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In the chaos of post-World War I
Germany, a fragile democracy crumbled under the weight
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of economic despair, political infighting, and national humiliation.
From the ashes of the Weimar Republic, a
man emerged, ambitious, calculating, and ruthless, promising to
restore glory, but leading the world to the brink of destruction.
The Nazi party kind of growing in the
background, but actually not very popular during that
period of the sort of early to mid 1920s.
And the time that the Nazi party really
comes to the fore is in the aftermath
of the Wall Street crash with the impact
of the world depression on Germany too.
The political leadership of the party will take
the stage and then these two institutions together
will raise the German people, and establish, and
carry on their shoulders the German state, the German Reich.
Adolf Hitler's meteoric ascent to power, exposing the
manipulative propaganda, the fervent nationalism, and the eerie
cult of personality that fueled his regime.
The head of state, he's now dead and gone.
It now means that one man can take on all the top roles for himself.
That man, of course, is Adolf Hitler.
The First World War was a catastrophe for Germany.
Huge casualties affected morale, shortages and starvation plagued
the home front.
And on November 9th, 1918, after a series
of mutinies by German sailors and soldiers, the
Kaiser had abdicated and fled the country.
The following day, a provisional government was announced,
made up of members of the Social Democratic
Party and the Independent Social Democratic Party of
Germany, shifting power from the military.
With peace declared and the Kaiser gone, Germany
needed to establish a new constitution that would
move the country forward after accepting responsibility for World War I.
It's effectively gone from a monarchy with Kaiser
Wilhelm having almost absolute power to a world
in which the Allies are saying, listen, you
need to have a more liberal form of
government like we have in France, the United
States, Great Britain, and what the Allies call
for is for the Germans to adopt a form of liberal democracy.
This is the start of what's known as the Weimar Republic.
It is now a Germany without a monarch.
It's a Germany with a president.
It's seen as a new form of stable, grown-up governance for Germany.
Unfortunately, as we'll see, it simply doesn't work.
On February 6th, 1919, the National Assembly met
in the town of Weimar and formed the Weimar Coalition.
They also elected SDP leader Friedrich Ebert as
president of the Weimar Republic.
The basic format of the government was based
around a president, a chancellor, and a parliament,
known as the Reichstag.
The president was elected by a popular vote to a seven-year term,
and held real political power, controlling the military and having
the ability to call for new Reichstag elections.
New constitutional elements were added, such as Article
48, which allowed the president to assume emergency
powers, suspend civil rights, and operate without the
consent of the Reichstag for a limited period of time.
The chancellor was responsible for appointing a cabinet
and running the day-to-day operations of
the government, ideally, the chancellor was to come
from the majority party in the Reichstag, or
if no majority existed, from a coalition.
The Reichstag, in turn, was also elected by
a popular vote with its seats distributed proportionally.
This meant when the Social Democratic Party won
21.7% of the popular vote in 1920, it was allocated roughly 21.7%
of the 459 seats available.
This system ensured that Germans had a voice
in government that they had never had before,
but it also allowed for a massive proliferation
of parties that could make it difficult to
gain a majority or form a governing coalition.
The most important issue facing the government was
the terms of the peace treaty.
Throughout the war, the German propaganda machine had
stressed to the German people that Germany was
fighting a just war against the aggression of
the Entente powers, Russia, France, and Great Britain.
The transition to democracy had given hope to
the German people that their country would be
treated leniently and that the final peace settlements
after the war would be acceptable.
On June 28th, 1919, the Treaty of Versailles
was signed, outlining peace terms between the victorious
Allies and Germany.
The treaty ordered Germany to reduce its military,
take responsibility for the World War I, relinquish
some of its territory, and pay extortionate reparations to the Allies.
It also prevented Germany from joining the League of Nations at that time.
The First World War had an absolutely devastating effect on Germany.
Well, the first simple reason is that she lost the war.
You know, if you lose wars, you never end up in a particularly happy place.
But actually, the First World War was particularly punishing.
Why? Because the Allies gathered together at the Palace
of Versailles to sign what was known as the Treaty of Versailles.
Now, in that treaty, they took away a lot from Germany.
It wasn't just going, you lost too bad.
It was actually saying, you've lost and some.
What we're gonna do is to take away your colonies.
We're gonna take away some of your coalfields.
We're gonna make you demilitarized.
So we're gonna strip your army and navy right down.
You're not allowed an air force.
All these massive punishments were inflicted on the Germans.
And then to make it even worse, the Allies said, and you've got to pay for
the war.
This was known as reparations.
And in today's money, it was worth about half a trillion.
