Harzburg Front

The Harzburg Front (German: Harzburger Front) was a short-lived radical right-wing, anti-democratic political alliance in Weimar Germany, formed in 1931 as an attempt to present a unified opposition to the government of Chancellor Heinrich Brüning. It was a coalition of the national conservative German National People's Party (DNVP) under millionaire press-baron Alfred Hugenberg with Adolf Hitler's NSDAP Nazi Party, the leadership of the Stahlhelm paramilitary veterans' association, the Agricultural League and the Pan-German League organizations.

The Front formed on Sunday, 11 October 1931 at a convention of representatives of the varying political groupings styling themselves the "national opposition" at the spa town of Bad Harzburg in the Free State of Brunswick, where the Nazi Dietrich Klagges had just been elected State Minister of the Interior. By choosing the province, the organizers avoided a rigid approval procedure conducted by the Social Democratic Prussian government as well as possible Communist protests. Several local communists were nevertheless arrested being charged with sedition and compromising public security. Many Harzburg citizens appreciated the gathering (and the accompanying revenues).

The participating organizations had already undertaken the ultimately unsuccessful joint "Liberty Law" campaign against the Young Plan on war reparations in 1929, by which Hitler had become an accepted ally of anti-democratic national conservative circles. In the course of the Great Depression, the Reich government under the Social Democratic chancellor Hermann Müller had broken up in March 1930, whereafter former Chief of the German General Staff and Reich President Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg had promoted the succession of Centre politician Heinrich Brüning in order to rule by authoritarian Article 48 emergency decrees. His policies however intensified the crisis and in the election of September 1930, the Nazi Party made the breakthrough with 18.2% of the vote cast (+15.7%), while the DNVP dropped to 7.0% (-7.3%). Hitler had outpaced his conservative associates and though he reluctantly assented to appear at Bad Harzburg, he had no intention to serve as Hugenberg's assistant.

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