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| - The Weimar Republic (German: Weimarer Republik [ˈvaɪmaʁɐ ʁepuˈbliːk] ([1] listen)) is the name given by historians to the federal republic and semipresidential representative democracy established in 1919 in Germany to replace the imperial form of government. It is named after Weimar, the city where the constitutional assembly took place. During this period, and well into the succeeding Nazi era, the official name of the state was German Reich (Deutsches Reich), which continued on from the pre-1918 Imperial period. Following World War I, the republic emerged from the German Revolution in November 1918. In 1919, a national assembly was convened in Weimar, where a new constitution for the German Reich was written, then adopted on 11 August of that same year. In its fourteen years, the Weimar Republic faced numerous problems, including hyperinflation, political extremists (with paramilitaries – both left and right wing) and continuing contentious relationships with the victors of World War I. However, the Weimar Republic successfully reformed the currency, unified tax policies and the railway system and it did eliminate most of the requirements of the Treaty of Versailles, in that Germany never completely met the disarmament requirements, and eventually only paid a small portion of the total reparations required by the treaty, which were reduced twice by restructuring Germany's debt through the Dawes Plan and the Young Plan. The German government during the Weimar Republic era did not respect the Treaty of Versailles that it had been pressured to sign, and various government figures at the time rejected Germany's post-Versailles borders. General Hans von Seeckt (head of the Reichswehr command from 1920 to 1926) supported an alliance between Germany and the Soviet Union to invade and partition Poland between them to restore the German–Russian border of 1914. Gustav Streseman as German foreign minister in 1925 declared that the reincorporation of territories lost to Poland and Danzig in the Treaty of Versailles was a major task of German foreign policy. The Reichswehr Ministry memorandum of 1926 declared its intention to seek the reincorporation of German territory lost to Poland as its first priority, to be followed by the return of the Saar territory, the annexation of Austria, and remilitarization of the Rhineland. The ensuing period of liberal democracy lapsed by 1930, when President Hindenburg assumed dictatorial emergency powers to back the administrations of Chancellors Brüning, Papen, Schleicher and finally Hitler. Between 1930 and 1933 the Great Depression, even worsened by Brüning's policy of deflation, led to a surge in unemployment. It led to the ascent of the nascent Nazi Party and Adolf Hitler in 1933. The legal measures taken by the new Nazi government in February and March 1933, commonly known as the Machtergreifung (seizure of power) meant that the government could legislate contrary to the constitution. The constitution became irrelevant, therefore 1933 is usually seen as the end of the Weimar Republic and the beginning of Hitler's Third Reich.
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