The Weimar Republic's inheritance

The Republic was born from defeat — and never escaped the association.

• 9 November 1918: Kaiser Wilhelm II abdicated; a republic was proclaimed; the armistice followed on 11 November. The Ebert–Groener pact traded army support for the suppression of the far left — the Spartacist rising (January 1919) was crushed by the Freikorps, and Liebknecht and Luxemburg were murdered. The left never forgave the SPD.
• The Constitution (August 1919): universal suffrage at 20, but also proportional representation (fragmenting the Reichstag into coalitions) and Article 48, permitting rule by presidential emergency decree. Both would be fatal.
• The Treaty of Versailles (28 June 1919): territorial loss, disarmament, reparations, and Article 231 — the 'war guilt' clause. It fed the stab-in-the-back myth and permanently delegitimised the politicians who signed it — the 'November criminals'.
• 1920–1923: the Kapp Putsch (1920) from the right; the murder of foreign minister Walther Rathenau (1922); the French occupation of the Ruhr (January 1923); and the hyperinflation of 1923, which destroyed savings and the security of the middle class. In November 1923 Hitler's Munich Putsch failed — and won him a national platform at his trial.

Careful with Article 48. It was designed for genuine emergencies and used sparingly by Ebert. It became lethal only after 1930, when Brüning governed by decree as a matter of routine. Structures do not kill democracies on their own — choices do.

The constitution's fault lines

Stresemann and the fragile recovery

Gustav Stresemann — Chancellor briefly in 1923, then foreign minister until his death in October 1929 — stabilised the Republic.

• Currency: the Rentenmark (November 1923) ended hyperinflation.
• Reparations: the Dawes Plan (1924) rescheduled payments and opened the tap of American loans; the Young Plan (1929) reduced the total.
• Diplomacy: the Locarno treaties (1925) guaranteed the western borders; Germany joined the League of Nations (1926).
• Culture: Bauhaus, Brecht, Weimar cinema — a period of extraordinary creativity that also generated a fierce conservative backlash.

How 'golden'? The recovery rested on short-term American loans that could be — and in 1929 were — recalled. Unemployment never fell below about 1.3 million even in the best years, agriculture was already depressed by 1927, and the anti-republican right (DNVP, and Hindenburg as President from 1925) had not been reconciled. The examinable judgement: stabilisation was real but shallow. Say which.

Depression, decree and the appointment of Hitler

The Wall Street Crash (October 1929) triggered the recall of American loans. Unemployment climbed towards six million by early 1932.

• March 1930: the Grand Coalition collapsed over unemployment insurance. Brüning governed by Article 48 — parliamentary democracy effectively ended three years before Hitler, and his deflationary policy deepened the slump.
• Elections: the NSDAP went from 12 seats (1928) to 107 (September 1930) to 230 — the largest party — in July 1932. It then fell back to 196 in November 1932: Nazi support was already past its peak when Hitler took office.
• The appointment: Hitler was made Chancellor on 30 January 1933 not by electoral victory but by an intrigue — Papen persuading Hindenburg that a Hitler cabinet with only two other Nazis could be controlled. It could not.
• Consolidation, at speed: the Reichstag Fire (27 February 1933) → the Reichstag Fire Decree suspending civil liberties; the Enabling Act (23 March 1933), passed with Centre Party votes, gave the cabinet power to legislate; Gleichschaltung destroyed the parties and unions by July; the Night of the Long Knives (30 June 1934) bought the army's loyalty with Röhm's blood; on Hindenburg's death (2 August 1934) Hitler merged the offices and the army swore a personal oath to him.

The precision that scores: 'Hitler was elected' is false and examiners punish it. He was appointed — and the vote of the Reichstag that mattered most, the Enabling Act, was taken with the KPD deputies already arrested and the building surrounded by the SA.

How Hitler came to power

Weimar, seizure, or Third Reich?

Tap an event, then the phase of 2O it belongs to.

Terror, consent and the racial state

How was the Third Reich actually governed? Not as a smoothly efficient machine.

• Terror: the SS under Himmler, the Gestapo, the concentration camps (Dachau from March 1933). But research on Gestapo files shows the force was small and heavily dependent on denunciations from ordinary Germans — terror worked partly because society co-operated.
• Consent: propaganda under Goebbels; Strength Through Joy; the apparent economic miracle — the Reich Labour Service, rearmament and public works cut registered unemployment sharply, though the figures were massaged by removing Jews and women from the count.
• The racial state: the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service (April 1933); sterilisation of the 'hereditarily diseased' (July 1933); the Nuremberg Laws (September 1935) stripping Jews of citizenship and criminalising marriage; Kristallnacht (9–10 November 1938).
• Economy: Schacht's 'New Plan' (1934), then Göring's Four Year Plan (1936) — autarky and rearmament, an economy pointed at war.
• Opposition: real but fragmented — the Confessing Church (Niemöller), Edelweiss Pirates, the White Rose (1943), and the army's July Bomb Plot (20 July 1944).

