention in his pledge to Hitler was that his
decision to support Brüning on 3 April had averted a major secession on the

71
Minutes of the DNVP Reichstag delegation, 3 Apr. 1930, BA Koblenz, NL Schmidt
Hannover, 72a. See also Westarp’s memorandum on the formation of the Brüning
cabinet, n.d. [Apr. 1930], NL Westarp, Gärtringen, II/61, as well as the entry in Quaatz’s
diary, 3 Apr. 1930, BA Koblenz, NL Quaatz, 16.
72
Hugenberg’s interpellation in the Reichstag, 3 Apr. 1930, in Unsere Partei 8, no. 7 (4
Apr. 1930): 61. See also Westarp, “Das Kabinett Brüning und die Deutschnationale
Volkspartei,” Neue Preußische (Kreuz )Zeitung, 6 Apr. 1930, no. 98.
73
Commentary on Hugenberg’s speech of 3 April 1930 in Unsere Partei 8, no. 7 (4
Apr. 1930): 61 62.
74
Entry for 4 Apr. 1930, in Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels, ed. Elke Fröhlich, Part I:
Aufzeichnungen 1924 1941, 5 vols. (Munich and New York, 1987 2004), vol. 2/I, 124.
75
See Hitler’s letter to the presidium of the National Committee for the German Referen
dum, 3 Apr. 1930, as well as Hugenberg to Hitler, 4 and 11 Apr. 1930, all in BA Koblenz,
NL Schmidt Hannover, 30.
76
Entry for 5 Apr. 1930, in Goebbels Tagebücher, ed, Fröhlich, 2/I, 125.
  ü  

DNVP’s left wing, one that would have been far more damaging than the
secession of the twelve dissident deputies at the end of the previous year. On
8–9 April the DNVP executive committee and the DNVP party representation
met in Berlin to reassure Hugenberg of their support in his conflict with the
dissidents in the Reichstag delegation.77 But Brüning, who was fully cognizant
of the situation within the DNVP and was by no means adverse to putting so
much pressure on the party that it would break in two,78 felt even more
strongly about the need to address the budgetary crisis than agrarian relief
and was fully prepared to dissolve the Reichstag if the Reichstag failed to
approve his fiscal reforms. At a meeting with the leaders of the parties that
supported his cabinet on 11 April, Brüning announced plans to introduce a
bill linking agrarian relief to the passage of a sweeping reform of German
finances that included, among other things, unpopular increases in consump-
tion taxes.79 Hugenberg’s supporters, for whom this came as no surprise and
who suspected Brüning of conspiring to split the party in two,80 immediately
attacked the chancellor’s linkage of the two bills as a ploy to secure the
imposition of new taxes that otherwise would have been rejected in the
Reichstag.81 Hugenberg subsequently instructed his party’s parliamentary
deputies to vote against the proposed tax bill when it came to the floor of
the Reichstag on 12 April even though this almost certainly meant the defeat
of the government’s farm bill.82 Hugenberg’s action provoked a storm of
protest from the DNVP’s agrarian deputies and threated a general secession
on the party’s agrarian wing. The storm was fueled in no small measure by the
intervention of the National Rural League, whose leaders implored those
deputies with close ties to German agriculture to ignore whatever instructions
they had received from the DNVP party leadership and vote for the Brüning–
Schiele program.83

77
Minutes of the DNVP party representation, 9 Apr. 1930, BHStA Munich, NL Dziem
bowski, 18. See also Hilpert, “Meinungen und Kämpfe,” BHStA Munich, NL Hilpert, 22/
4263 68, and the entries in Quaatz’s diary, 8 9 Apr. 1930, BA Koblenz, NL Quaatz, 16, as
well as the report in Unsere Partei 8, no. 8 (16 Apr. 1930): 78 79.
78
See Pünder’s memorandum of a conversation with Schleicher, 30 Apr. 1930, BA Koblenz,
NL Pünder, 131, reprinted in Politik und Wirtschaft, ed. Maurer and Wengst, 1:150.
79
Minutes of a meeting with the parliamentary leaders of the government parties, 11
Apr. 1930, BA Berlin, in Die Kabinette Brüning, ed. Koops, 1:50 51. See also the entry
for 13 Apr. 1930 in Pünder, Politik in der Reichskanzlei, 49 50.
80
Entries in Quaatz’s diary, 31 Mar. and 5 Apr. 1930, BA Koblenz, NL Quaatz, 16.
81
Quaatz, “Kabinett Brüning und deutsche Bauernnot,” Der Tag, 12 Apr. 1930, no. 88.
82
Hugenberg’s statement before the DNVP executive committee, 25 Apr. 1930, BA
Koblenz, NL Schmidt Hannover, 72a.
83
See Hepp, Bethge, and Kriegsheim to the RLB’s regional and local offices, 16 Apr. 1930,
NL Westarp, Gärtringen, VN 10, as well as the handwritten notes by Schmidt Hannover,
“Landbund und Regierung,” n.d. [after 19 Apr. 1930], BA Koblenz, NL Schmidt
Hannover, 75. See also Bethge to Nagel, 17 Apr. 1930, appended to Kriegsheim to the
   , –

While Hugenberg and his associates did not seem overly concerned about
the prospects of a second secession and may have actually been eager to
have it over and done with, the loss of the party’s agrarian wing was
something that Westarp desperately sought to prevent. Ever since the
December secession, Westarp had chosen to stay in the background where
he could use whatever influence he still had to soothe tensions within the
DNVP and to work for conciliation between the different factions in the
party.84 Determined to prevent Hugenberg’s intransigence from further
weakening the DNVP, Westarp led a contingent of thirty-one deputies
who ignored the instructions of the party leader and voted for the contro-
versial tax bill when it came to the floor of the Reichstag on 12 April, thus
securing its passage by a slim eight-vote margin. Only twenty-three DNVP
deputies supported the party chairman while another nine were absent at
the time of the vote and six others simply failed to vote. This scenario
repeated itself throughout the rest of the day and then again on 14 April as
the moderates led by Westarp continued to support the various measures
that Brüning brought to the floor of the Reichstag, all of which passed by
margins ranging from four to forty-six votes.85 Although Westarp succeeded
in averting what would certainly have been another secession from the
DNVP Reichstag delegation, he earned not Hugenberg’s gratitude for having
salvaged the unity of the party but the enmity of the Hugenberg camp for
having helped the Brüning cabinet survive its first parliamentary test of
strength.86 Nor had Westarp’s action done much to temper the lingering
resentment of the party’s agrarian leaders toward Hugenberg and the

RLB’s main offices, 22 Apr. 1930, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, II/40, and the circular from
the RLB headquarters in Berlin, 16 Apr. 1930, ibid., VN 10. For the ensuing polemic, see
Stubbendorf Zapel, “Der Streit zwischen Landbund und Partei,” Der Tag, 1 May 1930,
no. 104.
84
Westarp to Berg, 19 Jan. 1930, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, VN 1. See also Jones, “German
Conservatism at the Crossroads,” 166 69, and Mergel, “Scheitern des deutsche Tory
Konservatismus,” 357 59.
85
Verhandlungen des Reichstags, vol. 427, 4950 59, 5000 11. For Westarp’s position, see his
article “Agrarprogramm und Steuervorlage,” Neue Preußische (Kreuz )Zeitung, 17.
Apr. 1930, no. 108, as well as his letter to Hugenberg, 16 Apr. 1930, BA Berlin, R 8005,
11/46 51. See also the entries in Quaatz’s diary, 12 and 14 Apr. 1930, BA Koblenz, NL
Quaatz, 16. For differing perspectives on these developments, see Reichert, “Die parla
mentarischen Vorgänge in den Tagen vom 1. bis 14. April 1930,” appended to Reichert to
the ADI membership, 16 Apr. 1930, RWWA Cologne, Abt. 130, NL Reusch, 400101293/
10a, and Bang’s circular to the ADI membership, 18 Apr. 1930, NL Westarp, Gärtringen,
VN 14, as well as Steiniger, “Betrifft die Reichstagsverhandlungen der letzten Tage,” 17
Apr. 1930, BA Koblenz, NL Spahn, 174.
86
Comments of Steinhoff, Laverrenz, Spuler, Hilpert, and Stubbendorf before the DNVP
executive committee, 25 Apr. 1930, BA Koblenz, NL Schmidt Hannover, 72a.
  ü  

Nationalist party leadership for an obstructionist policy that threatened the

German agricultural community with economic disaster.87

The People’s Conservatives

Of the various groups, parties, and organizations that dotted Germany’s
political landscape at the beginning of the 1930s, none stood to benefit more
from this turn of events than the People’s Conservatives. The split within the
DNVP Reichstag delegation over Brüning’s tax and farm policies greatly
increased the likelihood of a second secession that would afford the People’s
Conservatives new opportunities to expand their political base at the expense
of the DNVP. The key figure in this regard was Treviranus, who served both as
chairman of the newly founded People’s Conservative Association and as
parliamentary leader of the Christian-National Coalition that the twelve dep-
uties who had seceded from the DNVP in December 1929 formed with the
parliamentary representatives of the Christian-National Peasants and Farmers’
Party. Treviranus’s appointment to the Brüning cabinet met with enthusiasm
from the deputies who had seceded from the DNVP in December 1929 and
helped validate the People’s Conservatives as a legitimate option to the
Katastrophenpolitik of Hugenberg and the DNVP party leadership.88 Hopeful
that the Christian-National Coalition might serve as the prototype of a new
united German Right,89 Treviranus was disappointed that both the CNBLP
and the Christian-Socials had chosen to assert their own political pedigree and
avoid ties with other political groups that might compromise their distinctive
ideological orientations.90
The collapse of efforts in January 1930 to unite the various factions that had
broken away from the DNVP into a united political party left the VKV
increasingly dependent upon the German National Union of Commercial
Employees for the financial and organizational support. The driving force
behind this alliance was the DHV’s Max Habermann, who, like Treviranus,

87
See Richthofen Boguslawitz to Hindenburg, 13 Apr. 1930, BA Koblenz, NL Schmidt
Hannover, 74, and Lind to Kriegsheim with supporting documentation, 2 May 1930, BA
Berlin, R 8034 I, 99/4 24, as well as the memorandum from Nicolas to the Brandenburg
Rural League’s county offices and other league officials, 9 May 1930, ibid., 36/43 51. See
also Richthofen, Speckzölle über Nationalpolitik. Aufklärung und Klärung, printed as a
manuscript (Boguslawitz, 1930).
88
For example, see Walther Lambach, Katastrophe oder Rettung?, Volkskonservative
Flugschriften, no. 3 (Berlin, 1930). See also Ulrich Roeske, “Brüning und die Volkskon
servativen (1930),” Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft 19 (1971): 904 15, and Erasmus
Jonas, Die Volkskonservativen 1928 1933. Entwicklung, Struktur, Standort und staatspo
litische Zielsetzung (Düsseldorf, 1965), 63 65.
89
Treviranus, “Unsere Aufgabe,” Politische Wochenschrift 5, no. 50 (14 Dec. 1929): 981 82.
90
Entry in Passarge’s diary, 12 Jan. 1930, BA Koblenz, NL Passarge, 2/16 18.
   , –

belonged to the circle of new chancellor’s intimate advisors and had played a
major role in persuading a reluctant Brüning to accept the chancellorship.91
Appointed the DHV’s chief political strategist in the fall of 1927, Habermann
had sought to build up an elaborate network of interrelationships, or Quer-
verbindungen, between the DHV, the Christian labor movement, and the
various non-socialist parties as a vehicle for representing the material and
spiritual welfare of Germany’s white-collar employees.92 But the Lambach
affair and Hugenberg’s election as DNVP party chairman, Stresemann’s death
and the ascendancy of heavy industry within the DVP, and the defeat of
Stegerwald’s bid for the Center party chairmanship had dealt Habermann’s
strategy a severe blow, with the result that he and the DHV leadership now
concentrated their energies on the creation of a new political party that
embodied the basic principles of the People’s Conservative world-view.93
The DHV’s relations with the DNVP had in the meantime deteriorated to
such a point that in late March 1930 Habermann ordered all union members
who had been elected to municipal assemblies on the DNVP ticket to sever
their ties with the party.94
The DHV’s close identification with the VKV alienated many industrial
leaders who might otherwise have been attracted to the new organization.95
Treviranus had hoped to offset the DHV’s influence in the new organization
by reaching out to Catholic conservatives like Baron Ferdinand von Lüninck,
but his entreaties were rebuffed with the argument that a truly conservative
reconstruction of the German state could never take place on the basis of the
existing system of government.96 Lüninck’s response was symptomatic of the
obstacles the People’s Conservatives began to encounter as they tried to
develop a broad and socially heterogeneous popular base upon which a
genuine consolidation of the German Right could take place. By the middle
of March the VKV, whose total membership still languished around two
thousand, had become so moribund that many of those who had greeted its
founding two months earlier with enthusiasm were on the verge of

91
Habermann, “Der DHV im Kampf um das Reich,” DHV Archiv Hamburg, 70 71. See
also Habermann, “Reichskanzler Heinrich Brüning,” Deutsche Handels Wacht 37, no. 17
(10 Apr. 1930): 129 30.
92
Habermann, “Querverbindungen. Eine politische Betrachtung zum ‘Fall Lambach’,”
Deutsche Handels Wacht 35, no. 14 (25 July 1928): 281 82. See also Krebs, “Habermann,”
FZG Hamburg, 12/H, 38 41.
93
Krebs, “Habermann,” 41 44. See also Jones, “Between the Fronts,” 465 71.
94
Habermann to the DHV district leaders, 24 Mar. 1930, FGZ Hamburg, NL Diller, D9.
95
Entry in Passarge’s diary, 22 Feb. 1930, BA Koblenz, NL Passarge, 3/58 62. For the
concerns of German heavy industry, see Blank to Reusch, 17 Apr. 1930, RWWA Cologne,
Abt. 130, NL Reusch, 4001012024/6.
96
Correspondence between Lüninck and Treviranus, 4 7 Feb. 1930, VWA Münster, NL
Lüninck, 823.
  ü  

abandoning the project altogether.97 Much of resulting blame fell on Trevi-

ranus, who in the eyes of one sympathizer may have been an effective public
speaker, a competent negotiator, and a politician with influence and connec-
tions but most certainly not a skilled organizer with the command of detail
required to launch a new organization like the VKV. Perhaps what was most
disturbing in this regard was the almost total absence of a grass-roots
organization outside of Berlin, Hamburg, and one or two other urban
centers.98
The formation of the Brüning government breathed new life into a move-
ment that was on the brink of total obscurity. The Christian-National
Coalition embraced the formation of the Brüning cabinet with a promise to
help secure passage of the new chancellor’s tax and farm programs, though
with the caveat that this be done in the spirit of a renewed commitment to “the
imperishable and life-giving values of the Christian faith.”99 The mutiny
within the DNVP Reichstag delegation in the votes on Brüning’s tax and farm
initiatives raised the distinct possibility of a second and more extensive seces-
sion by DNVP moderates who could no longer tolerate Hugenberg’s flirtation
with disaster. By this time a group of about twenty-five deputies, including
such party stalwarts as Max Wallraf, Jakob Wilhelm Reichert, and Bernhard
Leopold along with Heinrich Lind and Baron Prätorius von Richthofen-
Boguslawitz from the party’s agrarian wing, began to meet regularly to lay
the foundation for a second secession from the DNVP.100 Hugenberg, on the
other hand, had already begun to mobilize his supporters at the local and
district levels of the DNVP party organization in an attempt to impose even
tighter discipline upon the party’s Reichstag delegation.101 After offering his
resignation as DNVP national chairman in a blatantly transparent ploy to
solidify support behind his chairmanship,102 Hugenberg convened an emer-
gency session of the DNVP executive committee on 25 April to secure the
adoption of a resolution that would make the decisions of the party executive
committee and party leader binding upon all members of the party’s delega-
tions to the Reichstag and sundry state parliaments. Failure to observe these

97
Entry in Passarge’s diary, 16 Mar. 1930, BA Koblenz, NL Passarge, 3/60. On the
composition of the VKV leadership, see “Zusammensetzung des Reichsausschusses,”
appended to Langhoff to Gerland, 7 May 1930, BA Koblenz, Nachlass Heinrich
Gerland, 8.
98
Entries in Passarge’s diary, 22 Feb. 19 Mar. 1930, BA Koblenz, NL Passarge, 3/51 62.
99
Reichstag declaration by Hülser, 2 Apr. 1930, BA Berlin, NL Mumm, 333/54 57.
100
Westarp, “Betr. Trennungsabsichten,” [undated notes from before July 1930], NL
Westarp, Gärtringen, II/61.
101
Resolution adopted by the DNVP district organization in Potsdam II, reprinted in Der
Tag, 22 Apr. 1930, no. 96.
102
Blank to Reusch, 17 Apr. 1930, RWWA Cologne, Abt. 130, NL Reusch, 4001012024/6.
   , –

decisions would result in expulsion from the party.103 Westarp and his
supporters protested vigorously against the resolution, denouncing it as “a
tyrannical suppression of the deputy’s responsibility to his conscience, to his
electorate, to the interests standing behind him, and to the other political
parties.”104 Such entreaties were to no avail as an overwhelming four-fifths
majority of the committee members proceeded to vote for the resolution.105
Three days later Reichert, Leopold, and Walther Rademacher from the
dissident faction in the DNVP Reichstag delegation met with Schiele, who
insisted that the group’s first priority should be Hugenberg’s removal as DNVP
party chairman. In the event that this was no longer possible, Schiele proposed
the creation of a “conservative people’s party” more or less along the lines of
what the DNVP had been before Hugenberg’s takeover of the party. But Schiele
also stressed that the recent action of the DNVP executive committee did not
constitute a suitable pretext for leaving the party and that the dissidents should
wait for a more auspicious moment when the weight of public opinion was on
their side. Then and only then, Schiele argued, would the dissidents be able to
bring a significant portion of the DNVP party organization along with them.106
In a more defiant mood, Westarp and his supporters sent Hugenberg an open
letter in which they expressed disappointment with the resolution that had
been adopted by the DNVP executive committee and reserved for themselves
the right to vote according to their conscience and personal sense of political
responsibility.107 Convinced that less than a half-dozen of the DNVP’s district
organizations were sympathetic to the plight of the dissidents,108 Westarp tried
to dissuade his colleagues from leaving the party until they could reasonably
expect to take a significant part of the DNVP’s local and regional organization
with them. Like Wallraf, Reichert, and most of the DNVP’s farm leaders,
Westarp had become convinced that a break with the party could no longer
be avoided; it was only a matter of finding the appropriate pretext.109 The
People’s Conservatives, on the other hand, had become increasingly frustrated
by Westarp’s indecisiveness and Schiele’s naïve hope that the DNVP would

103
Hugenberg’s remarks before the DNVP executive committee, 25 Apr. 1930, BA Koblenz,
NL Schmidt Hannover, 72a.
104
Westarp’s speech before the DNVP executive committee, 25 Apr. 1930, NL Westarp,
Gärtringen, II/61.
105
Unsere Partei 8, no. 9 (1 May 1930): 86 87.
106
Westarp, “Betr. Trennungsabsichten,” NL Westarp, Gärtringen, II/61.
107
Westarp to Hugenberg, 2 May 1930, FZG Hamburg, NL Diller, 9. See also Westarp’s
letter to thirty five members of the DNVP Reichstag delegation, 26 Apr. 1930, SHStA
Dresden, NL Philipp, 24.
108
Westarp, “Betr. Trennungsabsichten,” NL Westarp, Gärtringen, II/61.
109
Westarp’s unpublished memorandum composed between 25 Apr. and 18 July 1930, NL
Westarp, Gärtringen, II/61.
  ü  

“drop into his lap like a ripe fruit” once Hugenberg had thoroughly discredited
himself as DNVP party leader.110
The predicament in which the People Conservatives found themselves
was further complicated by the fact that the first secession from the DNVP in
December 1929 and the formation of the Brüning cabinet has also energized
efforts at bourgeois concentration. At the end of February 1930 party leaders from
Treviranus to the DDP’s Erich Koch-Weser met to explore the creation of a new
“state party” under the leadership of former chancellor Hans Luther.111 In his
report to the DVP national committee at the beginning of March Scholz proposed
that the “state-supporting” bourgeois parties – namely, the Democrats, the
Christian-National Coalition, the Business Party, and his own DVP – should test
their ability to work together in the form of a parliamentary coalition, or Arbeits-
gemeinschaft, to secure passage of the various measures in the areas of finance and
tax policy that would be required for implementation of the Young Plan.112 By all
accounts, Scholz’s sudden embrace of bourgeois concentration reflected the influ-
ence of Luther and the leaders of the DVP’s young liberal wing, so much so that he
returned to the theme at the DVP’s Mannheim party congress from 21 to 23
March to issue an appeal “to all of those parties that share our goal for positive and
constructive cooperation . . . for a closer union [Zusammenschluß] – a union that
under certain circumstances does not have to stop at existing party lines.”113
Scholz’s initiative at Mannheim received warm support from Brüning and his
circle of supporters.114 But his efforts to position himself and the DVP at the
head of the movement for bourgeois concentration presented problems for both
the Democrats and the People’s Conservatives. Though among the first to
champion the cause of bourgeois concentration, the leaders of the DDP
remained adamantly opposed to any form of bourgeois concentration that
was directed against the German working class and, more specifically, against
the Social Democrats.115 The People’s Conservatives, on the other hand, were
now being asked to take a position on the question of bourgeois concentration
before their own organization had had an opportunity to get off the ground and

110
Blank to Reusch, 24 May 1930, RWWA Cologne, Abt. 130, NL Reusch, 4001012024/6.
111
Memorandum by Pünder of a telephone conversation with Brüning, 1 Mar. 1930, in
Morsey, “Neue Quellen,” 216 17.
112
Scholz’s speech before the DVP national committee, 2 Mar. 1930, BA Koblenz, R 45 II,
332/25 27.
113
Scholz, “Deutsche Politik” (n. 31), 3 5. On Scholz’s embrace of bourgeois concentration,
see Mansfeld’s report to the editorial board of the Kölnische Zeitung, 25 Mar. 1930, in the
“Büchner Protokolle. Redaktionssitzungen der Kölnischen Zeitung 22. März 1929 bis 2.
Dezember 1935,” archives of the Kölner Stadt Anzeiger, Cologne, made accessible
through the generosity of Kurt Weinhold.
114
See Brüning to Pünder, 22 Apr. 1930, BA Koblenz, NL Pünder, 30/53 57.
115
Koch Weser, “Material zu einem Programm für eine neu zu gründende Partei,” n.d.
[Apr. 1930], BA Koblenz, NL Koch Weser, 101/149 59.
   , –

were justifiably concerned about the loss of their political identity should they
become too closely tied to the other political parties.116 The first round of formal
talks did not take place until the third week of April, at which time Scholz met
with Koch-Weser, Lindeiner-Wildau, and the Business Party’s Hermann
Drewitz met to discuss an electoral truce in the event of new national elec-
tions.117 The four party leaders would meet on several more occasions over the
course of the next six weeks, although by then the focus of the discussion had
shifted from the question of electoral strategy to that of a parliamentary alliance
in support of the Brüning cabinet.118 The Democrats, their ranks already badly
divided by their party’s participation in the Brüning cabinet, became increas-
ingly uneasy about an alliance with the more conservative bourgeois parties and
announced their withdrawal from the proposed Arbeitsgemeinschaft at a meet-
ing of the four party leaders on 28 May.119 When the project also encountered
strong opposition from the leaders of the CNBLP, Lindeiner-Wildau reluctantly
announced his organization’s withdrawal from the proposed parliamentary
alliance as well. Even though Scholz and the WP’s Drewitz were prepared to
proceed with the project even if the Democrats opted out, Lindeiner-Wildau’s
announcement effectively sealed the fate of the proposed Arbeitsgemeinschaft
and left the two party leaders with no alternative but to suspend efforts on behalf
of a parliamentary alliance with the other state-supporting bourgeois parties.120
Many of those in the People’s Conservative movement were privately
relieved that Scholz’s efforts to create a parliamentary alliance of the so-
called “state-supporting” elements in the spring of 1930 had ended in failure.
Although the People’s Conservatives were among Brüning’s most reliable
political allies, they were nevertheless fearful that their distinctive ideological
profile might be lost through the establishment of closer ties with other
political parties.121 For the People’s Conservatives, the one positive note to
all of this was their success in enlisting at least the moral support of dissident
Democrats like the former Reichstag deputy Heinrich Gerland and, more
importantly for the immediate context, Willy Hugo Hellpach. The Democratic

116
Treviranus at a meeting of bourgeois party leaders and representatives of the young
liberal movement, 17 Mar. 1930, StA Braunschweig, GX6, 612.
117
DVP Reichsgeschäftsstelle, circular no. 2, 25 Apr. 1930, BA Berlin, R 45 II, 225/168.
118
On the course of these negotiation, see Gilsa to Reusch, 1 May 1930, RWWA Cologne,
Abt. 130, NL Reusch, 400101293/4.
119
“Arbeitsgemeinschaft der Mittelparteien?,” Der Demokrat 11, no. 11 (5 June 1930): 258.
See also Koch Weser to Scholz, 9 July 1930, BA Koblenz, NL Koch Weser, 105/116 18.
120
Scholz’s report to the DVP Reichstag delegation, 28 May 1930, BA Koblenz, R 45 II, 367/
240 41, and to the DVP central executive committee, 4 July 1930, ibid., 346/75 77.
121
Lindeiner Wildau, “Wandlungen im Parteileben,” Volkskonservative Stimmen, 7 June
1930, no. 9. See also Blank to Reusch, 17 July 1930, RWWA Cologne, Abt. 130, NL
Reusch, 4001012024/7, as well as the report of Treviranus’s speech at a VKV rally in
Frankfurt, 12 May 1930, Kölnische Zeitung, 13 May 1930, no. 261a.
  ü  

candidate for the Reich presidency in 1925 and a highly visible member of the
DDP Reichstag delegation, Hellpach had celebrated the founding of the
People’s Conservative Association in January 1930 with an oft cited article
in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung in which he espoused the virtues of a “conserva-
tive democracy.”122 In early March 1930 Hellpach established ties with Artur
Mahraun and the leaders of the People’s National Reich Association (Volks-
nationale Reichsvereinigung or VNR) that Mahraun and the Young Germans
had launched earlier in the year as the first step toward the concentration of
the German Staatsbürgertum.123 Frustrated by his party’s inactivity in the
matter of bourgeois concentration, Hellpach caused a sensation when he
resigned from the DDP Reichstag delegation on 3 March.124 Lindeiner-Wildau
subsequently approached the renegade Democrat later that spring in the hope
that the recruitment of a politician of Hellpach’s stature might provide the
VKV with the political boost it needed to revive its flagging fortunes. While
these overtures revealed a sense of common purpose, Hellpach’s response fell
far short of the firm commitment Lindeiner was seeking.125 If the People’s
Conservatives were going to expand their political base, then it would not be in
the middle but at the expense of the DNVP.

