The German People's Party was a conservative-liberal political party during the Weimar Republic that was the successor to the National Liberal Party of the German Empire. Along with the left-liberal German Democratic Party (DDP), it represented political liberalism in Germany between 1918 and 1933.
Franz Joseph Hermann Michael Maria von Papen, Erbsälzer zu Werl und Neuwerk was a German national conservative, diplomat, Prussian nobleman and General Staff officer. He served as the chancellor of Germany in 1932, and then as the vice-chancellor under Adolf Hitler from 1933 to 1934. Papen is largely remembered for his role in bringing Hitler to power.
The Centre Party, officially the German Centre Party and also known in English as the Catholic Centre Party, is a Christian democratic political party in Germany. It was most Influential in the German Empire and Weimar Republic. Formed in 1870, it successfully battled the Kulturkampf waged by Chancellor Otto von Bismarck against the Catholic Church. It soon won a quarter of the seats in the Reichstag, and its middle position on most issues allowed it to play a decisive role in the formation of majorities. The party name Zentrum (Centre) originally came from the fact that Catholic representatives would take up the middle section of seats in parliament between the social democrats and the conservatives.
Otto Braun was a politician of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) during the Weimar Republic. From 1920 to 1932, with only two brief interruptions, Braun was Minister President of the Free State of Prussia. The continuity of personnel in high office resulted in a largely stable government in Prussia, in contrast to the sometimes turbulent politics of the Reich. During his term of office, Prussia's public administration was reorganized along democratic lines. He replaced many monarchist officials with supporters of the Weimar Republic, strengthened and democratized the Prussian police, and made attempts to fight the rise of the Nazi Party.
The German National People's Party was a national-conservative and monarchist political party in Germany during the Weimar Republic. Before the rise of the Nazi Party, it was the major nationalist party in Weimar Germany. It was an alliance of conservative, nationalist, monarchist, völkisch, and antisemitic elements supported by the Pan-German League. Ideologically, the party was described as subscribing to authoritarian conservatism, German nationalism, monarchism, and from 1931 onwards also to corporatism in economic policy. It held anti-communist, anti-Catholic, and antisemitic views. On the left–right political spectrum, it belonged on the right-wing, and is classified as far-right in its early years and then again from the late 1920s when it moved back rightward.
The Weimar Coalition is the name given to the coalition government formed by the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), the German Democratic Party (DDP) and the Catholic Centre Party (Z), who together had a large majority of the delegates to the Constituent Assembly that met at Weimar in 1919, and were the principal groups that designed the constitution of the Weimar Republic. These three parties were seen as the most committed to Germany's new democratic system, and together governed Germany until the elections of 1920, when the first elections under the new constitution were held, and both the SPD and especially the DDP lost a considerable share of their votes. Although the Coalition was revived in the ministry of Joseph Wirth from 1921 to 1922, the pro-democratic elements never truly had a majority in the Reichstag from this point on, and the situation gradually grew worse for them with the continued weakening of the DDP. This meant that any pro-republican group that hoped to attain a majority would need to form a "Grand Coalition" with the conservative-liberal German People's Party (DVP), which only gradually moved from monarchism to republicanism over the course of the Weimar Republic and was virtually wiped out politically after the death of their most prominent figure, Foreign Minister Gustav Stresemann in 1929.
In the fourteen years the Weimar Republic was in existence, some forty parties were represented in the Reichstag. This fragmentation of political power was in part due to the use of a peculiar proportional representation electoral system that encouraged regional or small special interest parties and in part due to the many challenges facing the nascent German democracy in this period.
Presidential elections were held in Germany on 29 March 1925, with a runoff on 26 April. They were the first direct elections to the office of President of the Reich, Germany's head of state during the 1919–33 Weimar Republic. The first President, Friedrich Ebert, who had died on 28 February 1925, had been elected indirectly, by the National Assembly, but the Weimar Constitution required that his successor be elected by the "whole German people". Paul von Hindenburg was elected as the second president of Germany in the second round of voting.
The 1932 Prussian coup d'état or Preußenschlag took place on 20 July 1932, when Reich President Paul von Hindenburg, at the request of Franz von Papen, then Reich Chancellor of Germany, replaced the legal government of the Free State of Prussia with von Papen as Reich Commissioner. A second decree the same day transferred executive power in Prussia to the Reich Minister of the Armed Forces Kurt von Schleicher and restricted fundamental rights.
Federal elections were held in Germany on 31 July 1932, following the premature dissolution of the Reichstag. The Nazi Party made significant gains and became the largest party in the Reichstag for the first time, although they failed to win a majority. The Communist Party increased their vote share as well. All other parties combined held less than half the seats in the Reichstag, meaning no majority coalition government could be formed without including at least one of these two parties.
