The rationale for placing the command authority over the armed forces directly with the responsible minister in charge of the military establishment, and thus breaking with the longstanding German constitutional tradition in both earlier monarchical and republican systems of placing it with the head of state, was that in a democratic parliamentary system the command authority should directly reside where it would be exercised and where it is subject to the parliamentary control of the Bundestag at all times. By assigning it directly to the responsible minister, instead of with the Federal Chancellor, this also meant that military affairs is but one of the many integrated responsibilities of the government; in stark contrast of earlier times when the separate division of the military establishment from the civil administration allowed the former to act as a state within a state (in contrast to the Federal Republic, the Weimar Republic began with the Ebert–Groener pact, which kept the military establishment as an autonomous force outside the control of politics; the 1925 election of Paul von Hindenburg as "Reichpräsident", surrounded by his camarilla and the machinations of Kurt von Schleicher, did little to reverse the trend).