A democracy nobody had asked for

The Republic was declared on 9 November 1918 and signed the armistice two days later. It never escaped that association.

• The Constitution (August 1919): genuinely democratic — but proportional representation fragmented the Reichstag, and Article 48 allowed the President to rule by emergency decree.
• Versailles (28 June 1919): territorial loss, disarmament, reparations, and the war-guilt clause. It fuelled the stab-in-the-back myth and branded the Republic's founders 'November criminals'.
• Crisis, 1919–23: the Spartacist rising (January 1919) crushed by Freikorps; the Kapp Putsch (1920) from the right; the French occupation of the Ruhr (January 1923); and the hyperinflation of 1923, which wiped out savings and the security of the middle class. Hitler's Munich Putsch (November 1923) failed — and made him famous.
• Recovery, 1924–29: Stresemann's Rentenmark ended the inflation; the Dawes Plan (1924) brought American loans; Locarno (1925) and League membership (1926) restored Germany's international position. But recovery rested on short-term American credit, and the anti-republican right was never reconciled.

Do not blame the constitution alone. Article 48 was used sparingly under Ebert. It became lethal only when Brüning chose, from March 1930, to govern by decree as a matter of routine.

Weimar's shallow recovery

Depression, decree and appointment

The Wall Street Crash (October 1929) triggered the recall of American loans; unemployment approached six million by early 1932.

• March 1930: Brüning began governing by Article 48. Parliamentary democracy effectively ended three years before Hitler took office, and his deflationary policy made the slump worse.
• Electoral surge: the NSDAP rose from 12 seats in 1928 to 107 in September 1930 to 230 — the largest party — in July 1932. It then fell back to 196 in November 1932. Nazi support had peaked before Hitler took power.
• 30 January 1933: Hitler was appointed Chancellor by Hindenburg, after intrigue by Papen, who believed a cabinet containing only two other Nazis could be controlled.
• Consolidation: the Reichstag Fire Decree (28 February 1933) suspended civil liberties; the Enabling Act (23 March 1933) gave the cabinet power to legislate; Gleichschaltung destroyed parties and unions by July; the Night of the Long Knives (30 June 1934) secured the army; on Hindenburg's death (2 August 1934) the offices were merged and the army swore a personal oath to Hitler.

Terror, consent, war and genocide

How the regime actually worked is the central historiographical question of this unit.

• Terror and consent together: the SS, Gestapo and camps (Dachau, March 1933) — but the Gestapo was a small force that depended heavily on denunciations by ordinary Germans. Meanwhile propaganda, Strength Through Joy, and the collapse of registered unemployment (helped by rearmament, the Labour Service, and by removing Jews and women from the count) bought real popularity.
• The racial state: the civil service law (April 1933); compulsory sterilisation (July 1933); the Nuremberg Laws (September 1935); Kristallnacht (9–10 November 1938).
• War and radicalisation: Poland (1939); Barbarossa (22 June 1941), a declared war of annihilation with the Einsatzgruppen murdering behind the lines; the Wannsee Conference (20 January 1942) co-ordinating a genocide already under way.
• Collapse: the July Bomb Plot (20 July 1944); Hitler's suicide on 30 April 1945; unconditional surrender on 8 May 1945.

Intentionalist or structuralist? Intentionalists stress Hitler's ideology and will as the driver. Structuralists — Martin Broszat, Hans Mommsen — describe a polycracy of competing agencies and a 'weak dictator' who avoided routine decisions, with policy radicalising cumulatively. Ian Kershaw's idea of 'working towards the Führer' (a phrase he drew from a 1934 speech by a Nazi official) reconciles the two: subordinates anticipated Hitler's wishes and competed to outdo them.

How Hitler took office

Which German state?

Tap a development, then the Germany it belongs to.

From four zones to two states

Division was not planned at Potsdam. It emerged from the breakdown of the wartime alliance.

• Potsdam (July–August 1945) agreed the four zones, denazification, demilitarisation and reparations — but not what Germany was for.
• The economic split: the American and British zones merged as Bizonia (1947); the Marshall Plan was rejected for the East. The Western currency reform of June 1948 was the decisive act, and the Soviets responded with the Berlin Blockade (June 1948 – May 1949), defeated by the airlift.
• Two states: the Federal Republic was founded under its Basic Law in May 1949, with Konrad Adenauer as Chancellor from September; the German Democratic Republic followed in October 1949 under Walter Ulbricht.

