States of the Weimar Republic

In its early years, the Weimar Republic also saw a number of separatist movements and attempts to set up soviet-style governments, but all of them were short lived.

[2] The affected regions, with the exception of Danzig[3] and the Saar, all had significant non-German speaking populations (primarily Polish, French and Danish).

[5] In accordance with the Treaty of Versailles, the city of Danzig (now Gdańsk, Poland) was detached from Germany on 15 November 1920 and turned into a semi-autonomous city-state under the protection of the League of Nations.

[8] The 22 ruling dynasties of Germany's constituent states (excluding the city-states, which had no monarchs) were driven out during the German revolution of 1918–1919 and all royalty abolished by the new Weimar Constitution (Article 109).

[14] After that proposal also failed to pass the National Assembly, it decided that the members of the Weimar Republic's Reichsrat would continue to be appointed by the state governments, although the body had fewer powers overall than the imperial Bundesrat.

If such a change was made by means of a law passed altering the constitution (which required a two-thirds majority vote in the Reichstag), it could be accomplished without the consent of the affected state governments or populations.

If the state governments involved agreed to a boundary change, it could become effective by the passage of an ordinary national law (i.e. with a simple majority vote in the Reichstag).

Every state was required to have a republican constitution (Article 17) with a representative body "elected by universal, equal, direct, and secret suffrage of all German citizens of either sex, according to the principles of proportional representation".

The seven areas in which the federal government had sole power of legislation (such as national defence and foreign relations) were enumerated in Article 6, while Article 7 listed twenty additional areas in which it could legislate (including civil and criminal law, judicial procedure, the press, the right of assembly, commerce and a number of social issues such as "poor relief" and public health).

All of them failed:[13] In addition, Hamburg's government made several unsuccessful attempts in the 1920s to expand the growing city-state by incorporating immediately surrounding areas that were part of Prussia.

Both received material and propaganda support from France:[23] Finally, there was the Free State of Bottleneck (10 January 1919 – 25 February 1923), a bottleneck-shaped area formed during the Occupation of the Rhineland by the near convergence of the semi-circular bridgeheads east of the Rhine around Koblenz and Mainz.

[25] Source: gonschior.de The states of the Weimar Republic were effectively abolished after the establishment of Nazi Germany in 1933 by a series of laws and decrees between 1933 and 1935, and autonomy was replaced by direct rule of the National Socialist German Workers' Party in the Gleichschaltung process.