The July Secession

The passage of his government’s tax and farm bills in April 1930 had given
Brüning a brief respite from the pressures of Weimar party politics but
certainly not a lasting and fundamental solution to the fiscal and economic
problems that confronted the German people. It would only be a matter of
time before the conflict over the rising costs of Germany’s unemployment
insurance program would resurface, this time resulting in a mutiny in the
DVP Reichstag delegation and Moldenhauer’s resignation as the Reich finance
minister on 18 June.126 The crisis then drew to a climax in the second and

122
Hellpach, “Konservative Demokratie,” Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 4 Feb. 1930, no. 218. On
Hellpach and the People’s Conservatives, see [Willy Hellpach], Hellpach Memoiren
1925 1945, ed. Christoph Führ and Hans Georg Zieher (Cologne and Vienna, 1987),
99 108. See also Claudia Anja Kaune, Willy Hellpach (1877 1955). Biographie eines
liberalen Politikers der Weimarer Republik (Frankfurt a.m. Main, 2005), 292 99.
123
[Hellpach], Hellpach Memoiren, ed. Führ and Zieher, 106.
124
Hellpach to Meyer, 3 Mar. 1930, Landesarchiv Baden Württemberg, Generallandes
archiv Karlsruhe (hereafter cited as GLA Karlsruhe), Nachlass Willy Hellpach, 257.
For further details, see Jones, German Liberalism, 359 63.
125
Correspondence between Lindeiner Wildau and Hellpach, 20 May 12 June 1930, GLA
Karlsruhe, NL Hellpach, 257.
126
On Moldenhauer’s resignation, see his remarks before the cabinet, 18 June 1930, in Die
Kabinette Brüning, ed. Koops, 1:209 12, and excerpts from his unpublished memoirs,
BA Koblenz, NL Moldenhauer, 3.
   , –

third weeks of July as the Social Democrats intensified their efforts to prevent
the Brüning cabinet from using presidential emergency powers to implement a
tax program to which they were irreconcilably opposed. The fate of Brüning’s
tax program would depend upon the number of deputies in the DNVP who
were prepared to defy Hugenberg by voting against the SPD’s efforts to block
the cabinet’s use of Article 48. Against the background of these developments
Brüning met first with Oberfohren, chairman of the DNVP Reichstag delega-
tion, on 12 July and then again with Oberfohren and Hugenberg four days
later but to no avail as the Nationalists remained unconditionally opposed to
the government’s tax bill.127 Four days later a majority of the deputies in the
DNVP Reichstag delegation joined forces with the Social Democrats, the
Communists, and the National Socialists in defeating Brüning’s proposed tax
increase in the Reichstag. At this point, the chancellor proceeded to enact the
bill that had just been rejected by the Reichstag by invoking the special
emergency powers that had been invested in the office of the Reich Presidency
by Article 48 of the Weimar Constitution. Brüning’s use of presidential
emergency powers to enact a bill that had been rejected by the Reichstag
represented a dramatic break with historical precedent and was, in the eyes of
the Social Democrats and other contemporary observers, of dubious consti-
tutional legitimacy. Brüning’s efforts to assuage these concerns by making
minor modifications in the text of his proposed tax bill did little to mollify his
critics in the SPD, who immediately introduced a motion to rescind the
government’s emergency powers. Should this motion pass, Brüning was fully
prepared to dissolve the Reichstag, call for new elections, and govern by means
of presidential emergency powers until a new parliament had been elected.128
The historic vote on the Social Democratic motion to revoke the govern-
ment’s emergency powers was set for the afternoon of 18 July. In forcing a
confrontation with the Reichstag, Brüning was hoping to ignite a rebellion
against Hugenberg’s leadership of the DNVP that, if it did not produce a
change in the party leadership, would leave Hugenberg’s control of the party
severely weakened. Under these circumstances, tensions within the DNVP
Reichstag delegation quickly reached the boiling point. At a meeting of the
delegation on the morning of 17 July Hugenberg tried to disarm his opponents
by proposing a letter to the chancellor in which he urged the start of negoti-
ations aimed at breaking the deadlock. But such a move, Hugenberg insisted,
made sense only if he could count on the unconditional support of the entire
delegation for the Social Democratic motion rescinding the government’s

127
On contacts between the Brüning government and DNVP party leadership, see Pünder’s
memoranda from 12 and 19 July 1930, in Die Kabinette Brüning, ed. Koops, 1:301 03,
326 29.
128
For further details, see Patch, Brüning, 90 95; Hömig, Brüning, 177 82; and Harsh,
Social Democracy, 59 62.
  ü  

emergency powers. Although most of the delegation strongly endorsed the

idea of negotiations with the chancellor, Westarp and his followers refused to
commit themselves to supporting the Social Democratic motion without
knowing in advance what Hugenberg hoped to accomplish or precisely what
circumstances might require them to vote against the government. In short,
the group around Westarp lacked sufficient confidence in Hugenberg’s inten-
tions to provide him with the authority he sought and suspected that all of this
was little more than a ploy to force the dissidents to toe the line in any vote
against the Brüning cabinet.129
The discussion continued into the early hours of the following morning but
did not produce a break in the deadlock between Hugenberg and his opponents
on the DNVP’s left wing. When the Reichstag delegation resumed its deliber-
ations early on the morning of 18 July, Westarp read a statement on behalf of
himself and twenty-one members of the delegation announcing that they
would not support the Social Democratic motion to lift the government’s
emergency powers and that, pursuant to the resolutions adopted by the DNVP
executive committee on 25 April, they were prepared to leave the party.
Westarp implored Hugenberg to reconsider his position or at the very least
accept a postponement in the crucial vote until the fall, a strategem that would
have averted a second secession on the DNVP’s left wing.130 When Hugenberg
remained adamant in his determination to force the dissolution of the Reich-
stag, Westarp and approximately thirty Reichstag deputies refused to capitulate
to what they denounced as the tyranny of the party chairman and announced
their resignation from the DNVP.131 Not even this, however, was sufficient to
rescue the cabinet from defeat in the Reichstag, leaving the chancellor with no
alternative but to dissolve parliament and call for new elections.

The secession of Westarp and his supporters from the DNVP Reichstag
delegation in the summer of 1930 had been long expected and set the stage
for a further realignment of forces on the German Right. The shape of the
German Right that would ultimately emerge from the turmoil of 1930 would
be determined by the way in which three separate endeavors intersected cut
across each other. The first of these was the struggle of the People’s Conserva-
tives to establish themselves into a viable political force by uniting the other

129
Minutes of the DNVP Reichstag delegation, 17 July 1930, BA Koblenz, NL Schmidt
Hannover, 72a.
130
Westarp’s statement before the DNVP Reichstag delegation, 18 July 1930, NL Westarp,
Gärtringen, II/61. See also Westarp’s letters to Oldenburg Janaschau, 26 July 1930, ibid.,
II/46, and Schulenberg, 1 Aug. 1930, ibid., VN 15, as well as Gasteiger, Westarp, 366.
131
For Westarp’s reasons for leaving the DNVP, see his two part article, “Die Gründe der
Trennung von der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei,” Neue Preußische (Kreuz )Zeitung, 24
Aug. 1930, nos. 238 39.
   , –

groups that had broken away from the DNVP into a comprehensive and
socially heterogeneous conservative Sammelpartei modeled after what the
DNVP had been before Hugenberg’s election to the party chairmanship. The
second was the tenacity with which Hugenberg and the leaders of the DNVP
struggled to retain control of the DNVP party organization and to isolate the
secessionists from any support they may have enjoyed at the state, provincial,
and local levels of the party apparatus. And the last was the determination of
Germany’s industrial elite to use its control over campaign finances to force
closer ties between the various groups that now existed between the Social
Democrats on the Left and the DNVP on the Right. Just how all of this would
shake out in time for the upcoming Reichstag elections remained to be seen.
 18

The September Earthquake

The campaign for the 1930 Reichstag election opened under a cloud of
deepening economic crisis and increasing radicalization of the German
electorate. Capital flight, mass unemployment, and agricultural insolvency
placed an enormous strain upon Germany’s parliamentary institutions and
threatened the complete breakdown of the governmental system. Brüning’s
decision to invoke presidential emergency powers to enact his fiscal and
economic program after it had been rejected by the Reichstag represented a
radical departure from the fundamental tenets of Weimar democracy and
signaled the end of effective parliamentary government in Germany. Brüning’s
use of Article 48 greatly expanded the prerogatives of executive power at the
expense of the Reichstag and created an opening that not just Hugenberg and
the DNVP party leadership but also the Reichswehr and Germany’s industrial
leadership were eager to exploit. At the same time, the evacuation of the last
contingents of French and Belgian troops from the Rhineland in August
1930 – the crowning achievement of Brüning’s foreign policy – meant that
Germany’s conservative elites were free from external restraints that might
have kept them from replacing Germany’s democratic institutions with an
authoritarian system of government more in line with their values and inter-
ests. But the increasing fragmentation of Germany’s conservative milieu and
the general disarray that existed on the German Right after two secessions on
the DNVP’s left wing had left those elites without a reliable political base from
which they could pursue their agenda. The dilemma in which Germany’s
conservative elites found themselves was further compounded by the emer-
gence of an even more radical alternative to the existing political system in the
form of Adolf Hitler and the NSDAP. Just how the leaders of the various
parties and organizations that made up Germany’s non-Nazi Right would deal
with the phenomenon of Nazism would ultimately decide just how the crisis of
Weimar parliamentarism would resolve itself.

An Inauspicious Debut
Much depended upon the outcome of the September 1930 Reichstag elections.
For Brüning and his supporters, the critical question was whether the more

   , –

moderate elements on the German Right would garner enough support at the
polls to implement the government’s program for fiscal and economic recov-
ery within the framework of established parliamentary praxis. Otherwise the
cabinet would have no recourse but to enact its programs through the use of
presidential emergency powers in defiance of the Reichstag and whatever party
political configurations the new elections might produce. Most likely Brüning
would have preferred to resolve the political stalemate that had led to the
dissolution of the Reichstag by parliamentary means, but Schleicher and many
of his closest advisors were already pressing for a more authoritarian solution
to the existing political crisis.1 In their pre-election assessment of what would
be needed to avoid the use of Article 48, Brüning and his associates estimated
that the Center and the Bavarian People’s Party have would to gain approxi-
mately ten seats in the Reichstag, that the remaining middle parties with the
exception of the DVP would need to hold their own, and that the various
groups that had broken away from the DNVP would need to win at least fifty
seats. All of this was predicated upon the expectation that between them the
DNVP and NSDAP would win approximately a hundred seats and that the
two Marxist parties would return to the Reichstag with a combined strength of
about two hundred deputies. If this prognosis held true, the government
would still be approximately eighty deputies short of a parliamentary majority
and would require the support of either the SPD or DNVP to avoid the use of
Article 48.2
From the chancellor’s perspective, it was imperative that the various groups
that had splintered off from the DNVP make as strong a showing as possible.
The key figure in Brüning’s calculations was his minister of agriculture, Martin
Schiele. On the afternoon of 19 July Schiele received Westarp, Treviranus, and
a number of their closest supporters in his Berlin office, where he announced
that the National Rural League would be founding a new agrarian party
uniting the Christian-National Peasants and Farmers’ Party with those
members of the Westarp faction with ties to German agriculture. For urban
areas Schiele proposed the creation of a sister party that would draw its
support from the People’s Conservative movement and those elements of
the Westarp group without ties to agriculture. According to Schiele’s proposal,
the two parties would then cooperate with each other both within and outside
of parliament.3 Up until this point, Treviranus and the People’s Conservatives
had been careful to avoid contact with the dissidents in the DNVP Reichstag

1
Blank’s summary of a conversation between Schleicher and Gerhard Erdmann from the
Federation of German Employer Associations in his report to Reusch, 24 July 1930,
RWWA Cologne, Abt. 130, NL Reusch, 4001012024/7.
2
Entry for 14 Sept. 1930, in Hermann Pünder, Politik in der Reichskanzlei. Aufzeichnumgen
aus den Jahren 1929 1932, ed. Thilo Vogelsang (Stuttgart, 1961), 58 59.
3
Blank to Reusch, 21 July 1930, RWWA Cologne, Abt. 130, NL Reusch, 4001012024/7.
    

delegation for fear of compromising their standing in the party.4 Now that
there was no longer any reason for such scruple, the leaders of the People’s
Conservative delegation responded favorably to Schiele’s proposal and granted
Treviranus authority to enter into exploratory negotiations with the various
groups that had broken away from the DNVP on 21 July.5 These negotiations
culminated two days later in the founding of the Conservative People’s Party
(Konservative Volkspartei or KVP) at a demonstration in Berlin’s Hotel
Kaiserhof. The demonstration was a modest affair, attended by less than a
hundred supporters plus a sizeable delegation from the German press. The
principal speakers were Westarp and Schiele, both of whom stressed the
imperative of close ties with the German agricultural community, and Trevi-
ranus, who commented briefly on the conservative goals that lay at the heart of
the new party’s ideological orientation. While Treviranus went to great lengths
to stress the KVP’s loyalty to the state regardless of the form in which it
happened to exist, he carefully avoided any mention of the one issue over
which the KVP’s founders had not been able to agree, the issue of
monarchism.6
The founders of the KVP – and none more so than Westarp – were
committed to restoring the historic ties that had always existed between
organized agriculture.e and German conservatism.7 Westarp and his associates
had a willing partner in the person of Schiele, who as minister of agriculture
in the Brüning cabinet and president of the National Rural League was the
single most influential individual in the German agricultural community.
Like Westarp, Schiele deeply regretted the rupture of ties between organized
agriculture and the DNVP, and he regarded the restoration of those ties
between agriculture and German conservatism as one of his highest priorities.8
But at a heated meeting of the RLB executive committee on 22 July Schiele’s
plan for the creation of a new agrarian party that would cooperate with the
People’s Conservatives both during and after the election encountered strong

4
Treviranus to Westarp, 14 July 1930, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, II/57.
5
Blank to Reusch, 21 July 1930, RWWA Cologne, Abt. 130, NL Reusch, 4001012024/7. See
also the report of this meeting in the Volkskonservative Stimmen. Zeitschrift der Volks
konservativen Vereinigung, 26 July 1930, no. 26.
6
On the founding of the KVP, see the Neue Preußische (Kreuz ) Zeitung, 25 July 1930,
no. 208, as well as the report from Blank to Reusch, 24 July 1930, RWWA Cologne,
Abt. 130, NL Reusch, 4001012024/7, and the entry in Passarge’s diary, 28 July 1930, BA
Koblenz, NL Passarge, 4/101 03. On the new party’s goals, see Konservative Volkspartei,
Das Wollen und Wirken der Konservativen Volkspartei (Hamburg, 1930).
7
Westarp, “Das Ziel konservativen Zusammenschlusses,” Neue Preußische (Kreuz )Zeitung,
25 July 1930, no. 208.
8
In this respect, see Schiele, “Schließt die Reihen! Ein Appell an das Landvolk,” Reichs
Landbund 10, no. 33 (16 Aug. 1930): 385, as well as his letter to Seeckt, 20 Aug. 1930, BA
MA Freiburg, NL Seeckt, 131.
   , –

Figure 14. KVP campaign placard designed by Henry Boothby for the September
1930 Reichstag elections. Reproduced with permission from the Bundesarchiv Berlin,
Plakat 002 031 002
    

opposition from Hepp and those members of the RLB leadership who had cast
their lot with the CNBLP. Hepp and the CNBLP leadership advocated a
fundamental realignment of the German party system along corporatist lines
and were adamantly opposed to any and all proposals for the reestablishment
of close ties between organized agriculture and the more ideologically oriented
political parties.9 Their intransigence left Schiele with no alternative but to
abandon plans for the creation of a new agrarian party that would align itself
with the party that Treviranus and Westarp were in the process of founding.
The resolution that the RLB executive committee released at the conclusion of
the meeting called upon the RLB membership, in a clear and deliberate
departure from the practices of the past, to follow the “appeal for vocational
solidarity [Sammelparole des Berufsstandes]” and to support, in so far as local
circumstances permitted, the election of candidates on regional agrarian
tickets throughout the country.10 Efforts to restore the historic ties between
agriculture and German conservatism that Hugenberg’s policies as DNVP
party chairman had done so much to destroy had been effectively stymied.

Consolidation or Splintering?
Developments within the RLB came as a bitter disappointment not just to
Westarp and those of his allies who were trying to launch a new conservative
party but also to the leaders of the German industrial establishment who were
prepared to use the resources at their disposal to pressure the various parties
between the Center and DNVP into some sort of alliance for the upcoming
elections.11 In this regard, Reusch and the anti-Hugenberg elements in the
Ruhr industrial establishment pursued a two-pronged strategy that sought
both to bolster the electoral prospects of the People’s Conservatives and to
encourage the other groups that stood between the Center and DNVP to
present a united front in the upcoming campaign. To make their point, Reusch
and his associates threatened to withhold campaign contributions from those
parties that refused to resolve their differences for the sake of a joint effort in
the campaign for the September elections.12 Against the background of these
developments, Westarp met with DVP chairman Ernst Scholz on the after-
noon of July 21 to lay the groundwork for a more concerted campaign effort.
Much to Westarp’s surprise, Scholz took the initiative by proposing the

9
Report of CNBLP party chairman Ernst Höfer’s speech “Neue Sorgen, neue Wege” in
St. Goarshausen, 27 July 1930, Nassauische Bauern Zeitung, 29 July 1930, no. 173.
10
Reichs Landbund 10, no. 30 (26 July 1930): 360.
11
For example, see Krupp to Wilmowsky, 19 July 1930, HA Krupp Essen, FAH 23/503.
12
Blank to Reusch, 23 July 1930, RWWA Cologne, Abt. 130, NL Reusch, 4001012024/7. See
also Turner, “The Ruhrlade,” 208 09; Langer, Macht und Verantwortung, 463 66; and
Neebe, Grossindustrie, Staat und NSDAP, 73 76.
   , –

creation of a single slate of candidates stretching from the Democrats to the

People’s Conservatives. Though skeptical that this could be done in the short
time that remained before the election, Westarp nevertheless agreed to bring
Scholz’s proposal for an electoral truce, a joint election appeal, and a parlia-
mentary alliance after the elections to the attention of his associates the
following morning.13 All of this met with strong, if not skeptical, support
from Reusch and his associates in the Ruhr industrial establishment. But with
encouragement from the leaders of his own party’s right wing,14 Scholz
decided to take his cause one step further, and on 22 July he sent the leaders
of the DDP, the Christian-National Coalition, the Westarp faction, and the
Business Party an open letter inviting them to join his party in conversations
aimed at satisfying the “strong yearning for the concentration of all state-
supporting forces” that existed in broad sectors of the German populace.15
In the meantime, Westarp was heavily involved in preparations for the
founding of the KVP and regarded the unification of the various groups that
had broken away from the DNVP as his first and most pressing political
priority.16 Still, the People’s Conservatives were desperately short of funds
and could ill afford to ignore the offer of support from Reusch and his
associates in return for their participation in an electoral alliance with the
other moderate bourgeois parties. Meeting with a select group of business and
banking leaders that included Hjalmar Schacht, Georg Solmssen, and Ernst
von Borsig shortly before the KVP’s official founding on the afternoon of
23 July, Westarp and Treviranus went to great lengths to stress that although
they had little interest in a merger with the DVP and other political parties,
they were not opposed to an agreement aimed at minimizing inter-party
animosity during the campaign. By the same token, Westarp and his associates
did not rule out the possibility of a parliamentary coalition, or Fraktionsge-
meinschaft, between the non-Catholic parties that supported the Brüning
government once the elections were over.17 But this interest in the possibility
of closer ties with the other political parties that stood between the Center and

13
Blank to Reusch, 21 July 1930, RWWA Cologne, Abt. 130, NL Reusch, 4001012024/7.
14
For example, see Jarres to Scholz, 21 July 1930, and Treviranus, 25 July 1930, both in BA
Koblenz, NL Jarres, 45. In a similar vein, see Schmidt to Westarp, 20 July 1930, NL
Westarp, Gärtringen, II/40, and Brandes to Scholz, 21 July 1930, BrStA Brunswick, GX6/
606.
15
The text of Scholz’s letter is appended to Scholz to Brüning, 22 July 1930, BA Berlin, R 43
I, 1006/8 9, and reprinted in Mit Hindenburg für Deutschlands Rettung!, ed. Reichs
geschäftsstelle der Deutschen Volkspartei (Berlin, n.d. [1930]), 24 26. For further details,
see Richter, Deutsche Volkspartei, 651 52.
16
Westarp, “Meine Verhandlungen zwischen dem 18. Juni und 18. Oktober 1930,” n.d.
[Oct. 1930], NL Westarp, Gärtringen, II/61.
17
Berliner Börsen Courier, 24 July 1930, no. 340. See also Treviranus to Jarres, 26 July 1930,
BA Koblenz, NL Jarres, 45.
    

DNVP did not extend to the other groups that had emerged from the ruins of
the DNVP’s left wing. The Christian-Social People’s Service had consistently
dissociated itself from the movement for bourgeois unity and remained adam-
antly opposed to any ties to other political parties that might compromise its
confessional orientation. When pressed on the matter of bourgeois concen-
tration, the leaders of the CSVD stressed their commitment to a Christian
social policy that transcended existing class lines and specifically rejected
efforts to create a united bourgeois front that would have been directed against
the German worker. Meeting in Eisenach in the last week of July, the CSVD
national executive committee (Reichsvorstand) reiterated its commitment to
preserving the CSVD’s independence vis-à-vis other political parties and
announced that the CSVD would enter the upcoming Reichstag campaign
free of arrangements or obligations that might infringe upon its political and
organizational integrity.18
Even more disturbing in this regard was the position of the CNBLP. At the
meeting of the RLB executive committee on 22 July Schiele and his supporters
had failed to overcome the opposition of those like Hepp, Heinrich von Sybel,
and Albrecht Wendhausen who insisted that the political realignment of the
German agricultural community should take place on a vocational rather than
an ideological basis.19 As a result, Schiele’s efforts to launch an new agrarian
party that would unite the CNBLP with those farm leaders who, like himself,
intended to work with the Conservative People’s Party both before and after
the elections were placed on hold until the CNBLP leadership could meet to
discuss its options the following week.20 On the following day Westarp and
Schiele met with the CNBLP’s newly elected chairman Ernst Höfer and
Günther Gereke, a driving force in the CNBLP, in one last attempt to salvage
something of the efforts to negotiate an alliance between the KVP and CNBLP.
With Gereke’s vigorous support, Schiele and Westarp were able to persuade
Höfer to go along with an arrangement whereby the CNBLP would reserve
places on the new agrarian ticket’s national slate, or Reichswahlvorschlag, for
candidates from the KVP so that it would receive the full complement of
mandates to which it was entitled under Weimar electoral law without having
to elect so much as a single deputy at the district level.21

18
See the report on the meeting of the CSVD national executive committee in Eisenach,
26 27 July 1930, as well as Simpfendörfer, “Neubildung der Fronten,” both in the
Christlicher Volksdienst, 2 Aug. 1930, no. 31.
19
Westarp, “Meine Verhandlungen zwischen dem 18. Juni und 18. Oktober 1930,” n.d.
[Oct. 1930], NL Westarp, Gärtringen, II/61.
20
Blank to Reusch, 21 24 July 1930, RWWA Cologne, Abt. 130, NL Reusch, 4001012024/7.
See also Westarp to Hiller von Gaertringen, 28 July 1930, NL Hiller, Gärtringen.
21
Westarp, “Meine Verhandlungen zwischen dem 18. Juni und 18. Oktober 1930,” n.d.
[Oct. 1930], NL Westarp, Gärtringen, II/61.
   , –

Figure 15. CSVD campaign placard designed by H. P. Schnorr for the September
1930 Reichstag elections. Reproduced with permission from the Bundesarchiv Berlin,
Plakat 002 031 033
    

In the meantime, Reusch and his associates in the “Ruhrlade” intensified

their efforts to keep the movement for conservative unity on track. Industrial
leaders from moderates like Carl Duisberg and Carl Friedrich von Siemens to
Reusch and the leaders of Ruhr heavy industry had long supported the
consolidation of those parties that stood to the right of the Center, though it
was no longer clear just how Hugenberg’s DNVP would factor into their
plans.22 The fragmentation of the DNVP’s left wing and the proliferation of
parties on the moderate Right had lent a new sense of urgency to their efforts
on behalf of a united bourgeois front in the upcoming Reichstag elections.
Reusch and his associates were critical of the political course Hugenberg had
steered since his election as DNVP party chairman, and they strongly sup-
ported Westarp’s efforts to organize the various elements that had broken
away from the DNVP into a new conservative party that would be sympathetic
to the interests of German industry. This, they hoped, would serve as the
prelude to a much broader bourgeois constellation that would include not just
Westarp’s new conservative party but also the DVP, WP, and other political
parties between the Center and DNVP. To underscore their commitment to
the success of these efforts, the “Ruhrlade” resolved at a meeting on 28 July to
provide support to all non-socialist parties from the Democrats on the Left
to the DNVP on the Right if they agreed to suspend polemics against each
other for the duration of the campaign.23
On 28 July Martin Blank from the Gutehoffnungshütte’s Berlin office
and Martin Sogemeier from the Alliance of Northwest German Business
Representatives (Zweckverband nordwestdeutscher Wirtschaftsvertreter) met
with Gereke to honor his role in the struggle against Hepp with a campaign
contribution of 30,000 marks with reassurances that more would be forthcom-
ing if the CNBLP executive committee gave its approval to an electoral alliance
with the KVP.24 As the chief conduit of funds from German industry to the
CNBLP, Gereke would then redirect this money to the party’s state and district
organizations to help underwrite their campaign expenses.25 The leaders of the
CNBLP could ill afford to turn their back on offers of this magnitude and
agreed after a series of heated meetings of the its party leadership on 29 July to
an arrangement whereby the CNBLP would join forces with regional conser-
vative agrarian organizations under the banner of a united agrarian ticket
known as the German Rural People (Deutsches Landvolk). The CNBLP party

22
For example, see the speeches by Duisberg and Wieland at a meeting of the RDI central
committee, 23 May 1930, WA Bayer, 62/10.5.
23
Blank to Springorum, 29 July 1930, RWWA Cologne, Abt. 130, NL Reusch, 4001012024/7.
24
Blank to Reusch, 28 July 1930, RWWA Cologne, Abt. 130, NL Reusch, 4001012024/7.
25
See Gereke to Tiemann, 15 July 1930, LA Berlin, Prozeßakten Gereke, Rep. A, 358 01,
76/16, Anlage 12, and Ohm to Gereke, 30 Aug. 1930, ibid., Anlage 26.
   , –

leadership also agreed to accept the terms of the electoral alliance that Höfer
had negotiated with Schiele and Westarp six days earlier.26 All of this repre-
sented a modest, but nonetheless important victory for Schiele, who officially
endorsed the CNBLP and agreed to head its ticket in a number of districts
across the country.27
As the negotiations with the CNBLP were running their course, Scholz’s
efforts on behalf of a more broadly based bourgeois unity front received a rude
shock when on the morning of 28 July Erich Koch-Weser, chairman of the
left-liberal DDP, and the Young German Order’s Artur Mahraun announced
that they had joined forces to launch a new party of their own bearing the
name German State Party (Deutsche Staatspartei or DStP).28 The founders of
the DStP hoped to infuse German party life with the selfless idealism and
activism of the “front generation” to galvanize the forces of the German
middle into a cohesive political front capable of rescuing the German nation
from the twin threats of international Marxism and world plutocracy.29
Although the negotiations between Koch-Weser and the Young Germans
had been going on since the dissolution of the Reichstag, the founding of
the German State Party hit Scholz and those who championed the creation of a
bourgeois unity front for the upcoming Reichstag elections like a bombshell.
Scholz was furious with Koch-Weser for what he regarded as a clear act of
betrayal and an attempt to split the elements on his party’s left wing off from
the rest of the DVP.30 Reusch and the leaders of the Ruhr industrial establish-
ment were no less shocked by the founding of the new party, criticized the
secretive and disloyal way in which it had been founded, and excluded it from
financial support from the funds at their disposal as well as from the efforts to
forge a bourgeois unity ticket for the September elections.31
For Scholz, it was now a question of whether the movement for bourgeois
concentration would regain the momentum it seemed to be building before
the founding of the DStP had taken place. At a series of meetings with various

