Barrie Davis - Weimar Germany: Death of a Democracy

“The Weimar Republic was Germany’s postwar experiment with democracy, and a time of unprecedented intellectual and artistic freedom. But beneath the glamour was a polarized society plagued by economic disasters, populist leaders fuelling culture wars and an uneasy political settlement that would soon spawn the horrors of Nazism.”

“Covering fifteen years from the end of the First World War to Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor in 1933, this is the definitive story of how Germany’s interwar republic descended into fascism.”

So reads the cover of Weimar Germany: Death of a Democracy, published this year by Victor Sebestyen.

Sebestyen begins the book with. “The best minds of their generation had little idea what was about to happen to the civilization that had formed them.” A century later, I suspect that also applies to us in New Zealand today. In an attempt to learn from history, I will compare some topics from the book with the position and direction of our once and future country.

Sebestyen might be describing New Zealand in 2040 when he writes (p. 2), “The result was a fractured, polarized country… Weimar was torn apart by economic crises, by civil strife and violence, by cultural wars of all kinds, by politics based on magical thinking and where people ceased listening to each other.”

That was the cause of the fall of Germany’s fledgling democracy and there are indications that ours is failing now: “In the end the Nazis made sure they, the people, didn’t have to listen, merely do as they were ordered…” (p. 2) New Zealand has been similarly described as “A Government That Has Turned Its Back On The Public” (here) and for an example, there is the “Racist Control of New Zealand Psychologists” (here).

“Germany’s first attempt at democracy failed principally because there were not enough democrats around to defend it when it needed support.” (p. 2) Who is defending our democracy?

For Germany, the fly in the ointment was one Adolf Hitler. Sebestyen says there was “one crucial factor on which the success of Hitler depended. His rejection of a rational and factual world, and his ability to convince enough people to believe in an alternative reality he created for them… It did not matter that it was irrational; logic was overrated…” (p. 273)

Hitler could have been advising the Waitangi Tribunal on the Principle of Partnership in the Treaty of Waitangi 1840 when he said politicians “were wasting their time when they told dull, old ‘workaday small lies’, which can ‘be easily discovered and would destroy credibility’. It was much wiser to tell a ‘big lie … in the greatness of the lie there is always a certain element of credibility … because the broad masses of people can be more easily corrupted in the deeper reaches of the heart than consciously or deliberately’.” (p. 274)

“Facts, Hitler wrote, do not matter at all.” He could have had in mind the chief’s speeches at Waitangi on 5 February 1840.

About 1 percent of the German population were Jews in 1922 and “essentially German Jews were equal citizens under the law. … On the whole, in the latter part of the nineteenth century, under the Kaiserreich, Jews identified with German nationalism and prospered…” (p. 171)

However, after the First World War, between 1919 and 1933, Germany experienced hyperinflation (1923), mass unemployment, political assassinations, street battles between extremist groups, and the Great Depression (from 1929). A faction of indigenous Germans – especially the Nazis – considered themselves to be the master race or ‘Übermenschen’ (c.f., tangata whenua). They blamed anyone but themselves – the Communists, socialists, liberals, and of course the Jews – for the loss of the war and the subsequent problems.

In those troubled times, conspiracy theories thrived. Antisemitic propaganda portrayed Jews as capitalists controlling finance, communists undermining the nation, and foreigners, despite Jews being German citizens (c.f., tangata te Tiriti). This contradiction didn’t matter to propagandists, because it was about blame, not logic.

Clever and persistent use of propaganda can make a nation believe that heaven is hell and, conversely, that the most miserable life is paradise.

Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf (1925)

Berlin was the Moa Point of Weimar Germany.

“From around the end of 1928, well-informed political journalists and commentators in Berlin were talking and writing about ‘the camarilla’ – a shadowy cabal of generals, powerful business leaders, elite civil servants and Junker landowners around the President whose aim was to bypass parliament and bring about an autocratic government of the Right. In truth the main actor in the group was not at all in the shadows: it was Hindenburg himself.” (p. 372)

At the 14 September 1930 election, Hitler’s NSDAP party had a political breakthrough: From 2.5 per cent of the vote two years earlier, the NSDAP increased to 18.2 per cent (6.4 million votes), which took them from 12 seats in the Reichstag to 107.

