The murder of the minor reactionary poet and alleged Russian spy August von Kotzebue in March 1819 by the Jena student Karl Ludwig Sand was a clarion calling the forces of conservatism in Germany to unite against dissidents and extremists in the universities and in the student reform movement, the Burschenschaft. Metternich, reacting to what appeared to be a groundswell of opposition, wrote Friedrich von Gentz in June that the political stability of Central Europe would not be threatened by academics and professors; rather, any threat would likely come from the more practical-minded Advocaten, or counselors at law. Mathias Edler von Rath, Austrian member from April 1820 until June 1824 on the Mainz Central Investigating Commission, formed in September 1819 by the Federal Assembly in Frankfurt on Main to investigate “revolutionary activities” in Germany since 1810, concluded that there were no more than eight key “facts” that deserved the Commission's attention: six of these had occurred in one specific area of the Southwest—the Grand Duchy of Hesse and the Duchy of Nassau.

On February 10, 1831, word reached Vienna that revolution had broken out in central Italy, first in the Duchies of Modena and Parma, then in the Legations, the northern provinces of the Papal State. The news was shortly followed by appeals from the threatened Italian princes for Austrian military intervention, and for Metternich, there could be no doubt as to the proper reply: these revolts were not merely another blow at the tottering conservative order, already hard hit by the July Revolution and its aftermath, but a “question of life and death” for the Habsburg Empire itself. At the Congress of Vienna, Metternich had established Austrian predominance in Italy as a fundamental component of her international position, vital for her status as a great power. Revolution in central Italy, if allowed to go unchecked, would end that predominance, for it would surely spread throughout the peninsula, to create in the end a united and independent Italian state.

Surveying the German political situation in the spring of 1913, the chairman of the National Liberal Party in Baden, Edmund Rebmann, could only see “black,” the adjective commonly used to describe the Catholic Center Party. The Center was systematically tightening its grip on the states of south Germany: Bavaria had already fallen under its domination; Württemberg and Alsace-Lorraine were wavering; even Baden, the last stronghold of liberalism south of the Main, was threatened. Rebmann was deeply concerned. “A united south Germany with purely black governments,” he warned a meeting of National Liberal leaders in Karlsruhe, Baden's capital, “would be an enormous prize for the Center” and might ultimately undermine the unity of the German empire. His assessment was shared by other political observers who had witnessed at first hand the way in which the Center Party had insinuated itself into a virtually impregnable position in German politics. While there is no evidence of a conspiracy to break up the empire, the Center, with its solid block of votes in the Reichstag, its growing representation in the Landtage of south Germany, and its famous tactical flexibility, was able to exert considerable influence over government policy both nationally and regionally in the decade before World War I. The party once designated by Bismarck as an enemy of the Reich had become a conservative friend of the status quo.

I recall a remarkable statement made by Hitler to some visitors, of whom I was one, at Obersalzburg in 1932. The death sentence had just been pronounced on the murderers at Potempa, and the unforgotten declaration of solidarity with the murderers made by the leader of the Party had just become publicly known. A nation—so ran the declaration—may overlook and forget anything in so disturbed a time as the present, if it happens in an open conflict between holders of opposed views. If the Storm Troopers were given a free hand, if it came to street fighting and twenty to thirty thousand Germans lost their lives, the nation would be able to recover from that. The wound would heal. It would be like fighting in the field. But a miscarriage of justice, a death sentence pronounced after cool deliberation, and pronounced and carried out against the people's unerring sense of justice, an execution of men who had acted in national passion, like those who had been sentenced at Potempa as common murderers —that would never be forgotten. —Hermann Rauschning

From my point of view it is certain that the whole affair [Potempa] must be regarded less as a political but much more as a criminal one, even taking as a basis the yardstick that any fighter for the movement takes in view of the events of that time. —The Kreisleiter of the NSDAP in Rosenberg, Upper Silesia