Federal elections were held in Germany on 14 September 1930. Despite losing ten seats, the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) remained the largest party in the Reichstag, winning 143 of the 577 seats, while the Nazi Party (NSDAP) dramatically increased its number of seats from 12 to 107. The Communists also increased their parliamentary representation, gaining 23 seats and becoming the third-largest party in the Reichstag.
The Free State of Prussia was one of the constituent states of Germany from 1918 to 1947. The successor to the Kingdom of Prussia after the defeat of the German Empire in World War I, it continued to be the dominant state in Germany during the Weimar Republic, as it had been during the empire, even though most of Germany's post-war territorial losses in Europe had come from its lands. It was home to the federal capital Berlin and had 62% of Germany's territory and 61% of its population. Prussia changed from the authoritarian state it had been in the past and became a parliamentary democracy under its 1920 constitution. During the Weimar period it was governed almost entirely by pro-democratic parties and proved more politically stable than the Republic itself. With only brief interruptions, the Social Democratic Party (SPD) provided the Minister President. Its Ministers of the Interior, also from the SPD, pushed republican reform of the administration and police, with the result that Prussia was considered a bulwark of democracy within the Weimar Republic.
The Free State of Brunswick was a state of the German Reich in the time of the Weimar Republic. It was formed after the abolition of the Duchy of Brunswick in the course of the German Revolution of 1918–19. Its capital was Braunschweig (Brunswick). In 1933 it was de facto abolished by Nazi Germany. The free state was disestablished after the Second World War in 1946.
The Free State of Mecklenburg-Schwerin was a state in the Weimar Republic that was established on 14 November 1918 upon the abdication of the Grand Duke of Mecklenburg-Schwerin following the German Revolution. In 1933, after the onset of Nazi rule, it was united with the smaller neighbouring Free State of Mecklenburg-Strelitz to form the new united state of Mecklenburg on 1 January 1934.
Carl Wilhelm Severing was a German union organizer and Social Democratic politician during the German Empire, Weimar Republic and the early post-World War II years in West Germany. He served as a Reichstag member and as interior minister in both Prussia and at the Reich level where he fought against the rise of extremism on both the left and the right. He remained in Germany during the Third Reich but had only minimal influence on reshaping the Social Democratic Party after World War II.
The Prussian State Council was the second chamber of the bicameral legislature of the Free State of Prussia between 1921 and 1933; the first chamber was the Prussian Landtag. The members of the State Council were elected by the provincial parliaments and gave the provinces of Prussia a voice in the legislative process. The Council had an indirect right to introduce legislation, could object to bills passed by the Reichstag and had to approve expenditures that exceeded the budget.
The 1931 Prussian Landtag referendum was an attempt to prematurely dissolve the sitting session of the Landtag (parliament) of the Weimar German state of Prussia. The referendum, which took place according to Article 6 of the 1920 Prussian Constitution, was triggered by a petition launched in the spring of 1931 by the anti-republican veterans' organization Der Stahlhelm. It was supported by several right-wing parties including the Nazis, as well as by the Communist Party of Germany (KPD). Even though 93.9% of those voting on 9 August 1931 opted to dissolve the Landtag, the referendum failed because the turnout of 39.2% did not meet the minimum 50% requirement.
The Papen cabinet, headed by the independent Franz von Papen, was the nineteenth government of the Weimar Republic. It took office on 1 June 1932 when it replaced the second Brüning cabinet, which had resigned the same day after it lost the confidence of President Paul von Hindenburg.
The presidential cabinets were a succession of governments of the Weimar Republic whose legitimacy derived exclusively from presidential emergency decrees. From April 1930 to January 1933, three chancellors, Heinrich Brüning, Franz von Papen, and Kurt von Schleicher were appointed by President Paul von Hindenburg, and governed without the consent of the Reichstag, Germany's lower house of parliament. After Schleicher's tenure, the leader of the Nazis Adolf Hitler succeeded to the chancellorship and regained the consent of the Reichstag by obtaining a majority in the March 1933 German federal election with DNVP.
The Provisional Law and Second Law on the Coordination of the States with the Reich were two laws enacted by the German government of Adolf Hitler to expand its control over the seventeen German states (länder). The Provisional (First) Law dissolved all the sitting landtage, except for that of Prussia, and reconstituted them in accordance with the results of the recent parliamentary election of 5 March 1933, which had given the Nazi Party and its coalition partner, the German National People's Party (DNVP), a majority of the Reichstag seats. The Second Law established the new powerful position of Reichsstatthalter appointed by the central government to effectively take control of each state administration. The effect of these laws was to undermine the power and influence of all political parties other than the Nazis and the DNVP, and to move Germany significantly away from being a federal republic and put it on a path to becoming a unitary state.
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