Weimar Constitution - Legacy of The Constitution

Legacy of The Constitution

After the death of Hindenburg in 1934, the constitution was largely forgotten, with some minor exceptions. In Hitler's 1945 political testament (written shortly before his suicide) he appointed Admiral Karl Doenitz to succeed him, but he named Doenitz as President, not Fuehrer, thereby re-establishing a constitutional office which had lain dormant since Hindenburg's death ten years earlier. On the 30th of April 1945 Doenitz formed what became known as the Flensburg government, which controlled only a tiny area of Germany near the Danish border, including the town of Flensburg. It was dissolved by the Allies on the 23rd of May. On the 5th of June, the Allied Berlin Declaration abolished all the institutions of German civil government, and this established that the constitution no longer held any legal force.

The 1949 Constitution of the German Democratic Republic contained many passages that were directly copied from the 1919 constitution. It was intended to be the constitution of a united Germany, and was thus a compromise between liberal-democratic and Leninist ideologies. It was replaced by a new, explicitly Leninist constitution in 1968. In 1990, the DDR dissolved altogether.

The Basic Law for the Federal Republic of Germany, enacted in 1949, stated that

'The provisions of Articles 136, 137, 138, 139 and 141 of the German Constitution of 11 August 1919 shall be an integral part of this Basic Law.'

These articles of the Weimar constitution (which dealt with the state's relationship to various Christian churches) remain part of the German Basic Law to this day. The Berlin Declaration of 5 June 1945, establishing the Allied Control Council formally abolished German civil government and it may be argued that this declaration also caused the original Weimar Constitution to finally go out of force.

The first official constitution of the Republic of Korea was originally based on the Weimar Constitution.