26
Resolution published by the CNBLP executive committee, 29 July 1930, in the Thüringer
Landbund 11, no. 62 (2 Aug. 1930): 1. See also Wilmowsky to Krupp, 1 Aug. 1930, HA
Krupp, Essen, 23/504. See also Höfer, “Offener Brief an die deutschen Bauern,” 1
Sept. 1930, BA Koblenz, ZSg 1 647/4 (8).
27
Interview with Schiele in the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, 2 Aug. 1930, nos. 355 56.
28
On the founding of the DStP, see Jones, German Liberalism, 366 77. On Koch Weser’s
role, see Gerhard Papke, Der liberale Politiker Erich Koch Weser in der Weimarer
Republik (Baden Baden, 1989), 175 81.
29
Artur Mahraun, Die Deutsche Staatspartei. Eine Selbsthilfeorganisation des deutschen
Staatsbürgertums (Berlin, 1930), esp. 25 29.
30
Scholz’s remarks before the DVP central executive committee, 31 July 1930, BA Koblenz,
R 45 II, 332/245 55, reprinted in Nationalliberalismus in der Weimarer Republik, ed.
Kolb and Richter, 2:1056 58.
31
Reusch to Weinlig, 5 Sept. 1930, RWWA Cologne, Abt. 130, NL Reusch, 400101293/10b.
See also Reusch to Hamm, 2 Aug. 1930, ibid., 40010123/25b.
    

party leaders on 31 July and 1 August Scholz succeeded in securing the

agreement of Treviranus, Gereke, and the WP’s Hermann Drewitz to the
publication of a joint election appeal in support of the reforms that had come
to be known as the “Hindenburg Program.” The DVP’s Adolf Kempkes was
given the task of drafting the text of the proposed appeal for presentation to
the four party leaders at their next meeting on 7 August.32 But Gereke, who
supported the proposed action, encountered such strong opposition from the
forces around Hepp and Höfer in the CNBLP party leadership that he had no
choice but to announce at the meeting on 7 August that his party would not be
participating in a joint election appeal with the other three parties.33 Upon
hearing this, Gotthard Sachsenberg from the Business Party responded that
Gereke’s announcement made it impossible for the WP, as the only remaining
vocational party, to proceed with the project, whereupon Scholz and the KVP’s
Lindeiner-Wildau declared efforts to forge an electoral alliance among the
moderate bourgeois parties for the upcoming Reichstag elections at an end.34
Bitterly disappointed by the outcome of the meeting on 7 August, Reusch
and his associates in the Ruhr industrial establishment immediately mobilized
their resources in an attempt to rectify the situation.35 This led to a second
round of negotiations in the third week of August that culminated in the
publication of an appeal on 21 August that carried the signatures of the DVP,
KVP, and WP in support of the so-called Hindenburg Program. In signing
the appeal, the three parties committed themselves to cooperating with each
other in the implementation of the reform package that Brüning had launched
in the name of the Reich president with the prospect of formal political ties in
the new Reichstag.36 In no way whatsoever, as Westarp explained in a letter to
a KVP sympathizer, did this agreement compromise the organizational or
political independence of the participating parties.37 In terms of its immediate
impact, the publication of the “Hindenburg Appeal” meant that the three
parties would not squander their limited resources – and more importantly
those of their industrial backers – on fruitless polemics against each other.
The People’s Conservatives – and above all Treviranus – had fully invested

32
Westarp, “Bericht über Verhandlungen mit der DVP wegen Zusammenwirkens für das
Hindenburg Programm,” n.d. [Aug. 1930], NL Westarp, Gärtringen, II/40.
33
Ibid. See also the report of Hepp’s speech in Usingen, 28 Aug. 1930, Nassauische Bauern
Zeitung, 30 Aug. 1930, no. 200.
34
DVP, Reichsgeschäftsstelle, circular no. 11, 9 Aug. 1930, BA Berlin, R 45 II, 225/143 46.
See also Blank to Reusch, 9 Aug. 1930, RWWA Cologne, Abt. 130, NL Reusch,
4001012024/7.
35
Blank to Springorum, 13 Aug. 1930, RWWA Cologne, Abt. 130, NL Reusch, 4001012024/7.
36
Report by Scholz to the DVP central executive committee, 24 Aug. 1930, BA Koblenz,
R 45 II, 347/49 57.
37
Westarp to Kropatscheck, 2 Sept. 1930, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, VN 15.
   , –

themselves in the efforts to reach an understanding with the moderate bour-

geois parties and were doubtlessly satisfied with the successful conclusion of
the negotiations.38 In point of fact, however, the tedious and often contentious
negotiations that accompanied the publication of the “Hindenburg Appeal”
only underscored the confusion and disorder that existed on Germany’s
moderate Right. In as much as neither the State Party nor the Christian-
Social People’s Service signed the appeal,39 it remained an empty gesture that
offered the appearance but not the substance of bourgeois unity.

DNVP on the Counterattack

With characteristic intransigence, Hugenberg greeted the call for new elections
with a public appeal in which he claimed credit for the dissolution of the
Reichstag, denounced the second wave of secessionists as renegades who had
traded the banner of the DNVP for that of the Center, and protested against
the misuse of Hindenburg’s name to advance a partisan political agenda. At
the same time, Hugenberg reaffirmed the DNVP’s commitment to the struggle
against Marxism and called for a reversal in the conduct of German foreign
policy and a radical change of the existing political system if a “catastrophe of
unimaginable magnitude” was to be avoided.40 But the secession from the
DNVP that followed the dissolution of the Reichstag in July 1930 was far more
extensive than the one that had taken place the previous December. Of the
seventy-eight Nationalist deputies who had been elected to the Reichstag in
1928, only thirty-five remained after the dust had settled from the altercation
over Hugenberg’s decision to support the suspension of the government’s
emergency powers. The list of those who had left the party included such
party stalwarts as Wilhelm Bazille, Gottfried von Dryander, Jakob Haßlacher,
Bernhard Leopold, Jakob Wilhelm Reichert, Georg Schultz-Bromberg, and
Max Wallraf in addition to Westarp and Schiele.41 Of the five DNVP deputies
from Saxony only Paul Bang remained with the DNVP while the four others –
Alvin Domsch, Georg Hartmann, Albrecht Philipp, and Walther Radema-
cher – had left the party.42 The same was true in Bavaria, where Georg

38
See the statement by Treviranus, 11 Aug. 1930, in the Neue Preußische (Kreuz )Zeitung,
12 Aug. 1930, no. 437, as well as his article, “Gemeinsame Verantwortung,” Deutsche
Allgemeine Zeitung, 12 Aug. 1930, nos. 371 72.
39
Blank to Reusch, 28 Aug. 1930, RWWA Cologne, Abt. 130, NL Reusch, 4001012024/7.
40
Hugenberg, “Es, geht um Freiheit und Schicksal der Nation! Der Wahlaufruf des Führers
der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei!,” n.d., Flugblatt no. 554, NL Hiller, Gärtringen, also
in Unsere Partei 8, Wahlkampf Sondernummer 1 (23 July 1930): 157.
41
“Hugenbergs Verlustliste,” Volkskonservative Stimmen, 2 Aug. 1930, no. 27. See also
Mergel, “Das Scheitern des deutsche Tory Konservatismus,” 359 62.
42
Domsch, Hartmann, Philipp, and Rademacher to the DNVP Saxon state committee, n.d.,
in the Dresdener Nachrichten, 23 July 1930, no. 341. On the situation in Saxony, see
    

Bachmann, Kurt Fromm, Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck, and Hermann Strath-

mann along with the long-time DNVP loyalist Walter Otto all cast their lot
with the secession,43 while in Württemberg Bazille, Wilhelm Dingler, Heinrich
Haag, and Wilhelm Vogt announced that they too were leaving the party.44 By
no means, however, was the secession confined to deputies from central and
western Germany. Of the DNVP’s once powerful agrarian wing, only a
handful of deputies stayed with the DNVP, most notably Hans von Goldacker
from Thuringia and Walther Stubbendorf from Potsdam. But the rest of the
DNVP’s agrarian support had evaporated in what amounted to a mass exodus
of the party’s farm leaders, including seven members of the DNVP’s delegation
to the Prussian Landtag.45 One curious exception to this trend was the fact that
the party’s most prominent women’s leaders – Annagrete Lehmann, Paula
Müller-Otfried, Käthe Schirmacher, and Magdalene von Tiling – continued to
support Hugenberg, as they had in his bid for the DNVP party chairmanship
and in his crusade against the Young Plan.46 This, however, did little to change
the fact that in terms of its parliamentary representation the secession had
been an unmitigated disaster for the DNVP.
Hugenberg and his loyalists scrambled to immunize the party’s national
organization against the effects of the secession. Hugenberg summoned dis-
trict leaders from throughout the country to Berlin for a series of high-level
strategy conferences on 24–25 July. He opened the meeting of the DNVP
executive committee on 24 July with a vigorous defense of the policies he had
pursued since the formation of the Brüning cabinet and characterized the
departure of Westarp and his associates as part of a purification process
through which the DNVP had to pass if it was to assume the lead in the
struggle against Marxism. The immediate task, he continued, was to take the
struggle to those middle parties like the Center whose very existence had
contributed to the persistence of Social Democratic power in Prussia and the
Reich.47 Hugenberg continued his tirade against Brüning, the Social
Democrats, and the parties he held responsible for the stranglehold of Marx-
ism over German economic and political life the following day at a meeting of

Maltzahn to Westarp, 26 July 1930, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, II/57, and Kurt Philipp to
Lüttichau, 28 July 1930, SHStA Dresden, NL Philipp, 24.
43
For further details, see Kiiskinen, DNVP in Bayern, 346 53. See also Otto to Westarp,
27 July 1930, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, VN 106.
44
Müller, “Bürgerpartei,” 416 17.
45
Volkskonservative Stimmen, 9 Aug. 1930, no. 28.
46
Schirmacher, Tiling, and Müller Otfried at the meeting of the DNVP executive commit
tee, 24 July 1930, BA Berlin, R 8005, 56/5 6, 32, 35. For further details, see Süchting
Hänger, “Gewissen der Nation,” 317 33.
47
Hugenberg’s comments before the DNVP executive committee, 24 July 1930, BA
Koblenz, NL Schmidt Hannover, 72a. For the discussion that followed, see the minutes
of the DNVP executive committee, 24 July 1930, BA Berlin, R 8005, 56/1 38.
   , –

the DNVP party representation.48 With nearly three hundred members from
all corners of the Reich, the party representation was the largest and most
representative body in the DNVP organization and voted by an overwhelming
283 to 4 margin to approve a resolution expressing full confidence in Hugen-
berg’s performance as party chairman.49 The resounding votes of confidence
Hugenberg received from the leaders of his party’s national organization
reassured him of his party’s rank and file and only strengthened him in his
determination to stay the course in his attacks against Brüning.
The next task facing Hugenberg and his supporters was to minimize the
damage the most recent secession from the Reichstag delegation had done to
the party’s district, regional, and local organizations. In Württemberg, for
example, the secession had claimed the state’s most prominent conservative
politician, Wilhelm Bazille. In many respects Bazille’s career mirrored that of
Westarp. Not unlike Westarp, Bazille had evolved from one of Weimar
democracy’s most outspoken critics into a governmental conservative who
served first as Württemberg state president from 1924 to 1928 and then as
Württemberg minister of culture until 1933.50 Throughout his early career,
Bazille had enjoyed the strong support of the Württemberg Burgher Party, but
by the late 1920s increasing resistance to Bazille and his brand of governmen-
tal conservatism had begun to crystallize within the WBP around the person of
Fritz Wider, a Hugenberg loyalist who had faithfully supported the DNVP
party chairman in the inner-party conflicts of 1928–30.51 Increasingly disen-
chanted with Hugenberg’s leadership during the crusade against the Young
Plan and in the struggle with the Reichstag delegation in the first half of 1930,
Bazille emerged as one of the most vocal and readily identifiable members of
the so-called Westarp group.52 Like Westarp, Bazille refused to go along with
the party chairman in supporting Social Democratic efforts to suspend Brü-
ning’s use of presidential emergency powers and left the party following the
fateful Reichstag vote and call for new elections on 18 July 1930.53 Given his
stature in Württemberg politics, Bazille had every reason to expect that a

48
Hugenberg’s speech “Freiheitspolitik statt Tributpolitik” before the DNVP party repre
sentation, 25 July 1930, in Unsere Partei 8, Wahlkampf Sondernummer 2 (6 Aug. 1930):
182 83.
49
Unsere Partei 8, no. 15 (1 Aug. 1930): 163.
50
Müller, “Bazille,” 501 09.
51
See Wider to Westarp, 26 Nov. and 19 Dec. 1929, both in NL Westarp, Gärtringen, II/37.
For further details, see Müller, “Bürgerpartei,” 412 21.
52
Bazille’s remarks at the meetings of the DNVP Reichstag delegation, 11 12 Apr. and
10 July 1930, BA Koblenz, NL Schmidt Hannover, 72a.
53
Bazille to Hirzel, open letter, 26 July 1930, in the Frankfurter Zeitung, 27 July 1930,
no. 553. See also Wilhelm Bazille, “Die Tragödie der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei,”
Nationale Volksgemeinschaft 1, no. 2 (Sept. 1930), Stadtarchiv Stuttgart, Nachlass Wilhelm
Kohlhaas, Bestand 2134, 77.
    

significant portion of the Burgher Party would follow him in his decision to
leave the DNVP. But at a meeting of the WBP state committee on 27 July an
overwhelming majority of the committee members threw their support behind
Hugenberg and Wider in an embarrassing rebuff to the most prominent and
well-known Württemberg conservative. Only a small number of highly placed
state civil servants joined Bazille in leaving the party, while the rest of the WBP
organization rallied almost without exception behind the party leaders in
Berlin and Stuttgart.54
A similar situation existed in Bavaria, where the Bavarian Middle Party had
functioned as the DNVP’s state affiliate ever since its merger with the national
party in early 1920. Like its Württemberg counterpart, the BMP had been a
member of the state government almost without interruption from 1920 to
1928. But unlike the WBP where Hugenberg’s election as DNVP national
chairman had been accompanied by increased tensions within the state party
organization, the Bavarian Middle Party and its chairman Hans Hilpert
supported Hugenberg’s candidacy and were quick to close ranks behind him
once he had been elected.55 Moreover, the leaders of the BMP state organiza-
tion had staunchly supported Hugenberg in his conflicts with the party
moderates both during and after the campaign against the Young Plan despite
the increasing strain this produced between the state party and its supporters
in the Bavarian Rural League.56 But by the spring of 1930 all of this had begun
to take its toll on the state party organization, which found itself without
money and facing the defection of its younger members to either the NSDAP
or People’s Conservatives.57 Following the secession of the Westarp faction
and all five Bavarian members of the DNVP Reichstag delegation in July
1930,58 the KVP established a state organization under the mentorship of
neo-conservative publicist Edgar Julius Jung to support the Reichstag

54
Ernst Marquardt, “Kaempfe fuer Deutschlands Zukunft und Ehre. Umrisszeichungen aus
der Geschichte der deutschnationalen Volkspartei Württembergs,” unpublished manu
script in the Württembergische Landesbibliothek, Stuttgart, 77. See also the report of this
meeting in the WBP campaign leaflet “Der deutschnationale Wahlaufruf,” n.d. [Aug.
Sept. 1930], NL Hiller, Gärtringen, as well as the circular letter from Wider and Sonthei
mer, Aug. 1930, ibid.
55
Minutes of the BMP state committee, 13 Oct. and 8 Dec. 1928, BHStA Munich, Abt. V,
NL Hilpert, 1/10 23. See also Kiiskinen, DNVP in Bayern, 332 34, and Kittel, “Zwischen
völkischem Fundamentalismus und gouvernementaler Taktik,” 885 87.
56
See the exchange between Hilpert and Bachmann in the minutes of the BMP state
committee, 9 Dec. 1929, and 10 May 1930, BHStA Munich, Abt. V, NL Hilpert, 1/
57 79, as well as the more detailed analysis by Kiiskinen, DNVP in Bayern, 341 46.
57
Dziembowski to Brosius, n.d. [8 May 1930], BHStA Munich, Abt. V, NL
Dzeimbowski, 18.
58
Kiiskinen, DNVP in Bayern, 347 48. See also Schmidt Hannover to Dziembowski, 11 July
1930, BHStA Munich, Abt. V, NL Dzeimbowski, 18.
   , –

candidacy of retired general Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck.59 A highly decorated

hero of the African campaign in World War I, Lettow-Vorbeck had belonged
to the DNVP Reichstag delegation since 1920 and was among those who had
left the party in July 1930.60 The founders of the Bavarian KVP no doubt
hoped that Lettow-Vorbeck’s popularity would not just serve as a rallying
point for the anti-Hugenberg elements within the BMP but would also attract
the support of voters who stood outside the immediate orbit of Bavarian
conservatism. But Hilpert and the leaders of the BMP moved quickly to shore
up their organization against the threat of further defections. Meeting in
Munich on 2 August, the BMP state committee reaffirmed its unequivocal
loyalty to Hugenberg and the party’s national leadership, criticized those who
had recently left the party for having undermined the unity of the national
front, and rededicated the Bavarian Middle Party as a “Kampfgemeinschaft
against Marxism and cultural Bolshevism, against unitarism and alien [volks-
fremder] republicanism and parliamentarism, against tribute slavery, and
against the debilitating economic and tax policies of the post-revolutionary
period.”61

Disarray on the Moderate Right

The most serious problem the leaders of the DNVP faced in their efforts to
contain the damage that the July secession had done to their party’s grass-
roots organization was the estrangement of the party’s agrarian wing.
Following the dissolution of the Reichstag in July 1930 the executive commit-
tee of the National Rural League had called upon its regional affiliates
throughout the country to run candidates on separate agrarian tickets in
the spirit of vocational solidarity.62 In Württemberg the RLB affiliate, the

59
Jung to Pechel, 25 July 1930, BA Koblenz, NL Pechel, 79. On Jung and the People’s
Conservative movement, see Roshan Magub, Edgar Julius Jung: Right Wing Enemy of the
Nazis. A Political Biography (Rochester, NY, 2017), 133 50.
60
See the drafts of Lettow Vorbeck’s letters of resignation to Hugenberg and Hilpert, both
dated 19 July 1930, BA MA, Freiburg, Nachlass Paul von Lettow Vorbeck, 58, and
Lettow Vorbeck to Einem, 9 Sept. 1930, BA MA Freiburg, Nachlass Karl von Einem,
28/60 67, as well as Paul Lettow Vorbeck, Warum ich aus der DNVP. austrat (Berlin, n.d.
[1930]), BA Koblenz, ZSg 1 275/2 (4). See also Uwe Schulte Varendorff, Kolonialheld für
Kaiser und Führer. General Lettow Vorbeck Mythos und Wirklichkeit (Berlin, 2006),
100 01.
61
“‘Unter Schwarz weiß rot gegen Marxismus und Versailles.’ Landesausschuß der
Deutschnationalen Volkspartei i.B.,” n.d. [Aug. 1930], BHStA Munich, Abt. V, Flugblät
ter Sammlung 60/1930. See also the minutes of the BMP state committee, 2 Aug. 1930,
BHStA Munich, Abt. V, NL Hilpert, 1/80 96, as well as Hilpert’s recollection of this
meeting in Hilpert, “Meinungen und Kämpfe,” ibid., 22/4371 73.
62
Reichs Landbund 10, no. 30 (26 July 1930): 360.
    

Württemberg Peasants and Wine Growers’ League, severed its decade-long

ties with the Württemberg Burgher Party and announced that in accordance
with the RLB’s appeal for vocational solidarity it would run its own slate of
candidates in the upcoming national elections under the rubric “German
Rural People” with the understanding that the deputies elected on this ticket
would subsequently affiliate themselves with the CNBLP Reichstag delega-
tion.63 In a parallel move Karl Prieger, president of the Bavarian Rural League,
announced at a meeting of the BLB’s general membership on 10 August that
the increasing fragmentation of the German Right had left his organization
with no choice but to “go it alone” in the upcoming campaign and that it too
would field its own slate of candidates.64 And in Saxony, where four of the
DNVP’s six Reichstag deputies had left the party and where the Pan-Germans
were busy at work purging the party’s state organization of those who still
harbored sympathies for Westarp and his supporters,65 the Saxon Rural
League declared on 31 July that it would follow the RLB’s appeal for vocational
solidarity and run its own slate of candidates in the campaign for the Septem-
ber elections.66 Even in Pomerania, where the regional RLB affiliate was
among the most reactionary in the entire organization, local farm leaders
including representatives of the land-owning nobility turned their backs on
the DNVP after it refused to enter into an electoral alliance with the CNBLP at
the provincial level.67
All of this dealt a severe blow not just to the DNVP’s prospects in the
upcoming Reichstag elections but also to the electoral hopes of urban conser-
vatives like Saxony’s Albrecht Philipp who had pinned their chances of

63
WBVB, “Wahlaufruf zur Reichstagswahl am 14. Sept. 1930,” n.d. [Aug. 1930], NL Hiller,
Gärtringen. See also Das grüne Buch der Bauernpolitik. Ein politisches Handbuch für
Wähler in Stadt und Land, ed. Theodor Körner alt (Stuttgart, 1931), 22 24. On relations
between the WBWB and local KVP, see Körner to Hiller von Gärtringen, 7 Aug. 1930, NL
Hiller, Gärtringen.
64
Bayerischer Landbund 32, no. 33 (17. Aug. 1930).
65
For further details, see the letter to Hugenberg, 23 July 1930, BA Berlin, R 8048, 216/
158 62, and Beutler to Claß, 9 Sept. 1930, ibid., 194 95. See also Larry Eugene Jones,
“Saxony, 1924 1930: A Study in the Dissolution of the Bourgeois Party System in
Weimar Germany,” in Saxony in German History: Culture, Society, and Politics,
1830 1933, ed. James Retallack (Ann Arbor, MI, 2000), 336 55, here 343 54.
66
Sächsische Bauern Zeitung 37, no. 31 (3 Aug. 1930): 315. See also Domsch, “Reich
stagsauflösung und Neuwahl,” ibid., 316 17, as well as Domsch to Philipp, 27 July,
1930, SHStA Dresden, NL Philipp, 24.
67
Sächsischer Bauern Zeitung 37, no. 33 (17 Aug. 1930): 338. On developments in Pomer
ania, see Knebel Döberitz to Schiele, 31 Aug. (sic July) 1930, NL Westarp, Gärtringen,
VN 15, and Brosius to Hugenberg, 12 Aug. 1930, BA Koblenz, NL Hugenberg, 189/
273 74, as well as the entries in Passarge’s diary, 4 and 23 Aug. 1930, BA Koblenz, NL
Passarge, 4/104 09.
   , –

reelection upon the support of organized agriculture.68 Not surprisingly, a

bitter polemic erupted between the DNVP and RLB over the latter’s support of
the CNBLP and affiliated agrarian tickets throughout the country. DNVP
propagandists claimed that Schiele and the leaders of the National Rural
League had abandoned the RLB’s long-standing policy of bipartisan neutrality
by its support of the CNBLP and that its sabotage of the national front had left
German agriculture defenseless in the struggle against Marxism.69 The RLB
responded with a vigorous defense of Schiele’s accomplishments as Reich
minister of agriculture and implored the German agricultural community to
rally behind Hindenburg and Schiele as “the best guarantee for the continu-
ation of efforts to save German agriculture.”70 For its part, the CNBLP
contrasted the positive steps that had been taken under Schiele’s leadership
to rescue German agriculture from the brink of disaster with the Katastro-
phenpolitik of Hugenberg and those in control of the DNVP. Whereas Hugen-
berg and his supporters, the CNBLP alleged, was intent upon plunging
Germany into a full-scale economic crisis in order to bring down the existing
political system, the leaders of the CNBLP argued that the struggle against
Marxism could never be won without a healthy German peasantry and that
the first order of business was the rehabilitation of German agriculture. And
this, they insisted, could only take place through the consolidation of the
German agricultural community into a single agrarian party.71
Yet for all of its passion, the CNBLP’s appeal to the vocational identity of
the German peasantry met with a mixed reception from the different constitu-
encies within the German agricultural community. Not only did some DNVP
farm leaders like the Westphalian Ludwig Schwecht decline to follow Schiele
and remained loyal to Hugenberg and the DNVP,72 but the Association of

68
See Philipp, “Landvolk und Reichstagswahl,” Sächische Bauern Zeitung 37, no. 33 (17
Aug. 1930), 338 40, and his letters to Schiele, 24 July and 24 Aug. 1930, SHStA Dresden,
NL Philipp, 24.
69
Der Landbund im Wahlkampf (Berlin, n.d. [1930]), BA Koblenz, ZSg 1/E77. See also
Müller, “Fällt der Bauer,” 185 95.
70
Reichs Landbund e.V., Agrarpolitische Zwischenbilanz. Entwicklung der Lage der Land
wirtschaft seit dem Amtsantritt Schieles, Berlin, 30 July 1930, 1 7. In a similar vein, see
Für Ar und Halm! (Berlin, n.d. [1930]), as well as “Wahlaufruf zur Reichstagswahl am 14.
Sept. 1930,” ed. Vorstand und Landesauschuss des Württ. Bauern und Weingärnterpar
tei, n.d. [Aug. 1930], NL Hiller, Gärtringen.
71
Die Sendung des Landvolkes (Berlin, n.d. [1930]), 12 18. See also Döbrich, “Christlich
Nationale Bauern und Landvolkpartei und Neuwahlen,” Thüringer Landbund 11,
nos. 69 (27 Aug. 1930), and 70 (20 Aug. 1929), and Ohm, “Landvolk und Reichstags
wahl,” Reichs Landbund 10, no. 16 (3 Aug. 1930): 244 45, as well as the campaign
speeches by Gereke, “Die Ziele der Landvolkpartei,” Der Landbürger 5, no. 16 (16
Aug. 1930): 241 42, and Hepp, “Was wird die Landvolkpartei im neuen Reichstag
tun?,” Nassauische Bauern Zeitung, 30 Aug. 1930, no. 200.
72
Schwecht to Schiele, 2 Aug. 1930, BA Koblenz, ZSg 1 44/13 (1).
    

