Separatist movements

Source: nrw2000.de Handbill proclaiming an independent Rhineland

The continuing economic crisis leads to catastrophic conditions in the Weimar Republic. The result is both separatist movements and communist turmoil. On 21 October 1923, militant separatists in Aix-la-Chapelle proclaim an independent „Rhenish Republic“. However, due to a lack of popular support, this initiative will collapse by mid-November.

© mdr Prime Minister Erich Zeigner who became Chief Burgomaster of Leipzig in the GDR after making a living as a road sweeper during the Nazi period

In Saxony and Thuringia the SPD and KPD form a coalition government and set up „proletarian squadrons“. With these paramilitary units the KPD proposes to prepare for revolutionary uprisings and to unleash a „German October“ (in reference to Russia's 1917 „October Revolution“). On 26 September the Reich government had already imposed a state of emergency over the entire Reich. When Saxony's Prime Minister Erich Zeigner (SPD) refuses to dissolve the „proletarian squadrons,“ Berlin reacts with the „Reichsexekution“ against Saxony: Reich Army units march into the state, and the Communists are ordered excluded from state government. When Zeigner's government resists, Reich President Friedrich Ebert (SPD) invokes Article 48 of the Weimar Constitution to remove it from office. The DVP-politician Rudolf Heinze is appointed Reich Commissioner for Saxony. A right-wing dictatorship, which bourgeois circles had attempted to establish, could only be prevented by promptly electing a new social-democratic prime minister and forming a entirely socialdemocratic cabinet.