How It Happened There: The Nazi Rise to Power
After Germanyʼs defeat in WWI the monarchy of the Kaiser was replaced by the Weimar Republic. For the first time in its history, Germany was a democracy. But it would prove to be a very fragile democracy.
The punitive terms of the Versailles Treaty imposed severe economic hardships on Germany. Also, many Germans believed that their country had not really lost the war but had been “stabbed in the back” by traitors at home: communists, socialists and Jews.
The first crisis was the hyperinflation of 1923. Buying a loaf of bread literally cost a wheel barrel of bills. The German middle class was devastated. Their loss of status would lead to a lingering resentment that would eventually provide fuel for the Nazis.
After the economy stabilized so did the democratic process. The governing coalition consisted of centrists, democrats and socialists. As late as 1928 the Naziʼs won less than 5% of the vote.
Then came the Great Depression and the death of Weimar democracy. As the crisis worsened, the center parties lost support to the Naziʼs and Nationalists on the right, and the Communists on the left. Taking orders from Moscow, the Communists refused to cooperate with the Social Democrats, thus destroying the possibility of a viable progressive coalition that might have prevented the Nazi rise to power.
Meanwhile on the right, the conservative Nationalist party, led by the Junkers(landed aristocrats) began to see cooperation with the Naziʼs as a viable alternative to the “Communist threat”. In 1925 the Nationalists had helped elect the aging war hero Paul von Hindenburg as president of the republic. Business interests, also fearing the left, were beginning to see the Nazis as a “lesser evil”.
In the 1932 elections the Naziʼs won about a third of the vote, much of their support coming from the lower middle class. Allied with the Nationalists the Naziʼs now had a clear path to power. In 1933 President Hindenburg(who may have been senile) appointed Hitler chancellor(prime minister)
Hitler now had control of the police as well as the Nazi Storm Troopers, and he put those forces to work terrorizing opponents and consolidating his own power. Prior to the next election, the Reichstag(parliament)building was severely damaged in a fire. . Although the fire was probably started by the Nazis, Hitler blamed it on the Communists, gaining further popular support, and maintaining his working majority in the Reichstag.
In April 1933 the Reichstag voted to give Hitlerʼs government dictatorial powers for four years. In 1934 a plebiscite was held to solidify mass support for the regime. The election was anything but fair, nevertheless, there were 39 million votes for the Nazis and merely 3 million opposed. In the same “election” , Hitlerʼs decision to withdraw Germany from the League of Nations was legitimized.
A massive propaganda effort led by Joseph Goebbels increased public support for the Nazi regime. As two historians put it: “The hysteria of the Nazi revolution was heightened by spectacular anti-semitism. Jews (and Christians with Jewish blood) were dismissed from all public posts. Jewish shops were looted.....the persecutions continued until thousands of Jews fled the country, while others were immured in concentration camps. This ruthless anti-semitism was embodied at length in a code of laws, while youths were encouraged to despise and even destroy Jewish books, art and music” As we now know, this was but a prelude to the “Final Solution”, the Holocaust.
The Nazi regime was totalitarian, the people had no political freedom. Yet, the Nazis could not have gained, and maintained power without the support, sometimes active, often passive, of a a majority of the German people. It was not domestic opposition but defeat in World War Two that finally toppled the Nazis from power.
Sources
Hayes and Cole History of Europe Roskin Countries and Concepts