Hindenburg becomes president

On 12 May 1925, in the Reichstag building in Berlin, the 77-year-old Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg took the oath as the second President of the Reich. The oath was administered by the president of the parliament, the Social Democrat Paul Löbe, and the old soldier – symbol of imperial Germany and victor of Tannenberg – swore loyalty to the Weimar Constitution, that is, to a republic for which he had never felt any sympathy. War chronologies often record that Hindenburg was “elected on 12 May”. In fact the election had been decided earlier, in the second round of voting on 26 April 1925, and on 12 May the new president took office. He was the first German president elected directly by the citizens, since his predecessor had been chosen in 1919 by the National Assembly.

Ebert’s death

The first President of the Reich, the Social Democrat Friedrich Ebert, died unexpectedly on 28 February 1925 at the age of 54. He had been suffering from appendicitis for weeks but kept putting off an operation because he was fighting in court to defend his good name. A nationalist journalist had accused him of high treason for his part in the strike of Berlin munitions workers in January 1918. In December 1924 a court in Magdeburg sentenced the libeller to three months in prison for insult, but in its reasoning held that in the legal sense Ebert had indeed committed treason. The verdict was a blow to the president, and for the republic a foretaste of how judges and much of the middle class treated the men of the 1918 revolution. By the time Ebert finally went under the knife, his peritonitis was too far advanced.

The duties of president passed briefly to Chancellor Hans Luther, and from March, under a special law, to the president of the Reich Court, Walter Simons. The constitution provided for the president to be elected by popular vote for a seven-year term. An absolute majority was needed in the first round; in the second a simple plurality sufficed, and parties could then put forward entirely new candidates. This last rule was to decide the outcome.

The first round

The election was set for 29 March 1925. The democratic parties tried to agree on a joint candidate, but the talks failed, so seven candidates stood in the first round, almost each of them representing a single party. The right-wing “Reich Bloc” (Reichsblock), in which the German National People’s Party (DNVP) and Gustav Stresemann’s German People’s Party (DVP) worked together, put up the Lord Mayor of Duisburg, Karl Jarres. The Social Democrats nominated the former Prussian prime minister Otto Braun, the Centre Party its chairman, the former chancellor Wilhelm Marx, and the Communists Ernst Thälmann. Also standing were the left-liberal candidate Willy Hellpach and the Bavarian prime minister Heinrich Held. The far right was represented by Erich Ludendorff, Hitler’s accomplice in the Beer Hall Putsch, acquitted a year earlier at the trial in which Hitler was convicted. He was backed by Adolf Hitler, who had left Landsberg prison in December 1924 and at the end of February 1925 had re-founded the NSDAP.

Nobody won a majority. Jarres received 38.8 per cent of the vote, Braun 29 per cent, Marx 14.5 per cent, Thälmann 7 per cent, Hellpach 5.8 per cent and Held 3.8 per cent. Ludendorff got a mere 1.1 per cent, about 286,000 votes. For the war hero it was a humiliation. According to some historians, Hitler, who had himself encouraged him to stand, was not at all sorry to see a rival for the leadership of the völkisch movement made a laughing stock. Turnout was just under 69 per cent, markedly lower than in the Reichstag election of December 1924. After years of putsches and inflation, Germans – thanks to currency stabilisation and the Dawes Plan – had for a moment turned away from extremes.

The People’s Bloc and the Reich Bloc

Before the second round the parties of the so-called Weimar Coalition – the Social Democrats, the Centre and the Democrats – realised that only a joint candidate gave them a chance. They formed the “People’s Bloc” (Volksblock) and on 3 April agreed on Marx. The Social Democrats consented to back the Catholic politician, and in return the Centre helped Braun return the same day to the post of Prussian prime minister. Marx did not inspire the crowds, and to many Protestants he was a “Roman” candidate, but together the three parties had won more than half the vote in the first round.

The right knew that Jarres could not beat Marx. It needed someone who would attract people who had not voted at all and whom nobody would see as a party politician. A Hohenzollern prince, the head of the Army Command Hans von Seeckt and industrialists were all considered. The choice finally fell on Hindenburg, retired since 1919 in Hanover, the most popular man in Germany, who for millions embodied duty and past greatness. The field marshal refused for a long time, citing his age and his dislike of party quarrels. He gave way only when Grand Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz presented the candidacy to him as a duty to the fatherland. On 8 April he agreed to stand. Biographers disagree over whether this time he first asked the consent of Kaiser Wilhelm II, in exile in the Netherlands: some write that he obtained it, others that the Kaiser was merely informed. Jarres withdrew, and Hitler told his followers to vote for the field marshal.

Hindenburg’s candidacy horrified Stresemann. The foreign minister was in the middle of talks on a guarantee of the Rhine frontier and feared that the election of a wartime commander, whom the victors had in 1920 placed on the list of persons to be handed over as war criminals, would be seen abroad as heralding a return of militarism and monarchy. The British, French and American press did indeed react with alarm, and in the final days Chancellor Luther tried to persuade both main candidates to withdraw in favour of Simons. He failed.

