In 2009, Layton wrote, "At first sight the collapse of the Kapp "Putsch" could be viewed as a major success for the Weimar Republic. In the six days of crisis, it had retained the backing of the people of Berlin and had effectively withstood a major threat from the extreme right." Among the grievances which Kapp and his followers had against the government were that the national assembly, which had been elected to serve temporarily, was beginning to act as a permanent Reichstag and that it seemed this assembly might revise the constitution with respect to the election of the President of the Republic, which would make the Reichstag, rather than the electorate, responsible for the Presidential election. As a consequence of the promise made to the putschists, the National Assembly was dissolved in April and the date of the general election for the first republican Reichstag was brought forward to 6 June so that the German people could express their feelings regarding the terms of the Versailles Treaty. All attempts to change the method of election for the presidency of the Republic were abandoned. In the Reichstag elections of 6 June, the number of votes cast for the SPD and the Democratic Party fell by more than half, compared to the January 1919 elections, while the extreme right-wing German National People's Party (DNVP) (whose voters eventually switched to the Nazis) and the extreme left-wing USPD gained substantially. The Weimar Coalition lost its majority in parliament and would never regain it. The SPD had made a pact with the Army, which resulted in Communist workers being shot dead, so the Left was permanently fractured. Ebert told the Army it was free to arrange its own affairs, thereby forming a state-within-a-state implacably opposed to Weimar that eventually was central to the right-wing coup against the Prussian state government (half of German territory) in 1932. Essentially, the collapse of Weimar cannot be understood without understanding the Kapp Putsch and its consequences.