Free State of Prussia

• 1. Introduction

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  The Free State of Prussia stopped existing on the 25th of February 1947, erased by a decree from the four-power Allied Control Council. For nearly three decades before that date, it had held Berlin and roughly three-fifths of Germany's entire territory and population. It rose from the collapse of the Kingdom of Prussia after Germany's defeat in the First World War and the overthrow of the German monarchies. The kingdom that had once anchored an authoritarian empire turned, under a new constitution, into a parliamentary democracy. For much of the Weimar Republic, pro-democratic parties ran the state so consistently that Prussia earned a reputation as a bulwark of democracy. Why did the empire's most powerful state become the Republic's most reliable defender? Why did politicians across Germany spend years arguing over whether Prussia should even continue to exist? And how was a state built on such stability dismantled years before the Allies ever signed a decree against it?

• 2. The Councils Take Charge

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  Sailors of the German High Seas Fleet mutinied at Kiel in late October 1918, igniting a revolt that spread across the country within days. Workers' and soldiers' councils modeled on the Kiel example took power from military, royal and civil authorities, largely without resistance. The revolution reached Berlin on Saturday the 9th of November. Two rival groups favored a soviet-style council republic: the Revolutionary Stewards and the Spartacus League. They called a general strike backed by the Majority Social Democratic Party.

  At midday on the 9th of November, Max von Baden announced the abdication of Wilhelm the Second as Emperor and King of Prussia. Von Baden was the German Empire's last chancellor and Prussia's last minister president, and the abdication had not actually happened yet. He then handed the chancellorship to Friedrich Ebert, leader of the Majority Social Democratic Party. That afternoon Philipp Scheidemann, also of the party, proclaimed a republic from the Reichstag building.

  The next day, Ebert formed a provisional government called the Council of the People's Deputies. It split evenly between his own Majority Social Democrats and the more leftist Independent Social Democratic Party, which had broken away in 1917. On the 12th of November 1918, council representatives including Paul Hirsch, Otto Braun and Adolph Hoffmann declared the previous Prussian government deposed. A manifesto titled 'To the Prussian People' promised to transform 'the old, fundamentally reactionary Prussia … into a fully democratic component of the unified People's Republic.'

  Two days later, the Majority and Independent Social Democrats formed Prussia's revolutionary cabinet, with Hirsch and Heinrich Ströbel serving as joint chairmen. On the 15th of November, the Prussian House of Lords was abolished and the House of Representatives dissolved. Former royal district administrators often kept their posts as though no revolution had taken place. Interior minister Wolfgang Heine dismissed workers' councils' complaints against them.

  Minister of Culture Adolph Hoffmann abolished religious instruction as a step toward separating church and state. The move revived memories of Bismarck's Kulturkampf and turned segments of the population against the revolution. That backlash, combined with a violent army crackdown on the Volksmarinedivision in late December, set the stage for what followed. Fighting erupted across Berlin as the Spartacist uprising, lasting from the 5th to the 12th of January 1919, cost an estimated 150 to 200 lives.

• 3. A State on the Brink

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  In the Rhine Province, the Catholic Centre Party's advisory council feared a dictatorship of the proletariat. On the 4th of December 1918, it called for an independent Rhineland-Westphalian republic. In the Province of Hanover, 600,000 people signed an appeal for territorial autonomy. Around Christmas 1918, a revolt aiming to restore a Polish state spread across the Province of Posen and grew into a guerrilla war.

  Hugo Preuss, who drafted the Weimar Constitution, had originally proposed breaking Prussia into smaller states. Otto Landsberg of the Council of the People's Deputies argued the case bluntly: 'Prussia occupied its position with the sword, and that sword is broken. If Germany is to live, Prussia in its present form must die.' Prussia's new socialist government opposed any change to the state's borders. On the 23rd of January 1919, an emergency meeting of the provisional government spoke out against dissolution.