And there was one big problem.
Germany had no money.
So you're basically asking a beggar if he
can lend you or give you back half a trillion dollars.
He doesn't have it.
And Germany certainly didn't have it.
Reactions from the German people were extremely negative.
There were protests in the Reichstag and out on the streets.
Along with the loss of land and overseas
colonies, Germany had to deal with the humiliation
of accepting responsibility for the war, which the
German public didn't agree with.
The Treaty of Versailles was very much seen
by the Germans as a diktat, a dictated treaty.
So this sense that the army perhaps wouldn't
have lost the war had they had the chance to go on on the battlefield.
One of the other effects of the First
World War on Germany was it totally polarised political life.
You had a lot of soldiers coming back
from the front feeling that the war had
been going well, and yet suddenly the government
back home in Berlin had surrendered.
Well, why had it done that?
Why had the Kaiser let them down?
And so you have what arises is something called the stab in the back myth.
This idea that all those brave soldiers at
the front didn't lose to the Allies, they
actually lost to their leaders back home who
supposedly stabbed them in the back.
Now, those soldiers come back and they form
lots of very militaristic units, which are known
as the Free Corps or the Freikorps.
And it's from that kind of groundswell, a
very nationalist, very angry, very resentful opinion, that
you start seeing these little parties like the Nazi Party being formed.
The Weimar government was then associated with failure
in World War I, since it had signed
the Treaty of Versailles, which had ended the war.
Many nationalists believed the government had sold Germany
out to its enemies, ending the war too
soon and allowing the country to be controlled.
Due to the public unhappiness with the Weimar
Republic, many German citizens looked towards radical and
extremist parties who were opposing the political situation in Germany.
What you start to see in the early
1920s is this sort of development, almost like
a kind of fungus on the ground, of
all these small political parties from different parts
of the political spectrum.
You know, you've got Communist Party growing up
on the left, you've got things like the
Nazi Party growing up on the right, and
you've got tonnes of these little parties, many
of which have extremely vicious agendas.
They didn't like the Kaiser, or some of
them liked the Kaiser, some of them want
democracy, some of them want communism or fascism.
There is a whole kind of maelstrom, a
mixture of very radical, very defined, very virulent
type of politics emerging in Germany.
It's a very poisonous cocktail indeed.
One party in particular was beginning to surface, the Nazi Party.
The National Socialist German Workers' Party, better known
as the Nazi Party, had been established in
1919, and were promoting radical views.
One theory that the Nazi Party had developed
was the stab-in-the-back theory, which
regarded the loss of World War I, and who was to blame.
What any extreme movement needs is a kind of legend, or a kind of myth, or
a kind of enemy to kick against.
And the Nazis and Hitler created plenty of
enemies, some of which were actual enemies, like
the Communists, you could say that they were
genuine enemies of the Nazis, because they were
at different ends of the political spectrum.
But also, what Hitler also whipped up, and
what he encouraged, was this idea that the
German soldier who had fought in the First
World War had been stabbed in the back
by his political masters in Berlin, and that's
why the war was lost, and that's why Germany faced this shame of defeat.
And so what Hitler's saying is, listen to
those soldiers, those former soldiers, I can actually reverse this.
I can not only put a rifle or a spade in your hand and make you
feel proud, but I can also get Germany
back her pride, and her wealth, and her status in the world.
At the end of the First World War, there was a lot of social and economic
dislocation and upheaval in Germany, and there was
a sense, particularly by groups on the far
right, and there were a lot of them, so the Nazi Party was just one of
dozens, actually.
And there's a sense on the far right
in particular, but in other groups in society
too, that the army had been stabbed in the back.
So this whole myth or legend arose called
the Dolchstoss, the stab in the back.
And there was this sense that the army had been stabbed in the back by this
group, what the Nazis and the others on
the far right called the November Criminals, who
signed the Treaty of Versailles in the aftermath of the First World War.
Although many different variations of this theory existed,
the Nazi Party proclaimed that Germany was betrayed
by those on the home front, which led to the loss of the war, rather than
their defeat on the battlefield.
Shifting the blame to what they referred to
as the November Criminals, Adolf Hitler and the
Nazi Party bought into the myth that Jews
and communists had betrayed the country and brought
a left-wing government to power that had wanted to throw in the towel.
Providing the country with a scapegoat meant more
and more individuals supported the Nazi Party.
They had established the enemy and had a
full plan for how they were going to
remove them and make Germany great again.
By blaming the Jews for the defeat, Hitler
had created a stereotypical enemy, someone to point
the blame at and encourage the party supporters to do the same.
