President of Germany (1919–1945)

• 1. Introduction

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  The president of Germany, the Reichspräsident, held more raw power over the nation's fate than almost any democratically elected office in modern history. When the Weimar Constitution came into force in 1919, its framers imagined a president who would stand above party politics, a steady hand above the fray of parliamentary squabbling. What they got, instead, was an office that became the hinge on which German democracy swung open and then fell shut.

  Hugo Preuss, who wrote the initial draft of the constitution, wanted the presidency to serve as a block against what he called "parliamentary absolutism." He drew on the thinking of constitutional scholar Robert Redslob and the sociologist Max Weber as he shaped the role. The result was a semi-presidential system that divided power between the president, the cabinet, and the Reichstag. But that balance was always precarious.

  The office was held by only three men before it ceased to exist in any meaningful form. Friedrich Ebert, a Social Democrat, governed through the Republic's most chaotic early years. Paul von Hindenburg, a World War I field marshal, presided over its unraveling. And Adolf Hitler simply absorbed the presidency into himself. The story of this office is, in many ways, the story of how a constitutional safeguard became an instrument of its own destruction.

• 2. A Constitution Built on Contradictions

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  Article 48 of the Weimar Constitution gave the president the power to act when "public order and security are seriously disturbed or threatened." That phrase was broad enough to drive a government through. The permissible steps included deploying armed force, suspending civil rights guaranteed elsewhere in the same constitution, and issuing emergency decrees that carried the same legal weight as laws passed by parliament.

  The constitution also required that no vote of confidence was needed before a chancellor or cabinet took office. A government could begin governing the moment the president named it. The Reichstag could remove it with a vote of no confidence, but it bore no obligation to have a replacement ready. Thirteen of the twenty Weimar governments, not counting Hitler's, took office as minority cabinets. That built-in fragility pushed presidents toward intervention again and again.

  Preuss designed the presidential oath with an almost imperial scope. The president swore to "devote my energy to the welfare of the German people, increase its wellbeing, protect it from harm, uphold the constitution of the Reich and its laws, conscientiously fulfil my duties and exercise justice towards all." He was commander-in-chief of the armed forces, the nation's diplomatic face, and the sole authority who could dissolve the Reichstag and call new elections within sixty days. Some contemporaries called the role a kind of "replacement emperor," Ersatzkaiser. The label proved uncomfortably apt.

• 3. Friedrich Ebert's Emergency Years

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  On the 11th of February 1919, the Weimar National Assembly elected Friedrich Ebert the first Reich president by a vote of 379 to 277. He was chosen by the assembly rather than by the people, because the political situation was too unstable for a direct national vote. The regular presidential election, due when the Weimar Constitution formally took effect in August 1919, was postponed so many times that the Reichstag eventually extended Ebert's term by amending Article 180 of the constitution, pushing his mandate out to the 30th of June 1925.

  The Republic Ebert led was born into violence. In October 1923, when the Communist Party of Germany entered the Social Democratic-led governments of Saxony and Thuringia with what Ebert's government believed were hidden revolutionary intentions, he invoked a Reichsexekution under Article 48 to send troops into both states and remove the Communists from office. He also granted Chancellor Wilhelm Cuno significant latitude under the same article to address Germany's hyperinflation, a use of emergency powers that was widely questioned because the constitution had not obviously been written with economic crises in mind.

  By the time his presidency ended with his death in February 1925, Ebert had invoked Article 48 on 136 occasions. He did so, the record shows, on the basis of agreements with the government and parliament rather than by acting alone. Twelve governments served under him, six of them minority cabinets at the start. Three Reichstag elections were held during his tenure. The next man to hold the office would use the same emergency powers with far less restraint.

• 4. Hindenburg and the Collapse of Parliament

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  Paul von Hindenburg became Germany's second president through a two-round election held in March and April 1925. After the first round produced no majority, the right-wing parties replaced their first-round candidate, Karl Jarres of the German People's Party, with the World War I field marshal. The parties of the centre and left united behind Wilhelm Marx of the Centre Party. Hindenburg took the second round with 45% of the vote. The Communist Party's decision to run their candidate, Ernst Thälmann, in that second round was widely regarded as having split the anti-Hindenburg vote enough to deliver the election to the old general.

  Many on the German right hoped Hindenburg would dismantle the Republic from within. In the early years he largely disappointed them, governing within the letter of the Weimar Constitution if not always its spirit. That changed in March 1930 when he appointed Heinrich Brüning chancellor after Hermann Müller's coalition collapsed. When the Reichstag rejected Brüning's budget bill that July, Hindenburg adopted it by presidential decree and dissolved the Reichstag when parliament moved to reverse the action. From 1930 to 1932, Hindenburg used Article 48 on 109 occasions. The last four cabinets of the Republic, Brüning I and II, Papen, and Schleicher, are known as presidential cabinets because decree had so thoroughly replaced legislation.

  In January 1933, when Kurt von Schleicher learned that Franz von Papen and Adolf Hitler were conspiring to remove him, he went to Hindenburg and requested a declaration of a state of emergency. Hindenburg refused, describing the move as clearly unconstitutional. Schleicher resigned on the 28th of January. On the 30th of January, under pressure from advisors and citing continued economic and political instability, Hindenburg consented to appoint Adolf Hitler chancellor.

• 5. The Office Absorbed and Revived

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  Hindenburg died on the 2nd of August 1934. His government had anticipated this: the previous day, on the 1st of August, Hitler's cabinet issued the "Law Concerning the Head of State of the German Reich," which merged the offices of president and chancellor into a single role to be held by Hitler upon Hindenburg's death. Hitler took the title Führer und Reichskanzler, "Leader and Chancellor," and declined to use the title "Reich President."

  The legal basis for the merger was disputed even by the Nazis' own paperwork. Article 2 of the Enabling Act, passed in March 1933, had explicitly stated that "the rights of the President remain unaffected." The January 1934 Law on the Reconstruction of the Reich had countered that "the Reich Government may issue new constitutional laws," offering a thin legal cover. A popular referendum held on the 19th of August approved the arrangement.

  The office lay dormant for nearly eleven years. Then, in his Final Political Testament written just before he died on the 30th of April 1945, Hitler revived it one last time, naming Karl Dönitz as president. Dönitz had not sought the role and the gesture was constitutionally void: Articles 41 and 51 of the Weimar Constitution, technically still in force, did not allow the president to designate his own successor. Dönitz ordered Germany's military surrender a few days later and appointed Ludwig von Krosigk as chancellor. The two tried to form a functioning government at Flensburg. British forces arrested the group on the 23rd of May 1945, and the office of Reichspräsident ended without ceremony.

• 6. What Replaced It

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  The Basic Law for the Federal Republic of Germany, established after 1945, created the office of Federal President, Bundespräsident, with the memory of the Weimar presidency plainly in mind. The new office was designed to be chiefly ceremonial, largely stripped of political power. The framers had watched Article 48 turn a constitutional safeguard into a tool for authoritarian governance, and they built a successor that could not repeat the pattern.

  The contrast with the Weimar original is almost point-for-point deliberate. Where the Reichspräsident held supreme command of the armed forces, appointed and dismissed governments at will, dissolved the Reichstag on personal judgment, and issued legally binding decrees in emergencies, the Bundespräsident does none of those things in any comparable measure. Hugo Preuss had feared parliamentary absolutism enough to create a very powerful counterweight. The post-war constitutional designers feared presidential power enough to do the opposite.