German Peasant Unions, Germany’s second largest agricultural interest

organization, went to great pains to reaffirm its neutrality with respect to the
existing political parties and urged its members to work within those parties to
ensure that the interests of German agriculture were well represented in
the selection of candidates for the upcoming Reichstag elections.73 Nor did
the CNBLP’s appeal for vocational solidarity sit well with the leaders of the
German Peasants’ Party, who argued that the preponderance of nobility and
large landowners in the CNBLP leadership and on its slate of candidates for
the upcoming election had left the DBP, as the party of the small and middle-
sized peasant, with no alternative but to enter the campaign under its own
banner.74 The logic of vocational solidarity was apparently not as clear to all
sectors of the German agricultural community as it was for the leaders of the
RLB and CNBLP.
If the agitation of the CNBLP posed a serious threat to the DNVP’s
prospects in the September 1930 Reichstag elections, the same was no less
true in the case of the Christian-Social People’s Service.75 The leaders of the
CSVD portrayed their party as “a calming pole of stability” in the midst of the
confusion and turmoil that bedeviled Germany’s other non-socialist, non-
Catholic parties.76 While recognizing that the German party system was in
the midst of a profound structural and spiritual transformation and that all of
the parties to the right of the Social Democrats and Center were in an
advanced state of internal dissolution, the leaders of the CSVD reserved their
sharpest attacks for the DNVP. Not only had Hugenberg and his associates
employed methods in their struggle against the CSVD that were unworthy of a
supposedly Christian party, but the DNVP had betrayed its crusade against
Marxism by voting for the Social Democratic and Communist motion to
revoke the Brüning cabinet’s presidential emergency powers. The political
cynicism and moral bankruptcy that existed at the upper echelons of the
DNVP party leadership had left Evangelical Christians, claimed the CSVD,
with no alternative but to seek a new political home in the Christian-Social

73
See the two circulars from Hermes, president of the Association of German Peasant
Unions, 21 and 29 July, 1930, in Landesarchiv Nordrhein Westfalen Münster, Archiv des
Landschaftsverbandes Westfalen Lippe (Bestand C113), Bestand B: Restakten der Ver
einigung der deutschen Bauernvereine, 103.
74
Hiltmann to Fehr, 24 July 1930, BHStA Munich, Abt. V, NL Fehr, 30. See also Hillebrand,
“Vom alten zum neuen Reichstag,” Die grüne Zukunft. Zeitschrift für deutsche Bauern
politik 3, nos. 7 8 (July Aug. 1930): 81 86.
75
In this respect, see Hülser, “Die derzeitige Lage des Volksdienstes. Interne Betrachtung
für die Reichsleitung,” 1 July 1930, BA Berlin, NL Mumm, 333/121 28, as well as Mumm
to Hül the leaders of the CSVD ser, 5 July 1930, ibid., 121/19 21. See also Simpfendörfer
to party supporters, 19 July 1930, HStA Stuttgart, NL Simpfendörfer. 374.
76
Hülser, “Umgruppierungen,” Christlicher Volksdienst, 9 Aug. 1930, no. 32.
   , –

People’s Service.77 At the same time, the CSVD dissociated itself as unequivo-
cally as possible from efforts at liberal or bourgeois concentration into an anti-
Marxist front as well as from special-interest parties like the Business Party
and CNBLP. All of this, the CSVD charged in a campaign leaflet from the pen
of Paul Bausch, was but another manifestation of the increasingly pervasive
role that material rather than spiritual values had come to play at all levels of
German public life.78 And this, Bausch continued, only underscored the need
for a Christian renewal of German political life and for a reaffirmation of
Evangelical Christian values as the key to Germany’s redemption from the
morass into which it had descended.79
The success with which the CNBLP and CSVD were able to mobilize the
agrarian and Evangelical sectors of the DNVP’s national electorate signifi-
cantly narrowed the field in which the People’s Conservatives could operate.
Relations between the KVP, CSVD, and CNBLP had been on a positive footing
before the campaign and displayed little of the bitterness that generally
characterized relations between the different parties on the German Right.80
But as it became increasingly clear by late July 1930 that the KVP’s hopes of
reuniting all of those who had broken away from the DNVP into a new
conservative party would go unfulfilled, the party became more and more
dependent upon Habermann and the German National Union of Commercial
Employees for financial and organizational support.81 The alliance between
the KVP and DHV, however, was problematic in two critical respects. In the
first place, the DHV was a white-collar union established on the principle of
bipartisan neutrality with respect to the individual political parties, a principle
that it had taken special pains to reaffirm at its most recent national congress
in Cologne on 27–28 June 1930.82 Second, the prominent role the DHV had
played in the founding of the KVP was seen as a blemish, or Schönheitsfehler,
in the eyes of more traditional conservatives like Westarp who were offended
by the new party’s ambivalence on the issue of monarchism.83 Many

77
CSVD, “Der Christlich soziale Volksdienst und die Hugenberg Partei,” n.d. [Aug. Sept.
1930], HStA Stuttgart, NL Simpfendörfer. 374.
78
CSVD, “Die Neugliederung der politischen Fronten in Deutschland,” n.d. [Aug. Sept.
1930], ibid.
79
CSVD, “Was will der Christlich soziale Volksdienst?,” n.d. [Aug. Sept. 1930], ibid.
80
For example, see Lambach to Hülser, Hartwig, Mumm, and seven other CSVD leaders,
17 June 1930, BA Berlin, NL Mumm, 333/89.
81
Westarp to Wallraf, 28 July 1930, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, VN 5. See also Albert Krebs,
“Max Habermann. Eine biographische Studie,” FGZ Hamburg, 49.
82
“22. Verbandstag des Deutschnationalen Handlungsgehilfen Verbandes am 27. Juni
1930 in Köln,” BA Koblenz, NL Lambach, 12, also in Deutsche Handels Wacht 37,
no. 13 (15 July 1930): 251 52.
83
Westarp to Oldenburg Janaschau, 26 July 1930, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, II/46. See also
Alvensleben to Schleicher, 25 July 1930, BA MA Freiburg, NL Schleicher, 76/20 23.
    

prominent Catholic conservatives, including the long-time chairman of the

DNVP’s Reich Catholic Committee Baron Engelbert von Landsberg-Velen
and the Würzburg historian Max Buchner who had left the DNVP during
the most recent secession, also found it difficult to embrace the new party
because of its unclear position on the question of monarchism.84 Treviranus
tried to clarify the KVP’s stand on monarchism with an article in the Berliner
Börsen-Courier in which he argued not only that monarchism was an import-
ant, if not indispensable, component of German conservatism but also that a
conservative reconstruction of the German state entailed much more than the
restoration of the monarchy.85 Statements like this did little to assuage the
concerns of German monarchists and only complicated the KVP’s efforts to
enlist the support from the ranks of the monarchist movement.86
Its various shortcomings notwithstanding, the Conservative People’s Party
still received massive support from German industry and banking in the
campaign for the 1930 Reichstag elections. As Eduard Hamm, a former
Democrat who served as executive secretary of the German Chamber of
Industry and Commerce, wrote to Reusch on 28 July 1930, the KVP appeared
to be a party in which his organization’s views on economic policy would find
“a not unfriendly reception.”87 Ruhr heavy industry, the Curatorium for the
Reconstruction of German Economic Life, and the Berlin banks would funnel
substantial sums into the KVP’s campaign coffers over the course of the next
month and a half in an attempt to provide the conservative moderates who
had been driven from the DNVP with a new and reliable political base from
which they could continue their work on behalf of the Brüning cabinet. The
bulk of these funds ran through Reichert, a former member of the DNVP
Reichstag delegation who had served as a liaison between the party and the

84
For Landsberg’s resignation, see his letter to Hugenberg, 25 July 1930, VWA Münster, NL
Landsberg, II. See also Bucher to Hilpert, 7 Aug. 1930, BA Koblenz, NL Buchner, 13. For
indications of Catholic conservative ambivalence toward the KVP, see Landsberg to
Westarp, 10 and 15 Aug. 1930, NL Westarp, Gärtringen, VN 10, as well as the corres
pondence between Landsberg and Buchner, 22 27 Aug. 1930, BA Koblenz, NL Buchner,
66. On Buchner, see Jens Flemming, “‘Vollprozentige Katholiken und Deutsche’: Max
Bucher, die Gelben Hefte und der Rechtskatholizismus zwischen Demokratie und Dikta
tur,” in Le milieu intellectuel catholique en Allemagne, sa presse et ses réseaux
(1871 1963)/Das katholische Intellektuellen Milieu in Deutschland, seine Presse und seine
Netzwerke (1871 1963), ed. Michael Grunewald and Uwe Puschner (Bern, 2006), 363 94,
here 382 87.
85
Treviranus, “Konservative Volkspartei und Monarchismus,” Berliner Börsen Courier, 12
Aug. 1930, no. 372. See also the statement on monarchism in Konservative Stichworte, ed.
Konservative Volkspartei (Berlin, n.d. [1930]), BA Koblenz, ZSg 1 275/1 (3a).
86
For example, see Buchner to Guttenberg, 22 Aug. 1930, BA Koblenz, NL Buchner, 51.
87
Hamm to Reusch, 28 July 1930, RWWA Cologne, Abt. 130, NL Reusch, 40010123/25b.
See also Wolfgang Hardtwig, Freiheitliches Bürgertum in Deutschland. Der Weimarer
Demokrat Eduard Hamm zwischen Kaiserreich und Widerstand (Stuttgart, 2018), 322 33.
   , –

Ruhr industrial establishment before leaving it in the summer of 1930.88 As

executive secretary of the Association of German Iron and Steel Industrialists
with close ties to Reusch and the Ruhr industrial elite, Reichert joined the
KVP, where he campaigned for a Reichstag seat in the district of Magdeburg-
Anhalt and served as party treasurer to play an instrumental role in funneling
funds to the KVP from his associates in the German business community.89
Ties between the KVP and the Ruhr industrial establishment were further
cemented by the candidacy of Ludwig Grauert, executive secretary of the
Employers Association for the Northwestern Branch of German Iron and
Steel Industrialists (Arbeitgeberverband für den Bezirk der nordwestlichen
Gruppe des Vereins Deutscher Eisen- und Stahlindustrieller or VDESI), in
Cologne-Aachen and Koblenz-Trier.90
In the meantime, the DNVP was experiencing financial difficulties of its
own as funding from erstwhile supporters in Ruhr heavy industry and other
sectors of the German industrial establishment began to dry up.91 Not even the
Blohm und Voß Ship Building Firm in Hamburg, a long-time source of
funding for Hugenberg and his Pan-German allies, was able to keep up its
contributions to the campaign chest of the DNVP’s national headquarters in
Berlin.92 By no means, however, were the financial difficulties the DNVP
experienced in the 1930 election campaign a unique or isolated incident. All
of Germany’s non-socialist parties were severely affected by the fact that their
former backers in industry, commerce, and finance were reluctant to see their
increasingly precious resources squandered in fruitless polemics among the
parties they supported. What the German business community expected more
than anything else from the parties it supported was an end to their fratricidal
polemics and greater solidarity in support of a sweeping reform of Germany’s
financial and economic policy.93 From the outset, the “Ruhrlade” had made its
support contingent upon a positive commitment to the principle of bourgeois
concentration and was willing to support only those parties that demonstrated
both in word and deed their willingness to cooperate with each other in

88
For Reichert’s reasons, see “Warum fort von Hugenberg? Die Gründe für die Spaltung
der Deutschnationalen,” n.d., appended to Reichert to Krupp, 8 Sept. 1930, HA Krupp
Essen, FAH IV E 962, also in SHI Berlin, NL Siemens, 4 Lf/670.
89
Reichert to Witzleben, 19 Aug. 1930, SHI Berlin, NL Siemens, 4 Lf/646.
90
See Ludwig Grauert, Worum geht es am 14. September? (N.p., n.d. [1930]).
91
See Scheibe to Blohm, 14 Aug. 1930, StA Hamburg, Blohm und Voß GmbH, 1223, and
Scheibe to Gok, 26 Aug. and 4 Sept. 1930, ibid., 1219.
92
Blohm to Scheibe, 16 Aug. 1930, StA Hamburg, Blohm und Voß GmbH, 1223. See also
Gok to Scheibe, 5 Sept. 1930, ibid., 1219.
93
See the appeal issued by the RDI presidium, 16 Aug. 1930, BA Koblenz, NL Silverberg,
268/208, as well as the circular from the Bavarian Industrialists’ Federation (Bayerischer
Industriellen Verband) to its members, 19 Aug. 1930, RWWA Cologne, Abt. 130, NL
Reusch, 400106/104. See also Neebe, Silverberg, 67 76.
    

support of Brüning’s reform program.94 But by the end of August Carl

Friedrich von Siemens and his associates in the Curatorium for the Recon-
struction of German Economic Life had become so frustrated with the lack of
movement toward the goal of bourgeois consolidation that they decided not to
collect any new funds and to cease operations after distributing the monies on
hand. According to the formula it used for allocating the funds at its disposal,
the Curatorium allotted 24,000 marks each to the DNVP, KVP, DVP, and
DDP/DStP and 6,000 marks to the Business Party.95 The Center, which had
been overlooked in the original dispersal of funds, subsequently received two
donations totaling 25,000 marks.96 But for the Borsig Locomotive Works, a
long-time member of the Curatorium, the situation in which the machine
construction industry found itself was so desperate that it suspended contri-
butions to individual political parties for the duration of the campaign.97
All told, the amount of money the Curatorium for the Reconstruction of
German Economic Life allocated in the 1930 campaign was less than half of
what it had given in 1928, and in September 1930 it formally dissolved itself
and suspended solicitations for financial support.98 The demise of the Cur-
atorium and the general decline in the level of industrial support for the parties
of the middle and moderate Right in the campaign for the 1930 elections were
symptomatic of a more fundamental breakdown in the relationship between
economic interest organizations and the political parties that had traditionally
served as vehicles for the representation of their social and economic interests.
The same was true of the National Rural League and the German National
Union of Commercial Employees, both of which found it increasingly difficult
to work through the existing political parties and now sought a more effective
representation of their vital interests in new political parties like the CNBLP
and KVP respectively. The consequences of this were two-fold. Not only did it
obviously undermine the electoral effectiveness of the large, sociologically
diverse people’s parties like the DNVP and DVP, but it left the interest
organizations themselves susceptible to penetration and subversion by the
most radical of the parties on the German Right, the NSDAP.

94
Blank to Reusch, 28 July 1930, RWWA Cologne, Abt. 130, NL Reusch, 4001012024/7. See
also Brandi to Schifferer, 9 Aug. 1930, Landesarchiv Schleswig Holstein, Schleswig,
Nachlass Anton Schifferer, 27g.
95
Memorandum on the meeting of the executive committee of the Curatorium for the
Reconstruction of German Economic Life, 28 Aug. 1930, SHI Berlin, NL Siemens, 4/Lf
646. See also Witzleben to Borsig, 1 Sept. 1930, LA Berlin, Zentralverwaltung Borsig
GmbH, 5/24 25.
96
Correspondence between Siemens and the Center Party’s Rudolf ten Hompel, 8 18
Sept. 1930, SHI Berlin, NL Siemens, 4/Lf 670.
97
Heinrich to Bennigsen, 28 Aug. 1930, LA Berlin, Zentralverwaltung Borsig GmbH, 8/183.
98
Memorandum by Witzleben, 10 Oct. 1930, SHI Berlin, NL Siemens, 4 Lf/670.
   , –

Misreading the Nazi Threat

As the parties of the middle and moderate Right jostled for position in the
lead-up to the September 1930 Reichstag elections, those on the radical Right
prepared their assault against the Marxist citadel that had been erected on
the foundation of Weimar parliamentarism. For the DNVP, the immediate
objective of the campaign was to break the political power of the Center in
the Reich and Prussia without which the Marxist domination of German
political life would not have been possible. As Hugenberg wrote to fellow
Pan-German and Essen lord major Theodor Reismann-Grone four days
before the election, “For me the reason behind the dissolution of the Reich-
stag and the election campaign is to crush the insidious policy of the Center
[dem Zentrum seine hinterlistige Politik zu erschlagen] and to make certain
that we no longer continue to fool around in the old ways [in dem bisherigen
Trane weiter dahin dusseln].”99 To accomplish this, however, it was first
necessary to pulverize the various splinter parties in the middle and moderate
Right upon which the influence of the Center ultimately depended. Speaking
in the Berlin Sports Palace on 14 August, Hugenberg intoned what was to
become the dominant motif of his party’s campaign for the September
elections when he declared anti-Marxism as the ideological axis around
which the German bourgeoisie should unite in its crusade to rescue Germany
from collapse. Dismissing those who had turned their backs on the DNVP as
“marionettes of the Center,” Hugenberg held the Center and its habit of
alternating coalitions first with the Left and then with the Right responsible
for the Marxist hold on German political life. By implication, it was only
through the ruthless destruction of the smaller parties to the left of the
DNVP that the Center’s political leverage could be broken. Calling for the
consolidation of the German bourgeoisie into “an anti-Marxist freedom
front” under strong and resolute leadership, Hugenberg invoked the maxim
of the famed military strategist Count Alfred von Schlieffen: “Make my right
wing strong!”100
In its efforts to polarize the German party system into two mutually
antagonistic camps, one Marxist and the other nationalist, the DNVP

99
Hugenberg to Reismann Grone, 10 Sept. 1930, Stadtarchiv Essen, Nachlass Theodor
Reismann Grone, 12.
100
“Was will die Deutschnationale Volkspartei? Die Rede Dr. Hugenbergs im Berliner
Sportpalast am 14. August 1930,” StA Hamburg, Blohm und Voß GmbH, 1221, also
in Unsere Partei 8, no. 16 (15 Aug. 1930): 197 201. In a similar vein, see Hilpert,
“Klarheit und Entschlossenheit,” n.d. [Aug. Sept. 1930], BHStA Munich, Abt. V, Flug
blätter Sammlung, 60/1930. For further evidence of DNVP hostility toward the Center,
see Reinhard G. Quaatz, Die politische Entwicklung der letzten Jahre. Rede auf der
Schulungstagung am 7. August 1930 in Berlin, Deutschnationale Flugschrift, no. 346
(Berlin, n.d. [1930]).
    

targeted the various parties that stood between the DNVP and Social Dem-
ocracy for annihilation. The DNVP was especially dismissive in its treatment
of the Conservative People’s Party, which, with support from the arch-
reactionary Central Association of German Conservatives, it attacked as a
mockery of the true and tried principles of German conservatism that had
laid a false claim to the word “conservative” in a ploy to deceive the German
electorate.101 The DNVP employed a more subtle approach in its propaganda
against the Christian-National Peasant and Farmers’ Party. Not only did the
Nationalists claim credit for the enactment of Brüning’s farm program, but
they insisted that the effectiveness of the government’s farm program had
been undercut by the chancellor’s refusal to break with the Social Demo-
crats.102 In supporting the Brüning cabinet, therefore, the CNBLP was only
perpetuating the stranglehold the Marxist Left held over the conduct of
national policy. It was not until those who had left the DNVP had returned
to the fold, argued Hugenberg and his associates, that it would be possible to
break this stranglehold and provide the German farmer the help he so
desperately needed.103 But Hugenberg and the DNVP reserved their
strongest venom for the Christian-Social People’s Service. Not only did the
DNVP take issue with the CSVD’s claim that it was not a political but a
religious movement, but it directly challenged the theological assumptions
about the state and political authority that lay at the heart of the CSVD’s
Christian Weltanschauung. In particular, the DNVP disputed the emphasis
the Christian-Socials placed upon the Christian’s responsibility to act
according to the dictates of conscience in all matters political as an affront
to the majesty of God as the source of all political authority.104 On a more
mundane level, the DNVP contested the CSVD’s depiction of Hugenberg and
his associates as plutocrats whose easy access to money had corrupted the
moral fiber of German political life and accused the CSVD not only of
fostering a fratricidal war among Evangelical Christians but also of compli-
city in implementing the tax policies of the Brüning cabinet. Its protestations

101
“Wer ist konservativ?,” n.d. [Aug. 1930], Flugblatt no. 558, reprinted in Unsere Partei 5,
Wahlkampf Sondernummer 2 (6 Aug. 1930): 184. See also Richthofen Mertschütz,
“Die Konservativen und die neue ‘Konservative Volkspartei’,” ibid., 5, Wahlkampf
Sondernummer 3 (22 Aug. 1930): 220 21.
102
“Das Kabinett Brüning und die deutsche Bauernnot,” n.d. [Aug. 1930], Flugblatt no. 545,
NL Hiller, Gärtringen.
103
Landvolkpartei, Deutschnationales Rüstzeug, no. 25 (Berlin, 1930), esp. 8 9. See also
Hilpert, “Macht den rechten Flügel stark! Ein Appell an das Landvolk,” n.d. [Aug. Sept.
1930], BHStA Munich, Abt. V, Flugblätter Sammlung, 60/1930.
104
Die religiösen Grundanschauungen des Christlich Sozialen Volksdienstes. Herrschaft
Gottes oder Herrschaft des “Christlichen Gewissens”?, ed. Vorstand des Evangelischen
Reichsausschusses der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei (Berlin, n.d. [1930]).
   , –

to the contrary, the CSVD was a political party no different from all the
others that dotted Germany’s political landscape.105
For all of the fury the DNVP directed against the parties of the middle and
moderate Right, Hugenberg and his associates took relatively little notice of its
erstwhile ally and incipient rival, the National Socialist German Workers’
Party. Of all the pamphlets, leaflets, and handbills the DNVP’s national party
headquarters in Berlin circulated during the campaign, only one dealt directly
with the NSDAP.106 What this suggests is that Hugenberg and the DNVP
party leadership still viewed the NSDAP as a prospective ally in the struggle
against Weimar democracy and wished to avoid a further strain in their party’s
relationship with the NSDAP despite their growing distrust of Nazi motives
and tactics.107 The NSDAP, on the other hand, had shown much less restraint
in its polemics against the DNVP ever since Hitler had resigned from the
National Committee for the German Referendum in early April 1930.108 In the
campaign guidelines the Reich Propaganda Leadership (Reichspropagandalei-
tung or RPL) of the NSDAP issued to the party’s district and local organiza-
tions on 23 July, it conceded that, of the four groups that had formerly made
up the DNVP, the one around Hugenberg was by far the most reliable in the
struggle against Weimar parliamentarism and the legacy of Versailles. At the
same time, however, RPL guidelines drew attention to the thoroughly reac-
tionary and capitalistic character of Hugenberg’s rump party and dismissed it
as a force with no future in the revolutionary transformation of the German
state for which the National Socialists were striving. Although the guidelines
discouraged personal attacks against Hugenberg and his entourage, it stressed
that ideological differences between the NSDAP and the Hugenberg faction
should be highlighted as much as possible. The other three factions that had
emerged from the ruins of the DNVP were anathema to the aspirations of the
Nazi movement and should receive no mercy in the NSDAP’s assault upon the
remnants of the hated Weimar system.109

105
For example, see Agnes Riesner (WBP), “Deutschnationale und Christlicher Volks
dienst,” n.d. [Sept. 1930], and Johanna Beringer (DNVP Stuttgart), “Offener Brief an
Herrn Rechnungsrat Bausch, Korntal,” n.d. [Sept. 1930], HStA Stuttgart, NL
Simpfendörfer. 374.
106
For an overview of DNVP’s campaign literature in the 1930 elections, see Unsere Partei
8, Wahlkampf Sondernummer 3 (22 Aug. 1930): 231 32, and 8, no. 17 (1 Sept. 1930):
248. For the lone exception, see Wir und die Nationalsozialisten, Vortragsentwurf, no. 14
(Berlin, n.d. [1930]), BA Koblenz, ZSg 1 44/18 (8).
107
For example, see Hugenberg to Hitler, 4 and 11 Apr. 1930, BA Koblenz, NL Schmidt
Hannover, 30.
108
Hitler, “Prinzip und Taktik. Zur Krise der Deutschnationalen Volkspartei,” Völkischer
Beobachter, 9 Apr. 1930, no. 83.
109
Reichspropagandaleiter, Ausserordentliches Rundschreiben der Reichspropagandalei
tung zur Vorbereitung des Wahlkampfes zur Reichstagswahl am 14. Sept. 1930, 23 July
1930, BA Koblenz, Nachlass Julius Streicher, 24. See also Goebbels, “Das patriotische
    

The lack of attention the DNVP devoted to the NSDAP was a strategic
oversight of enormous proportions. Among other things, the DNVP seemed
oblivious to the fact that following its dismal showing in the 1928 Reichstag
elections the NSDAP had developed the most elaborate and sophisticated
party organization in all of Germany.110 The architect of the Nazi party
organization was Gregor Strasser, who in 1928 had been appointed Reich
Organization Leader (Reichsorganisationsleiter) of the NSDAP to develop a
comprehensive and effective party organization that would make it possible
for Goebbels and his co-workers to carry their propaganda message to all
corners of the Reich. Strasser’s organizational reforms were in place well
before the onset of the Great Depression and left the NSDAP well positioned
to exploit the distress the deepening economic crisis had produced within
Germany’s urban and rural middle classes.111 The result of all this was a
dramatic breakthrough into the ranks of the German middle classes and a
string of victories at the state and local level beginning with the Saxon Landtag
elections in May 1929, when the NSDAP polled 4.9 percent of the popular vote
and elected five deputies to the new state parliament. This scenario would
repeat itself in Baden five months later when the NSDAP, possibly benefiting
from its alliance with the DNVP and other right-wing organizations in the
campaign against the Young Plan, received 7.0 percent of the popular vote and
elected six deputies to the Baden state parliament. Then, in the Thuringian
state elections of December 1929 the NSDAP increased its share of the popular
vote to 11.3 percent and sent six deputies to the state parliament. The
NSDAP’s greatest success would come in Saxony, where new state elections
in June 1930 provided Hitler and his followers with 14.4 percent of the popular
vote and fourteen deputies in the Saxon Landtag. There can be little doubt that
the NSDAP was well on its way to achieving a full-scale breakthrough into the
ranks of Germany’s middle-class electorate before the full effect of the Great
Depression would make itself felt.112 All of this underscored the DNVP’s folly
in not taking the challenge of Nazism and the danger that the NSDAP posed to
its own electoral base more seriously than it did.

