A distinctive feature of the first German transition to democracy after World War I was the paucity of meaningful democratizing reform of the sprawling federal, state, and local bureaucracies. In this paper, I argue that insufficient efforts to reform a deeply anti-democratic state apparatus prevented the consolidation of democratic governance in the Interwar period. Focusing on the state of Prussia and the 1917-1932 period, I build a county-level panel combining original career data on local law enforcement officials, novel biographical data on the universe of candidates for elected office and secondary data on incidents of politically motivated violence and electoral outcomes. Leveraging a difference-in-differences design, I demonstrate that replacement of reactionary law enforcement officials by outsider candidates vetted by the democratic central government (i) led to a reduction in the incidence of politically motivated violence, (ii) reduced the number of Nazi candidates running for office, and (iii) increased electoral support for pro-democratic parties at the expense of the Nazi party. My paper identifies the persistence of autocratic bureaucracies as a crucial obstacle to democratic consolidation and efforts to limit political violence.