  By December 1919, the Prussian State Assembly settled the question for the time being. It passed a resolution by 210 votes to 32. The resolution declared that, as the largest German state, Prussia's first duty was to see whether a unified German nation could still be built. The vote did not settle what Germany's peace terms would take from Prussia's map.

  Under the Treaty of Versailles, Eupen-Malmedy went to Belgium and the Hultschiner Ländchen to Czechoslovakia. Danzig became a free city under League of Nations administration. Large areas of the provinces of Posen and West Prussia became part of the new state of Poland. That cut East Prussia off from the rest of Germany behind what became known as the Polish Corridor. Some borders were settled by vote instead of by treaty. In northern Schleswig, 74% voted on the 10th of February 1920 to join Denmark. Just to the south, 81% chose on the 14th of March to remain German. In the 1921 Upper Silesia plebiscite, 59.6% of voters chose to stay with Germany. The eastern part of Upper Silesia was nonetheless awarded to Poland.

  Prussia's only territorial gain during the entire Weimar period was small. The Free State of Waldeck-Pyrmont joined in two stages. The Pyrmont district voted to join the Province of Hanover in 1921, and Waldeck followed through its own plebiscite in 1929. The losses elsewhere carried a real administrative cost. Under the Ministry of Justice alone, 3,500 civil servants and employees had to be relocated or compensated because of the redrawn borders.

• 4. A Parliament Without a President

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  A draft constitution did not reach the State Assembly until the 26th of April 1920. Two things delayed it: the wait for the national Weimar Constitution, ratified on the 11th of August 1919, and then the Kapp Putsch itself. On the 30th of November 1920, the Assembly adopted the Free State's constitution by a vote of 280 in favor, 60 against and 7 abstaining. Opposition came mainly from the German National People's Party and a handful of independent deputies.

  Unlike the national government and most other German states, Prussia had no state president. That absence gave real weight to the position of minister president. Otto Braun in particular used the office to set policy far beyond what a mere chairman could. The Landtag itself held broad powers. Its term ran four years, and it could dissolve itself by majority vote or by referendum. It could establish committees of inquiry, amend the constitution, and impeach ministers, the last two requiring a two-thirds majority.

  The constitution's Ministry of State combined the minister president and the ministers of state. Under Article 46, the minister president alone held policymaking authority, and from 1932 onward the Landtag had to elect him by an absolute majority. Individual ministries were never fixed in the constitution and instead grew from practical need. The Ministry of Trade and Commerce became the second most powerful office after the Interior, shaping trade well beyond Prussia's own borders. The wartime Ministry of War, by contrast, disappeared once military affairs passed to the national government.

  A State Council modeled on the national Reichsrat gave Prussia's provinces a formal voice. It could object to Landtag laws unless overridden by a two-thirds vote. Konrad Adenauer, the mayor of Cologne and future chancellor of the Federal Republic, chaired the State Council until 1933. Even so, Prussia's weight in national affairs had shrunk since the empire. In 1925-61% of Germans lived in Prussia, yet the state held only 40% of the votes in the national Reichsrat.

• 5. The Braun-Severing System

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  In March 1920, the right-wing Kapp Putsch tried to overthrow the national government. In Prussia, the only genuinely united group behind it was the class of large landowners east of the Elbe River. While the national government fled Berlin, the Prussian government stayed in place. A general strike backed by unions, civil servants and the Majority Social Democrats paralyzed public life against the coup. Most provincial governors stood by the legal government. Only those in Schleswig-Holstein, Hanover and East Prussia backed the putschists, among them East Prussia's own Social Democratic governor, August Winnig. The coup collapsed after six days.

  Otto Braun replaced Paul Hirsch as minister president in its aftermath, and Carl Severing became minister of the Interior. Both men proved far more assertive than their predecessors, and the pairing became known simply as the Braun-Severing system, a shorthand for democratic Prussia itself. Hirsch and his finance minister, Südekum, left office discredited for having negotiated with the putschists.