Bürgertum,” Nationalsozialistische Monatshefte 1, no. 5 (Aug. 1930): 221 29. For further
details, see David A. Hackett, “The Nazi Party in the Reichstag Election of 1930” (Ph.D.
diss., University of Wisconsin, 1971), 195 331, and Childers, Nazi Voter, 137 42.
110
For an overview of the Nazi party organization, see “Die Organisation der N.S.D.A.P.,”
Nationalsozialistische Monatshefte 1, no. 1 (Apr. 1930): 35 46.
111
For further details, see Udo Kissenkoetter, Gregor Straßer und die NSDAP (Stuttgart,
1978), 48 54, and Peter Stachura, Gregor Strasser and the Rise of Nazism (London,
1983), 67 73, as well Dietrich J. Orlow, The History of the Nazi Party, 1919 1933
(Pittsburgh, PA, n.d. [1969]), 128 84, and Wolfgang Horn, Führerideologie und Par
teiorganisation in der NSDAP (1919 1933) (Düsseldorf, 1972), 278 327.
112
Childers, Nazi Voter, 119 91.
   , –

Figure 16. NSDAP campaign placard designed by an unidentified graphic artist for
the September 1930 Reichstag elections. Reproduced with permission from the
Bundesarchiv Berlin, Plakat 002 039 025
    

The Nazi success in the various state and local elections in late 1929 and
early 1930 stemmed in no small measure from its ability to penetrate and
mobilize important sectors of Germany’s conservative Protestant milieu.113
The key to this success lay in the NSDAP’s ability to co-opt the support of four
key groups that played a critical role in influencing the voting patterns of
Germany’s rural population: the large peasant or Großbauer, the manor lord
or Gutsherr, the country parson, and the village school teacher. Not only did
the support the NSDAP received from these groups help validate it as a
legitimate claimant to the political loyalties of Germany’s rural voters, but it
afforded the Nazis easy access to the influence that rural elites traditionally
exercised over the political and electoral behavior of Germany’s conservative
milieu.114 Whereas the DNVP was slow to recognize the threat that this posed
to its standing in the German countryside and responded with a defense of its
position that was lukewarm at best, the various parties that had drifted away
from the DNVP during the second half of the 1920s took the threat of Nazi
radicalism far more seriously and mounted fierce counterattacks of their own.
This was particularly true in the case of the Christian-Social People’s Service,
which took direct aim at the enthusiasm with which increasingly large sectors
of Germany’s Protestant population had embraced National Socialism by
challenging the NSDAP’s Christian credentials in a widely circulated handbill
entitled “Hakenkreuz oder Christenkreuz?” Specifically, the CSVD denounced
the NSDAP for its “anti-Christian glorification and absolutization [Verabso-
lutierung] of race,” for equating the love of God with the love of nation, for
propagating “an excessive, un-Christian hatred of Jews,” and for presenting
National Socialism as a surrogate religion divorced from the moral content of
the Christian faith. For the leaders of the CSVD, any compromise between
Christianity and National Socialism, between Cross and Swastika, was
inconceivable.115
Few of Germany’s non-socialist parties, particularly as early as 1930, were as
outspoken in their rejection of Nazism as the Christian-Social People’s Service.
Only the Center, which like the CSVD defined itself as a Christian party, took
the challenge of Nazism as seriously. For Kaas and Brüning, the real challenge
facing the Center was not just to position itself as well as possible for the
upcoming election, but to lay the foundation for the consolidation, or

113
Wolfram Pyta, “Politische Kultur und Wahlen in der Weimarer Republik,” in Wahlen
und Wahlkämpfe in Deutschland. Von den Anfängen im 19. Jahrhundert bis zur Bun
desrepublic, ed. Gerhard A. Ritter (Düsseldorf, 1997), 197 239, esp. 229 39.
114
For further details, see Pyta, Dorfgemeinschaft und Parteipolitik, 324 471.
115
Christlicher Volksdienst Korntal, “Hakenkreuz oder Christenkreuz? Eine ernste Frage
an die evangelische Christenheit,” [Aug. Sept. 1930], HStA Stuttgart, NL Simpfendörfer,
374. See also Paul Bausch, Lebenserinnerungen und Erkenntnisse eines schwäbischen
Abgeordneten (Korntal, n.d. [1969]), 313 14.
   , –

Sammlung, of all those elements that were prepared to cooperate with each
other in support of Brüning’s program for Germany’s fiscal and economic
recovery.116 In its campaign propaganda, the Center portrayed Brüning in
almost heroic terms as the last line of defense against radicalism and party
dictatorship.117 At the same time, the Center denounced the NSDAP as a
revolutionary party whose commitment to the violent overthrow of the
existing social, economic, and political order would only lead Germany deeper
and deeper into chaos.118 Special-interest parties like the CNBLP and WP, on
the other hand, articulated their attacks against the NSDAP in the language of
economic self-interest. For the CNBLP it was a question of whether the
interests of the German farmer could be best served by a party that preached
the gospel of social revolution and threatened to plunge all of Germany into
political and economic chaos or by a party that had placed itself uncondition-
ally behind the reform program of the Brüning-Schiele cabinet.119 For the
Business Party, it was a question of whether the NSDAP as party that relied
more on demagogy than reason was genuinely committed to the welfare of
Germany’s middle-class electorate.120 In both parties, however, the confron-
tation with National Socialism took second place to the struggle against
Marxism, which from the perspective of all parties to the right of the Center
represented the most palpable threat to Germany’s propertied classes.121 The
preoccupation with the threat that Marxism presumably posed to the

116
Speech by Kaas at the information conference of the executive committee of the German
Center Party, 27 July 1930, ACDP Sankt Augustin, VI 051, 280/1 3.
117
Mit Brüning gegen Radikalismus und Parteiherrschaft für Wahrheit und Verantwortung
(Cologne, n.d. [1930]).
118
For example, see Die NSDAP als Umsturzpartei (Berlin, n.d. [1930]), 14 24, and Der
Nationalsozialismus. Der Weg ins Chaos, ed. Reichsgeneralsekretariat der Deutschen
Zentrumspartei (Berlin, n.d. [1930]), esp. 6 7, as well as “Der Nationalsozialismus.
Entwicklung, Grundlagen, Organisation und Arbeitsmethoden der N.S.D.A.P.,” Das
Zentrum 1, nos. 7 8 (July Aug. 1930): 219 38.
119
Die Sendung des Landvolkes (Berlin, n.d. [1930]), 12 18. In a similar vein, see Theodor
Körner Herrenburg, “Bauernbund und Nationalsozialisten,” ed. Württembergischer
Bauern und Weingärtnerbund, Flugblatt no. 16, NL Hiller, Gärtringen, and “Warum
Nationalsozialist?,” Thüringer Landbund 11, no. 70 (30 Aug. 1930): 1, as well as Hepp’s
remarks in a debate with the NSDAP’s Willy Seipel in Aumenau, 5 Sept. 1930, in
Nassauische Bauern Zeitung, 7 Sept. 1930, no. 207.
120
H. A. Hömberg, Hitlerpartei oder Wirtschaftspartei Phrase oder Vernunft? (Reckling
hausen, n.d. [1930]). See also Unsere Arbeit und unsere Gegner. 1930 Wahlhandbuch der
Reichspartei des deutschen Mittelstandes (Wirtschaftspartei) (Berlin, n.d. 1930), 123 29.
121
For example, see Willy Ohm, Der Schicksalsruf: Bauern, an die Front! (Berlin, n.d.
[1930]), 4 7. In this same context, see Theodor Körner alt, “Der ‘Marxismus’ und der
‘Christliche Volksdienst.’ Eine Entgegnung auf die Landtagsrede des Abgeordneten
Bausch,” ed. Württembergischer Bauern und Weingärtnerbund, Flugblatt no. 15, NL
Hiller, Gärtringen.
    

bourgeois social and political order only obscured the real danger of National
Socialism and left the parties between the Center and NSDAP more vulnerable
to Nazi penetration than might otherwise have been the case.

The Nazi Breakthrough

While Germany’s non-socialist parties generally tended to minimize the threat
that Nazism posed to their prospects in the 1930 Reichstag elections, the Nazi
campaign was reaching a crescendo of its own. Between 18 August and
14 September the NSDAP held more than 30,000 separate demonstrations
in every corner of the Reich.122 In the last ten days before the elections Hitler
addressed large and enthusiastic crowds in Königsberg, Hamburg, Nurem-
burg, Augsburg, Berlin, Breslau, and finally in Munich on the last day of the
campaign.123 A recurrent motif in all of Hitler’s speeches from the last week of
the campaign was the political fragmentation of the German electorate and the
failure of the existing political parties to forge the unity that a badly divided
German nation needed to survive the increasingly desperate situation in which
it found itself. Speaking on 6 September before an estimated 10,000 supporters
in Hamburg, Hitler deplored the deep cleavage that had developed within the
German people between “bourgeois nationalism” and “Marxist socialism.”
Neither the nationalist nor the socialist camp, Hitler continued, had succeeded
in forging the unity Germany so desperately needed. It was only by healing the
cleavage between nationalism and socialism in the spirit of the two million
German soldiers who had fallen in the battlefields of the Great War could the
fragmentation of the German nation be ended and the unity of the German
nation at long last restored.124 Hitler returned to this theme on the following
day in a speech before 15,000 followers in Nuremburg: “Nationalism and
socialism must become one [zu einer Einheit werden]!”125 This was invariably
combined with a stinging indictment of the existing political parties for having
placed their own salvation before that of the nation. Dismissing the old
parliamentary parties as “rotten and fragile [morsch und faul],” Hitler
demanded their elimination as an essential prerequisite for the rebirth of the
German nation.126 This was something that neither the Marxist Left nor the
bourgeois Right could accomplish. Both, Hitler claimed before an enthusiastic
crowd of 16,000 in the Berlin Sports Palace on 10 September, had become
hostage to the rhetoric of economic self-interest and were incapable of

122
Hackett, “Nazi Party in the Election of 1930,” 224.
123
For the content of these speeches, see Hitler, Reden, Schriften, Anordnungen, vol. 3, part
3, 382 83, 384 94, 408 18.
124
Hitler, speech in Hamburg, 6 Sept. 1930, ibid., 384 86.
125
Hitler, speech in Nuremburg, 7 Sept. 1930, ibid., 387 90, here 388.
126
Hitler, speech in Augsburg, 8 Sept. 1930, ibid., 390 94, here 393.
   , –

articulating a sense of national unity that transcended the cleavages of class,

confession, and region.127 It was precisely therein, Hitler reiterated in one
speech after another, that the historic mission of the NSDAP lay.
What Hitler and the leaders of the NSDAP articulated was a sense of
national unity so powerful in terms of its emotional appeal that it overrode
more traditional patterns of voting behavior based upon the pursuit of eco-
nomic self-interest. The appeal of National Socialism lay not merely in the fact
that it had identified itself with the material welfare of the German middle
classes but, more importantly, that it had done this not as an interest party but
as a Sammelpartei dedicated to the welfare of the German nation as a whole.
All of this was reinforced by the personal charisma that Hitler had nurtured
ever since his start in politics in the immediate postwar period. The effect of
Hitler’s charisma was to disrupt and eventually override patterns of behavior
based on tradition or the rational subordination of means to ends. The force of
Hitler’s charisma was only enhanced by the confluence of economic crisis and
political paralysis as his party mobilized the support of those who had
abandoned hope in the existing political system with promises of salvation
through the agency of a great leader who stood above all of the conflicts real or
imagined that were ripping apart the fabric of the German nation.128
The net effect of this was a dramatic breakthrough into the ranks of the
German middle classes and a victory of unexpected proportions. When the
votes were finally tallied, the NSDAP had polled approximately 6.4 million
votes – or 18.3 percent of the total popular vote – and elected 107 deputies to
the Reichstag. Suddenly a party that had received scarcely 2 percent of the
popular vote in 1928 and held no more than mere twelve seats in the national
parliament had catapulted itself to the center of the political stage as the
second largest party in the Reichstag. Of the more established non-socialist
parties, only the Center and Bavarian People’s Party managed to hold their
own in the face of the Nazi onslaught. The two liberal parties, by comparison,
saw their share of the national vote plummet from 13.5 percent in May 1928 to
8.4 percent in 1930. Not even the DDP’s alliance with the Young German
Order and its rebaptism as the German State Party could shield it from losses

127
Hitler, speech in Berlin, 10 Sept. 1930, ibid., 408 12.
128
On Hitler’s charisma and the creation of the Hitler myth, see M. Rainer Lepsius, “The
Model of Charismatic Leadership and Its Applicability to the Rise of Adolf Hitler,”
Totalitarian Movements and Politics Religions 7 (2006): 175 90, and Ludolf Herbst,
Hitlers Charisma und die Erfindung eines deutschen Messias (Frankfurt a.m. Main,
2010). On the messianic impulse in the late Weimar Republic, see Klaus Schreiner,
“‘Wann kommt der Retter Deutschlands?’ Formen und Funtionen von politischem
Messianismus in der Weimarer Republik,” Saeculum 49 (1998): 107 60, and Thomas
Mergel, “Volksgemeinschaft und Maschine. Politische Erwartungsstrukturen in der Wei
marer Republik und der Nationalsozialismus 1918 1936,” in Politische Kulturgeschichte
der Zwischenkriegszeiten 1928 1939, ed. Wolfgang Hardtwig (Göttingen, 2005), 91 127.
    

that amounted to approximately a fifth of the votes the DDP had received in
1928. But the heaviest losses of all were sustained by the DNVP, which lost
nearly two million of the 4.4 million votes it had received in 1928 and saw its
share of the popular vote plunge from 14.2 in 1928 to 7.0 percent two years
later. Of the splinter parties that had broken away from the DNVP’s left wing,
the CNBLP improved upon its performance in the 1928 elections by over a
half million votes with 3.2 percent of the total popular vote and twenty-two
deputies in the Reichstag, whereas the CSVD received over 860,000 votes for
2.5 percent of the popular vote and elected fourteen deputies to the Reichstag
in its national electoral debut. The Conservative People’s Party, by contrast,
went down to a devastating defeat, polling slightly less than 315,000 votes and
electing only four deputies to the Reichstag.129
The NSDAP’s gains in the 1930 Reichstag elections came almost exclusively
at the expense of the DNVP and the parties of the middle and moderate Right.
The party appealed across class and vocational lines to diverse sectors of the
German electorate as what Thomas Childers has called “a catch-all party of
protest whose constituents were united by a vehement rejection of an increas-
ingly threatened present.”130 The NSDAP drew its greatest strength from the
predominantly Protestant areas in the northern and eastern parts of Germany
where it was able to capitalize upon the distress of the local peasantry and
other groups that were dependent upon the vitality of the rural economy. In
Schleswig-Holstein, where it had experienced its first successes in 1928, the
NSDAP received 27.0 percent of all votes cast, while to the east of the Elbe in
one-time DNVP strongholds such as East Prussia, Pomerania, Breslau, and
Frankfurt an der Oder the NSDAP consistently polled more than 20 percent of
all eligible votes. The party also did well in predominantly Protestant Fran-
conia and Hesse-Nassau, where it received 20.5 and 20.8 percent of the
popular vote respectively. In predominantly Catholic areas or in districts with
large working-class populations, on the other hand, the NSDAP’s performance
at the polls lagged significantly behind its national average.131 The Nazis also
benefited from the fact that voter participation in the 1930 election was

129
Alfred Milatz, “Das Ende der Parteien im Spiegel der Wahlen 1930 bis 1933,” in Das
Ende der Parteien 1933, ed. Erich Matthias and Rudolf Morsey (Düsseldorf, 1960),
743 93, here 744 58. See also Hackett, “Nazi Party in the Election of 1930,” 332 58.
130
Thomas Childers, “The Social Bases of the National Socialist Vote,” Journal of Contem
porary History 11 (1976): 17 42, here 31.
131
For a regional, confessional, and class breakdown of the Nazi vote in the 1930 elections,
see John O’Loughlin, Colin Flint, and Luc Anselin, “The Geography of the Nazi Vote:
Context, Confession, and Class in the Reichstag Election of 1930,” Annals of the
Association of American Geographers 84 (1994): 351 80. See also Jürgen W. Falter and
Reinhard Zintl, “The Economic Crisis of the 1930s and the Nazi Vote,” Journal of
Interdisciplinary History 19 (1988): 55 83. On the social and geographical composition
of the Nazi electorate, see Falter, Hitlers Wähler (Munich, 1991), 30 34, 101 25.
   , –

significantly higher than at any time since the 1919 elections to the National
Assembly. Over 4.2 million more voters went to the polls in 1930 than in
1928 as the percentage of the eligible electorate that voted increased from 74.6
to 81.4 percent between 1928 and 1930. The success with which the Nazis were
able to mobilize the support of new voters as well as that of voters who had
abstained from voting in previous national elections contributed in no small
measure to the party’s dramatic victory at the polls in the 1930 elections.132

The magnitude of the Nazi victory on 14 September 1930 sent shock waves
through the ranks of the German Right. In this respect, three factors were
particularly relevant. The first was the defeat of the DNVP, which no matter
how Hugenberg might try to sugarcoat his party’s performance at the polls
returned to the Reichstag with only forty-four of the seventy Reichstag seats it
had held in 1928. As much satisfaction as Hugenberg’s opponents might take
from his party’s setback at the polls, the fact remained that the parties on the
moderate Right had failed to establish themselves as a viable political force.
This, in turn, severely limited the political options that were available to the
Brüning cabinet. Brüning and his supporters had hoped that the parties of the
middle and moderate Right would be able to coalesce into a solid phalanx of
support that would make him less dependent upon the toleration of either the
Social Democrats or the radical Right. This was clearly not the case. All of this
left the leaders of the German Right with a situation radically different from
the one that had existed before the election. Although the collapse of
Germany’s parliamentary democracy had created unprecedented opportun-
ities for the German Right, it remained deeply divided as to how these
opportunities were to be exploited.

132
Jürgen W. Falter, “The National Socialist Mobilisation of New Voters: 1928 1933,” in
The Formation of the Nazi Constituency, 1919 1933, ed. Thomas Childers (Totowa, NJ,
1986), 202 31.
 u

Epilogue
The Price of Disunity

The 1930 Reichstag elections represented a major and ultimately irreversible

turning point in the history of the German Right. At no point in the history
of the Weimar Republic had the splintering of the German Right and its
disastrous consequences become more apparent than in the outcome of the
September 1930 elections. Neither the DNVP nor any of the splinter parties
that had emerged on the moderate Right since the middle of the 1920s had
succeeded in establishing itself as the crystallization point around which all of
those who were opposed to the Weimar state and sought to replace it with a
more authoritarian order of one sort or another could coalesce. The situation
in which the more traditional elements of the German Right found themselves
was further complicated by the unexpectedly strong performance of the
NSDAP. The NSDAP’s exact relationship to the German Right was always
ambiguous. From the perspective of many of those on the German Right, the
NSDAP did not belong to the Right as such but was a revolutionary force that
rejected the existing social and economic order in favor of socialist schemes
that were scarcely discernible from those of the Marxist Left.1 What the more
traditional elements of the German Right shared with the NSDAP was deep-
seated animosity toward the system of government that Germany had
inherited from the November Revolution and a commitment to returning
Germany to great power status by breaking the chains of Versailles in a
powerful and vigorous assertion of the rights to which Germany had been
denied by the victors of World War I. But whether or not this would be
sufficient to overcome the deep-seated apprehension that influential elements
on the German Right felt with respect to Nazi radicalism on social and
economic question was far from clear.
The magnitude of Nazi gains in the 1930 Reichstag elections sent shock
waves throughout Germany’s conservative establishment. Just how the more

1
For example, see Anton Scheibe, DNVP und NSDAP. Was uns einigt und was uns trennt,
Deutschnationale Flugschrift, no. 307 (Berlin, 1932), and Irmgard Wrede, Deutschnatio
nale und Nationalsozialisten. Die Unterschiede auf wirtschafts und sozialpolitischem
Gebiete. Vortrag, gehalten am 12. Juni 1932 auf der Tagung des Erweiterten Reichsfrauen
ausschusses (Berlin, Deutschnationale Flugschrift, no. 365 (Berlin, 1932).


   , –

traditional elements of the German dmost important single question that its
leaders would have to face. It was to this question that Westarp, the parlia-
mentary leader of the small People’s Conservative faction in the newly elected
Reichstag, turned his attention in a lead arti3cle entitled “Was nun?” for his
party’s official organ, the Volkskonservative Stimmen. Here Westarp urged
Brüning to initiate negotiations with the National Socialists in an attempt to
determine if they were prepared to abandon their obstructionist tactics and
make a positive contribution to the solution of the myriad problems that
confronted the German nation. Specifically, Westarp hoped that the National
Socialists could be persuaded to join the Center and the other parties between
the DNVP and Social Democrats in supporting Brüning’s reform program.
Not only would this provide a way out of the impasse in which Germany’s
parliamentary system found itself as a result of the most recent national
elections, but it also offered the only possibility of separating the Center from
the Social Democrats in Prussia and making possible the long-awaited realign-
ment of the Center with the forces of the German Right. More importantly, it
would determine whether Hitler and the NSDAP were indeed prepared to
accept the mantle of responsibility that their recent victory at the polls had
bestowed upon them and wrest leadership of a badly divided German Right
from Hugenberg and his minions in control of the DNVP. As Westarp himself
expressed it: “In all seriousness, it will now be incumbent upon [the National
Socialists] to show proof whether they, with their new strength so surprisingly
won at the polls, will find the will and ability to accept a responsible role in the
conduct of foreign and domestic affairs.”2
Westarp’s article contained the germ of what would come to be known as
“the taming strategy” for dealing with the challenge of National Socialism. The
essential premise of this strategy was that bringing the National Socialists into
the government would deprive them of the advantages they enjoyed as an
opposition party and force them to accept a responsible role in the solution of
the problems that faced the German nation. This, in turn, would transform the
Nazi movement with all of its energy and dynamism from a revolutionary
force that threatened the established social and economic order into a force of
stability that could be mobilized in support of a conservative agenda for the
reorganization of the German state.3 This strategy was quickly embraced by
the leaders of the German business community. While a handful of prominent
German businessmen and industrialists openly sympathized with the program
and aspirations of the Nazi movement, most were deeply suspicious of the
NSDAP’s social and economic programs and would have countenanced the

2
Westarp, “Was nun?,” Volkskonservative Stimmen, 20 Sept. 1930, no. 36. See also Westarp
to Fumetti, 20 Sept. 1930, NL Westarp, Gärtingen, II/40.
3
For further details, see Gotthard Jasper, Die gescheiterte Zähmung. Wege zur Machter
greifung Hitlers 1930 1934 (Frankfurt a.M., 1986).
  

party’s entry into the national government only if it was accompanied by

guarantees that effectively limited its potential for social and economic mis-
chief. More importantly, industry’s plans for “taming the NSDAP” always
assumed that the Nazis would not be the dominant force within the govern-
mental coalition but subject to control by their more conservative coalition
allies.4 But the strongest and most persistent advocacy of the taming strategy
came not from the ranks of Germany’s economic elites but from the German
military. Here the key figure was the Reichswehr’s enigmatic political strategist
and architect of the Brüning cabinet, Kurt von Schleicher. After the NSDAP’s
dramatic breakthrough in the 1930 Reichstag elections, Schleicher and his
associates felt that they could no longer afford to dismiss Hitler as a political
incompetent and began to formulate the general outlines of a strategy for
containing the threat that he and his movement posed. Like Westarp and
Germany’s industrial leadership, Schleicher believed not only that the radical-
ism of the Nazi movement could be mitigated by saddling it with political
responsibility but also that this would oblige Hitler and his party to moderate
the tone and intensity of their rhetoric against the government. At the same
time, bringing the Nazis into the government would provide Germany’s
conservative elites with the mantle of popular legitimacy they needed to carry
out a fundamental revision of Germany’s constitutional system, a revision that
had already begun under Hindenburg’s aegis with Brüning’s appointment as
chancellor in March 1930.5
An indispensable prerequisite for the success of the taming strategy that
Schleicher and the leaders of the German business community devised for
containing the threat of Nazism was a large, well-established conservative
party sufficiently powerful to contain the Nazi movement and subordinate it
to the agenda of Germany’s conservative elites. The fact of the matter, how-
ever, was that by the fall of 1930 no such party in Germany existed. The
chronic and unmitigated disintegration of the German National People’s Party
since 1924 had left it so weak that by 1930 it was no longer in a position to
contain the incomparably more dynamic National Socialist German Workers’
Party despite Hugenberg’s assertion that he and not Hitler was the leader of
the national movement. To be sure, there had been moments in the earlier
history of the DNVP when it appeared on the verge of developing into the
kind of party that would have been necessary to contain the NSDAP. As early

4
For example, see August Heinrichsbauer, Schwerindustrie und Politik (Essen Kettwig,
1948), 40 42. See also, Henry A. Turner, German Big Business and the Rise of Hitler
(New York and Oxford, 1985), 313 39.
5
For further details, see Larry Eugene Jones, “Taming the Nazi Beast: Kurt von Schleicher
and the End of the Weimar Republic,” in From Weimar to Hitler: Studies in the Disso
lution of the Weimar Republic and the Establishment of the Third Reich, ed. Hermann Beck
and Larry Eugene Jones (New York and Oxford, 2018), 23 51.
   , –

as the fall of 1918 there had been a concerted attempt by progressive-minded

young conservatives under the leadership of Ulrich von Hassell to fashion an
entirely new kind of conservative party that was unburdened by the follies of
the past and tailored to the exigencies of the democratic age. But this effort
encountered strong resistance from old-line conservatives like Westarp and
been effectively muted by the time the DNVP formally adopted its new party
program in April 1920. Though symbolically important, the secession of the
Free Conservatives around Siegfried von Kardorff and Johann Victor Bredt
had little impact on the DNVP’s efforts to transform itself into a sociologically
heterogeneous people’s party that reflected the social, economic, and confes-
sional diversity of the German people. Fueled by the runaway inflation of the
early 1920’s and the national uproar over the imposition of the London
Ultimatum and the transfer of large sections of Upper Silesia to Poland, this
process drew to a preliminary climax at the DNVP’s Munich party congress in
September 1921. Highlighted by the defection of the Center’s Martin Spahn in
what was a calculated effort to woo the support of right-wing Catholics
disillusioned by the Center’s embrace of the Weimar Republic, the Munich
party congress testified to just how far German conservatism had come since
the outbreak of World War I in transforming itself from an instrument of
feudal self-interest into an expression of the popular will.
The first real blip on this trajectory occurred with the racist crisis and the
subsequent secession of the leaders of the DNVP’s racist wing in the summer
and fall of 1922. But party leaders – most notably DNVP party chairman
Oskar Hergt, Karl Helfferich and Westarp – were able to negotiate this crisis
with great aplomb and minimize its damage on the party organization as a
whole. The irony of the situation was that despite the racist secession in
September–October 1922 racism and antisemitism were to become an even
more prominent feature of the DNVP’s public profile over the course of the
next year and a half. With the continued collapse of the German mark, the
Franco-Belgian occupation of the Ruhr, and the resurgence of the Communist
threat in the summer and fall of 1923, the DNVP experienced little difficult in
establishing itself as the party of national opposition to the Weimar system
and all that supposedly represented. With a steady dose of antisemitism to
underpin its appeal to the anxiety of all those who had been victimized by the
great inflation, the DNVP scored a sensational victory in the 1924 Reichstag
elections that fully vindicated all the time, energy, and money that had gone
into the creation of a truly comprehensive party organization. But now the
DNVP suddenly found itself confronted with a host of new problems. For with
success comes responsibility. As the largest of Germany’s non-socialist parties,
the DNVP faced the challenge of transforming itself from a party that had
flourished in opposition to one that would have to accept responsibility as a
member of a coalition government that included other political parties.
Among other things, this meant that the party would have to mute the
  

antisemitism that had played such an essential role in its victory in the May
elections so that it could present itself as a credible candidate for a role in the
national government. The challenge here was to make the transition from an
opposition to a government party without alienating those elements whose
opposition to the Weimar Republic had made its success at the polls possible
in the first place. Or in the words of DNVP moderate Hans Erdmann von
Lindeiner-Wildau, could the DNVP transform the “unity of the no” that had
served it so well in the first years of the Weimar Republic into a “unity of the
yes” that would enable the party to find the same unity in governmental
participation that it had found in opposition?”6
The first test of the party’s ability to make this transition came with the
August 1924 Reichstag vote on the Dawes Plan. And as the 48–52 split in the
Nationalist vote revealed, the party had clearly failed. With the economic and
political stabilization of the Weimar Republic from 1924 to 1928, the problems
that had bedeviled the DNVP in the vote on the Dawes Plan were only
exacerbated. Here party leaders would find themselves confronted with two
closely intertwined challenges: first, that of preserving party unity while
working within a governmental system to which the party was unconditionally
opposed and, second, that of reconciling the different and often conflicting
expectations that the various social and economic interests that constituted the
DNVP’s material base attached to the party’s entry into the national govern-
ment. The task of the DNVP party leadership was further complicated by the
fact that they faced increasingly heavy pressure not just from special-interest
organizations like the National Federation of German Industry, the National
Rural League, and the German National Union of Commercial Employees but
also from the Pan-German League, the Stahlhelm, and the various organiza-
tions on the patriotic Right. Nowhere was the party’s inability to reconcile the
exigencies of interest politics with the anti-system rhetoric of the patriotic
Right more apparent than in its withdrawal from the first Luther cabinet in the
fall of 1925 as a result of the controversy over Locarno. In the meantime, the
party’s middle-class constituencies became increasingly embittered over what
they perceived as the preferential treatment accorded industry, agriculture, and
organized labor and began to abandon the DNVP in favor of special-interest
parties like the Business Party and the People’s Justice Party. The fragmenta-
tion of the DNVP’s material base continued even after the party entered the
government for a second time in January 1927 when conservative farm leaders
disgruntled with the party’s failure to address the deepening agrarian crisis
launched the Christian-National Peasants Farmers’ Party in early 1928 with
support from local and state branches of the National Rural League.