Getting rid of the Jews would solve all
of Germany's problems, or so he claimed.
With economic struggles and no positive way of
life, the German people liked the policies that
the Nazi Party was outlining and support continued to grow.
One of the overlooked successes of the Weimar
government was skillfully renegotiating and restructuring its debts
and bringing the economy back under control.
Article 48 was used frequently by liberal chancellors
to take immediate action to stabilise the economy.
However, the high reparations payments and costs of
war had devastating consequences.
The cost of living in Germany rose 12
times between 1914 and 1922, compared to three in the United States.
The German government faced the classic dilemma, cut
government spending in an attempt to balance the
budget or increase it in an attempt to jumpstart the economy.
When the government sought to pay reparations simply
by printing more money, the value of German
currency rapidly declined, leading to hyperinflation.
The early period of the Weimar Republic was
beset with quite a lot of economic, social and political problems.
So there's inflation, there's all sorts of economic
difficulties, and they really rose to a peak
in 1923 with the hyperinflation.
So very common is the image of a
German person in the street literally carrying a
wheelbarrow full of money to pay for an everyday item like a loaf of bread.
So just this sense of the devaluation of
the currency and the hyperinflation brought about in this period.
So there were lots and lots of different
problems in those early years of the Weimar Republic.
In January 1920, the exchange rate was 64
.8 marks to $1.
In November 1923, it was way over 1
billion marks to $1.
This economic disaster had social consequences as well.
Since Germany couldn't keep up with repayments of
the reparations, the French and Belgian armies invaded
the Ruhr region of Germany, the main area of industrialism.
The French aimed to extract the unpaid reparations
and therefore took control of key industries and natural resources.
The Weimar government instructed the Ruhr workers to
go on strike instead of helping the French.
The occupation of the Ruhr worsened the economic crisis in Germany.
One of the things that particularly sticks in
the craw of Hitler and other politicians like
him is the fact that the French have
seized the Ruhr, this important and absolutely vital industrial area.
Now, without the Ruhr, it helps to cripple Germany's economy still further.
And of course, it benefits the French economy enormously.
It's just yet another kick in the teeth
for the Germans, who are thinking, you know,
we've lost the Ruhr, we've lost the coalfields
of the Tsar, we've had the Rhineland demilitarised,
we've lost our colonies in China and Africa,
and we're having to pay lots of war
loans back, which we don't have any money to do so.
You know, if you look at it, it seems to be a complete disaster.
Of course, that's what it became.
Many Germans who considered themselves middle class found
themselves destitute.
Heinrich Brüning, who became chancellor in 1930, chose
the deeply unpopular option of an austerity programme,
which cut spending, and those programmes designed precisely
to help those most in need.
Prices ran out of control, and many people
couldn't afford to live or survive.
Poverty was at an all-time high.
By autumn of 1923, it cost more to
print the money than the notes themselves were worth.
During the hyperinflation crisis, workers were often paid twice per day.
Because prices rose so fast, their wages were
virtually worthless by lunchtime.
Unsurprisingly, the impact of hyperinflation dissolved a lot
of support for the government, and people began
looking towards uprisings and extremist parties to deliver
the answers to their crisis.
As the currency collapsed, so did the policy of passive resistance.
The Nazi Party continued to grow support within this time.
Once again, Hitler expressed his anti-Semitism, declaring
that since Jews ran the banks, they were
responsible for the economic mess Germany found itself in.
The German economy had completely crumbled, although this
didn't result in the collapse of the Weimar Republic.
However, it shook the faith of many Germans
who began looking towards radical parties to drag
them out of the economic rubble.
The confusion caused by hyperinflation led Adolf Hitler
to believe that he could take power in
Munich in November 1923, leading the Beer Hall Putsch.
However, the attempt failed.
In 1923, Hitler thought that he was in
a strong enough position with a lot of
different kinds of patronage and support from military
circles to stage a coup, so a putsch, a kind of takeover of power, and he
decided to do this in the city of Munich, so that it became known as the
Munich Beer Hall Putsch.
However, it was a crisis and a fiasco,
and the Nazi Party actually fell apart afterwards.
Some of its members wounded, some of them
becoming martyrs too, but essentially Hitler was placed
into jail at Landsberg, so he was imprisoned
in Landsberg, and that was where he wrote Mein Kampf.
Hitler believed that the government of Germany was
so unpopular that many Germans would support him.
He was even planning a march on Berlin after his success in Munich.
Hitler was arrested and tried for high treason.
He was found guilty and sentenced to five years in prison.
This seemed like the end for Hitler and for the Nazi Party.
In April 1925, former war veteran Paul von
Hindenburg was elected as president of the Weimar.
