“The Failure of Democracy” – “The weaknesses of Weimar” Do headlines such as these suggest that the whole architecture of the first German republic was wrong, that it was doomed right from the start, that the “collapse” was unavoidable?
In my short comment I will argue for the antithesis to this view: Powerful personalities, who can be clearly identified, and the pressure groups behind them, deliberately destroyed the democratic structure of Germany’s first republic. A closer look at the biography of one of them, Paul Reusch, the boss of the “Steelworks of Good Hope” (GHH) can reveal what the industrial power elite was responsible for in the crucial years from 1918 to 1930.