6
Hans Erdmann von Lindeiner Wildau, “Konservatismus,” in Volk und Reich der Deut
schen, ed. Bernhard Harms, 3 vols. (Berlin, 1929), 2:35 61, here 29.
   , –

All of this came together to inflict a massive defeat on the DNVP in the May
1928 Reichstag elections, the first in the party’s history since its founding in
1918. As the outcome of the election clearly showed, the disintegration of the
DNVP’s social base was highly advanced, so much so that its prospects of
developing into a political force sufficiently powerful to contain the rise of
Nazism had been severely compromised. Moreover, the shock and scale of the
party’s defeat triggered a bitter internal conflict that would culminate in the
triumph of those forces that were most adamantly opposed to any sort of
collaboration with the existing political order. Hugenberg and those now in
control of the DNVP eschewed all ties to those parties that sought to stabilize
Germany’s republican order for the sake of closer relations with elements on
Germany’s anti-republican Right, including the NSDAP. To be sure, Hugen-
berg envisaged himself as the unquestioned leader of the so-called national
opposition and fully expected Hitler and the NSDAP to assume a role subor-
dinate to the DNVP in the struggle against Weimar democracy. But this
scheme, like so much of what Hugenberg hoped to accomplish in the last
years of the Weimar Republic, rested upon a fundamental misreading of Hitler
and the Nazi calculus for the seizure of power. More importantly, Hugenberg’s
ascendancy to the DNVP party chairmanship in October 1928 took place in
the face of bitter opposition from the party’s more moderate elements and
resulted in two secessions on the DNVP’s left wing, the first in December 1929
and the second in July 1930. In the fall of 1930 the party’s strength in the
Reichstag was reduced to less than half of what it had been after the December
1924 national elections, a fact that underscored just how miserably the DNVP
had failed as a truly comprehensive conservative Sammelpartei that could have
facilitated the transition from autocratic to democratic government or, at the
very least, have contained the threat of Nazism. As it was, the DNVP was too
divided to do the former and too weak to do the latter.
The reasons for this were many and complex. In the first place, the German
Right was never all that united to begin with. The divisions that had marked
the development of the German Right in the Second Empire carried over into
the Weimar Republic and were papered over only by virtue of the fact that all
of the various factions that made up the German Right categorically rejected
the republican system of government that Germany had inherited from the
November Revolution. But the glue that had held the party together while the
party was in opposition began to lose its cohesive strength once the DNVP had
to enter the government and assume the role of a responsible coalition partner.
At the same time, the general course of German economic development
during the Weimar Republic intensified the level of interest conflict at all
levels of German society, with the result that it became increasingly difficult
for Germany’s non-socialist parties to mediate between the divergent and
often antagonistic interests that constituted their material base. This was
particularly true of the DNVP, which of all of Germany’s non-socialist parties
  

with the possible exception of the Center and BVP had the most diverse and
highly differentiated social base. From this perspective, the fate of DNVP was
hardly different from that suffered by the other non-Catholic bourgeois parties
of the Weimar Republic. And like its non-Catholic counterparts, the DNVP
suffered from chronic financial problems that only became more acute with
the stabilization of the mark in second half of the 1920s and that made it
increasingly difficult for it to sustain the elaborate organizational apparatus
that it had built up in the first years of the Weimar Republic. In the case of the
DNVP, the situation was further complicated by a decentralized organiza-
tional structure that afforded party leaders in Berlin little direct influence over
what was happening at the local and regional levels of the party. This, in turn,
created sanctuaries within the party organization for extremist elements that
were then in a position to obstruct or block initiatives on the part of the
DNVP’s national leadership that might have contributed to the stability of the
Weimar Republic. It was precisely the decentralized character of the DNVP
party organization that explains the success of the insurgency candidacy that
elements on the party’s right wing unfurled in support of Hugenberg and his
bid for the DNVP party chairmanship in the summer and fall of 1928. The
organizational structure of the DNVP left the party vulnerable to a right-wing
assault from within that would – and ultimately did – render it incapable of
rallying conservative forces to the support of Germany’s republican order.7
The fragmentation of the DNVP’s left wing in 1929 and 1930 doomed
efforts to stabilize the Weimar Republic from the Right to failure. To be sure,
there would be repeated attempts over the course of the next several years to
fuse the various splinter parties that had broken away from the DNVP and the
other non-socialist parties into a united middle party or some kind of united
political front. Much to the annoyance of the Brüning government and
Germany’s economic elites, these efforts invariably ended in failure as it
proved impossible to bridge the gap between those who remained loyal to
the principles of democratic government and still hoped to unite in support of
Germany’s beleaguered republican system and those who were more inter-
ested in an alliance with the anti-democratic forces on the radical Right.8 The
split between the two ran right through the middle of the movement for
bourgeois unity at a time when the popular longing for unity was stronger
than ever. In this respect, the disunity of the DNVP only mirrored that of the
German Right as a whole. The campaign against the Young Plan was supposed
to bring together the various elements on the German Right, including

7
On this point, see Ohnezeit, Zwischen “schärfster Opposition,” 47 59, and Daniel Ziblatt,
Conservative Parties and the Birth of Democracy (Cambridge, 2016), 280 85, 301 14.
8
For further details, see Larry Eugene Jones, “Sammlung oder Zersplitterung? Die Bestre
bungen zur Bildung einer neuen Mittelpartei in der Endphase der Weimarer Republik
1930 1933,” Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 25 (1977): 265 304.
   , –

patriotic leagues like the Stahlhelm and Pan-German League, into a common
crusade against Stresemann’s foreign policy, but it too foundered on the
conflict between organizations like the RLB and DHV that functioned as the
representatives of special economic interests and those like the Stahlhelm and
Pan-German League that were committed to a national agenda that had little,
if anything, in common with the representation of special economic interests.
This was a fundamental division that had run through the heart of the German
Right since the founding of the Weimar Republic and that had been intensified
by the political and economic stabilization of the republic in the second half of
the 1920s. Whether or not it could ever be overcome remained to be seen.
All of this had profound consequences for the success or failure of the
taming strategy that not just Schleicher, but influential elements of Germany’s
conservative elites had adopted for dealing with the rise of National Socialism.
If nothing else, the disunity of the German Right meant that those conserva-
tives who hoped to domesticate the Nazis by bringing them into the national
government lacked the means to keep Hitler and his minions under control
once they were in power. Only if the architects of this strategy had had at their
disposal a large and well organized conservative party that could serve as a
bulwark against Nazi radicalism would it have been possible to enforce the
terms of the covenant under which the Nazis were allowed into the govern-
ment. But by the end of 1930 it was clear that neither the DNVP nor any other
constellation of forces on the German Right was capable of performing in this
capacity. Consequently, when Papen and Schleicher first tried to negotiate
with the Nazis in the summer of 1932 in an attempt to entice them into the
government, the absence of a strong and united conservative party at their
backs meant that they were negotiating from a position of weakness and that
they lacked the leverage necessary to hold the Nazis in check. As it was, Hitler
was able to extract concessions from Papen and Schleicher – namely, the
dissolution of the Reichstag, the repeal of the ban on the SA and other Nazi
paramilitary organizations, and the removal of the Prussian government from
office – in return for promises that he had no intention of fulfilling once his
own demands had been met. Nowhere were the tragic implications of this
situation more apparent than in January 1933 when Papen – this time without
Schleicher’s backing – succeeded in reaching an agreement with Hitler
whereby the Nazi party leader would assume the leadership of a government
in which all but three positions would be held by conservatives. Hitler’s
appointment as chancellor was based on the premise that the conservatives
in the Hitler cabinet would have sufficient leverage to contain the activism of
the Nazi movement and harness it to their own political agenda. But without
the support of a strong and united conservative party behind them, this proved
to be a devastating illusion. This was particularly apparent in the spring of
1933 when the more militant elements with the Nazi movement unleashed an
assault that not only destroyed the last vestiges of Germany’s republican order
  

but targeted Hitler’s conservative allies as well. By the end of the summer all of
Germany’s conservative organizations had either been dissolved or coordin-
ated into the institutional structure of the Nazi state on terms that amounted
to their virtual subjugation to the Nazi will.9 Had the conservatives enjoyed the
support of a strong and well-organized party at their back, this might very well
have been averted. But such was not the case.

9
Hermann Beck, The Fateful Alliance: German Conservatives and Nazis in 1933. The
Machtergreifung in a New Light (New York and Oxford, 2008), 146 73, 259 93.
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
   

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  

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  

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accessed at www.cambridge.org/thegermanright.

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 INDEX

agriculture, 16, 55 63, 209, 247 48, German Peasantry, 437

267 69, 314, 316, 332 38, German Peasants’ League, 48, 56,
340 41, 365, 368 69, 58
386 87, 445, 450 55, 481, German Rural League (DLB),
512 17, 557 59, 561, 59 60
570 73 National Rural League (RLB), 6,
1925 tariff bill, 317 18 59 64, 69, 174, 198, 239,
and DNVP, 317 18, 422 23, 512 17 241, 265, 268 69, 283, 310,
Green Front, 453 54, 513 314, 323, 331, 333 35,
organizations 340 41, 368, 385, 390,
Agrarian League (BdL), 13, 20, 423, 450 51, 466 67,
29 31, 44, 48 49, 56 60, 513, 534, 556, 570, 577,
91, 105 6, 268 596
regional affiliates, 91, 106 and Brüning cabinet, 534, 541
Württemberg Peasants and and CNBLP, 386, 399 400, 402,
Wine Growers’ League 423, 451, 513, 557 59, 572
(WBWB), 30 and Dawes Plan, 233 34, 238,
Association of German Peasant 265, 268
Unions (VdB), 20, 51, 58, and DNVP, 267, 323, 336, 383,
452, 454, 573 422 23, 513, 593
Catholic peasant unions, 454 and KVP, 557 59
regional affiliates and NLV, 247
Bavarian Christian Peasants’ and trade policy, 234
Union, 29, 63 campaign against Young
Rhenish Peasants’ Union, 62, Plan
122, 452 55, 467 controversy over §4 of the
Westphalian Peasants’ Union “Freedom Law”, 481 83
(WBB), 62 63, 452, National Committee for the
454 55, 468 German Referendum, 473,
Bavarian Peasants’ League (BBB), 484, 486, 513
57, 384, 386 87 elections
Coalition of German Agriculture, Reichstag September 1930,
56 557 59, 572
German Association of Rural regional affiliates, 385, 593
Municipalities, 513 Bavarian Rural League (BLB),
German Chamber of Agriculture, 60, 106, 220, 400 1, 536,
369, 453 569


  

Brandenburg Rural League National Socialist Freedom

(BrLB), 58, 335, 339 Party (NSFP), 217, 227,
Hessian Rural League, 386, 251
399, 450 Racist Social Bloc (VSB), 216
Pomeranian Rural League, 312, antisemitism, 11 14, 19 20, 35 37,
571 106 7, 129, 147, 151 61,
Prussian Saxony, 487 216 21, 250, 306, 308
Rhenish Rural League, 452, 454 and ADV, 147
Saxon Rural League (SLB), 31, and DNVP, 96, 106 7, 129, 151 61,
401, 571 216 21, 250
Silesian Rural League, 237, 335 organizations
Thuringian Rural League German Racist Protection and
(TLB), 31, 385 87, 450 Defense League (DSTB),
and CNBLP, 399 401 107, 150 51, 162, 171 72
and NSDAP, 516 Tannenburg League, 467
Westphalian Rural League, aristocracy, 304 11, 338 39
452, 454 and DNVP, 304, 311 12, 335 38
Württemberg Peasants and antisemitism, 306, 308
Wine Growers’ League Catholic aristocracy, 62 63, 306 7,
(WBWB), 30, 60, 106, 523 309 11, 452
and DNVP, 400 and Christian People’s Party, 280
break with WBP, 571 and German Center Party, 62 63,
trade policy, 233 280
Saxon Landvolk, 401 East Elbia, 17, 56, 62, 91, 106
Silesian Peasants’ League, 384 and Central Association of German
peasant protest 1927 28, 383 86 Conservatives, 309
Rural People’s Movement and DNVP, 308 9
(Landvolkbewegung), 450 and Kapp Lüttwitz putsch, 99
Albert, Heinrich, 202 and VVVD, 301
Alvensleben, Bodo von, 302, 402 organizations
Alvensleben, Werner von, 508 Association of Catholic Nobles
antisemitic parties, 19 20, 217 in Bavaria (GKE),
Christian Social Party, 18 19 306, 309
and DKP, 19 Association of Catholic Nobles of
Christian Social Workers’ Party, 18 Germany (VKE), 305
German Racist Freedom Party Central Association of Catholic
(DVFP), 160, 216, 221, Nobles, 306 7
226 Central Committee of Catholic
and ADV, 160 German Noble
Reichstag elections March 1924, Associations, 307
217 German Nobles’ Society (DAG),
German Racist Party, 18 20, 27 305 6, 463
German Reform Party, 19 Rhenish Westphalian Association
German Social Party, 19 of Catholic Nobles, 307
German Workers and Employees’ radicalization, 308 10
Party (DAAP), 23 Arnim Boitzenburg, Dietlof von,
National Socialist Freedom 338 39, 412
Movement of Greater Arnim Rittgarten Ragow, Dietloff von,
Germany, 251 339
 

Bachmann, Georg, 334, 536, 567 speech at Berlin party congress 1919,
Baecker, Paul, 117 89
Baltrusch, Fritz, 67 Beißwänger, Gustav, 29, 421
Bang, Paul, 266, 407, 416, 419, 424, 448, Benda, Julian, 298
472, 477, 494, 566 Bertram, Adolf von, Cardinal, 248,
League for National Economics and 348
Industrial Peace, 416 Best, Georg, 246 47, 314 15
Barlach, Ernst, 273 Bethge, Albert, 423
Bartel, Adolf, 171 Bethge, Albrecht, 451, 513
Baudissin, Friedrich von, 172 Bethmann Hollweg, Theobald von, 21,
Baudissin, Leopold von, 425, 495 132, 147
Bauer, Gustav, 84 Bethmann Hollweg, Moritz August,
Baum, Erwin, 482, 515 10
Bausch, Paul, 518, 523, 574 Bismarck, Otto von, 10, 146
Bauser, Adolf, 355 and Free Conservatives, 18
Bavaria, 6, 28, 36, 38, 62, 106, 156, Blank, Martin, 476, 563
180 84, 201, 205, 248, Blohm und Voß Ship Building Firm,
400 1 576
Beer Hall putsch, 175, 199 201, 207, Blohm, Rudolf, 390
299 Blüher, Hans, 289
conflict with Reich, 191 92, 198, Boehm, Max Hildebert, 275 76
400 1 Bolshevism, 279
Joint Committee (Gäa), 196, 277, threat of, 150, 162, 164 65,
293 173, 182
separatism, 175, 185, 205 Bornemann, Otto, 348
Bavarian Middle Party (BMP), 28 30, Borsig Locomotive Works, 577
97, 183 84, 221, 428 29, Borsig, Ernst von, 43, 285, 560
569 70 Bösch, Frank, 4
and BLB, 400 1 Bosch, Robert, 490
and Hugenberg, 569 Brandenburg, 57, 61, 106
struggle with racist Right, 183 84 Brandes, Ernst, 369, 453
Bavarian People’s Party (BVP), 29, 63, Brandi, Ernst, 392
120, 135, 179 80, 197, 252, Braun, Friedrich Edler von, 36
307, 318, 371, 467, 556, Braun, Otto, 258
595 Brauns, Heinrich, 65 66, 366 67
elections Brauweiler, Heinz, 280, 284, 298, 465,
1925 presidential election, 257 58, 470, 474, 478, 480
260, 263 and CVP, 122
Reichstag 1920, 112 and Hugenberg
Reichstag 1928, 437 disagreement over §4 of the
Reichstag September 1930, 586 “Freedom Law”, 479
Bavarian Royal Party, 135 and right wing unity, 302
Bazille, Wilhelm, 29, 237, 421, and Stahlhelm
566 68 National Referendum Committee,
Bechly, Hans, 67 72, 105 467 68
Behm, Margarete, 41, 108, 138 proposal for revision of Weimar
Behrens, Franz, 19, 61, 65 66, 69, 77, Constitution, 462 64
88 89, 106, 285, 414, 504, Bredt, Johann Victor, 353, 535, 592
511 resignation from DNVP, 102
  

Brosius, Hans, 474 Catholic conservatives, 62 63, 279 82

Bruhn, Wilhelm, 77, 151 and DNVP, 121 24, 310, 460
Brüning, Heinrich, 272, 284 85, and German Center Party, 310
527 30, 567, 591, 595 and patriotic Right, 348 49
as chancellor, 535, 542, 551 53 German Catholic Congress, 183
agrarian relief, 543 Freiburg convention 1929, 539
and consolidation of German Hanover convention 1924, 348
Right, 555 56 Munich convention 1922, 183
and DNVP, 541, 543, 552 53 Kulturkampf, 123, 440
and Hugenberg, 552 53 Central Association of German
composition of Brüning cabinet, Conservatives, 41, 79, 304
533 35 and DNVP, 41, 79 81, 94, 245, 304,
fiscal reform, 543 412
program, 536 Central Association of Industrial and
Reichstag elections September Commercial Employer
1930, 556, 588 and Employee
use of Article 48, 543 52 Associations (ZAG), 49,
and Christian labor movement, 284 51, 55, 343
“Essen Program” 1920, 120 Chevallerie, Otto de le, 289
and German Center Party, 528, 532, Childers, Thomas, 587
583 Christian labor, 63 72, 118 19, 284,
and Hindenburg, 532, 535 300, 317, 331, 365 66, 390,
and Müller cabinet, 529, 531 438, 496, 528
political profile, 532 and civil service salary reform 1927,
and Ring Movement, 284 85 366
and Schleicher, 527, 529 and DNVP, 69, 403 4, 416
Brunstäd, Friedrich, 285, 414 Lambach affair, 417 20
on the “Jewish question”, 144 53 and German Democratic Trade
speech at the Munich party congress Union Federation
1921, 144 53 (DDGB), 62, 67
Bücher, Hermann, 266 membership, 64 65
Buchner, Max, 460, 575 organizations
Budjühn, Gustav, 404 5 Catholic Worker’s Associations,
Bülow, Bernhard von, 18, 146 442
Burke, Edmund, 9 Central Association of Farm
Business Party of the German Middle Laborers (ZdL), 61, 69,
Class (WP), 228, 349, 353, 88 89, 285, 414
410. See also Reich Party of and DNVP, 90
the Middle Class (WP) Central Association of German
Buttmann, Rudolf, 220 Forest, Farm, and
Vineyard Workers, 88
Caprivi, Leo von, 56 Christian Metal Workers’ Union of
Cartel of Productive Estates, 20, 48 Germany, 69
Catholics, 348 German Labor Congress, 59
Catholic Church German Trade Union Federation
concordat with Prussia 1929, 445 57 (DGB), 68 69, 75, 105,
Fulda Bishops’ Conference, 284 85, 438, 443, 528
248 49, 348 and Ring Movement, 284
Prussian concordat 1929, 456 Dawes crisis, 234
 

Christian labor (cont.) ideological profile, 523

guidelines for 1920 Reichstag Kassel party congress 1930, 523
elections, 119 Reichstag elections September 1930,
German Trainmen’s Union, 67 573 74, 579 80, 587
Union of Christian Mine Workers, and Hugenberg, 573
69 and NSDAP, 583
United Federation of Christian Trade Christian Socials, 88, 508 10, 545. See
Unions (GCG), 65, 438 also Christian Social Party,
United Federation of German Civil Christian Social Workers’
Servant Unions, 68 Party, Christian Social
United Federation of German People’s Service (CSVD)
Employee Unions and DNVP, 25, 103, 141, 403 4,
(Gedag), 68 424 25, 448 50, 493 96,
Querverbindungen, 69, 546 503, 517 23
Christian People’s Party (CVP), 120, and Hugenberg, 424, 448 50, 520
122 23, 129, 280 81 Evangelical parties, 494
Christian National Coalition, 508, 511, Christian People’s Service (CVD),
517, 545, 549, 560 495, 520, 522
and Brüning cabinet, 547 ideological profile, 518 19
Christian National Peasants and Evangelical People’s Service, 495,
Farmers’ Party (CNBLP), 520
386 87, 410, 445 46, organizations
450 51, 467, 469, 480, Christian National Self Help, 521
,501, 509, 512 17, 519, Christian Social Faith
545, 550, 556, 563 64, 574, Communities
593 in Stuttgart, 518
campaign against Young Plan Nuremberg congress 1927, 518
controversy over §4 of the Christian Social Reich Union
“Freedom Law”, 474 83 (CSRV), 424 25, 448 49,
National Committee for the 493, 522
German Referendum, 473, Bielefeld congress 1928, 520
517 Bielefeld congress 1929, 494 95
and Christian National Coalition, Christian Social Union, 424, 522
517, 545 Evangelical Social Academy, 88,
and DNVP, 515 414
and KVP, 557 59, 561 civil service unions
and NSDAP, 516 German Civil Servants’ Association,
national delegate conference 73
Hannover 1928, 513 United Federation of German Civil
Reichstag elections September 1930, Servant Unions, 68
572 73, 579, 587 Claß, Heinrich, 146 48, 193, 320, 372,
alliance with KVP, 563 375, 413, 475, 477, 491
and NSDAP, 584 and DVFP, 160
“German Rural People,” 563 antisemitism, 146 47
Christian National Peasants’ Party, as ADV chairman, 146 47
385 86 and Hugenberg, 372, 415
Christian Social People’s Service (CSVD), call for a völkisch dictatorship, 147
521 23, 537, 561, 574 Coalition of the Constitutional Middle,
and Evangelical labor, 521 22 180, 186, 203
  

Communist Party of Germany (KPD), dependence on Hugenberg,

112, 212, 251, 352, 358, 552 285 86
conservatism, 8 11, 533 reorganization as Academy for
and antisemitism, 11 14 Politics, 282 86
Catholic conservatism, 62 63, 124, Ring Movement, 278 82,
279 82. See also Christian 286 87, 309, 528
People’s Party (CVP) and Christian labor, 285
organizations and DNVP, 302
Kettler League, 280 81 and VVVD, 302
Society for Corporatist Reform, Berlin rally for right wing
280 unity, 302
and nationalism, 9 Ring Publishing House, 295
and romanticism, 9 Young National Ring, 494
revolutionary conservatism, 10 11, Der Niedergang der nationalen
297, 299, 350 51 Opposition, 496
young conservatism, 10 11, 78 79, conservative milieu, 4, 72 74, 77 78,
270 98 143, 161, 555, 583
and DNVP, 78 79, 496 97, 506 12 Conservative People’s Party (KVP),
organizations. See also People’s 556 59, 565, 574 75
Conservative Association and CNBLP, 561
(VKV), Conservative and DHV, 574
People’s Party (KVP) and industry, 555 76
Academy for Politics, 286 controversy over monarchism,
Anti Bolshevist League, 272 574 75
Association for National and founding, 556 57
Social Solidarity, 272 in Bavaria, 569 70
Fichte Society of 1914, 286 87 Reichstag elections September 1930,
and June Club, 286 87 574 75, 579, 587
Association for a German Coßmann, Paul Nikolaus, 196, 277
Stage, 288 Cuno, Wilhelm, 180, 464 65, 468, 473,
Fichte Academy, 288 480
Leadership Academy for as chancellor, 179 81, 184 85
German Politics, 290 and Hamburg National Club of 1919,
Young German League, 290 464
German Gentlemen’s Club and Levetzow, 465
(DHK), 296 98, 302, Curtius, Julius, 98, 359, 381, 535
464
German University Ring (DHR), Dähnhardt, Heinz, 494
289 90 Daily Telegraph affair, 16, 146
June Club, 272 78, 286, 294 95, Dawes, Charles G., 221
414 Delbrück, Clemens von, 77, 81, 84, 86
and Beer Hall putsch, 293 94 Dewitz, Johann Georg von, 312
membership, 272 Dewitz, Otto von, 102
League for the Defense of Dietrich, Hermann, 535
German Culture, 272 Dingler, Wilhelm, 567
Political College for National Döbrich, Friedrich, 215, 386, 480, 515
Political Training and domestic politics
Pedagogy, 196, 282 86, cabinet negotiations 1927, 358
414 campaign against Young Plan
 

domestic politics (cont.) Landtag

National Committee for the Baden October 1929, 495, 520, 581
German Referendum, Bavaria April 1924, 220
473 74 Mecklenburg August 1926, 355
affiliated organizations, 473 Prussia February 1921, 125 30, 353
presidium, 473 Prussia November 1929, 495, 516
Federal Railway Law 1924, 238 Saxony October 1926, 352 57, 375
Law for the Protection of the Saxony May 1929, 581
Republic, 172, 183 Saxony June 1930, 581
renewal of Law for the Protection Thuringia December 1929, 516,
of the Republic 1927, 581
369 71 Prussian municipal elections
Unemployment Insurance Act 1927, November 1929, 520
366 Reichstag
Work Hours Law 1927, 395 March 1912, 20, 46, 48
Dommes, Wilhelm von, 420, 428 June 1920, 104 12, 123
Doms, Julius, 539 May 1924, 7, 213, 226 28, 241, 246,
Domsch, Alvin, 566 353
Dorsch, Wilhelm, 386 December 1924, 7, 250 52, 310,
Dosteoevsky, Fjodor, 273 353, 410
Drewitz, Hermann, 353, 395, 550, 565 splinter parties, 353
Dryander, Gottfried von, 236, 566 May 1928, 7, 394 412, 433 34, 444,
Duesterberg, Theodor, 168 69, 302, 462, 464, 474
347, 349, 364, 463, 465, splinter parties, 410
478, 485 September 1930, 14 15, 555 89
and Bavarian putschists, 169 Weimar National Assembly 1919, 30,
and Mussolini, 169 32 39
rivalry with Seldte, 170, 321, 347 Eley, Geoff, 13
Duisberg, Carl, 54, 490, 507, 563 Elverfeldt, Alexander von, 348
as president of RDI, 267, 343 44 Epstein, Klaus, 10
Düringer, Adelbert, 86, 155 Erzberger, Matthias, 119, 126 27,
Dziembowski, Maximilian von, 428 132 34, 155, 281
Escherich, Georg, 163 65, 277, 293
East Prussia, 6, 28, 61, 74, 450 and Ogesch, 164
Ebert, Friedrich, 84, 180, 185 86, 197, disarmament of Bavarian
200 3, 205, 230, 255 56 Einwohnerwehren, 165
Egan Krieger, Jenó von, 474 Eulenburg, Botho Wendt zu, 312
Egelhaaf, Gottlob, 29
Ehrhardt, Hermann, 346 Faulhaber, Michael von, 183
Einstein, Albert, 490 Fechter, Paul, 272
Eisner, Kurt, 57 Fehr, Anton, 384 86, 453, 512
elections Fehrenbach, Konstantin, 115, 125, 130
1925 presidential election, 255 64, Feldmann, Otto von, 262, 401
303 4 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 9, 286
National Citizens’ Council, 255 56, Flathmann, Johannes, 52, 55, 110
262 Foellmer, Wilhelm, 140
People’s Bloc (Volksblock), 259 foreign policy
Reich Bloc (Reichsblock), 258 62 Dawes Plan, 221 22, 226, 245 46,
results, 258, 264 255, 376, 470 71
  

First Moroccan Crisis, 146 Gerber, Hans, 289 91

League of Nations, 83, 135, 346, 357 Gereke, Günther, 480 81, 511, 561, 563
Locarno, 376 and CNBLP, 513 15, 517, 565
and DNVP, 358 Gerlach, Ernst von, 533
ratification, 308 23 Gerlach, Leopold von, 533
London Ultimatum, 114, 132, 134, Gerland, Heinrich, 550
177, 592 German Academy for Politics, 282
partition of Upper Silesia, 114 German Bank and Discount Society, 405
policy of fulfillment, 134 German Center Party, 3, 16, 18, 29, 45,
Rapallo Treaty, 154 54, 62, 65 66, 71, 82, 84,
reparations, 177, 221 115, 117, 123, 125, 127 28,
Ruhr occupation, 174 75, 180, 592 131 32, 179, 197, 203 4,
failure of passive resistance, 184 85 237, 246, 272, 280 81, 283,
Upper Silesia, 114, 592 317, 343 44, 348, 365, 373,
Versailles Peace Treaty, 83, 85, 358 393, 433, 437 40, 455, 460,
Young Plan, 5, 470 71, 524, 530, 535 497, 530, 532, 535, 539,
ratification, 531 556, 559, 577, 592, 595
Frahm, Friedrich, 89 90 domestic politics
Franke, Helmut, 350 cabinet negotiations 1927, 359, 361
Freytagh Loringhoven, Axel von, 157, collapse of fourth Marx cabinet, 382
160 61, 419, 467 and DNVP, 358 59
Frick, Wilhelm, 474 political manifestos 1927, 359
Fritsch, Theodor, 171 Provisional Work Hours Law, 366
Fromm, Kurt, 536, 567 Reich School Law, 381
Frowein, Abraham, 143 renewal of Law for the Protection
of the Republic 1927, 370
Gallwitz, Max von, 129, 460, 539 election of Kaas as Center party
Gamp Massaunen, Karl Friedrich von, chairman, 439 44
24 elections
Gayl, Wilhelm von, 285, 303 1925 presidential election, 258
1925 presidential election, 255, 260, Prussian Landtag 1921, 127, 129
262 Reichstag June 1920, 112
and paramilitary Right, 255 Reichstag December 1924, 245 46,
proposed Arbeitsgemeinschaft 250
between DVP and DNVP, Reichstag May 1928, 410, 437
333 42 Reichstag September 1930, 583
and National Committee, 300 and Brüning, 584
Gebsattel, Ludwig von, 473, 480 and NSDAP, 583 84
Geisler, Fritz Weimar National Assembly 1919,
and Hitler, 200, 205 6 46
and the “Jewish question”, 174 75 and industry, 53, 408
and Stresemann, 174, 200 party organization
quest for right wing unity Advisory Council for Trade and
National Committee, 300 Industry, 442
resignation from DVP, 174 National Civil Servant Advisory
Ruhr occupation, 181 Council, 439
and VVVD, 174, 225, 301 German Chamber of Commerce and
and “yellow” trade union movement, Industry (DIHT), 51
173 German Colonial Society, 145
 

