The Rise of Nazi in Germany:-

The Nazi Party was one of a number of right-wing extremist political groups
that emerged in Germany following World War I. Beginning with the onset of
the Great Depression it rose rapidly from obscurity to political prominence,
becoming the largest party in the German parliament in 1932.
Key facts:-
1. The Nazi Party’s meteoric rise to power began in 1930, when it attained
107 seats in Germany’s parliament, the Reichstag. In July 1932, the Nazi
Party became the largest political party in the Reichstag with 230
representatives.
2. In the final years of the Weimar Republic (1930 to 1933), the govt ruled
by emergence decree because it could not attain a parliament majority.
Political and economic instability and voter dissatisfaction with the status
quo benefitted the nazi party.
3. As a result of the nazi’s mass support, German president Paul von
Hindenburg appointed Hitler chancellor on January 30, 1933. His
appointment paved the way to the Nazi dictatorship after Hinderburg’s
death in August 1934.

Before the onset of the Great Depression in Germany in 1929–1930, the

National Socialist German Workers' Party (or Nazi Party for short) was a small
party on the radical right of the German political spectrum. In
the Reichstag (parliament) elections of May 2, 1928, the Nazis received only
2.6 percent of the national vote, a proportionate decline from 1924, when the
Nazis received 3 percent of the vote. As a result of the election, a "Grand
Coalition" of Germany's Social Democratic, Catholic Center, German
Democratic, and German People's parties governed Weimar Germany into the
first six months of the economic downturn.

During 1930–1933, the mood in Germany was grim. The worldwide economic
depression had hit the country hard, and millions of people were out of work.
The unemployed were joined by millions of others who linked the Depression
to Germany's national humiliation after defeat in World War 1. Many Germans
perceived the parliamentary government coalition as weak and unable to
alleviate the economic crisis. Widespread economic misery, fear, perception of
worse times to come, and anger and impatience with the apparent failure of
the government to manage the crisis offered fertile ground for the rise of Adolf
Hitler and his Nazi Party.
Hitler was a powerful and spellbinding orator who, tapping into the anger and
helplessness felt by many voters, attracted a wide following of Germans
desperate for change. Nazi electoral propaganda promised to pull Germany out
of the Depression. The Nazis pledged to restore German cultural values,
reverse the provisions of the Treaty of Versailles, turn back the perceived threat
of a Communist uprising, put the German people back to work, and restore
Germany to its "rightful position" as a world power. Hitler and other Nazi
propagandists were highly successful in directing the population's anger and
fear against the Jews; the Marxists (Communists and Social Democrats); and
those the Nazis held responsible for signing both the Armistice of November
1918 and the Versailles treaty, and for establishing the parliamentary republic.
Hitler and the Nazis often referred to the latter as "November criminals."

Hitler and other Nazi speakers carefully tailored their speeches to each
audience. For example, when speaking to businessmen, the Nazis
downplayed antisemitism and instead emphasized anti-communism and the
return of German colonies lost through the Treaty of Versailles. When
addressed to soldiers, veterans, or other nationalist interest groups, Nazi
propaganda emphasized military buildup and return of other territories lost
after Versailles. Nazi speakers assured farmers in the northern state of
Schleswig-Holstein that a Nazi government would prop up falling agricultural
prices. Pensioners all over Germany were told that both the amounts and the
buying power of their monthly checks would remain stable.

Using a deadlock among the partners in the "Grand Coalition" as an excuse,

Center party politician and Reich Chancellor Heinrich Bruening induced the
aging Reich President, World War I Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg, to
dissolve the parliament in July 1930 and schedule new elections for September
1930. To dissolve the parliament, the president used Article 48 of the German
constitution. This Article permitted the German government to govern without
parliamentary consent and was to be applied only in cases of direct national
emergency.

Bruening miscalculated the mood of the nation after six months of economic
depression. The Nazis won 18.3 percent of the vote and became the second
largest political party in the country.

For two years, repeatedly resorting to Article 48 to issue presidential decrees,

the Bruening government sought and failed to build a parliamentary majority
that would exclude Social Democrats, Communists, and Nazis. In 1932,
Hindenburg dismissed Bruening and appointed Franz von Papen, a former
diplomat and Center party politician, as chancellor. Papen dissolved the
Reichstag again, but the July 1932 elections brought the Nazi party 37.3
percent of the popular vote, making it the largest political party in Germany.
The Communists (taking votes from the Social Democrats in the increasingly
desperate economic climate) received 14.3 percent of the vote. As a result,
more than half the deputies in the 1932 Reichstag had publicly committed
themselves to ending parliamentary democracy.

When Papen was unable to obtain a parliamentary majority to govern, his

opponents among President Hindenburg's advisers forced him to resign. His
successor, General Kurt von Schleicher, dissolved the Reichstag again. In the
ensuing elections in November 1932, the Nazis lost ground, winning 33.1
percent of the vote. The Communists, however gained votes, winning 16.9
percent. As a result, the small circle around President Hindenburg came to
believe, by the end of 1932, that the Nazi party was Germany's only hope to
forestall political chaos ending in a Communist takeover. Nazi negotiators and
propagandists did much to enhance this impression.