The 'weak dictator' thesis. Hans Mommsen and Martin Broszat (The Hitler State, 1969) argued the regime was a polycracy — overlapping, competing agencies, an unsystematic Hitler who avoided routine decisions. Ian Kershaw resolved the paradox with the idea of 'working towards the Führer' (a phrase he took from a 1934 speech by a Nazi official): subordinates anticipated Hitler's wishes and radicalised policy competitively — so chaos and Hitler's centrality are both true.

How the regime radicalised

The radicalising war

War did not interrupt Nazi ideology; it unleashed it.

• Escalation: after the invasion of Poland (1 September 1939) ghettoisation began; the invasion of the USSR (Operation Barbarossa, 22 June 1941) was explicitly a war of annihilation, with the Einsatzgruppen conducting mass shootings behind the front.
• The Wannsee Conference (20 January 1942) did not decide on genocide — killing was already under way — but co-ordinated the Final Solution across the German bureaucracy. The extermination camps followed.
• Home front: Speer's rationalisation of armaments; the 'total war' mobilisation proclaimed by Goebbels in February 1943 after Stalingrad; mass use of forced labour; Allied bombing.
• Collapse: the July Bomb Plot (20 July 1944) failed and was followed by savage reprisals. Hitler killed himself on 30 April 1945; Germany surrendered unconditionally on 8 May.

Intentionalism vs structuralism, applied to the Holocaust. Intentionalists (Lucy Dawidowicz, Eberhard Jäckel) see a long-held plan flowing from Hitler's ideology. Structuralists/functionalists (Broszat, Mommsen) see a cumulative radicalisation — improvised escalation in the chaos of war in the east. Most historians now hold a middle position: Hitler's ideological intent was the necessary condition; the machinery, the timing and the method were produced by the war and by competing agencies.

Build the German spine

Tap the events in chronological order, earliest first.

Interpretation → historian

Tap an argument on the left, then the historian most associated with it.

Browning vs Goldhagen

The extract question

AQA Component 2: 80 marks, 2 hours 30 minutes, 40% of the A-level.

• Section A (30 marks): three historians' extracts. Evaluate each argument's persuasiveness using your own knowledge — not its 'bias'.
• Sections B and C (25 marks each): two essays from three, each a judgement.

2O-specific advice: most extracts in this option sit somewhere on the intentionalist–structuralist spectrum, or in the terror vs consent debate about how the regime held power. Learn to place an extract on that map in one sentence — then spend the rest of the answer testing it against precise evidence: the July 1932 vote, the Enabling Act, Gestapo denunciation records, the chronology of killing in 1941.

Terror or consent?

Did the Nazis fix the economy?

The 'economic miracle' is the regime's most successful claim, and it needs careful dismantling.

• What is true: registered unemployment fell dramatically. Public works, the Reich Labour Service, conscription and above all rearmament put people to work. Schacht's Mefo bills concealed the borrowing that funded it.
• What is misleading: Jews and women were removed from the unemployment statistics; conscription absorbed a cohort of young men; and the figures were politically managed.
• What was sacrificed: real wages recovered only slowly, consumer goods and housing were starved of investment, and independent unions were destroyed — workers gained jobs and lost bargaining power.
• Where it was heading: Göring's Four Year Plan (1936) pursued autarky and rearmament explicitly to make Germany ready for war within four years. This was not an economy being repaired; it was an economy being aimed.

The interpretation to know: some historians have argued that by 1939 the regime faced a mounting economic crisis — shortages of labour, raw materials and foreign exchange — which made war not merely ideological but economically urgent. Others reject the idea of an economy forced into war on a timetable. It is a live debate: engage it, don't settle it by assertion.

Reading the unemployment figures

Who resisted, and why so few?

Opposition existed, and it failed. Explaining why is more interesting than listing it.

• The left — SPD and KPD — was destroyed first and fastest, its leaders in camps or exile by mid-1933, and it was fatally divided before that.
• The churches resisted selectively: Bishop Galen's sermons against the murder of the disabled in 1941 forced the regime to end the T4 programme's public phase — proof that concerted protest could work. That it happened so rarely is the point.
• Youth: the Edelweiss Pirates and Swing Kids rejected the regime culturally more than politically. The White Rose students in Munich were executed in 1943.
• The elite and the army: the July Bomb Plot of 20 July 1944 — Stauffenberg's attempt — came only when the war was visibly lost, and was followed by mass reprisals.

The uncomfortable conclusion examiners reward: resistance was rare not principally because terror made it impossible, but because the regime delivered things many Germans wanted — work, order, national restoration — until it began losing the war. Galen's success in 1941 shows what pressure might have achieved had more been willing to apply it.

The big ideas to carry into the exam

You now have the whole of AQA 2O and the debates that define it. Press Finish to see your score.