Earlier on 28 June 1919, it had signed the Versailles Peace Treaty, which imposed a number of international obligations.
Its frontiers with France, Belgium, and Denmark and with the new independent states of Poland, Lithuania and Czechoslovakia were redrawn and its territory was reduced to 472,000 sq km, with 62 million inhabitants.
In its early years the Weimar Republic was troubled by postwar economic and financial problems and political instability, but it had recovered considerably by the late 1920s. It major political leaders included presidents Friedrich Ebert (1919-1925) and Paul Von Hindenburg (1925-1934) as well as Gustav Stresemann, who was chancellor (1923) and foreign minister (1923-1929).
The Great Depression did irreparable harm to Weimar’s tenuous hold on democracy. A financial crisis of the first order was coupled with a dramatic rise in unemployment and hopelessness. The republic was further weakened by an ability of any of the democratic parties to secure a majority and faced unremitting and open hostility from virtually all center-right and conservative parties and in the streets from the Freikorps.
The republic never fully accepted by many of the German people, the democratic Weimar Republic began to dissolve at the start of the 1930s. When the Nazis came to power in 1933, they effectively abolished it, soon establishing in its pace a dictatorial regime that came to be known as the Third Reach.
Weimar republic
