How did the German Weimar Republic, a constitutional democracy with checks and balances descend into a totalitarian system, the dictatorship of the Nazis? In his new book, “The Death of Democracy: Hitler’s Rise to Power and the Downfall of the Weimar Republic,” Professor Benjamin C. Hett (The Graduate Center, CUNY and Hunter College) focuses on the old elites that enabled Hitler’s rise to power. Conservative politicians, part of the military, and powerful interest groups that represented the landed aristocracy from East-Elbia tried to co-opt the Hitler movement in an attempt to abolish democratic rule and the hated republic.
“We [the old elites] have hired [Hitler] … In two months we will have Hitler in a corner, squealing,” thus the chancellor of the final days of the Weimarer Republic, Franz von Papen, famously assessed in January 1933. Historians have been described that period as “substantially devoid of democratic content” (Karl Dietrich Bracher) or “somewhere between a parliamentary democracy and an authoritarian regime” (Michael Burleigh). Much points at democratic rule already having been severely undermined at the time Hitler became chancellor. Hett’s insights serve as an important reminder that democracy requires the support of political and economic elites in both substance and procedure.