German Combat League, 191, 199 386 87, 422 23, 445, 455,
German Conservative Party (DKP), 13, 482, 497, 508, 512 17
17 19, 23 24, 28 31, 34, and RLB, 451, 572
45 46, 56, 74, 85, 91, 302, antisemitism, 14, 35 36, 106 7,
336 216 21, 250, 592
and DNVP, 26, 30 and antisemitism, 35 37, 96, 118,
ideological orientation, 17 129, 151 61
ideological profile Gierke affair (1920), 107
monarchism, 17 resolution in Prussian Landtag
German Democratic Party (DDP), 1924, 219
27 30, 42 43, 45, 52 55, and aristocracy, 338 39
69, 71, 74, 82, 84, 102, 112, conservative milieu, 76, 143
115, 125, 131, 140, 179, and Catholics, 117, 248 49, 251, 379,
243, 253, 317, 340, 355 56, 460, 538 39
390, 410, 417, 432 34, 436, Catholic conservatives, 121 24,
461, 490, 535, 549 51, 560, 310, 460
577, 586 and Central Association of German
elections Conservatives, 41, 94, 412
1925 presidential election, 253, and DHV, 71
256 58 and DKP, 26
Reichstag June 1920, 112 and DVP, 98, 125 26, 366
Reichstag May 1924, 228 Joint Committee of the DVP and
Reichstag December 1924, 250 DNVP, 392
Reichstag May 1928, 410 proposed Arbeitsgemeinschaft,
Weimar National Assembly 1919, 333 42
46 and German Center Party, 359 61
founding of DStP, 564 and Hindenburg, 259 60, 262, 327 28
German Democratic Trade Union and Hitler, 474
Federation (DDGB), 62, 67 and patriotic Right, 321 22, 372 73
German Fatherland Party (DVLP), ADV, 319, 413 14
21 24, 27 28, 31, 98 Stahlhelm, 318 21, 349, 466 67
German League against Women’s VVVD, 246, 321 22
Emancipation, 40 and yellow trade union movement,
German National Bank 416 17
credit policies 1925 26, 332 at Weimar National Assembly, 77,
German National People’s Party 81 87
(DNVP), 4 8, 14, 24 31, status of Lutheran Church, 81 82
71, 74, 114, 118, 132, 144, Versailles, 82 85
151 57, 174, 207, 211 12, Weimar Constitution, 85 87
246, 272, 300, 307, 310, domestic politics
355 62, 376 79, 393, 432, 1925 tariff bill, 317
444 48, 466 67, 471, 497, Bavarian strategy, 134 35
505, 536 40, 559, 561, 563, Brüning cabinet, 534 42, 545, 553
589, 591 96. See also mutiny in DNVP Reichstag
Bavarian Middle Party delegation April 1930,
(BMP) and Württemberg 547 48
Burgher Party (WP) cabinet negotiations 1923, 195,
agriculture, 55 63, 91, 247 48, 202 4
316 18, 335 36, 368 69, cabinet negotiations 1924, 229 31
  

cabinet negotiations 1927, 359 61 and NSDAP, 580 81, 583

crisis in Bavaria 1923, 197 Weimar National Assembly
Cuno government, 180 81, 185 1919, 32 39, 41 44, 47
Dawes crisis, 222, 232, 234, 236 38, foreign policy
242, 300 Dawes Plan, 224, 228 29
enabling act of 8 December 1923, fulfillment, 135
211 League of Nations, 340, 357
first Luther cabinet, 7, 255, 309, Locarno, 299 329, 593
312 18, 324, 327, 593 opposition to fulfillment, 134
trade policy, 316 18 passive resistance in the Ruhr,
formation of third Marx cabinet, 191
340 41 proposed Rhineland security pact,
fourth Marx cabinet, 7, 379 83 319
Provisional Work Hours Law referendum against Young Plan,
1927, 366, 368 472 84
renewal of Law for the Protection Rhineland security pact, 318 23
of the Republic 1927, Ruhr occupation, 180 81
369 72 ideological profile, 405 7
Unemployment Insurance Act anti Marxism, 497 98, 500
1927, 367 68, 387 identity, 78 81, 87, 176, 259,
Kapp Lüttwitz putsch, 98 104, 114 376
November 1923 currency reform, monarchism, 34, 81 82, 95, 109,
211 362, 377
Reich School Law, 379 industry, 143, 224 25, 366 68,
revaluation, 246 47, 312 16 387 93, 407 9. See also
compromise of March 1925, 314 Coordinating Committee
second Luther cabinet, 335, 340 of German National
Stresemann cabinet, 186 87, 195, Industrialists (ADI), Reich
197 98, 200 Industrial Committee of
trade policy, 382 the DNVP
elections campaign financing, 44, 52 53,
1925 presidential election, 258 60, 141
262 63 internal crises, 357 62, 394 95
Landtag campaign against Young Plan
Mecklenburg 1926, 355 controversy over §4 of the
Prussia 1921, 125 30 “Freedom Law”, 481 83
Saxony 1926, 356 57 National Committee for the
Prussian Constitutional Assembly German Referendum,
1919, 45 473
Reichstag Dawes crisis, 233 39, 324,
June 1920, 104 12 593
May 1924, 7, 213, 216 21, December secession 1929, 501 5,
226 28, 312 13, 455, 545, 594
592 agriculture, 512 17
December 1924, 7, 245 52, 310, Christian Socials, 517 23
312, 409 10, 455 young conservatives, 506 12
May 1928, 7, 407 12, 474, 594 dispute over Locarno, 5, 308 23
September 1930, 556, 566 70, Free Conservative secession 1920,
587 88 592
 

German National People’s Party Evangelical Reich Committee of

(DNVP) (cont.) the DNVP, 137, 380,
July secession 1930, 553, 566 67, 594 495 96, 537 38
Lambach affair, 417 20, 425, 432, 546 German National Civil Servants’
Prussian concordat 1929, 456 60 Association, 104
racist crisis 1922, 5, 157 61, 592 German National Workers’
Treviranus case, 499 Conference, 89
party congresses German National Workers’ League
Berlin 1919, 85, 87 92, 151 (DNAB), 141, 404, 417,
Hanover 1920, 90, 116 18, 124, 449, 500, 536 37
141, 152, 290 German Racist Coalition (DvAG),
Munich 1921, 134 36, 139, 141, 157 60
144 59, 183, 367, 456, 592 National Federation of DNVP
Görlitz 1922, 158 59 Youth Groups, 140
Hamburg 1924, 222 National Racist Committee of the
Berlin 1925, 329 DNVP, 159 61, 218, 325,
Cologne 1926, 345 57, 387, 417 425
Königsberg 1927, 368 90, 415 National White Collar Committee
Kassel 1929, 497 501, 538 of the DNVP, 417
Treviranus case, 499 National Women’s Committee of
party finances, 41 44, 367 88, 409 the DNVP, 40, 107, 138,
party organization, 87 92, 222, 337, 252, 473
400, 445 46, 536 40, 595 program commission 1919,
Agricultural National Committee, 93 94
445 Reich Catholic Committee of the
Association of German Nationalist DNVP, 123 27, 130, 137,
Higher Civil Servants of 184, 248 49, 455 56, 460,
the Reich, 402 537 40
Bismarck Youth of the DNVP, 141 Prussian concordat, 456 57
Coordinating Committee of Reich Committee for Sales Clerks
German National and Private Employees,
Industrialists (ADI), 90
135 43, 224, 314, 367, 388, Reich Industrial Committee of the
392, 407 DNVP, 142
DNVP party representation Reich Middle Class Committee,
(Parteivertretung) 404
meeting of 20 October 1928 Reich Vocational Committee of the
Hugenberg’s election as party DNVP, 143
chairman, 429 31 Reich Workers’ Committee of the
meeting of 8 December 1928 DNVP, 88, 141
party reorganization, 446 Section for the Liberal Bourgeoisie,
resolution on Prussian 27
concordat, 437, 457 State Political Coordinating
meeting of 8 9 July 1928 Committee of the DNVP,
Westarp’s resignation as party 78, 95, 103, 121, 123
chairman, 419 20 programmatic statements, 93 97
meeting of 9 December 1927 “Aktionsprogramm der
proposal for constitution Deutschnationalen
reform 1927, 363 66 Volkspartei”, 187 88
  

“Die völkischen Ziele der German National Union of

Deutschnationalen Commercial Employees
Volkspartei”, 218 19 (DHV), 13, 48, 68 72,
“Grundsätze der 89 90, 117, 227, 365,
Deutschnationalen 390, 425, 435, 468, 577,
Volkspartei” 1920, 99 103 596
“Nationales Manifest der and DNVP, 71, 90, 417, 593
Deutschnationalen Fichte Society of 1914, 286 87
Volkspartei”, 103 founding, 286
“Ziele der Deutschnationalen Hanseatic Publishing Institute,
Volkspartei” 1919, 34 36, 78 288
regional organizations ideological profile, 71
Bavaria, 30, 38, 97, 180 84, 429 30. antisemitism, 69 70
See also Bavarian Middle and KVP, 574
Party (BMP) Querverbindungen, 49, 417, 425, 510,
East Elbia, 17, 32, 47 546
East Prussia, 430 and VKV, 510, 545 46
East Saxony, 421, 430 German Naval League, 13, 144
Frankfurt an der Oder, 430 German Peasants’ Party (DBP),
Pomerania, 421 384 85, 410, 512, 573
Potsdam II, 204 German People’s Party (DVP), 27, 30,
expulsion of Lambach, 419, 425 36, 50, 52 54, 69, 74,
Saxony, 30, 536 83 84, 98, 114 15, 125 26,
Thuringia, 30 130, 151, 168, 179, 185,
Württemberg, 30, 38, 421, 429 30. 272, 300, 355 56, 370, 388,
See also Württemberg 433 36, 464, 467 68, 497,
Burgher Party (WBP) 531, 535, 549, 556, 563,
social constituencies, 137 565. See also National
agriculture, 55 63, 90 92, 105 6, Liberal Association of the
128, 227, 335 36, 368 69, DVP (NLV)
382, 386 87, 394, 445, 455, and DNVP, 86, 97 98, 125 26, 194,
567, 593 200, 242 43, 333 43, 345,
aristocracy, 311 12, 335 38 366, 392
Christian labor, 67, 89 90, 117, antisemitism, 98
128, 367, 403 4 domestic politics
civil service, 104, 128, 227, 382, conflict over Reich School Law,
403 379 80, 382
Evangelical labor, 448 49, 536 37 Dawes crisis, 235, 237
middle class, 7, 104, 227, 312 16, elections
394, 404 5, 445, 593 1925 presidential election, 258, 263
small business sector, 129 Bavarian Landtag 1924, 220
small investors, 212, 394 Prussian Landtag 1921, 126
white collar employee, 89 90, 117, attack on DVP, 125 26
128, 227 Reichstag December 1924, 246, 250
women, 38 41, 107 8, 137 39, Reichstag June 1920, 111 12
251 52, 405 Reichstag May 1924, 226, 228
Gierke affair, 107, 138 Reichstag May 1928, 410
and Hugenberg, 567 Weimar National Assembly 1919,
youth, 139 41 46
 

German People’s Party (DVP) (cont.) Gürtner, Franz, 498

and industry, 141, 208 23, 408, 506, Gutehoffnungshütte, 225, 341, 388
524, 546, 577 Gutsche, Wilhelm, 67 69
and National Liberal State Party of
Bavaria, 214 Haag, Heinrich, 567
and patriotic Right Haase, Ernst, 146
Stahlhelm, 349, 434 35, 468 Habermann, Max, 287, 418, 425, 510, 574
VVVD, 246 and VKV, 545 46
National Liberal heritage, 381 Hamburg National Club of 1919, 464
Reichstag delegation, 186, 189, 194, Hamburg American Shipping Lines,
201, 242 43, 253 464
anti Stresemann fronde 1923, Hamm, Eduard, 575
189 90, 199 Hampe, Robert, 404
German State Party (DStP), 564, 566, Haniel, Karl, 277
577, 586 Hansa Bund for Commerce, Trade and
German Hanoverian Party, 467 Industrie, 48
Gessler, Otto, 192, 257, 259 Hänse, Franz, 386
Gierke, Anna von, 107 8, 138 Hartmann, Gustav, 67
Gierke, Otto von, 107 Hartwig, Emil, 69, 88, 90, 141, 427,
Giesberts, Johannes, 439, 441 448 49, 472, 495, 501,
Gildemeister, Alfred, 199, 215 503 4, 520
Gilsa, Erich von, 464, 468, 507 and CSVD, 500, 521
Glasebock, Willy, 460 Hartz, Gustav, 448 49, 494
Glatzel, Frank, 140, 290 91 Hassell, Ulrich von, 34, 78 80, 95, 592
Gleichen, Heinrich von, 272, 278, 283, Haßlacher, Jakob, 566
294, 296 98, 302, 309 Hauptmann, Gerhard, 490
Beer Hall putsch, 275 94 Heilbronner, Oded, 8
Glum, Friedrich, 508 Heim, Georg, 29
Goebbels, Joseph, 485, 490 91, 542 Heimcke, 334
Goethe, Gustav, 302 Heinze, Rudolf, 200
Gok, Carl Gottfried, 320 Helfferich, Karl, 37, 115, 130, 132 34,
Goldacker, Hans von, 235, 312, 567 153 55, 178 81, 187, 209,
Goldau, Franz, 459 60 211, 214, 414, 491, 592
Goltz, Rüdiger von der, 465, 473, 485 and Cuno, 180 81, 185
as VVVD chairman, 301, 304, 320, currency reform, 187
373 74, 464 65 and Dawes Plan, 222
and Hugenberg, 480 and Erzberger, 132 34
Graef Anklam, Walther, 123, 129, 361 DNVP racist crisis, 158
as chair of the National Racist on the “Jewish question”, 153
Committee of the DNVP, and policy of fulfillment, 133 34
160 rejection of antisemitism, 155
Graefe Goldebee, Albrecht von, 77, speech at the Munich party congress
117 18, 151, 154, 156, 184, 1921, 136
216 stabilization plan, 208
DNVP racist crisis, 156 61 and Versailles Peace Treaty, 132
Grauert, Ludwig, 576 Hellpach, Willy Hugo, 258, 550 51
Grimm, Hans, 289 and VKV, 551
Groener, Wilhelm, 525 26, 534 concept of “conservative democracy”,
Guérard, Theodor von, 382 551
  

Henning, Wilhelm, 153 54, 157 Hilpert, Hans, 28, 136, 184, 400, 428,
DNVP racist crisis, 156, 158 59, 161 536, 569 70
expulsion from DNVP Reichstag Hindenburg, Paul von, 7, 299, 327 28,
delegation, 155 481, 489, 572, 591
Hepp, Karl, 59 60, 463, 480, 563 1925 presidential election, 259 64
and CNBLP, 386, 400, 517, 559, 561, right wing disunity, 303 4
565 as Reich president, 540
and NLV, 215 1925 presidential election, 241 64
and RLB, 268 69, 318, 334, 384, 423, and Brüning, 532 33
451, 513 and DNVP, 322 27
Hergt, Oskar, 31 32, 37, 85 86, 110, and Westarp, 447, 527
130, 155, 218, 230, 315, cabinet negotiations 1927, 359, 361
327, 361, 414, 429, 431, and DNVP, 333
491, 533, 592 campaign against the Young Plan,
antisemitism, 107, 129, 218 489
as DNVP party chairman, 31, 79, Locarno, 322 27
92 93, 115 16, 137, 154, political profile, 532 33
180, 200, 202, 242, 244 Hirzel, Walter, 29
and Catholics, 109, 122 Hitler, Adolf, 14, 150, 184, 197 98,
and DVP, 97, 116, 126 205 6, 294, 473, 479,
campaign for the 1921 Prussian 591
Landtag elections, 126 appointment as chancellor, 596
DNVP racist crisis, 154 55, 157 58 Beer Hall putsch, 199 200, 205 6
domestic politics campaign against Young Plan, 485, 491
and Seeckt, 193, 197 German Combat League 1923, 191
and Stresemann, 100, 130 and Hugenberg, 477, 482, 542
Stresemann cabinet, 186, 197 Reichstag elections September 1930
cabinet negotiations 1923, campaign rhetoric, 586
193 203 speaking campaign, 585 86
Cuno cabinet, 180 resignation from National
Dawes crisis, 222, 230, 232 33, Committee for the
235 38 German Referendum, 580
Kapp Lüttwitz putsch, 99 100 and Stahlhelm, 468 69
keynote address Hoesch Steel Works, 423
Berlin party congress 1919, 79, Hoetzsch, Otto, 84 85, 155, 238, 272,
85, 92 284, 414, 504, 511
Hanover party congress 1920, 116 concept of “Tory Democracy”, 511
Munich party congress 1921, 135 Höfer, Ernst, 387, 561, 564 65
Görlitz party congress 1922, 159 Hompel, Rudolf ten, 442 43
Hamburg party congress 1924, Hugenberg, Alfred, 6, 27, 43 44, 55, 77,
222 154, 164, 194, 197, 214,
Ordnungsprogramm 1919, 93 224, 236, 282 83, 285 86,
Hermes, Andreas, 455 295, 336, 363, 371 88,
and “Green Front,” 453 390 91, 403, 415, 432, 466,
and VDBV, 452, 454 469, 471, 473 74, 480, 491,
Herrfahrdt, Heinrich, 284 493, 495, 503, 509, 515,
Heydebrand und der Lasa, Ernst von, 535, 579, 588
17, 20, 79 and ADV, 44, 414, 416
Hilferding, Rudolf, 189, 194, 208 and Dawes Plan, 415, 486
 

Hugenberg, Alfred (cont.) Hülser, Gustav, 424, 448 49, 494, 501,
and DNVP, 361, 378, 391, 414 16 503 4, 520
bid for party chairmanship,
377 78, 411 12, 416, I. G. Farben, 514
418 19, 421 25, 430 31, Imbusch, Heinrich, 69
434, 462 Imperial and Free Conservative Party
election as party chairman, (RFKP), 18, 25, 31, 45 46
429 31 and DKP, 18
letter to Westarp 17 September and founding of DNVP, 25 26
1927, 378 industry, 49 55, 224 25, 265 67, 365,
proposed triumvirate, 416, 422, 387 93, 496, 506 7, 528,
429 559, 563 64
fund raising, 44, 55, 110, 142, 388, and DNVP, 44, 141 43, 224 25,
407 8 367 68, 387 93, 423 24,
and industry, 142, 391 92, 414, 475 76 576, 593
and Stresemann, 188 89 and DVP, 223 26, 506 7
as DNVP party chairman, 446 48, and KVP, 555 76
456, 460, 467, 497, 524, and NSDAP
527, 530, 538, 540, 542, taming strategy, 590 91
546 48, 553, 567, 569, 594 campaign financing, 41 44, 52 55,
agriculture, 445, 455 387 93, 563
and Brüning cabinet, 537, 542 43, Commission for the Collection,
552 53, 567 68 Administration, and
and CNBLP, 480 Allocation of the
and Hitler, 474 75, 480, 482, 542, Industrial Campaign
591, 594 Fund, 52 55, 110, 141
and Kaas, 477 78 and DNVP, 110
and Stahlhelm, 466, 469 Curatorium for the Reconstruction
campaign against Young Plan, 472, of German Economic Life,
477, 484, 486, 491, 493 42 43, 53 54, 110, 141,
controversy over §4 of the 408, 577
“Freedom Law”, 477 84 and DNVP, 43, 110, 577
National Committee for the and KVP, 575
German Referendum, 470 “Kalle Committee,” 54 55
conflict with Westarp, 446 48, 544, “Ruhrlade,” 387 93, 408, 423 24,
553 577
ideological profile organizations
anti Marxism, 497 98 Alliance of Northwest German
goals, 444 Business Representatives,
keynote speech 563
Kassel party congress 1929, Association for Mining Interests, 414
500 Association for the Protection of
Prussian concordat with Catholic the Common Economic
Church, 457, 459 Interests in the Rhineland
reform of party organization, and Westphalia
445 46 (Langnamverein), 51, 344,
Reichstag elections September 475
1930, 566 68, 578 Association of Berlin Metal
Treviranus case, 499 Industrialists, 38
  

Association of German Iron and Johannes,Wolf, 334

Steel Industrialists Joos, Joseph, 439, 442, 539
(VDESI), 43, 233, 576 Jordan, Carl, 392
Central Association of German Jung, Edgar Julius, 569
Industrialists (CDI), 20, Jünger, Ernst, 289, 299, 350 51
42, 48 50, 52 “new nationalism,” 350 51
Chamber of Industry and myth of the “front experience”,
Commerce (DIHT), 575 350 51
Federation of German Employer Jünger, Friedrich Georg, 350
Associations (VDA), 51,
143 Kaas, Ludwig, 442 43, 498, 583
German Industrial Association as Center party chairman, 440 43
(DIV), 266, 302 ideological profile, 440 41
League for National Economics Kähler, Wilhelm, 137
and Industrial Peace, 403, Kahr, Gustav von, 163, 165, 182 83,
448 205, 294
League of Industrialists (BDI), 48, as general state commissar, 191,
50 196 98
League of Saxon Industrialists, 392 conflict with Reich, 191 92
1926 Saxon Landtag elections, Beer Hall putsch, 196, 199
356 and patriotic Right in Bavaria,
National Federation of German 183
Industry (RDI), 6, 50 51, Kaiser, Jakob, 441 42
143, 233, 238 39, 241, 265, Kalckreuth, Eberhard von, 234, 268,
269, 310, 331 41, 345, 390, 316, 334, 342, 384, 400,
414, 507, 593 451
Aufstieg oder Niedergang, 507 Kalle, Wilhelm Ferdinand, 54
Dawes Plan, 224, 265 66 Kanitz, Gerhard von, 155, 195, 247,
Dresden convention 1926, 254, 317, 334
343 44 Kapp, Wolfgang, 22, 98
Zechenverband, 414 and the ADV, 22
Ruhr heavy industry, 343 45, and DVLP, 22 23
387 93, 423 24, 430, 473, and Kapp Lüttwitz putsch, 100
475 76, 489, 506, 559 Kapp Lüttwitz putsch, 98 104, 119,
and DNVP, 374 88, 408, 423 24, 163
576 and DNVP, 98 104
and KVP, 575 National Association, 99
“Ruhrlade,” 392 93, 408, 423 24, Kardorff, Siegfried von, 80, 96, 101,
561 63 107, 202, 592
and DNVP party program, 95 96
Jäckh, Ernst, 282 and Kapp Lüttwitz putsch, 102
Jaeger, Samuel, 517 resignation from the DNVP,
Jaeger, Wilhelm, 445 99 101
Jarres, Karl, 190, 195, 197, 260 Kastl, Ludwig, 389, 471
1925 presidential election, 257 62, Kempkes, Adolf, 130, 565
303 Kerckerinck zur Borg, Engelbert, 62,
proposed Arbeitsgemeinschaft 281, 307, 452, 455
between DVP and DNVP, Keudell, Walther von, 235, 361, 380 81,
333 42 410 30, 458, 504 5
 

Kirdorf, Emil, 476 Lind, Heinrich, 547

Kittel, Manfred, 5 Lindeiner Wildau, Hans Erdmann von,
Kleinau, Wilhelm, 350 93, 123, 219, 272, 358, 361,
Klöckner, Peter, 393 431, 446, 496, 501, 503 4,
Klönne, Moritz, 216, 504 508, 550 51, 565
Koch, Karl, 537 and “unity of the no,” 87, 118, 491,
Koch, Wilhelm, 361, 427, 458, 537 593
Koch Weser, Erich, 433, 461, 549 50 and racism, 219
founding of DStP, 564 quest for conservative unity, 508
Köhler, Heinrich, 439 Lindner, Wilhelm, 537
Körner alt, Theodor, 30, 106, 400 Loebell, Friedrich Wilhelm, 256
Kriegsheim, Arno, 249 68, 463 1925 presidential election, 241, 261
Krupp Steel Works, 194, 233 Loebell Committee, 257 59, 303
Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach, reconstitution as Reich Bloc,
Gustav, 341, 390, 392, 507 258
Kühn, Leonore, 107 Loë Bergerhausen, Clemens von, 62,
452 55
Lagarde, Paul de, 10 and CVP, 122, 280
Lambach, Walther, 90, 117, 365, 404, Lossow, Otto von, 198 99
417 19, 424, 435, 495, 503, Löwenstein, Alois von und zu, 539
520 Lubbert, Erich, 474
and CSVD Ludendorff, Erich, 99, 198, 294, 467
Christian National Self Help, 521 German Combat League 1923,
as DNVP’s liaison to DHV, 417 191
Lambach affair, 417 20, 425 Ludwig, Hans, 351
on monarchism, 417 18 Lukassowitz, Viktor, 460
Lammers, Clemens, 344 Lüninck, Ferdinand von, 168, 280 81,
Landsberg Steinfurt, Alfred von, 121 307 8, 310, 348, 454,
Landsberg Velen, Engelbert von, 546
121 22, 124, 127, 455 56, speech to the Association of
538 40, 575 Catholic Nobles in
and Hugenberg, 456 Bavaria, 309 10
resignation from DNVP Reich Lüninck, Hermann von, 122 42,
Catholic Committee, 280 81, 307, 454, 473,
459 60 539
and Prussian concordat 1929, 458 59 and CVP, 122
Langbehn, Julius, 10 Luther, Hans, 195, 208, 253, 389, 490,
League for the Regeneration of the 527, 549
Reich (BER), 389 91, 527 as chairman of BER, 389, 527
Lehmann, Annagrete, 405, 473, 567 as chancellor
Lejeune Jung, Paul, 124, 127, 365, 368, first Luther cabinet, 255, 309, 362
505, 538 and DNVP, 326
Leopold, Bernhard, 429, 547 48, 566 Locarno, 326
Lepsius, M. Rainer, 3 4 second Luther cabinet 1926,
Lerchenfeld, Hugo von, 182 312 18
Lersner, Kurt von, 216 as finance minister
Lettow Vorbeck, Paul von, 567, 570 stabilization program, 208 10
Levetzow, Magnus von, 465, 480 Lutheran Church, 82
Liberal Association, 433 Lutheranism, 88
  