Hindenburg was instinctively conservative and anti-socialist.
It's hard to imagine a more kind of
old-school, aristocratic, Prussian-stroke German figure than
old Hindenburg.
You know, he looks the model of this
kind of bewhiskered president, and he regards Hitler
as what Hitler was in the First World
War, a little corporal, and that taught a
lot of people from Hindenburg's Junker class, as
it was called, referred to Hitler as.
So as Hitler starts climbing the ladders of
power, as he gets nearer and nearer to
the top, and indeed, when it comes to
the stage in which Hitler is gonna actually
take the chancellorship, Hindenburg still thinks, this man's
a little corporal.
This man is someone we grandees can still
control, but what they don't know is that
they basically let the most dangerous animal into
their zoo imaginable, and Hitler is just gonna
basically eat everyone alive, even Hindenburg.
They have no defense once they've let Hitler in.
From the very beginning of his presidency, Hindenburg
used his presidential powers and therefore had a
far greater influence than Ebert ever had on
the membership of coalition governments.
He made it very clear that he did
not wish for any constraints on his presidential power.
A new foreign minister, Gustav Stresemann, brought new
life to the Weimar Republic, bringing economic stabilization.
After 1923 into 1924, things seemed to settle down a little bit.
So the period from 1924 to 1928 of the Weimar years were very much a period
of progress that the Weimar government had a
chance to put into place a recovery of Germany.
So in terms of both her position at
home, but also how Germany was regarded in
Europe kind of as a European nation as well.
So that sense of what Germany's international reputation
was like changed as well during the course of the mid 1920s.
So then it's a period of more stability.
We've got a situation in Germany where there's
quite a lot of progressive life going on.
So women have got the vote for the first time since 1919 and they can be
elected to parliament.
Lots of progressive, different kinds of policies in
education, but also lots of progress in the
arts and in cultural life, the Bauhaus movement in architecture as well.
So those kinds of things, we see quite
a lot of progress in German society in the 1920s and a lot of hope.
But at the same time, and I think
this is quite interesting, at the same time,
we've got the Nazi party developing kind of
in a sense, almost in the background.
So not at the forefront of anyone's attention
during these years, because the popular attention's kind
of enjoying the 1920s, the kind of swinging
1920s, you know, with the cabaret lifestyle and
the women now taking jobs in the cities
as typists and in office jobs and these
kind of new glamorous jobs that hadn't been open to them before.
And at the same time, we kind of
got this sort of conservative and right-wing
backlash against that kind of progress that typified Weimar society.
So it's kind of quite an interesting time.
And then the Nazis, in a sense, they're
sort of in the background in this way,
but very, very busy building themselves, building up
the party and building up its propaganda and its profile.
Payments of reparations continued and the Ruhr was
no longer controlled by the French.
A new currency, the Rentenmark, was established, which
brought worth back to the currency.
Industry began moving again and unemployment decreased slightly.
Stressormen borrowed money from the US to help
pay back war reparations, a scheme known as the Doors Plan.
He also managed to get Germany a place in the League of Nations.
Morale in Germany was looking up.
Resistance was decreasing and more people were moving
on with their lives peacefully.
However, in 1929, the Wall Street crash in
the US came to affect the German economy
once again, sparking the beginning of the Great Depression,
The global economic downturn created by the
Great Depression in America had devastating repercussions for
the Weimar Republic.
As the panic hit Wall Street, the US
government pressed its former allies, Britain and France,
to repay their war debts.
Not having the money, Britain and France pressed
Germany for more reparations payments, causing an economic depression.
If you ask someone with no money to
pay you lots of money, they're really not going to be able to do it.
And in order to do it, they're then
going to have to borrow money off someone else to pay you back.
Now, that's what Germany does.
America offers Germany loans to pay back the
war reparations to America and to Britain and to France.
So what you have is this sort of
circle of income going across the Atlantic to
Germany and then some of which ends up
trickling back to France and Britain and the United States.
Now, that might work fine if the world's economy is OK.
But what happens in 1929?
You have Black Thursday, you have the depression,
the slump, the Wall Street index go crashing
through the floor in almost a matter of hours.
And you have one of the greatest depressions
the world's economy has ever seen.
Now, of course, what does that mean?
The Americans are going to go, ah, well,
we're no longer going to loan Germany any
money and actually any money we want back.
And the Germans are going, but if we
don't have this money, we can't keep our industry going.
And then Britain and France and other countries
around the world are going, we need these markets to sell things to.
That's collapsing, that's collapsing.
Everything's starting to collapse.
