This informal paper is just attempting to give a picture about the roles that Junkers occupied in the different periods, mostly including Weimar Republic, Hilter's government and little part in the Prussia and the WWI. And all information are mainly from the Wikipedia. Due to my personal poor abilities of reading and writing English, it is hard to avoid the misunderstanding of content when transferring words from the pages and the illogicalities between the paragraphs. Instance to all above necessary introdcution, all the relevant pages will be listed at the end of this paper.
First of all, the Junkers were members of the landed nobility in Prussia. Prussia, also called the Kingdom of Prussia, was a German kingdom that consituted the state of Prussia between 1701 and 1918. It was the driving force behind the unification of Germany in 1871 and was the leading state of the German Empire until its dissolution in 1918. One of the most famous people, known as a Junker, was Otto von Bismarck.
Although it took its name from the region called Prussia, it was based in the Margraviate of Brandenburg, where its capital was Berlin. In the area of Prussia, Junkers owned great estates that were maintained and worked by peasants with few rights. These estates often stood in the countryside outside of major cities or towns. In spite of the reason that the Junker estates were necessarily inherited by the eldest son alone, younger sons, all well educated and with a sense of noble ancestry, turned to the civil and military services, and dominated all higher civil offices, as well as the officer crops.
Junkers' political influence extended from the German Empire of 1871-1918 through the Weimar Repulic of 1919-1933. It was said that
"if Prussia ruled Germany, the Junkers ruled Prussia, and through it the Empire itself."
Before and during the World War I (1914-1918), Prussia supplied significant numbers of soliders and sailors in the German military, and Prussian Junkers dominated the higher ranks. In addition, portions of the Eastern Front were fought on Prussian soil. Prussia - along with Germany as a whole - experienced increasing troubles with revolutionaires during the war. The Great War ended by armistice on 11 November 1918.
Uprisings in Berlin and other centres began the civil conflit of the German Revolution of 1918-19. By late 1918, the Prussian House of Representatives was controlled by the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), which advocated Marxism. Kind WIlliam II knew that he lad lost his imperial crown ofr good, but still hoped to retain his Prussian crown; he believed that as ruler of two-thirds of Germany, he could remained a major figure in any successor regime. However, William discovered this was impossible under the imperial constitution. Moreover, he also lost his support of military who might have fought for hime. And Junkers certainly controlled the military.
After the Germany's defeat in World War I and the November Revolution that toppled the German monarchy. The Junkers' main interests were served by the German Conservative Party (DNVP), which combined remnants of the German Conservative Party, Free Conservative Party, German Fatherland Party and right-wing elements of the National Liberal Party. This party strongly rejected the republican Weimar Constutution of 1919 and the Treaty of Versailles which it viewed as a national disgrace, signed by traitors. The party instead aimed at a restoration of monarchy, a repeal of the dictated peace treaty and reacquisition of all lost territories and colonies.
During the mid-1920s, the DNVP moderated its profile, accepting republican institutions in practice (while still calling for a return to monarchy in its manifesto) and participating in centre-right coalition governments on federal and state levels. It broadened its voting base----winning as many as 20.5% in the December 1924 election---- and supported the election of Paul von Hinderburg as President of Germany in 1925. Under the leadership of the populist media entrepreneur Alfred Hugenberg from 1928, the party reclaimed its reactionary nationalist and anti-republican rhetoric and changed its strategy to mass mobilisation, plebiscites and support of authoritarian rule by the President instead of work by parliamentary means. At the same time, it lost many votes to Adolf Hitler's rising Nazi Party. Several prominent Nazis began their careers in the DNVP.
After 1929, the DNVP co-operated with the Nazis, joining forces in the Harzburg Front of 1931,forming coalition governments in some states and finally supporting Hitler's appointment as Chancellor (Reichskanzler) in January 1933. There were many co-corporations between the DNVP and Nazi party. For example, the Nazis and German Nationals marched out of the Reichstag in opposition to a procedural rule in 1931 because there were many bankrupts happened in the Prussia area. The 1931 budget was then passed easily, and the Reichstag adjourned until October after only increasing the military budget and the subsidies for Junkers in the so-called Osthilfe (Eastern Aid) program. This program was a policy of the German Government of the Weimar Republic (1919–33) to give financial support from Government funds to bankrupt estates in East Prussia.
However, between many co-corporations between these parties, some conflicts were also happened. One of the most interesting event was the relationship between Paul von Hindenburg, a very famous Junker, and Hilter.
In the summer of 1931, Hindenburg complained in a letter to his daughter: "What pains and angers me the most is being misunderstood by part of the political right". He met Adolf Hitler for the first time in October 1931, at a high-level conference in Berlin. Everyone present saw that they took an immediate dislike to each other. Afterwards Hindenburg in private often disparagingly referred to Hitler as "that Austrian corporal", "that Bohemian corporal" or sometimes simply as "the corporal" and also derided Hitler's Austrian dialect. For his part, Hitler often labeled Hindenburg as "that old fool" or "that old reactionary". On 26 January 1933, Hindenburg privately told a group of his friends: "Gentlemen, I hope you will not hold me capable of appointing this Austrian corporal to be Reich Chancellor". Hindenburg made it clear that he saw himself as the leader of the "national" forces and expected Hitler to follow his lead.
Initially, the DNVP had a number of ministers in Hitler's government, but the party quickly lost influence and eventually dissolved itself in June 1933, giving way to the Nazis' single-party dictatorship. The Nazis allowed former DNVP members in the Reichstag, the civil service, and the police to continue with their jobs and left the rest of the party membership generally in peace.
During the Second World War, there were many Junkers occupied the high-level position in the Nazi Army, such as Gerd von Rundstedt and Erich von Manstein
many World War II Field Marshals were also members of the Junkers, most notably Gerd von Rundstedt, Fedor von Bock and Erich von Manstein. Landowners like Helmuth James Graf von Moltke and the members of the Kreisau Circle were part of the resistance to Nazi Germany rule. As World War II turned against Nazi Germany several senior Junkers in the Army participated in Coleonel Claus von Stauffenberg's assassination attempt to Hilter in 20 July 1944. Fifty-eight were executed when the plot failed, among them Erwin von Witzleben and Heinrich Graf von Lehndorff-Steinort, or committed suicide like Henning von Tresckow. During the advancement of the Red Army in the closing months of the war and subsequent, most Junkers had to flee from the eastern territories that were turned over to the re-established Republic of Poland with the implementation of the Oder-Neisse line according to the Potsdam Agreement.
After World War II, during the communist Bodenreform (land reform) of September 1945 in the Soviet Occupation Zone, later East Germany, all private property exceeding an area of 100 hectares (250 acres) was expropriated, and then predominantly allocated to 'New Farmers' on condition that they continued farming them. As most of these large estates, especially in Brandenburg and Western Pomerania, had belonged to Junkers, the government promoted their plans with the slogan Junkerland in Bauernhand! ("Junker land into farmer's hand!"). The former owners were accused of war crimes and involvement in the Nazi regime by the Soviet Military Administration, with many of them being arrested, brutally beaten and interned in NKVD special camps (Speziallager), while their property was plundered and the manor houses demolished. Some were executed.
Junker
Kingdom of Prussia
German Empire
Otto von Bismarck
German National People's Party
Weimar Republic
Paul von Hindenburg
Eastern Aid
Gerd von Rundstedt
Erich von Manstein
Adolf Hitler's rise to power
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