i meant to do this days ago when daniel_rf asked for something like it but here is a (still tl;dr) condensation of ~50 pages of richard evans' the coming of the third reich, which is good on weimar parliamentary maneuvering.
the smoking gun mordy is asking for is not here and a lot of it is prob just extra detail on stuff yall know already. but hopefully this does make clearer how the opposition of landowners and big business to any reform or redistribution at all--even when proposed by right-wing democracy-hating militarists they had themselves helped to install in power--pushed them gradually towards open alliance w hitler; how the center-left Social Democrats never quite started acting like they understood that hindenburg et al despised them more than they did the nazis; how gradual the collapse of democracy was and how many people were working for it.
tried to reduce it to a story about three loci of right-wing power--the military under von schleicher; the gentry/clergy/plutes around hindenburg; and the paramilitary populist movement (semi-)controlled by hitler--fighting amongst themselves to be the one to kill democracy. the first two would each prefer themselves to the third, but once they perceive the choice as "hitler vs weimar" they pick hitler. and this doesn't happen when hitler's power in the streets and the reichstag is unwithstandable-- instead it happens at a low ebb of nazi political success, out of sudden fear that the democracy may limp to safety after all.
i just typed this in notepad so there are no umlauts or whatever in people's names sorry. i did however go through and maniacally bold stuff that seemed trenchant so hopefully it doesn't now read like comic book dialogue.
The Depression's first political victim was the Grand Coalition cabinet led by the Social Democrat Hermann Muller, one of the Republic's most stable and durable governments ... a rare attempt to compromise between the ideological and social interests of the Social Democrats and the 'bourgeois' parties left of the Nationalists. It was held together mainly by its common effort to secure the Young Plan, an effort made in the teeth of bitter opposition from the Nationalists and the extreme right. Once the plan was agreed towards the end of 1929, there was little left to bind the parties to one another.... the People's Party broke with the coalition over the Social Democrats' refusal to cut unemployment benefits, and the government was forced to tender its resignation on 27 March 1930.Although few realized it at the time, this marked the beginning of the end of Weimar democracy. From this point on, no government ruled with the support of a parliamentary majority in the Reichstag. Indeed, those who had President Hindenburg's ear saw the fall of the Grand Coalition as a chance to establish an authoritarian regime through the use of the Presidential power of rule of decree. Particularly influential in this respect was the German army... [Ministry of Defence Wilhelm Groener's] appointment in January 1928... had signalled the liberation of the army from any kind of political control, and was cemented by the right of the army chief to report directly to the President instead of going through the cabinet.... While civilian institutions of one kind and another, from the political parties to the legislature itself, crumbled, the army remained united.... Rearmament and the rebuilding of Germany as a great power could, in the view of men like Groener's political advisor, Colonel, later General Kurt von Schleicher, now be grasped by freeing the state from the shackles of parliamentary conditions. And the more Germany descended into political chaos and extremist violence, the more pivotal the position of the army became....
There was no [longer] any attempt to appoint a government that would rest on the democratic support of the parties represented in the Reichstag. Instead, a 'cabinet of experts' would be put in place... The new cabinet included such well-known Reichstag politicians as Josef Wirth, a former Reich Chancellor, for the Centre Party, Hermann Deitrich, for the Democrats (renamed the State Party in July 1930), Martin Schiele, for the Nationalists, Julius Curtius, for the People's Party, and Viktor Bredt, for the small Economy Party. But it did not include the Social Democrats, to whom Hindenburg and his advisors were unwilling to entrust the power of ruling by decree. Without the Social Democrats it had no parliamentary majority. But this did not seem to matter anymore....
Superficially, the President's nomination of Heinrich Bruning, born in 1885, as Reich Chancellor was defensible in democratic terms.... But already [Bruning's Centre Party] was moving towards a more authoritarian position, more narrowly concerned with defending the interests of the Catholic Church.... Bruning himself was at best a fair-weather friend of Weimar democracy.... his instincts were authoritarian at heart. He planned to reform the constitution by reducing the power of the Reichstag and combining the offices of Reich Chancellor and Prussian Minister-President in his own person, thus removing the Social Democrats from their dominance of Germany's largest state. Bruning did not have sufficient backing from Hindenburg to put this idea into effect, but it remained on the table, ready for anyone to use who did....
In March 1931, he introduced sharp curbs on the freedom of the press... By mid-July the liberal Berlin Daily News-Sheet was estimating that up to a hundred newspaper editions were being banned every month... By 1932 the Communist newspaper The Red Flag was being banned on more than one day in three.... Bruning thus began the dismantling of democratic and civil freedoms that was to be pursued with such vigour under the Nazis.... Bruning had not reached his position in the Centre Party without becoming adept at political calculation and manoeuver, [but] even his staunchest defenders have never maintained that he was a charismatic or inspiring leader. Austure in appearance, secretive, inscrutable, given to taking decisions without sufficient consultation, denied the gift of rhetoric, Bruning was not the man to win mass support from an electorate increasingly appalled at the economic chaos and political violence... whose dimensions beggared even those of 1923....