Now, of course, that's going to have a
devastating effect on even the most stable form
of political system, as you have, say, in Britain or the United States.
But even in those countries, you had a
lot of political instability as a result of
the depression, this worldwide slump.
But in Germany, it's far, far worse, because,
of course, what you're mixing there is basically
bankruptcy with political extremism.
And that is a very poisonous brew indeed.
And this is what gives rise to more
and more votes going to extremist parties.
Why?
Because they're saying, Weimar has failed and we can offer the solutions.
We've got something definite that these old men simply don't have.
A crucial factor in the rise of Nazism
was the ability of the party to expand
and provide a political home for those discontented
with the state of the Weimar.
Two months after Adolf Hitler was released from
prison, the Nazi party was re-established and
growing in numbers once again.
The roots of Adolf Hitler's rise to power
lie in the disaster of the economic crash
on 1929 and the subsequent depression.
The Wall Street crash and the rise in
unemployment had the important effect of further dividing German politics.
During the Weimar years, the Nazis very much
in the background, but very much building their
profile and their propaganda and their organisation.
But it's really after 1929, with the impact
of the Wall Street crash and the Great
Depression on Germany, that the Nazi party really
came into its own and really, from that
point, managed to attract very, very large numbers
of voters and supporters.
And the reason for this is that in that period, so with the height of the
depression in Germany, a lot of economic distress,
really despair, accompanied really too also by political chaos.
So the succession of short governments, one after
another, including a grand coalition government, unable really
to deal with the economic crisis.
Article 48, which was the presidential decree, was
called into place and used quite a number of times in this period.
So it's kind of a sense that the
normal workings of governments just weren't working.
And then the use of presidential decree, this
kind of emergency use, being called into use
more and more often is signifying these very
difficult political and economic circumstances.
On March 29th, 1930, the finance expert Heinrich
Brüning had been appointed the successor of Chancellor
Müller by Paul von Hindenburg, after months of
political lobbying by General Kurt von Schleicher on
behalf of the military.
The new government was expected to lead a
political shift towards conservatism based on the emergency
powers granted to the president by the constitution,
since it had no majority support in the Reichstag.
The economic downturn lasted until the second half
of 1932, when there were first indications of a rebound.
By this time though, the Weimar Republic had
lost all credibility with the majority of Germans.
The bulk of German capitalists and landowners originally
gave support to the conservative experiment, not from
any personal liking for Brüning, but believing the
conservatives would best serve their interests.
As the mass of the working class and
also of the middle classes turned against Brüning,
more of the great capitalists and landowners declared
themselves in favor of his opponents, in particular, Adolf Hitler.
After Hitler came out of prison, he picked
up the pieces of his party that was
in disarray and really forged his position once
again as the leader of the party and
indeed developing from that to be the leader of the nation.
So this kind of whole cult of the
Führer, cult of the leader surrounding him from
this point during the mid 1920s, that once
he comes to power, that cult of the
leader just expands to the whole nation.
So certainly at this point in the mid
1920s, he's sort of rebuilding the party now,
very much trying to make sure that it was very well organized.
So he organized the party into the different
regions, so the different Gau, each region with
its own regional leader or Gauleiter.
And then he also organized the party very cleverly, horizontally as well.
This idea that there were Nazi organizations right
across different sectors of the economy or of profession or occupation.
So for example, there was the Nazi Teachers
Association, the Nazi Jurists Association, the Nazi Doctors
Association, as well as students associations, women's groups
and youth groups as well.
So there's this kind of buildup, this kind
of groundswell of buildup of support for the
party through the mid 1920s, that once the
depression hits, that in that period from 1929
up until he comes to power in 1933,
he's really able to manipulate that basis of
support that's already been established.
The Reichstag general elections on September 14th, 1930,
resulted in an enormous political shift.
18.3% of the vote went to the Nazis, five times the percentage compared to
1928.
This had devastating consequences for the Republic.
The other thing that's really important is the
extent of the economic despair.
So we've got to remember that there's 5
million unemployed in Germany by the winter of
1930 to 31, and that goes up another million to 6 million by 1932.
So that's a very, very huge unemployment statistic.
And of course, Hitler's really putting himself forward
as a leader who will get Germany out
of these very, very dire economic circumstances, who
will make Germany great again.
There was no longer a majority in the
Reichstag, even for a great coalition of moderate parties.
And it encouraged the supporters of the Nazis
to bring out their claim to power with increasing violence and terror.
After 1930, the Republic slid more and more
into a state of potential civil war.
By late 1931, conservatism as a movement was
dead, and the time was coming when Hindenburg
would drop bruning and come to terms with Hitler.
