Heinrich Brüning | German Chancellor, Weimar Republic (2024)

Heinrich Brüning (born Nov. 26, 1885, Münster, Ger.—died March 30, 1970, Norwich, Vt., U.S.) was a conservative German statesman who was chancellor and foreign minister shortly before Adolf Hitler came to power (1930–32). Unable to solve his country’s economic problems, he hastened the drift toward rightist dictatorship by ignoring the Reichstag and governing by presidential decree.

The son of an industrialist, Brüning received his doctorate from the University of Bonn in 1915 and then rose to the command of a machine-gun company in World War I. After the war he served as business manager of the League of German Trade Unions from 1920 to 1930. A Roman Catholic, Brüning was a member of the Catholic Centre Party and from 1924 represented Breslau (now Wrocław, Pol.) in the Reichstag (lower house). In the Reichstag he came to be known as a financial and economic expert, and in 1929 he became the leader of his party in that legislative body.

Upon the fall of the coalition government of the Social Democrat Hermann Müller, Brüning was called on to form a new, more conservative ministry on March 28, 1930, without a Reichstag majority. His policies, formed in response to the onset of the Great Depression, involved increased taxation, reduced government expenditure, high tariffs on foreign agricultural products, cutbacks in salaries and unemployment insurance benefits, and continued payment of the reparations imposed on Germany by the Treaty of Versailles (1919). Brüning’s austerity measures prevented any renewal of inflation, but they also paralyzed the German economy and resulted in skyrocketing unemployment and a drastic fall in German workers’ standard of living.

On July 16, 1930, after the Reichstag rejected a major part of his plans, Brüning began governing by presidential emergency decree, using Article 48 of the Weimar Constitution as a basis for this step. On July 18 he dissolved the Reichstag, which returned after new elections in September 1930 with Communist and, more important, Nazi representation greatly increased. To accommodate this shift to the right, the Chancellor enacted a more nationalistic foreign policy.

In October 1931, Brüning took over the foreign ministry while retaining the chancellorship. He helped President Paul von Hindenburg win reelection in the spring of 1932, but on May 30 of that year Brüning resigned, a victim of intrigues by General Kurt von Schleicher and others around Hindenburg. The immediate cause of his dismissal was his project to partition several bankrupt East Elbian estates. Hindenburg, himself an eastern landowner, considered this plan Bolshevism, and his withdrawal of confidence left Brüning with no choice but to resign.

Brüning left Germany in 1934 and ultimately ended up in the United States, where he taught political science at Harvard University from 1937 to 1952.