As 1932 dawned, the venerable Paul von Hindenburg's seven-year term of office as President was coming to an end.... Hindenburg was reluctant to stand again, but he had let it be known that he would be willing to continue in office if his tenure could simply be prolonged without an election. Negotiations over automatically renewing Hindenburg's Presidency foundered on the refusal of the Nazis to vote [for it] without the simultaneous dismissal of Bruning and the calling of a fresh general election... Hindenburg was thus forced to undergo the indignity of presenting himself to the electorate once more.... Once the election was announced, Hitler could hardly avoid standing as a candidate himself.... His candidacy transformed the election into a contest between right and left in which Hitler was unarguably the candidate for the right, which made Hindenburg, extraordinarily, incredibly, the candidate for the left.... what was particularly astonishing was the degree of support he received from the Social Democrats. This was not merely because the party considered him the only man who could stop Hitler -- a point the party's propaganda made repeatedly throughout the election campaign -- but for positive reasons as well. The party leaders were desperate to re-elect Hindenburg because they thought that he would keep Bruning in office as the last chance of a return to democratic normality.... the Social Democrats were beginning to lose touch with political reality. Eighteen months of tolerating Bruning's cuts in the name of preventing something worse had relegated them to the sidelines of politics and robbed them of the power of decision.... their disciplined party machine duly delivered more than 8 million votes to the man who was to dismantle the Republic from above, in an effort to keep in office a Chancellor whom Hindenburg actually disliked and distrusted, and whose policies had been lowering the living standards and destroying the jobs of the very people the Social Democrats represented....
Bruning's attempts to curb the Nazi Party's rise had obviously failed to make any kind of impact. The time seemed to many in President Hindenburg's entourage to be ripe for a different tactic.... Bruning's cardinal sin was to have failed to persuade the Nationalists to support Hindenburg's re-election. WHen it became clear that they were backing Hitler, Bruning's days were numbered.... Moreover, the army was becoming impatient with the crippling effects of Bruning's economic policies on the arms industry, and considered that his ban on the brownshirts got in the way of recruiting them as auxiliary troops, a prospect that became more enticing the more members they acquired...
Hindenburg's attention was drawn to a moderate measure of land reform being proposed by the government in the east, in which bankrupt estates would be broken up and provided as smallholdings to the unemployed. As a representative of the landed interest himself, with an estate of his own, Hindenburg was persuaded that this smacked of socialism.... The man [he] appointed as the new Reich Chancellor was... even further to the right than Bruning himself. [Franz von] Papen had close contacts with some of the key social and political forces in the Weimar Republic, including the landed aristocracy, the Foreign Office, the army, the industrialists, the Catholic Church and the press... he had been recommended to Hindenburg by Schleicher as someone who would be sympathetic to the army's interests... he represented a form of Catholic political authoritarianism common throughout Europe in the early 1930s....
Papen and his fellow-ideologues, including Schleicher, saw themselves as creating a 'New State', above parties, indeed opposed to the very principle of a multi-party system, with the powers of elected assemblies even more limited... The kind of state they were thinking of was indicated by Papen's Interior Minister, Wilhelm Freiherr von Gayl, who had helped create a racist, authoritarian, military state in the area ceded to Germany by the treaty of Brest-Litovsk in 1918.... Papen's self-appointed task was to roll back history, not just Weimar democracy, but everything that had happened in European politics since the French Revolution, and re-create in the place of modern class conflict the hierarchical basis of ancien regime society....
Papen's cabinet was made up of men with relatively little experience. So many of them were unknown aristocrats that it was widely known as the 'cabinet of barons'. In the discussions that proceeded Bruning's resignation, Papen and Schleicher had agreed that they needed to win over the Nazis to provide mass support for the anti-democratic policies of the new government. They secured Hindenburg's agreement to dissolve the Reichstag and call fresh elections... In addition, they also conceded Hitler's demand for a lifting of the ban on the brownshirts.... Masses of stormtroopers flooded triumphantly back onto the streets.... Papen seized on the events of 'Bloody Sunday' in Altona to depose the state government of Prussia... on the grounds that it was no longer capable of maintaining law and order. This was the decisive blow against the Social Democrats which he had been put into office to achieve.... heavily armed combat troops took to the streets of Berlin, and a military state of emergency was declared throughout the capital city. The Social Democrat-controlled police force was simply pushed aside...
