Weimar Constitution

The Weimar Constitution in booklet form. The constitution itself required that it be provided to school children at the time of their graduation.

The Constitution of the German Reich (German: Die Verfassung des Deutschen Reiches), usually known as the Weimar Constitution (Weimarer Verfassung) was the constitution that governed the Weimar Republic (1919-1933). The constitution technically remained in effect during the Third Reich from 1933 to 1945.

The German state's official name was Deutsches Reich until the adoption of the 1949 constitution.

Origin

Following the end of World War I, a German National Assembly gathered in the town of Weimar, in the state of Thuringia, in January 1919 to write a constitution for the Reich. The nation was to be a democratic federal republic, governed by a president and parliament.

The constitution was drafted by the lawyer and liberal politician Hugo Preuss, who was then state secretary in the Ministry of the Interior and later became Minister of the Interior.

Weimar Constitution Media

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  Chart: political system of Germany according to the Weimar Constitution of 1919

Other websites

• Selected Articles: http://web.jjay.cuny.edu/~jobrien/reference/ob13.html Archived 2005-04-07 at the Wayback Machine
• Entire Constitution: http://www.zum.de/psm/weimar/weimar_vve.php
• The Constitution of the German Reich (Weimar constitution) of 11th August 1919, in full text Archived 2021-03-22 at the Wayback Machine
• The portion of a series of lecture on German history pertaining to the Weimar Republic Archived 2005-08-30 at the Wayback Machine
• Additional info is here: http://www.johndclare.net/Weimar2.htm