The Rise of Nazism in Germany

It's seen as a new form of stable, grown-up governance for Germany. Unfortunately, as we'll see, it simply doesn't work. 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. The ex-Kaiser's era of wonders has turned out to be an age of grinding poverty and chaos. You have Black Thursday, you have the depression, the slump. This is what gives rise to more and more votes going to extremist parties. 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. The brown shirts become an army. The private army of a single man. A man who aspires to become dictator of Germany. Dictator of Europe itself. Auf eine Ebene! Come on! Fuck! The First World War was a catastrophe for Germany. Huge casualties affected morale, shortages and starvation plagued the home front. And on November 9, 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 Socialist 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 called 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 6, 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'd 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 28, 1919, the Treaty of Versailles was signed, outlining peace terms between the victorious Allies and Germany. 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 going to do is to take away your colonies. We're going to take away some of your coal fields. We're going to make you demilitarized. So we're going to 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 dollars. 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. 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 Fry Corps. 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 believe 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, you know, growing up on the left, you've got things like the Nazi Party growing up on the right, and you've got tons of these little parties, many of which have extremely vicious agendas. They didn't like the Kaiser, 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 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're 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... Germany faced this shame of defeat. And so what Hitler's saying is, listen to those soldiers, those former soldiers. You know, I can actually reverse this. I can not only, you know, 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. Bye. 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 refer 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 of how they're 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. Being 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 stabilize the economy. However, the high reparations payments and costs of war had devastating consequences. 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 the 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. 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 the repayments of the reparations, the French and Belgium 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. 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, you know, 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. They're thinking, you know, we've lost the Ruhr, we've lost the coal fields of the Tsar, we've had the Rhineland demilitarized, 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. 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 program which cut spending. And those programs 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. In autumn 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 the 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 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 but whiskered president. And he regards Hitler as what Hitler was in the First World War, a little corp. And that's what 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 the top, and indeed... When it comes to the stage in which Hitler is going to actually take the chancellorship, Hindenburg still thinks, this man's the little corporal. This man is someone we grandees can still control. But what they don't know is that they've basically let the most dangerous animal into their zoo imaginable. And Hitler is just going to basically eat everyone alive, even Hindenburg. They have no defence once they've let Hitler in. From the very beginning of his presidency, Hindenburg used his presidential powers and therefore had a 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. And 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. with the cabaret lifestyle and the women now taking jobs in the cities as typists and in office jobs and this 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. Stresemann borrowed money from the US to help pay back war reparations, a scheme known as the Dawes 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 U.S. came to affect the German economy once again, sparking the beginning of the Great Depression. The global economic turndown 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 are 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 haven't. Black Thursday, you have the depression, the slump, the Wall Street index crashing through the floor, you know, 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've loaned, 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 broom 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 in 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 were very much in the background, but very much building their profile and their propaganda and their organization. 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 29, 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 turndown lasted until the second half of 1932, when there were the 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, however, 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 organised. So he organised the party into the different regions, so the different GAU, each region with its own regional leader or GAU-liter. And then he also organised the party very cleverly, horizontally as well. This idea that there were Nazi organisations 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 build-up, this kind of groundswell of build-up of support for the party through the mid-1920s that once the depression hits then 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 14, 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 Brünnig and come to terms with Hitler. Hindenburg himself was no less a supporter of an anti-democratic counter-revolution represented by Hitler. On May 30, 1932, Brünnig resigned after no longer having Hindenburg's support. Five weeks earlier, Hindenburg had been re-elected as president with Brüning'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, von Papen was closely associated with the industrialist and landowning 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 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 Reichsstaat were difficult to form among an increasingly 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 Reichsstaat dissolved and called for new elections. The general elections on July 31st, 1932, showed majority 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 two 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 maneuverings and the machinations, just in time, really, in a way. because they made 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 von Papen and demanded the chancellorship for himself, but was rejected by Hindenburg on August 13, 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 and 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 or anti-semitic. The anti-semitic nature of the Nazi party wasn't hidden but I think there was 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 attempted 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 capitalize on his popularity, brought him into the government. However, Hitler used the weakness 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 a 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. 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 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, I'm not a threat to you. I am not someone who wants to sort of rip apart factories. I want to work with you guys. 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 Juncker old school class have quite a lot of respect for the Nazi party and happily vote for him. Franz von Poppen 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 Schleicher. 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 depths 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 Poppen-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 him, that 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. Pindenburg, despite his misgivings about the Nazis' goals and about Hitler as a person, reluctantly agreed to von 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 1933, 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 had made him head of state, and 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 27, 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. These sort of, you know, red communists and all these sort of very dangerous figures 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. 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 and 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 establishes 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 called 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. It now means that one man can take on all the top roles for himself. That man, of course, is Adolf Hitler. 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 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. He's the Fuhrer, he's Chancellor. and the president all rolled into one, as it were. So he is the ultimate power and the ultimate authority. 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 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. With Adolf Hitler considered the savior 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.