Was 1945 a 'zero hour'? The idea of Stunde Null — a clean break — is comforting and largely false. Denazification was abandoned early in the West as the Cold War made anti-communists more useful than pure records; judges, civil servants, doctors and industrialists carried on. That continuity is one of the most examinable features of the post-war years.

Adenauer's miracle and Ulbricht's wall

Two states, two answers to the German question.

• The Federal Republic: the Basic Law was deliberately engineered against Weimar's weaknesses — a 5% threshold to keep out splinter parties, a constructive vote of no confidence so a Chancellor could only be removed by electing a successor, and a weak presidency. Ludwig Erhard's social market economy produced the Wirtschaftswunder. Adenauer anchored the Republic in the West: the Council of Europe, the European Coal and Steel Community, NATO membership (1955) and the Treaty of Rome (1957). He resigned in 1963.
• The GDR: a one-party SED state with the Stasi, collectivised agriculture and nationalised industry. Raised work norms triggered the uprising of 17 June 1953, put down by Soviet tanks.
• Haemorrhage: millions left the GDR for the West through open Berlin, and they were disproportionately the young and the skilled. On 13 August 1961 the Berlin Wall was built. It stopped the exodus — and admitted, permanently and in concrete, that the GDR could not compete.

The comparative judgement this unit is built for: why did democracy fail in 1933 and succeed after 1949? Weigh the constitutional design (the Basic Law learned Weimar's lessons), the economic context (boom rather than depression), the international context (integration and American support rather than Versailles and isolation), and the absence of a mass anti-democratic right after the catastrophe of 1945. That is a genuinely analytical essay, and it is the one OCR most wants.

Learning from Weimar

Build the German spine

Tap the events in chronological order, earliest first.

Sonderweg, continuity, and Kershaw's synthesis

Because this unit spans both dictatorship and democracy, it invites the biggest question in modern German historiography: was there something distinctive about Germany's path?

Why this matters for your essay on 1949–63: if the Sonderweg were true, the stability of the Federal Republic would be very hard to explain. Its success is itself an argument in the debate — and saying that is a genuinely sophisticated move.

Interpretation → historian

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

The non-British period study

OCR Unit Group 2: 1 hour, 30 marks, 15% of the A-level — assessed by essay.

• Exploit the range. This unit's great advantage is that it lets you compare: Weimar's constitution against the Basic Law; the collapse of 1930–33 against the stability of the 1950s; the GDR against the Federal Republic. Comparative essays are where the top marks live.
• Be precise about power. 'Hitler was elected' is wrong. 'Germany was divided at Potsdam' is wrong. Both are common, and both cost marks.
• Do not let 1945 be a wall in your own answer. The best students trace continuities across it — of elites, of institutions, and of the arguments Germans had about their own past.

Why the Wall was built

How much of Nazi Germany survived 1945?

The idea of Stunde Null — 'zero hour', a clean break in May 1945 — is comforting and largely false. Testing it is one of the best essays this unit offers.

• Denazification began seriously and was then abandoned. As the Cold War hardened, the Western powers found trained anti-communist Germans more useful than pure records. Judges, civil servants, police officers, doctors, teachers and industrialists returned to their posts in large numbers.
• In the East, the SED claimed a clean break by defining Nazism as a product of capitalism — which conveniently meant that a socialist state was by definition anti-fascist, and that individual East Germans need not examine their own pasts.
• Reckoning came late. The Frankfurt Auschwitz trials (1963–65), prosecuted by Fritz Bauer, forced a public confrontation that had been avoided for two decades — and they belong to the very end of this unit's period.

The examinable judgement: the Federal Republic became a genuinely stable democracy while large numbers of former Nazis remained in public life. Both things are true, and holding them together — rather than choosing the comfortable half — is what a historian does.

Comparing 1919 and 1949

The big ideas to carry into the exam

You now have the whole of OCR's Germany unit — dictatorship and democracy in one frame. Press Finish to see your score.