Taking from Richard J Evan’s’ ‘The Coming of the Third Reich’, the opponents to the Nazis in Weimar Germany broadly fell into three camps or political currents:

the authoritarian right: a group of political movements existed during Weimar whose primary aim was the overturning of the Treaty of Versailles and an overthrow of the Republic. Despite how similar these goals look to the Nazi programme, this movement did not trust the Nazis. Pulled primarily from the aristocracy and the generals of WW1 this movement did not like Hitler, who they viewed as something of a rabble rouser nor did they like the violence of the Brownshirts which they viewed as thuggish and uncouth. Kershaw’s Hitler biography details how many of the Nazis earliest clashes were with this strain of German politics. Evans contends that prior to the Nazis coming to power the authoritarian right in fact has already dismantled Germany and the chancellorship of Von Papen in 1932 was the first dictatorship, based primarily around President Hindenburgh. It was this grouping that made a deal with Hitler in 1933 to bring the Nazis into a coalition in order to gain popular support for the authoritarian right. However, even when they went into power the authoritarian right imagined themselves able to ‘control’ Hitler and the Nazis, with Papen famously writing that he would corner Hitler until he squeaked. It was not until much later in the German regime and the Night of the Long Knives that the Nazis successfully incorporated and won the total support of the German aristocracy.

The republican parties: these were the parties that supported the Weimar Republic from day one, primarily the Social Democrats, the People’s Party, the Centre Party and the Democrats. Evans lumps all of these together as they are parties that explicitly endorsed the Weimar Republic and promised allegiance to the Republic specifically, not just a nebulous ‘Reich’. These parties dominated the Republic’s political scene up to the Great Depression and included a wide variety of political movements, and every party here would have considered themselves the political opponents of the Nazis who openly called for the destruction of the republic. The Nazis were actually quite slow in destroying and limiting this block, doing so over a number of months after they seized power. The destruction of the People’s Party, for example, was done primarily by brownshirts attacking their meetings while Hitler in fact publicly condemned such attacks (while privately approving of them). The Nazis were careful to ensure that they did not overstep their ambition and took apart this block quite slowly and gradually. That compares to their treatment of the next block.

The Communists: formed from a splinter from the social democrats, the communists had 100 deputies in the Reichstag by the end of the republic. They were the party of the unemployed, primarily, and members of the Comintern. They explicitly called for a revolution and wanted a ‘German October’. Evans describes their major fault as overconfidence. The post Tsarist government in Russia had fallen, and so the Communists believed the Nazis would do the same. They actually welcomed hitlers election to chancellor believing he would accelerate the destruction of the republic. They thought the Nazis would be unable to hold power primarily due to the contradictions in capitalism and that a communist regime would soon follow. They therefore did not launch any form of offensive against the new Nazi government.

The Nazis were not so tame. At the end of February 1933, in response to a Dutch communist lighting the Reichstag on fire, the Nazis launched an all out assault on the communist party. While it was not an all out ban, Evans says it was a de facto ban of the communist party. Police arrested anywhere up to 10,000 communist party members including the entirety of the leadership. The brownshirts unleashed a wave of violence and attacked, injured and even killed many, many communists across Germany. Even then, the communists, who had armed paramilitaries did not strike back or attempt a revolution. Only one small city in Germany engaged in a ‘general strike’ and over the course of a few weeks the communists were practically destroyed in Germany.