In the situation of July 1932, when Hindenburg, the military leadership and the conservatives were all extremely anxious to avoid provoking a civil war in Germany, an armed uprising by the Reichsbanner might have forced a climbdown by Papen, or an intervention by the Reich President. One can never know. The call to resist never came. The law-abiding traditions of the Social Democrats compelled them to put a ban on any armed resistance to an act that was sanctioned by the head of state and the legally constituted government, backed by the armed forces and not opposed by the police. All that remained as an option for Braun and Severing were rhetorical protests and lawsuits brought against Papen on the ground that he had breached the constitution.... Papen's coup dealt a mortal blow to the Weimar Republic. It destroyed the federal principle and opened the way to the wholesale centralization of the state. Whatever happened now, it was unlikely to be a full restoration of parliamentary democracy....
The new election campaign saw Hitler, enraged at Papen's tactics [of banning public political meetings], launch a furious attack on the government. A cabinet of aristocratic reactionaries would never win the collaboration of a man of the people such as himself, he proclaimed... but all [the Nazis'] boasts could not disguise the fact that many of the meeting-halls where Hitler spoke were now half-empty, and that the many campaigns of the year had left the Party in no financial condition to sustain its propaganda effort... Hitler's populist attacks on Papen frightened off middle-class voters, who thought they saw the Nazis' 'socialist' character coming out again... Overall, the Reichstag was even less manageable than before. One hundred Communists now confronted 196 Nazis across the chamber... Papen considered cutting the Gordian knot by banning both Nazis and Communists and using the army to enforce a Presidential regime, bypassing the Reichstag altogether... [but] by this point, fatally, he had lost the confidence of the army and its leading officers, too... Schleicher was annoyed that the Chancellor had had the nerve to develop his own ideas and plans for an authoritarian regime instead of following the instructions of the man who had done so much to put him into power in the first place, that is, himself. Papen had also signally failed to deliver the parliamentary majority, made up principally of the Nazis and the Centre Party, that Schleicher and the army had been looking for. It was time for a new initiative... Papen, faced with uncontrollable violence on the streets and lacking any means of preventing its further escalation, was forced to announce his intention to resign....
By this time, the constitution had in effect reverted to what it had been in the Bismarckian Reich, with governments being appointed by the head of state, without reference to parliamentary majorities or legislatures.... Yet the problem remained that any government that tried to change the constitution in an authoritarian direction without the legitimacy afforded by the backing of a majority in the legislature would run a serious risk of starting a civil war. So the search for parliamentary backing continued....
The Nazis seemed to be on the wane.... the world economic situation was at last beginning to look up, the Depression seemed to be bottoming out, and Schleicher... was preparing a massive job-creation programme to relieve unemployment through the state provision of public works. This boded ill for the Nazis... [But] for Hindenburg and his advisers, above all, his son Oskar, State Secretary Meissner, and ex-Chancellor von Papen, it seemed more urgent than ever at this point to tame the Nazis by bringing them into government... if their decline continued, then in the forseeable future, with an economic upswing on the way, it seemed possible that the old political parties might recover and parliamentary government return, possibly even involving the Social Democrats... Some of Schleicher's economic schemes, which included a possible nationalization of the steel industry and his repeal, carried out in December, of Papen's wage and benefit cuts imposed the previous September, also caused concern among elements in the business world whose interests Papen, Hindenburg and Hugenburg took seriously. As the owner of a landed estate, Hindenburg was further alienated by Schleicher's proposals for land reform in East Elbia, distributing bankrupt Junker estates to the peasantry. A coalition of conservative forces began to form around Hindenburg with the aim of getting rid of Schleicher, whose announcement that he favoured neither capitalism nor socialism they found extremely worrying....
The conspirators seized the backing of [paramilitary veteran org] the Steel Helmets for a plan to oust Schleicher... Papen himself, though in the thick of the conspiracy, was clearly out of the running for the Chancellorship, since he had alienated almost everyone outside Hindenburg's entourage over the previous few months and had no popular backing in the country. Frantic negotiations finally led to a plan to put Hitler in as Chancellor, with a majority of conservative cabinet colleagues to keep him in check....
Some expected Schleicher and the army to take matters into their own hands and seize the powers they wanted anyway. But Schleicher and the army only ever considered a putsch for the eventuality of Papen returning to the Reich Chancellery... because they thought that Papen's appointment might well lead to the outbreak of civil war.... Keen to avoid this situation arising, however, Schleicher now saw a Hitler Chancellorship as a welcome solution, as far as the army was concerned. 'If Hitler wants to establish a dictatorship in the Reich,' he said confidently, 'then the army will be the dictatorship within the dictatorship.' Refused permission by the President to govern unconstitutionally, Schleicher had no option but to tender his resignation... At about half past eleven on the morning of 30 January 1933, Hitler was sworn in as Reich Chancellor....