Weimar Constitution

The Constitution of the German Reich (German: Die Verfassung des Deutschen Reichs), usually known as the Weimar Constitution (Weimarer Verfassung) was the constitution that governed Germany during the Weimar Republic (1919–1933). The constitution declared Germany to be a democratic parliamentary republic with a legislature elected under proportional representation. Universal suffrage was established, with a minimum voting age of 20. The constitution technically remained in effect throughout the Nazi era from 1933 to 1945.

The constitution's title was the same as the Constitution of the German Empire that preceded it. The German state's official name was Deutsches Reich until the adoption of the 1949 Basic Law.

Following the end of World War I, a German National Assembly gathered in the town of Weimar, in the state of Thuringia, after the 19 January 1919 Federal elections, in order 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. Preuss criticized the Triple Entente decision to prohibit the incorporation of post-Austro-Hungarian-dissolution German Austria into the nascent German republic, saying it was a contradiction of the Wilsonian principle of self-determination of peoples.

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