“On Monday, 13 October, when the Reichstag opened after the elections, there were mass demonstrations by the Nazis in towns throughout the country. In Berlin during the afternoon, they smashed the windows of Jewish-owned shops. In the evening they assembled in the Potsdamer Platz, shouting ‘Germany Awake’, ‘Death to Judah’ and ‘Heil Hitler’.” (p. 376)

In Weimar Germany and New Zealand, propaganda created the idea of a fundamental division of the population where none need exist. There is no partnership in the Treaty. The divide was manufactured, not actual. German Jews were not a foreign group; they had been part of German society for centuries. The split arose because extremist movements exploited fear, humiliation, and economic collapse to create an “enemy within.

“There were elections but no democracy – or at least no working democracy. The people voted it out of existence. By 1932, in the depths of the Depression, Germany was already under an authoritarian regime, with no functioning parliament, a judiciary that had never been ‘independent’ or in favour of the Republic…” (p. 397)

Could that be New Zealand by 2032, if not already?

Irrespective of whether you vote National or Labour, you get incremental Maori sovereignty, albeit at different rates. An extremist iwi faction has exploited Enlightenment values, leveraged conditioned guilt and misrepresented a decrepit treaty, to create a dissenting and disruptive group within government. They have implausibly blamed problems Maoris have on colonisation (e.g., Lindsay Mitchell: “Colonisation blamed for Maori Meth use,” here) and seek to ‘decolonise’ the country (e.g., David Lillis: “Imagining Decolonisation,” here). Since 2020, they have embarked on a plan, He Puapua (a break), with the objective of restructuring New Zealand governance to provide Maori self-determination (rangatiratanga Maori) by 2040.

That is a ‘double bind’ whereby both Labour and National allow divisive Maori sovereignty which is displacing New Zealand’s democracy. The people are voting democracy out of existence.

The initial Treaty of Waitangi 1840 agreement was for an hierarchical arrangement between the Monarch, Queen Victoria, and the Maori chiefs, similar to the Magna Carta. After having avoided democratic process (e.g., by concealing He Puapua), that arrangement is presently being changed to a partnership: Parliament and the part-Maori tribal leaders have conspired to revolt against Crown sovereignty, and our supposedly ‘representative’ Parliament is losing control of the nation.

The He Puapua plan is not for a democratic constitution, but for a change akin to the end of the Weimar Republic.

“Hindenburg got what he had wanted all along – an end to the Weimar Republic. But it was the German people who killed their democracy through a form of mass political suicide.” (p. 415)

“On Monday, 30 January 1933, Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany, and immediately after he took the post his first Cabinet was named. Just one position was left vacant, as the journalist Bella Fromme noted at the time: ‘It has started without a Minister for Justice’.” (p. 415)

Conclusion

Sebestyen says, “Now, as I am writing [in 2026], there are everyday reflections in Britain, North America and most of Europe about whether we are in a ‘Weimar moment’, whether we are in a repeat of 1926.” (p. 3) The above indicates that we should ask the same about New Zealand.

Dividing the country by race or ethnicity and assuming exclusive rights for the indigenous race did not work in Germany a century ago and it will not work here now. A nation needs a unified people to be effective and efficient, not the racial divide created by the Treaty of Waitangi Act.

Our democratic representative sovereign government has, for reasons which are not entirely clear, allowed a racial faction to usurp its power. It is not a coincidence that New Zealand has been declining since the passing of the Treaty of Waitangi Act 1975. We are declining because we are regressing into undemocratic, ineffective, inefficient Maori sovereignty and tribalism.

To prevent such a calamity, we need to restore social cohesion by removing the class division of part-Maori and non-Maori. To do that we need to remove those parts of legislation which distinguish part-Maoris as a privileged group. That entails also removing the institutions which have brought that about, the Waitangi Tribunal and the Maori seats in local and national government.

I suspect that the upcoming election will be the last chance we will have to do that.

Make the election, the point of inflection.

Barrie Davis is a retired telecommunications engineer, holds a PhD in the psychology of Christian beliefs, and can often be found gnashing his teeth reading The Post outside Floyd’s cafe at Island Bay.