  Severing used his new post to purge the civil service of officials hostile to the Republic. About one hundred senior officials, including three governors and 88 district administrators, mostly from the eastern provinces, were placed on retirement. By 1929, 291 of 540 political officials belonged to Weimar Coalition parties, among them nine of eleven governors. As late as 1918, eleven governors had been aristocrats; between 1920 and 1932 there were only two.

  The police underwent a similar transformation under police chief Wilhelm Abegg. Of Prussia's thirty police chiefs in 1928, fifteen belonged to the Social Democratic Party and five to the Centre. Four more came from the DDP and three from the DVP. The judiciary resisted change far longer. Minister of Justice Hugo am Zehnhoff, who held the post from 1919 to 1927, showed no real interest in reforming it. One estimate from 1932 found only about 5% of Prussian judges were republican-minded, a gap the Free State never had time left to close.

• 6. Two Prussias, East and West

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  Industry and the skilled trades employed 41.3% of Prussia's workforce in 1925, more than agriculture and trade and transport combined. That single average, though, hid a state split roughly in two. In East Prussia, 45.4% of workers farmed the land and just 19.6% worked in industry. In the Rhine Province and Westphalia, agriculture employed only about 13%, and commerce ran as high as 56% of the workforce in Westphalia alone.

  Population density told the same story. East Prussia held only 60.9 people per square kilometer in 1925, while the Rhine Province packed in 295.6. Prussia's overall density of 130.7 per square kilometer fell below the average for the German states, well under Saxony's 333.

  The wage gap that followed was stark. In 1928, average income in Berlin-Brandenburg reached 1,566 Reichsmarks, more than 30% above the national average. East Prussia's average of 814 Reichsmarks ran more than 30% below it. Social mobility barely closed the distance. In 1927 and 1928, only 1% of junior lawyers came from working-class families, even as the government worked to widen access to education.

  The political map mirrored the economic one. In the 1928 Reichstag election, the German National People's Party won over 30% of the vote in East Prussia. In Berlin that same year, the Social Democrats took 34% and the Communists nearly 30%. By the March 1933 Reichstag election, the Nazi Party's strength still followed the same eastern lean. It reached 56.5% in East Prussia, against a national average of 43.9% and just 31.3% in Berlin.

• 7. The Republic Under Siege

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  In December 1928, Berlin police chief Karl Zörgiebel banned all open-air demonstrations after clashes between Communists, Nazis and Social Democrats. The Communist Party defied the ban on the 1st of May 1929, International Workers' Day, and called a mass demonstration anyway. The clash that followed, remembered as Blood May, killed 33 people, injured nearly 200 and led to more than 1,200 arrests. Ernst Thälmann, the Communist Party's leader, responded by calling the SPD's 'social fascism' a particularly dangerous form of fascism. He urged his party to treat the Social Democrats as its main enemy.

  Franz Seldte, leader of the paramilitary Stahlhelm, attacked the Prussian government as 'Marxist' at a rally in Koblenz on the 4th of October 1930. He then launched a petition to force an early dissolution of the Landtag. Nearly 6 million Prussians signed it, more than the required share of eligible voters. But when the referendum was finally held on the 9th of August 1931, turnout collapsed. Only 37.1% of eligible voters took part, far short of the more than 50% needed to pass it.

  By the time of the next Landtag election in 1932, the Nazi Party had grown from just six seats to 162. It took 36.7% of the vote, becoming the largest party in Prussia's parliament. The Social Democrats fell to 94 seats, and the coalition parties together held only 38% of the chamber. Joseph Goebbels had already written in 1930: 'The key to power in Germany lies in Prussia. Whoever has Prussia also has the Reich.' No majority government could be formed. Otto Braun's caretaker administration limped on. Worn down by the campaign, Braun suffered a physical collapse on the night of the 22nd to the 23rd of April 1932.

  Chancellor Franz von Papen used the resulting paralysis to instigate the Prussian coup d'état later that year. It stripped the Free State of its independence and subordinated it to the national government. After the Nazi Party seized national power in 1933, Hermann Göring took over as Prussia's minister president on the 11th of April that year. He held the post, by then largely a formality, until the 23rd of April 1945.