Hindenburg himself was no less a supporter of
an anti-democratic counter-revolution represented by Hitler.
On May 30th, 1932, Bruning resigned after no
longer having Hindenburg's support.
Five weeks earlier, Hindenburg had been reelected as
president with Bruning's active support running against Hitler.
Hindenburg then appointed Franz von Papen as the new chancellor.
Von Papen lifted the ban on the SA
imposed after the street riots in an unsuccessful
attempt to secure the backing of Hitler and the Nazi party.
Papen was closely associated with the industrialist and
land-owning classes and pursued an extreme conservative
policy along Hindenburg's lines.
This government was to be expected to assure
itself of the cooperation of Hitler.
Since the Republicans and socialists were not yet
ready to take action and the conservatives had
shot their political bolt, Hitler and Hindenburg were
certain to achieve power.
Majorities and even coalitions in the Reichstag were
difficult to form among an increasing large number
of extremist parties, left and right.
Elections were held more and more frequently.
Since most parties opposed the new government, von
Papen had the Reichstag dissolved and called for new elections.
The general elections on July 31st, 1932 showed
major gains for the Nazis who won 37
.2% of the vote, overtaking the Social
Democrats as the largest party in the Reichstag.
In the July 1932 elections, that was when
the Nazi party reached the height of its electoral success.
Actually, by November 1932, they'd lost 2 million votes.
So it was kind of those last months were kind of a difficult moment for the
party, but it kind of all sort of
fell into place with the political manoeuvrings and
the machinations just in time, really, in a
way, because I think maybe some of the
popular support for the Nazi party was declining by the end of 1932.
July 1932 resulted in the question as to
now what part the immense Nazi party would
play in the government of the country.
The Nazi party owed its huge increase to
an influx of workers, unemployed, despairing peasants, and
middle-class people.
They wanted a renewed Germany and a new organization of German society.
Therefore, Hitler refused ministry under Papen and demanded
the chancellorship for himself, but was rejected by
Hindenburg on August 13th, 1932.
There was still no majority in the Reichstag for any government.
As a result, the Reichstag was dissolved and
elections took place once more in the hope
that a stable majority would result.
A combination of political and economic dissatisfaction, some
of it dating back to the founding of
the republic, helped create the conditions for Hitler's rise to power.
By drawing together the fringe nationalist parties into
his Nazi party, Hitler was able to gain
a sufficient number of seats in the Reichstag
to make him a political player.
I would strongly suggest that the vast, overwhelming
majority of people who voted for Adolf Hitler,
who looked at Adolf Hitler in the late
1920s, early 1930s, suspected that the person they
were electing would end up committing one of
the worst genocides the world has ever seen.
Yes, of course they knew he was anti -Semitic, but then a lot of people in
Europe and America and elsewhere were anti-Semitic.
It was a pretty standard prejudice.
It's not acceptable, of course, but it was
out there and it was just almost part of life.
You have something called drawing of anti-Semitism
in which people were even in the politest society were anti-Semitic.
The anti-Semitic nature of the Nazi party
wasn't hidden, but I think there was never
a sense that it would unleash the kinds
of policies that came about during the 1930s
and indeed, of course, during the war with
the eventual genocide or attempt to genocide of European Jews.
If Hitler was anti-Semitic, that wasn't necessarily a problem.
And of course, just because someone's a racist
doesn't necessarily mean they actually want to go around murdering people.
So I think that, you know, Hitler, yes,
was unpalatable in an enormous number of ways,
but your average voter in Germany before the
Nazis came to power, he looked like someone who had some solutions.
He looked like someone who had vigour, relative
youth, strength, will, this important word, will.
Hitler refers to the triumph of the will often.
And so you think, well, actually, Weimar's not doing much.
You know, you've got all these sort of
crusty old useless Democrats not doing very much.
Why not make Germany great again?
Eventually, conservatives hoping to control him and capitalise
on his popularity brought him into the government.
However, Hitler used the weaknesses written into the
Weimar constitution, like Article 48, to subvert it
and assume dictatorial power.
In 1932, the Nazi party became the largest political party in parliament.
It's the 1932 election when the Nazis take
230 seats in the parliament that actually makes
everybody turn around and realise this isn't just a kind of rabble.
This isn't just some kind of bloke who's
good at making speeches and, you know, foam flecked oratory.
This is something more than that, that this
party has got an appeal right across the board.
It's seen first as a bulwark, as a barrier against communism.
Many Germans have seen what's happened in Russia
and becoming the Soviet Union, and they fear for that greatly.
