From Weimar to w*r (2025)

[bunniefuu]

In the chaos of post-World w*r I

Germany, a fragile democracy

crumbled under the weight

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 n*zi 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 n*zi 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 w*r 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 w*r 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 w*r, the

German propaganda machine had

stressed to the German

people that Germany was

fighting a just w*r

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 w*r 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 w*r 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 w*r had an absolutely

devastating effect on Germany.

Well, the first simple reason

is that she lost the w*r.

You know, if you lose wars, you never

end up in a particularly happy place.

But actually, the First World

w*r 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 w*r.

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 w*r, 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 w*r had they had

the chance to go on on the b*ttlefield.

One of the other effects of the First

World w*r on Germany was

it totally polarised political life.

You had a lot of soldiers coming back

from the front feeling that the w*r 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 n*zi Party being formed.

The Weimar government

was then associated with failure

in World w*r I, since it had signed

the Treaty of Versailles,

which had ended the w*r.

Many nationalists believed the

government had sold Germany

out to its enemies, ending the w*r 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

n*zi 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 c*ck indeed.

One party in particular was

beginning to surface, the n*zi Party.

The National Socialist German

Workers' Party, better known

as the n*zi Party, had been established in

1919, and were promoting radical views.

One theory that the

n*zi Party had developed

was the stab-in-the-back theory, which

regarded the loss of World

w*r 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 w*r had been stabbed in the back

by his political masters

in Berlin, and that's

why the w*r 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 r*fle 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 w*r,

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 n*zi 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 w*r.

Although many different

variations of this theory existed,

the n*zi Party proclaimed

that Germany was betrayed

by those on the home front, which

led to the loss of the w*r, rather than

their defeat on the b*ttlefield.

Shifting the blame to what they referred to

as the November

Criminals, Adolf Hitler and the

n*zi 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 n*zi 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 n*zi 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

w*r 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

cr*pple 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 w*r

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 Brning, 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 n*zi 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 n*zi 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 n*zi Party.

In April 1925, former w*r 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

w*r, 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 n*zi 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 w*r 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 w*r 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

w*r 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 n*zi 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 n*zi 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

Brning had been appointed

the successor of Chancellor

Mller 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

Brning, but believing the

conservatives would

best serve their interests.

As the mass of the working class and

also of the middle classes

turned against Brning,

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

Fhrer, 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

n*zi organizations right

across different sectors of the

economy or of profession or occupation.

So for example, there was the n*zi Teachers

Association, the n*zi Jurists

Association, the n*zi 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

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 w*r.

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 n*zi 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 n*zi 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 n*zi party

was declining by the end of 1932.

July 1932 resulted in the question as to

now what part the immense n*zi party would

play in the government of the country.

The n*zi 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 n*zi 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 n*zi 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 w*r 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 r*cist

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 n*zi 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 n*zi

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 n*zi

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 n*zi 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 n*zi 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 w*r 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

n*zi 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 n*zi way.

The decree invoked Article 48 of the Weimar

Constitution and suspended a

number of constitutional protections

of civil liberties, allowing

the n*zi 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 n*zi 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 n*zi 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 n*zi 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 Fhrer, 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

n*zi 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 n*zi 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

n*zi form of unionism, and you have all

these kind of labour fronts and various of

these sort of n*zi 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 n*zi 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.