Lüttichau, Siegfried, 430 organizations

Lüttwitz, Walther von, 98 99 Central Association of Home and
Property Owners’
Mackensen, August von, 373 Organization, 353
Maercker, Georg, 347 German Middle Class Association,
Mahraun, Artur, 170, 303, 348, 375, 74
467, 494, 564 Imperial German Middle Class
and antisemitism, 171 League, 20, 48
estrangement from the patriotic Middle Class Association for
Right, 375 Political Enlightenment, 74
and VNR, 551 Protective Association of
Mann, Thomas, 490 Mortgagees and Savers for
Maretzky, Oskar, 199, 215 16 the German Reich, 246
Marwitz, Ludwig von der, 10 Reich Cartel of the German Middle
Marx, Wilhelm, 227, 253, 311 Class, 395
1925 presidential election, 258 59, Reich German Middle Class
261, 263 League, 74
as Center party chairman, 204, 437 Savers’ Association for the German
and DNVP, 203, 358, 360 61 Reich, 336, 339, 397
cabinet negotiations 1923, 203 4 retail sector, 16
cabinet negotiations 1927, 359 small business sector, 72
and SPD, 358 small investor
as chancellor, 203, 221, 229 30, revaluation question, 312 16
243 44, 253 stabilization, 210
cabinet negotiations May 1924, Minoux, Friedrich, 184, 194, 198
229 31 Moeller van den Bruck, Arthur, 10, 273,
cabinet negotiations October 1924, 277 78, 283 84, 286 87,
243 44 293 96, 298
dissolution of Reichstag 1924, 212 and Hitler, 295
fourth Marx cabinet and Spengler, 277
Reich school bill, 382 Moldenhauer, Paul, 535, 551
renewal of Law for the Protection monarchism, 34, 81 82, 95, 109, 377,
of the Republic 1927, 370 521, 557
and Stresemann, 203 Morosowicz, Elard von, 463
third Marx cabinet, 341 “Fürstenwald Hate Declaration,”
Matthiesen, Helga, 4 434 35, 462
Mecklenburg, 6, 74, 111 Möser, Justus, 10
Mecklenburg, Duke Johann Albrecht zu Mueller Otfried, Paula, 139
and DVLP, 22 Müller, Hermann, 433, 471, 530
Meinecke, Friedrich, 490 campaign against the “Freedom
Meißner, Otto, 327, 529 Law,” 490
Mergel, Thomas, 5 6, 364 Müller Otfried, Paula, 567
middle classes, 72 76, 227 Mumm, Reinhard, 26, 69, 82, 424, 448 49,
anxiety over stabilization, 213 495, 504, 520 21, 537 38
artisanry, 72 and CSVD, 522
civil service, 72 73, 208 9 and Evangelical Reich Committee of
and stabilization, 208 9 the DNVP, 137
liberal professions, 61 and Reich School Law, 380
Mittelstand concept, 72 73 rejection of racial antisemitism, 152
 

Munch, Edvard, 273 Oberdörfer, Hans, 518

Mussolini, Benito, 185 Oberfohren, Ernst, 505, 537, 541 42
carto del lavoro, 416 Ohnezeit, Maik, 6
March on Rome, 169, 196, 199 Oncken, Hermann, 490
Osten, Oskar von der, 95
National Committee, 300 Otte, Bernhard, 442
National Committee for the German Otto, Walter, 567
Referendum, 470, 489, 580
campaign against Young Plan, 477 91 Pacelli, Eugenio (Papal Nuncio), 124,
controversy over §4 of the “Freedom 434 40
Law,” 479, 483 Pan German League (ADV), 4, 6, 13,
propaganda, 484 86 22, 44, 144 51, 162, 172,
results, 484, 490 91 174, 193, 231, 239, 301,
plebescite on “Freedom Law,” 517 319, 346, 364, 372 73, 375,
National Liberal Association of the 407, 467, 474, 596
DVP (NLV), 214 16, 247, antisemitism, 13, 146 47, 149
265 Bamberg Declaration 1919, 149
Reichstag elections May 1924, 227 campaign against Young Plan, 473, 477
National Liberal Party (NLP), 18, and DNVP, 149, 151, 157, 160, 239, 319,
27 29, 70 324, 326, 372 73, 413 14,
National Liberal State Party of Bavaria, 416, 421, 505, 571, 593
214, 220, 536 and DVFP, 160
National Socialist German Freedom and General German League, 145 46
Party (NSDFP), 246 and Hindenburg, 328
National Socialist German Workers’ and Hugenberg, 419, 421
Party (NSDAP), 8, 14 15, membership decline, 413
147, 149, 163, 175, 184, and NSDAP, 149
217, 467, 569, 589, 591 and Stresemann’s foreign policy, 320,
electoral breakthrough 1929 30, 581 323 24
National Committee for the German and World War I, 147 48
Referendum, 473 74, 542 Independent Committee for a
campaign against the Young Plan, German Peace, 148
485 Papen, Franz von, 307, 310 11, 444
Reichstag elections September 1930, and German Center Party, 311
556, 585 88 and Hitler, 596
and DNVP, 580 and NSDAP, 596
Germany’s conservative milieu, paramilitary Right, 185, 301. See also
555 83 patriotic Right, Stahlhelm,
Reich Propaganda Leadership Young German Order
(RPL) 1925 presidential election 1925,
guidelines for campaign, 580 264
nationalism, 9, 13 1926 Saxon Landtag elections, 356
“new nationalism,” 299 300 and Hindenburg, 264
Naumann, Friedrich, 29 and World War I, 161 62
Neuhaus, Albert, 327 organizations. See also patriotic
Neumann, Sigmund, 9 Right, Stahlhelm, Young
Nicolas, Jean, 339 German Order
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 10, 271, 273 Einwohnerwehren, 163 64
Normann, Oskar von, 17 in Bavaria, 182
  

free corps, 162 63 People’s Conservatives, 545 51, 557,

League of Nationalist Soldiers, 560. See People’s
168 Conservative Association
Organization Kanzler, 165 (VKV), Conservative
Orgesch, 162, 164 65, 170 People’s Party (KVP)
Viking League, 346 and Brüning, 550
Westphalian League, 167, 346 Philipp, Albrecht, 399, 566
Stresemann’s foreign policy, Philipp, Kurt, 421
319 Planck, Max, 490
Passarge, Karl, 421 Poengsen, Ernst, 476, 497, 507
patriotic Right, 172 75, 300 4, Pomerania, 57, 61, 74, 106, 450
346 52, 372 76. See also Posadowsky Wehner, Arthur von, 77,
Pan German League 81, 339, 355
(ADV), United Patriotic Prieger, Karl, 571
Leagues of Germany Progressive People’s Party, 16, 27
(VVVD) Pünder, Hermann, 541
and DNVP, 329, 376 Pyta, Wolfram, 75
in Bavaria, 182 83
Central Office of Patriotic Leagues, Quaatz, Reinhold, 110, 201, 232, 235,
172 272, 284 85, 294, 419, 422,
opposition to Locarno, 324 25 428, 446, 472, 480, 502
opposition to Rhineland security and NLV, 214 15
pact, 319 21 anti Stresemann fronde, 190, 199, 214
oppostion to the fourth Marx cabinet, defection to DNVP, 215 16
372 75
organizations Rademacher, Walther, 356 57, 391 92,
Alliance for Patriotic 548
Enlightenment, 172 Radowitz, Joseph Maria von, 10
General German League, 414 Rathenau, Walther, 134, 154
National Unity Front, 172 assassination, 154, 169, 172, 177 78,
Reich Flag, 346 370
United Patriotic Leagues of Bavaria Raumer, Hans von, 190, 194, 392
(VVVB), 182 Reich Party for People’s Justice and
Stresemann’s foreign policy, Revaluation (VRP),
323 353 56, 376, 395 97, 523,
Locarno, 329 593
Stresemann’s foreign policy, elections
319 Reichstag May 1928, 395 97
Pechel, Rudolf, 272, 294 Saxon Landtag elections, 355
Pechmann, Wilhelm von, 28 elections Saxon Landtag 1926,
People’s Association for Catholic 395 97
Germany, 65, 440 Reich Party of the German Middle
People’s Conservative Association Class (WP), 353 54, 376,
(VKV), 510 11, 395, 405, 445 46, 467, 512,
556 523, 535, 549, 560, 563,
and DHV, 545 46 565, 574, 577, 593
ideological profile, 510 11 and Central Association of Home
organizational stagnation, and Property Owners’
546 47 Organization, 353
 

Reich Party of the German Middle 1926 Landtag elections, 352 57

Class (WP) (cont.) intervention of paramilitary Right,
elections 356
Reichstag May1928, 395 League of Saxon Industrialists, 356
Reichstag September 1930 Saxon Citizens’ Council, 356
and NSDAP, 555 left wing unrest 1923, 185
Saxon Landtag 1926, 355 removal of state government 1923,
Görlitz party congress 195, 197, 353
“Gölitzer Richtlinien”, 354 Schacht, Hjalmar, 308, 471, 527, 560
ideological profile, 354 Schack, Wilhelm, 69
and Reich Cartel of the German Schätzel, Georg, 534
Middle Class, 395 Schauwecker, Franz, 350
Reichert, Jakob Wilhelm, 43, 50, 142, Scheibe, Anton, 367 68
233, 547 48, 566 Scheidemann, Philipp, 24, 83, 358
and ADI, 142 43 Schiele, Georg Wilhelm, 27, 514
and KVP, 576 Schiele, Martin, 77, 203 4, 241, 312, 336,
Reichswehr, 163, 193, 198, 205, 496, 427, 431, 463, 469, 473,
508, 524 26 480, 491, 497, 502 3, 514,
Reismann Grone, Theodor, 578 533, 535, 548, 561, 564
Retallack, James, 13 and Brüning cabinet, 534 35, 540 42
Reusch, Paul, 265, 277 78, 293, 341, and DNVP, 516, 540
344, 388 93, 507, 560, 575 and first Luther cabinet, 327
and DNVP, 393, 423 24 Locarno, 324 26
and Hugenberg, 388 89, 391, 423 24, proposed Rhineland security pact,
563 323 24
and “Ruhrlade”, 388 93 and fourth Marx cabinet
and Spengler, 277 78 as minister of agriculture, 361, 369,
and Westarp, 392 384, 398
founding of BER, 389 90 farm program 1927, 368
quest for bourgeois unity, 559, 561 65 and Hugenberg, 423, 483, 540, 572
Rheinbaben, Rochus von, 436 and KVP, 556 57
Richthofen Boguslawitz, Prätorius von, and RLB, 268, 400, 423, 451, 454, 484,
235 36, 312, 335, 547 486, 513, 557 59, 572
Ritter, Emil, 539 as RLB executive president,
Ritter, Karl Bernhard, 152, 289 90 451 52, 556 57
Roedern, Siegfried von, 389 formation of “Green Front”,
Roesicke, Gustav, 59, 77, 91, 195, 453 54
267 68, 312 controversy over §4 of the
Rohe, Karl, 4 “Freedom Law”, 481 82
Röhr, Franz, 272 on Hindenburg’s election, 264
romanticism, 9 Schirmacher, Käthe, 77, 567
Rosenberg, Frederic von, 180 Schlange Schöningen, Hans, 204, 219,
Roth, Alfred, 150 336, 421, 427, 429, 504, 512
Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 9 and CNBLP, 516 17
Rüffer, Paul, 117, 141, 473, 537 Schleicher, Kurt von, 508, 514, 526 27,
556, 596
Sachsenberg, Gotthard, 565 and DNVP, 541
Saxony, 28, 30, 74, 201, 205, 352 57, 401 and Brüning, 527, 529
1922 Landtag elections, 352 and Hitler, 596
  

and NSDAP Simpfendörfer, Wilhelm, 503 23

taming strategy, 591, 596 Simson, Ernst von, 392
and Hugenberg, 541 Social Democratic Party of Germany
Schlenker, Max, 344, 475 (SPD), 16, 20 21, 48,
Schlieben, Otto von, 327 51 52, 105, 131, 134, 175,
Schlieffen, Alfred von, 578 180, 187 88, 191, 193 95,
Schlittenbauer, Sebastian, 29 198, 203, 210 12, 214, 228,
Schmidt, Wilhelm, 403 243, 310, 340, 343, 358 59,
Schmidt Hannover, Otto, 260, 480 432, 434, 468, 524, 530
speech at the Kassel party congress and Brüning cabinet, 535, 541, 551 52
1929, 497 elections
Schneider, Rudolf, 434 1925 presidential election, 258
Scholz, Ernst, 190, 200, 358, 392, Reichstag December 1924, 250
433 35, 527 28 Independent Socialists, 84, 86, 114
as DVP party chairman Majority Socialists, 45, 82, 84, 115, 179
quest for bourgeois unity, 531, 549, and Versailles Peace Treaty, 82
559 60, 564 65 Reichstag June 1920, 82
Schotte, Walther, 272, 296, 302 and Stresemann cabinet, 186, 197
Schulenburg Tressow, Friedrich von unification of Majority and
der, 338 Independent Socialists,
Schultz Bromberg, Georg, 566 179
Schwecht, Ludwig, 538, 572 socialist unions, 64 65
Schweitzer, Carl Günther, 137 General German Trade Union
Seeckt, Hans von, 193 94, 196, 198, Federation (ADGB), 69
200, 236, 267, 293 94 German Farm Workers’ Union
1925 presidential election, 258, 303 (DLV), 32, 105 6
plans for a national dictatorship, 199 Society for the Eastern Marshes, 13
Seidlitz Sandreczki, Ernst Julius von, Sogemeier, Martin, 563
309, 412 Solmssen, Georg, 560
Seißer, Hans von, 198 99 Sorge, Kurt, 50, 110, 225, 266
Seldte, Franz, 168 69, 347, 463 65, 470, Spahn, Martin, 124, 137, 196, 232, 272,
473 280 83, 296, 298, 302, 414,
agitation for a national dictatorship, 538, 592
169 and DNVP, 136, 281, 285
as leader of Stahlhelm, 321 and German Center Party, 117
rivalry with Duesterberg, 169 70, and Hugenberg, 283, 456, 458
321, 347 48, 364 and Political College for National
and Seeckt, 169 Political Training and
and Stresemann, 169, 321, 374, 462 Pedagogy, 196
World War I, 166 67 special interest parties, 7, 354 55, 376,
Seldte, Georg, 166 67 395 402, 577. See German
Severing, Carl, 489 Peasants’ Party, Christian
Siemens, Carl Friedrich von, 42, 53, 55, National Peasants and
110, 490, 563, 577 Farmers’ Party, Reich
Silverberg, Paul, 343 45 Party of the German
and SPD, 343 44 Middle Class, and People’s
speech at 1926 RDI convention, Rights Party
343 45 Spengler, Oswald, 196, 276 78, 293 94
and DNVP, 345 and Reusch, 277
 

Springorum, Fritz, 392, 408, 423 radicalization, 169 70, 347 52

and Wirtschaftshilfe, 408 Seldte Duesterberg rivalry, 170, 321,
Stackmann, Karl, 17 347 50, 364, 374
Stadtler, Eduard, 266, 272, 282, 298, 404 Stapel, Wilhelm, 287 90, 298
and right wing unity, 302 Stegerwald, Adam, 51 67, 69, 71, 127,
Beer Hall putsch, 294 202 3, 272, 284, 442, 528
plans for a putsch 1923, 293 and Christian labor movement, 284,
Stahl, Julius Friedrich, 533 438
Stahlhelm, 4, 6, 166 70, 172, 248, “Essen Program,” 119 20, 127, 438,
299 301, 303, 310, 320 21, 442, 508
346 49, 352, 364, 374 76, and civil service salary reform, 382
428, 465 67, 471, 480, 526, and DNVP, 202 3
596 and German Center Party
affiliated organizations and Kaas, 441, 443
League of Nationalist Soldiers, 168 bid for Center party chairmanship,
Reich Flag, 346 437 39
Viking League, 346 Altenburg speech November
Westphalian League, 167, 346 1928, 438
ban on Jewish membership 1924, 347 election as chairman of Center
and Catholics, 348 49 Reichstag delegation,
and Hindenburg, 304 442 43
1925 presidential election, 263, 303 4 speech at Essen workers’
and Hitler, 468, 470 conference December
and Hugenberg, 466, 469 1928, 441 42
and Locarno, 325, 329 and German Democratic Trade
and VVVD, 301, 469 Union Federation, 67
Morosowicz’s “Fürstenwald Hate Steinhoff, Werner, 419, 446
Declaration”, 434, 465, 468 Steuer, Lothar, 444
National Committee for the German Stinnes, Hugo, 55, 110, 188, 194 96,
Referendum, 473 201, 216, 282, 293, 343
campaign against Young Plan, 477, anti Stresemann fronde, 189 90, 214
484 founding of NLV, 214
agreement with Hugenberg on §4 Stoecker, Adolf, 12, 18 19, 26, 424, 448,
of the “Freedom Law”, 479 522
National Committee for the Strasser, Gregor, 474 75, 542
Referendum, 466 70. See campaign against Young Plan, 485
also National Committee as Reich Organization Leader of the
for the German NSDAP, 581
Referendum Strathmann, Hermann, 536, 567
affiliated organizations, 467 68 Streiter, Georg, 67
formation, 465, 467 Stresemann, Gustav, 204, 228, 258, 266,
referendum on revision of Weimar 275, 293, 308, 374, 434, 489
Constitution, 462 64, 467 and DNVP, 319
political parties, 349, 468 and Hugenberg, 188 89, 435
DNVP, 349, 462, 466 67, 593 and Stahlhelm, 321, 434
DVP, 349, 433 36, 464, 468 as chancellor, 115, 185 87, 191, 195,
NSDAP, 467 68 200 1, 205, 211
program for national renewal 1927, accomplishments, 197 201
374 75 and DNVP, 200 1
  

and Social Democrats, 185 86 Tiling, Magdalene von, 138, 495,

and Stinnes, 189 90 537 38, 567
second Stresemann cabinet, 194 95 speech at the Kassel party congress
termination of passive resistance in 1929, 500
the Ruhr, 190 Tirpitz, Alfred von, 22 23, 196 97, 221,
as DVP party chairman, 27, 67, 83, 232, 244, 328, 361
98, 114, 125 26, 130 32, 1925 presidential election, 261
169, 197 98, 200 1, and DVLP, 22 23
214 15, 229, 235, 321, 461, as a candidate for Reich chancery,
489 229 30
1926 Saxon Landtag elections, 356 and Kahr, 177
and DNVP, 130 31, 186, 242, 342, and Kapp, 22
358 Traub, Gottfried, 27 28, 77, 80, 99, 205
December 1924 Reichstag Treviranus, G. R., 343, 431, 496, 499,
elections, 245 502 4, 508, 529, 534, 545,
domestic politics 549, 556
1925 presidential election, 257, and Brüning cabinet, 541
259, 263 and KVP, 557, 560
cabinet negotiations 1927, 358 controversy over monarchism, 575
cabinet negotiations 1929, 436 as parliamentary leader of Christian
first Luther cabinet, 253 National Coalition, 508, 545
first Marx cabinet 1924, 253 as VKV chairman, 511, 545 47, 556
first Müller cabinet, 433 quest for conservative unity, 508, 510,
Reich School Law, 380 81 565
and Front 1929, 436 Trimborn, Carl, 131
and Liberal Association, 433 34
proposed reform of DVP, 436 Ullmann, Hermann, 509
stabilization strategy, 241, 255, 257, Die Rechte stirbt es lebe die Rechte, 509
265, 329, 381 82, 431, 434 Ulrich, Else, 537
as foreign minister, 224, 230, 300, United Patriotic Leagues of Germany
320, 361, 469 (VVVD), 172 75, 200,
Dawes Plan, 231 225 26, 299 300, 304,
proposed Rhineland security pact 349, 373, 375 76, 464,
and DNVP, 323 467, 469
revision of Dawes Plan, 470 71 and DNVP, 226, 325, 373
Stubbendorf, Walther, 567 delegate conference Berlin 1923,
Sybel, Heinrich von, 513, 561 200
electoral truce December 1924, 246
Tänzler, Fritz, 143 and Hitler, 201
Thadden, Reinhold von, 537 and Hugenberg, 480
Thiel, Otto, 69, 71 on the “Jewish question”, 173
proposed reform of DVP, 435 36 Locarno, 325
Thuringia, 28, 30, 74, 111, 201, 205, National Committee for the German
450 Referendum, 473
left wing unrest 1923, 185 Rhineland security pact, 320
removal of state government 1923, Ruhr occupation, 174, 180 81
195, 197 and “yellow” trade union movement,
Thyssen, Fritz, 265, 344, 367, 387, 392, 301
423, 473, 476 United Steel Works, 392, 471, 507
 

Veidt, Karl, 424, 519 20 Decree for the Reducation of Public

speech at the Kassel party Personnel 1923, 208
congress1929, 500 enabiling act of 13 October 1923,
veterans’ organizations. See also 208
Stahlhelm enabling act of 8 December 1923,
German Kyffhäuser League of 210
Imperial Warriors, 325 introduction of Rentenmark, 208
opposition to Locarno, 325 reintroduction of ten hour day, 209
National Association of German Third Emergency Tax Decree 1923,
Officers, 170, 467 209
Reich Front Soldiers’ Congress world economic crisis, 7, 493
eighth national congress 1927, budget crisis, 524
374 unemployment, 524
Vietinghoff Scheel, Leopold von, 157, Weiß, Max, 474
373 Wendhausen, Albrecht, 473, 514, 561
Vögler, Albert, 188, 214, 225, 265, 282, Werner, Ferdinand, 151
285, 342, 471, 476, 497 98, Westarp, Kuno von, 6, 20, 24, 37, 80,
507 83 85, 93, 95, 101, 104,
Vogt, Wilhelm, 106, 567 108 9, 115, 130, 180 81,
187, 190 91, 193, 197, 200,
Wagner, Siegfried, 477 78, 526 234, 275, 302, 304, 312,
Wallbaum, Wilhelm, 26, 77 339, 372, 392, 422, 471,
Wallraf, Max, 236, 238, 420, 459, 502, 533, 548, 556, 561,
547 48 567 68, 571, 591 92
speech at the Görlitz party congress and Central Association of German
1922, 159 Conservatives, 79 80,
Wangenheim, Conrad von, 268 102 3, 336, 412
Warburg, Max, 389 as chairman of DNVP Reichstag
Weber, August, 433 delegation, 312, 317, 322,
Weber, Max, 2 336, 448, 466, 478, 501 4
Weimar economy, 7, 432, 594 collapse of first Luther cabinet, 312,
agriculture, 540 329
impact of stabilization, 209, 247, 314 controversy over §4 of the
indebtedness, 383 “Freedom Law”, 482
peasant protest 1927 28, 383 86 December secession 1929, 503 5
trade policy, 316 18 Locarno dispute, 323 26
inflation, 7, 128, 134, 175 76, 178, speech at Berlin party congress
207, 592 1925, 329
recession 1925 26, 333 and DKP, 17, 24
agriculture, 332 33 as DNVP party chairman, 336 38,
revaluation, 7, 395 97 364 65, 372, 376, 380, 399,
ruling of German Supreme Court, 404, 415, 421, 430, 456
209 agriculture, 369
Third Emergency Tax Decree 1923, cabinet negotiations 1927, 360, 362
210, 246, 313, 315, 354 and Graefe Goldebee, 157
stabilization, 7, 201, 207 12, 316, 593, and Hindenburg, 263, 447, 527
595 and KVP, 556 57, 559, 565, 574
consequences, 208 11, 213 and NSDAP
consumption taxes, 208 taming strategy, 590
  

keynote address Willisen, Friedrich Wilhelm von,

Cologne party congress 1926, 529
345 57 Wilmowsky, Tilo von, 234, 341 42,
Königsberg party congress 1927, 389, 392, 489
378 79 Wilson, Woodrow, 82
Lambach affair, 417 20 Winckler, Friedrich
proposed Arbeitsgemeinschaft with as DNVP party chairman, 244 45,
DVP, 343, 345 263, 336
Reichstag elections May 1928, 411 1925 presidential election, 262
Reichstag speech of 3 February speech of 4 November 1924, 245
1927, 361 62, 370 and Lutheran General Synod, 244
renewal of Law for the Protection Winnig, August, 289
of the Republic, 370 Winterfeld, Friedrich von, 285, 422
commitment to monarchism, Wirth, Joseph, 126, 134, 281, 370, 535
361 62, 370, 377 as chancellor, 132, 146, 154 55, 179
conflict with Hugenberg, 378, Law for the Protection of the
411 12, 418 22, 425 31, Republic, 172
446 48, 544 45, 548, 553 Rathenau’s assassination, 155
DNVP racist crisis, 156 59 tax compromise 1922, 177
Kapp Lüttwitz putsch, 99 Wischnövski, Gustav, 537
quest for bourgeois unity, 559 60 Wissel, Rudolf, 531
Ruhr heavy industry, 387 88, 408, women, 38 41, 46 47, 251 52
423, 563 and DNVP, 38 41, 107, 251 52
speech at Berlin party congress 1919, elections to the Weimar National
85 Assembly 1919, 46 47
statement on antisemitism 1922, organizations, 38 40
156 Association of Conservative
Wheeler Bennett, John, 525 Women (VKF), 38
white collar unions. See also German Federations of German
National Union of Housewive’s Associations,
Commercial Employees 38
(DHV) German Protestant Women’s
Federation of Employee Unions League, 38
(GdA), 68 National Federation of Agricultural
membership, 64 Housewives’ Associations,
United Federation of German 38
Employee Unions Naval League of German Women,
(Gedag), 68 38
Widenmann, Wilhelm, 387 88, 497 98 Patriotic Women’s Club, 38
Wider, Fritz, 568 Protestant Women’s Aid, 38
Wieber, Georg, 69 Women’s Club of the German
Wilhelm II, 24, 81, 146 47, 167, 465, Colonial Society, 38
533 World War I, 21 24. See also German
Wilhelm, Walther, 354 Fatherland Party (DVLP)
Wilhelmine conservatism, 16 20 and antisemitism, 36
crisis of conservative hegemony, myth of the “front experience”,
16 17 166 67, 350 51
political infrastructure, 17 20 Peace Resolution, 16, 21
and World War I, 16 spirit of August 1914, 22
 

Wulle, Reinhold, 152 53, 156 and Hindenburg, 375

DNVP racist crisis, 157 59, 161 defection from the patriotic front,
Württemberg, 6, 28 29, 38, 106, 111, 375 76
400 founding of DStP, 564
Württemberg Burgher Party (WBP), ideological profile
29, 429, 568 69, 571 anti Marxism, 170
alliance with WBWB, 30 antisemitism, 171
and DNVP, 97 commitment to German Christian
Wüst, Reinhard, 353 culture, 170
concept of Volksgemeinschaft,
Xylander, Rudolf von, 184, 220, 477 171
and People’s National Reich
yellow trade union movement, 72, 300, Association (VNR),
403, 416, 424 551
and DNVP, 416 17, 448 and “People’s National Action”,
and VVVD, 301 494
concept of “work community” Ring of National German Catholics,
(Werkgemeinschaft), 416 348
National Alliance of Patriotic social composition, 171
Workers’ Clubs (RvA), and Stahlhelm, 170 72, 347, 375
174, 403 youth
National Farm Workers’ League, 61, organizations
174, 334 German National Youth League
National Federation of German (DNJ), 139 40, 174
Professional Unions National Federation of DNVP
(NDB), 300 Youth Groups, 140
National Federation of German Young German League, 140
Unions, 173 Young National League, 140
National League of German White Wandervögel, 171
Collar Professional
Associations, 145 Zapf, Alfred, 130
Young German Order, 166, 170 72, Zehrer, Hans, 509
174, 248, 299 301, 376, Zeigner, Erich, 353
464, 467, 494, 586 Ziblatt, Daniel, 2
1925 presidential election, 258, 263, Ziesché, Kurt, 460
303 Zitzewitz Kottow, Friedrich von, 302,
1926 Saxon Landtag elections, 348 334