Niess, Wolfgang Schicksalsjahr 1925

Als Hindenburg Präsident wurde

Elections decide the fate of democracies. We are more aware of this today than we have been for a long time. If the wrong people get into the highest offices, democracies can fail. In April 1925, the Germans elected Paul von Hindenburg as their Reich President, setting off a time bomb that would explode with destructive force in 1933. Wolfgang Niess shows how this came about and why Hindenburg became the gravedigger of the first German democracy. In February 1925, the Social Democrat Friedrich Ebert, the first Reich President appointed by the Weimar National Assembly, who had led Germany through the crises of the revolutionary and post-war period, dies. Who would succeed him? Wolfang Niess describes the background to the fateful election of 1925 in unprecedented depth. Influential forces on the new right wanted to use it to drive a wedge between bourgeois democrats and social democrats. They were looking for a kind of second Bismarck, who would push back the parties and parliament and eliminate democracy step by step. But the Republicans actually had a good chance of winning the election. How could they squander these chances? How could an anti-democrat get into the highest office of the state? And why did many overlook the long-term plans of the new incumbent? Analysing the 1925 election in detail is the key to reinterpreting Hindenburg's role in the establishment of the Nazi dictatorship. Because sometimes election results do not unfold their destructive potential immediately, but only years later.