But another thing that Hitler also appeals to
is not just kind of the man in the street, if you like.
What he's also done is had a lot
of very, very secret and important meetings with German industrialists.
And he said to the captains of industry,
you know, he said to various financiers, you know, I'm not a threat to you.
You know, I am not someone who wants to sort of rip apart factories.
You know, I want to work with you guys.
You know, I need your industrial might.
We all need your industrial might.
And so what he's doing is he's appealing to both rich and poor.
So you see a lot of the kind of Junker old school class have quite a
lot of respect for the Nazi party and happily vote for him.
Franz von Papen stepped down and was succeeded
by General von Schleicher as Chancellor on December 3rd.
Schleicher's bold and unsuccessful plan was to build
a majority in the Reichstag by uniting the
trade unionist left wings in the various parties,
including that of the Nazis led by Gregor Strasser.
This did not prove successful either.
Adolf Hitler learned from von Papen that the
general had no authority to abolish the Reichstag
parliament, whereas any majority of seats did.
The cabinet, under a previous interpretation of Article
48, ruled without a sitting Reichstag, which could
vote only for its own dissolution.
Hitler also learned that all past crippling Nazi
debts were to be relieved by German big business.
Outmaneuvered by von Papen and Hitler on plans
for the new cabinet and having lost Hindenburg's
confidence, Schleicher asked for new elections.
On January 28th, von Papen described Hitler to
Paul von Hindenburg as only a minority part
of an alternative von Papen-arranged government.
On January 30th, 1933, Hindenburg accepted the new
Papen-nationalist Hitler coalition with the Nazis holding
only three of 11 cabinet seats.
So Hindenburg himself was not fond of Hitler.
He sort of very much regarded him as
this upstart, didn't particularly like or trust him.
But I think what's important in this period
in the early 1930s is that Hitler's got
this entree to Berlin high society, to those
people who have influence with the president.
And they're, if not exactly bending his ear,
they're kind of making Hitler's path to leadership
a little bit easier in that way.
So that by the time that January 1933
comes and that Hindenburg offers Hitler the chancellorship,
because not much earlier on he'd rejected the vice chancellorship.
So Hitler wasn't having the second position.
He wanted the top position.
So by the time that January 1933 came
and Hindenburg offered him that position of chancellor,
he'd sort of accepted that this was going
to be the case because he wanted to
use the popular support that the Nazi party had.
And again, I think the other thing about
Hindenburg and some of the other sort of
more conservative and the kind of military elites
in German society, I think they thought that
they would be able to keep Hitler in control somehow.
So it was kind of almost wanting their
cake and eating it, but of course they couldn't.
So they kind of thought they could use
Hitler's massive support in this great electoral wave,
the kind of popular support of the German people for this party.
So they kind of wanted to harness and use that, but at the same time to
harness in the more violent side of the
party or the kind of ugliest sides of the party and somehow to tame Hitler.
There's this idea that they'd be able to
assimilate him into what they wanted him to be and to tame him out of the
worst excesses of the party.
Hindenburg, despite his misgivings about the Nazis' goals
and about Hitler as a person, reluctantly agreed
to Papen's theory that with Nazi popular support
on the wane, Hitler could now be controlled as chancellor.
After a brief struggle for power, Hitler was
named chancellor in January 1933.
This would be the end of the Weimar Republic.
When Hitler's appointed chancellor in January 33, it's
very tempting to suppose that's it, he's in power, he's totally in control.
You've got to remember that for the first
few years of the Nazis being in power,
they never really felt as in power as we may today think them to be.
Of course, by the time the war broke
out, they had absolute control of Germany and indeed other places too.
But actually, you only have to look at
the diaries of people like Goebbels, the propaganda
minister, Albert Schwer, who ended up becoming the
armaments minister, people like that to realise they
were very worried and Hitler was very, very
worried about public opinion because he was worried
that if public opinion turned against him, he
would lose power like any conventional politician.
So even though he had passed things like
the Enabling Act, which had given him absolute
power and made him head of state and
had given him enormous powers to do what
he liked, he still worried that the German
people, if he put a foot wrong, would turn against him and boot him out.
The Reichstag fire on February 27th, 1933 was
blamed by Hitler's government on the communists and
Hitler used the emergency to obtain President von
Hindenburg's assent to the Reichstag fire decree the following day.
The Reichstag fire is still somewhat shrouded in mystery.
Who burned it down?
It doesn't really matter in the end because
what happens is that Nazis use the burning
down of the Reichstag in order to say,
there's a national emergency, we need more powers
to deal with these sort of, you know,
Reds and communists and all these sort of
very dangerous figures who are burning down the
Reichstag and things like this.