So this sense that the army perhaps wouldn't have lost the war had they had the chance to go on on the battlefield. The ex-Kaiser's era of wonders has turned out to be an age of grinding poverty and chaos. You have Black Thursday, you have the depression, the slump. This is what gives rise to more and more votes going to extremist parties.

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. The brown shirts become an army. The private army of a single man. A man who aspires to become dictator of Germany. Dictator of Europe itself.

Auf eine Ebene! Come on! Fuck! The First World War was a catastrophe for Germany. Huge casualties affected morale, shortages and starvation plagued the home front.

And on November 9, 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 Socialist 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 called 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 6, 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'd 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 28, 1919, the Treaty of Versailles was signed, outlining peace terms between the victorious Allies and Germany. 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 going to do is to take away your colonies. We're going to take away some of your coal fields. We're going to make you demilitarized.

So we're going to 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 dollars. 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.

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 Fry Corps. 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 believe 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, you know, growing up on the left, you've got things like the Nazi Party growing up on the right, and you've got tons of these little parties, many of which have extremely vicious agendas.

They didn't like the Kaiser, 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 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're 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... Germany faced this shame of defeat. And so what Hitler's saying is, listen to those soldiers, those former soldiers. You know, I can actually reverse this.

I can not only, you know, 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. Bye. 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 refer 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 of how they're 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. Being 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 stabilize the economy. However, the high reparations payments and costs of war had devastating consequences. 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 the 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. 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 the repayments of the reparations, the French and Belgium 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. 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, you know, 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. They're thinking, you know, we've lost the Ruhr, we've lost the coal fields of the Tsar, we've had the Rhineland demilitarized, 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. 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 program which cut spending. And those programs 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. In autumn 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 the 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 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 but whiskered president.

And he regards Hitler as what Hitler was in the First World War, a little corp. And that's what 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 the top, and indeed...

When it comes to the stage in which Hitler is going to actually take the chancellorship, Hindenburg still thinks, this man's the little corporal. This man is someone we grandees can still control. But what they don't know is that they've basically let the most dangerous animal into their zoo imaginable. And Hitler is just going to basically eat everyone alive, even Hindenburg.

They have no defence once they've let Hitler in. From the very beginning of his presidency, Hindenburg used his presidential powers and therefore had a 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.

And 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. with the cabaret lifestyle and the women now taking jobs in the cities as typists and in office jobs and this 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. Stresemann borrowed money from the US to help pay back war reparations, a scheme known as the Dawes 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 U.S. came to affect the German economy once again, sparking the beginning of the Great Depression. The global economic turndown 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 are 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 haven't. Black Thursday, you have the depression, the slump, the Wall Street index crashing through the floor, you know, 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've loaned, 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 broom 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 in 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 were very much in the background, but very much building their profile and their propaganda and their organization. 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 29, 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 turndown lasted until the second half of 1932, when there were the 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, however, 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 organised. So he organised the party into the different regions, so the different GAU, each region with its own regional leader or GAU-liter. And then he also organised the party very cleverly, horizontally as well.

This idea that there were Nazi organisations 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 build-up, this kind of groundswell of build-up of support for the party through the mid-1920s that once the depression hits then 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 14, 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 Brünnig and come to terms with Hitler. Hindenburg himself was no less a supporter of an anti-democratic counter-revolution represented by Hitler. On May 30, 1932, Brünnig resigned after no longer having Hindenburg's support. Five weeks earlier, Hindenburg had been re-elected as president with Brüning'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, von Papen was closely associated with the industrialist and landowning 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 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 Reichsstaat were difficult to form among an increasingly 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 Reichsstaat dissolved and called for new elections. The general elections on July 31st, 1932, showed majority 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 two 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 maneuverings and the machinations, just in time, really, in a way. because they made 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 von Papen and demanded the chancellorship for himself, but was rejected by Hindenburg on August 13, 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 and 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 or anti-semitic.

The anti-semitic nature of the Nazi party wasn't hidden but I think there was 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 attempted 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 capitalize on his popularity, brought him into the government. However, Hitler used the weakness 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 a 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. 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 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, I'm not a threat to you.

I am not someone who wants to sort of rip apart factories. I want to work with you guys. 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 Juncker old school class have quite a lot of respect for the Nazi party and happily vote for him.

Franz von Poppen 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 Schleicher. 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 depths 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 Poppen-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 him, that 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.

Pindenburg, despite his misgivings about the Nazis' goals and about Hitler as a person, reluctantly agreed to von 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 1933, 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 had made him head of state, and 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 27, 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. These sort of, you know, red communists and all these sort of very dangerous figures 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. 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 and 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 establishes 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 called 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. It now means that one man can take on all the top roles for himself. That man, of course, is Adolf Hitler. 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 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. He's the Fuhrer, he's Chancellor. and the president all rolled into one, as it were. So he is the ultimate power and the ultimate authority.

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 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.

With Adolf Hitler considered the savior 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.

Transcript for:The Rise of Nazism in Germany

Transcript for:
The Rise of Nazism in Germany