Two decisions taken far from Hanover settled the matter. The Bavarian People’s Party, Catholic but at odds with the Centre and hostile to the Social Democrats, urged its supporters to vote for the Protestant Hindenburg rather than the Catholic Marx. The Communists, for their part, against the advice of the Comintern, kept Thälmann in the race, though they knew he was taking votes from the republic’s candidate. Hindenburg barely campaigned. He appeared at a single rally in Hanover and gave one radio address in which he promised to safeguard peace, the rule of law and the unity of the nation. His supporters presented him as a man above parties who would reconcile divided Germans.

26 April

In the second round on 26 April 1925 turnout rose to 77.6 per cent. Hindenburg won 48.3 per cent of the vote, about 14.7 million; Marx 45.3 per cent, about 13.8 million; and Thälmann 6.4 per cent, about 1.9 million. Had all the Communist voters backed Marx, he would have won. The next day the Social Democratic Vorwärts wrote of Hindenburg “by the grace of Thälmann”. Historians point out, however, that KPD voters would not have supported the candidate of the “bourgeois” republic anyway, and that victory was decided rather by the support of Bavarian Catholics and of some three million people who had not voted in the first round and now turned out for the field marshal. Hindenburg also won the votes of Protestant liberal voters and some Social Democrats who were averse to a Catholic candidate, especially in Saxony and Württemberg, and in East Prussia, where the memory of Tannenberg was most vivid, he attracted voters of the republican parties too.

The right celebrated. Processions filled the streets, thanksgiving services were held in churches, and a nationalist newspaper ran the headline “Heil Hindenburg!”. The democrats regarded the result as a defeat. On 29 April Hindenburg accepted his election; on 11 May he arrived in Berlin, greeted by crowds, and the next day he took the oath. He is said to have confided to friends that he had only now read the constitution and that it did not seem so bad to him. As he read it, he reportedly marked the provisions on the president in blue and those on the government and parliament in red, as on a military map, where red denoted the enemy.

The first years in office

The fears of April 1925 soon subsided. Hindenburg did not break his oath, made no attempt to restore the monarchy and did not block Stresemann’s foreign policy. He supported the agreements Germany negotiated at Locarno in the autumn of 1925, entry into the League of Nations and later the Young Plan, although the right that had elected him regarded all this as treason. Monarchists in his circle, such as Tirpitz, grew disillusioned with the president fairly quickly, while some democrats concluded that the field marshal’s authority might bind to the republic a conservative Germany that had rejected it until then.

With few exceptions, however, historians judge the 1925 election a defeat for democracy. The German historian Heinrich August Winkler called it a “conservative re-formation” of the republic. At the head of the state stood a man from another era, bound to the army and to the great landowners east of the Elbe, and his closest circle – his son Oskar von Hindenburg, the head of his office Otto Meissner and the generals of the Reichswehr Ministry, among them Kurt von Schleicher – gradually turned the presidency into a centre of power independent of parliament. As early as 1925–1926 Hindenburg was demanding governments “further to the right”, without the Social Democrats; he rejected the idea of a law restricting his powers under Article 48 of the constitution, which allowed him to issue decrees with the force of law; and he publicly opposed the expropriation of the former ruling houses. In September 1927, unveiling the memorial at Tannenberg, he declared that Germany bore no guilt for the outbreak of the war. For his 80th birthday grateful industrialists and landowners presented him with his family’s estate of Neudeck in East Prussia, bought back for him and registered in his son’s name to avoid inheritance tax.

Significance

Hindenburg’s election set the course that Germany followed in 1930–1933. When the Great Depression broke up the last parliamentary government in March 1930, it was Hindenburg who, under Article 48, established the presidential governments of Chancellor Heinrich Brüning, and later of Franz von Papen and Schleicher. In 1932, in the next presidential election, the situation was entirely reversed: the Social Democrats and the Centre backed the 84-year-old field marshal as the only barrier against Hitler, while many of the voters who had elected Hindenburg in 1925 now voted for Hitler. On 30 January 1933 Hindenburg appointed Hitler chancellor, and in the following weeks he signed the decrees that abolished civil liberties. When he died on 2 August 1934, Hitler merged the offices of president and chancellor, and the army swore an oath to him personally.

The men who in April 1925 persuaded the old field marshal to stand hoped that he would be an umbrella for the right and that under him the republic would shift towards an authoritarian state. They did not foresee that the beneficiary would be a movement that in 1925 had won little more than one per cent of the vote. Thus the election of the spring of 1925, seen at the time as a victory of the old order over the republic, opened the way to a dictatorship that destroyed both, and five years after Hindenburg’s death plunged Germany into the Second World War.