What will happen next?
We need more powers.
The Fuhrer, the leader, Adolf Hitler, he needs more powers too.
And so what you have as a result
is the Enabling Act, which ultimately gives the
Nazi party and Hitler absolute power.
But even then, they're still worried about what people think about them.
You know, this is not a government that
actually wants to do everything in defiance of the people.
It wants to do things for the majority of the people, but it wants to do
it in a very Nazi way.
The decree invoked Article 48 of the Weimar
Constitution and suspended a number of constitutional protections
of civil liberties, allowing the Nazi government to
take swift and harsh action against political meetings,
arresting, or in some cases, murdering members of the communist party.
Within weeks, Hitler invoked Article 48 of the
Weimar Constitution to squash many civil rights and
suppress members of the communist party.
In March 1933, Hitler introduced the Enabling Act
to allow him to pass laws without the
approval of Germany's parliament or president.
This act would and did bring Hitler and
the Nazi party unfettered dictatorial powers.
This bill, which receives the necessary two-thirds
majority with the aid of the center party,
grants full legislative powers to the cabinet without
requiring the assent of the Reichstag.
It is the formal basis of Hitler's power
for the remainder of the Third Reich.
To make sure the Enabling Act was passed,
Hitler forcibly prevented communist parliament members from voting.
Once it became law, Hitler was free to
legislate as he saw fit and establish his
dictatorship without any checks and balances.
Once Hitler has come to power, he consolidates his rule extremely quickly.
And again, it's sort of very unexpected from
the idea that they were going to be able to tame this politician.
So it's a sort of sense of underestimation,
both of Hitler and of the Nazi party as well, as something that was new and
that had a widespread appeal.
What Hitler did very quickly after he came
to power was to consolidate his control.
And he did this in a number of ways.
First of all, by what they call coordination
or the streamlining of society.
So again, it was, if anyone wanted to belong to a youth group, it had to
be an Nazi youth group.
So all of the others were destroyed or banned.
Destruction of the trade unions as well, astonishingly quickly.
And that was the strongest and biggest trade union movement in Europe.
And that's replaced by the German Labour Front.
So this kind of process of coordination, streamlining
society, trying to get people on side, and
then the other really important developments through 1934
was, first of all, that the army had
to swear an oath of personal loyalty to Hitler himself.
So it's not to the state anymore, but
a personal oath of loyalty to Hitler himself.
And then of course, when President Hindenburg died
in August 1934, it's kind of the last
sort of element of restraint or possible control has now disappeared.
Hindenburg's death is kind of the final nail
in the coffin of any semblance of sort
of the Weimar Republic or any hope of liberal democracy.
He represents a kind of a hangover from the Weimar period.
He was still the head of state.
He's now dead and gone.
So after all of the things that have
been put into place, like the Enabling Act
and other policies in those first months, the Nazis came to power.
So now after Hindenburg's death, Hitler's position is unchallenged.
He's the Führer, he's Chancellor, and President all
rolled into one, as it were.
So he is the ultimate power and the ultimate authority.
It now means that one man can take on all the top roles for himself.
That man, of course, is Adolf Hitler.
The change in political tactics and organization in
the mid-1920s allowed Adolf Hitler and the
Nazi Party to take advantage of legislation and
gain the support of the German public.
The collapse of democracy and the circumstances under
which Hitler was made Chancellor in 1933 paved
the way for a dictatorship in Germany, and
the Nazi Party would consolidate their power, leading
to a totalitarian state.
If you want to be a dictator and your party wants to be the only party
in charge, what are you going to do?
Well, you've got to ban every other political party.
So that's what Hitler does.
What else represents a bigger threat to Nazism?
Well, communism and also the trade union movement,
which is obviously traditionally quite leftist.
So what does Hitler do?
He bans that as well.
So that's basically got rid of two massive
power blocks that can threaten him.
Now, what he does is he replaces things
like the unions with his own kind of
Nazi form of unionism, and you have all
these kind of labour fronts and various of
these sort of Nazi bodies and functionaries who
run them who are all obedient to Adolf
Hitler rather than potentially rivals to him.
Or they don't even represent any other form of political thinking.
Everybody has got to feel and think in the same way.
This is called coming together.
This is called Gleichschaltung.
And this is a really important part of the kind of Nazi dream, if you like.
Everybody's marching in the same direction, doing the same thing together.
This is not a place in which individualism is to be encouraged.
With Adolf Hitler considered the saviour that Germany
needed, the support and political backing he obtained
allowed him to take over an entire country
with its people unaware of the horrors that were about to unfold.