On January 30, 1933, President Hindenburg appointed Adolf Hitler chancellor

of Germany. Hitler was not appointed chancellor as the result of an electoral
victory with a popular mandate, but instead as the result of a constitutionally
questionable deal among a small group of conservative German politicians who
had given up on parliamentary rule. They hoped to use Hitler's popularity with
the masses to buttress a return to conservative authoritarian rule, perhaps
even a monarchy. Within two years, however, Hitler and the Nazis
outmanoeuvred Germany's conservative politicians to consolidate a radical
Nazi dictatorship completely subordinate to Hitler's personal will.

How did Adolf Hitler happen:-

Adolf Hitler (April 20, 1889 - April 30, 1945) was appointed
chancellor of Germany in 1933 following a series of electoral
victories by the Nazi Party. He ruled absolutely until his death by
suicide in April 1945. Upon achieving power, Hitler smashed the
nation’s democratic institutions and transformed Germany into a
war state intent on conquering Europe for the benefit of the so-
called Aryan race. His invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939,
triggered the European phase of World War II. During the course of
the war, Nazi military forces rounded up and executed 11 million
victims they deemed inferior or undesirable—“life unworthy of life”—
among them Jews, Slavs, homosexuals, and Jehovah’s Witnesses.

Hitler had supreme authority as führer (leader or guide), but could

not have risen to power or committed such atrocities on his own. He
had the active support of the powerful German officer class and of
millions of everyday citizens who voted for the National Socialist
German Workers’ (Nazi) Party and hailed him as a national savior in
gigantic stadium rallies.

How were Hitler and the Nazis possible? How did such odious
characters take and hold power in a country that was a world
pacesetter in literature, art, architecture, and science, a nation that
had a democratic government and a free press in the 1920s?

Hitler rose to power through the Nazi Party, an organization he

forged after returning as a wounded veteran from the annihilating
trench warfare of World War I. He and other patriotic Germans were
outraged and humiliated by the harsh terms of the Treaty of
Versailles, which the Allies compelled the new German government,
the Weimar Republic, to accept along with an obligation to pay $33
billion in war reparations. Germany also had to give up its prized
overseas colonies and surrender valued parcels of home territory to
France and Poland. The German army was radically downsized and
the nation forbidden to have submarines or an air force. “We shall
squeeze the German lemon until the pips squeak!” explained one
British official.

Paying the crushing reparations destabilized the economy,

producing g ruinous, runaway inflation. By September 1923, four
billion German marks had the equal value of one American dollar.
Consumers needed a wheelbarrow to carry enough paper money to
buy a loaf of bread.

Hitler, a mesmerizing public speaker, addressed political meetings

in Munich calling for a new German order to replace what he saw as
an incompetent and inefficient democratic regime. This New Order
was distinguished by an authoritarian political system based on a
leadership structure in which authority flowed downward from a
supreme national leader.

In the new Germany, all citizens would unselfishly serve the state,
or Volk; democracy would be abolished; and individual rights
sacrificed for the good of the führer state. The ultimate aim of the
Nazi Party was to seize power through Germany’s parliamentary
system, install Hitler as dictator, and create a community of racially
pure Germans loyal to their führer, who would lead them in a
campaign of racial cleansing and world conquest.

“Either victory of the Aryan, or annihilation of the Aryan and the

victory of the Jew.” Said Adolf Hitler

Hitler blamed the Weimar Republic’s weakness on the influence of

Germany’s Jewish and communist minorities, who he claimed were
trying to take over the country. “There are only two possibilities,”
he told a Munich audience in 1922. “Either victory of the Aryan, or
annihilation of the Aryan and the victory of the Jew.” The young
Hitler saw history as a process of racial struggle, with the strongest
race—the Aryan race—ultimately prevailing by force of arms.
“Mankind has grown great in eternal war,” Hitler wrote. “It would
decay in eternal peace.”

Jews represented everything the Nazis found repugnant: finance

capitalism (controlled, the Nazis believed, by powerful Jewish
financiers), international communism (Karl Marx was a German
Jew, and the leadership of the German Communist Party was
heavily Jewish), and modernist cultural movements like
psychoanalysis and swing music.

Nazi Party foreign policy aimed to rid Europe of Jews and other
“inferior” peoples, absorb pure-blooded Aryans into a greatly
expanded Germany—a “Third Reich”—and wage unrelenting war on
the Slavic “hordes” of Russia, considered by Hitler to be
Untermenschen (subhuman).

Once conquered, the Soviet Union would be ruled by the German

master race, which would exterminate or subdue millions of Slavs
to create lebensraum (living space) for their own farms and
communities. In a conquered and racially cleansed Russia, they
would work on model farms and factories connected to the
homeland by new highways, called autobahns.

Hitler was the ideologue as well as the chief organizer of the Nazi
Party. By 1921, the party had a newspaper, an official flag, and a
private army—the Sturmabteilung SA (storm troopers)—made up
largely of unemployed and disenchanted WWI veterans. By 1923, the
SA had grown to 15,000 men and had access to hidden stores of
weapons. That year, Hitler and WWI hero General Erich Ludendorff
attempted to overthrow the elected regional government of Bavaria
in a coup known as the Beer Hall Putsch.

The regular army crushed the rebellion and Hitler spent a year in
prison—in loose confinement. In Landsberg Prison, Hitler dictated
most of the first volume of his political autobiography, Mein Kampf
(My Struggle). The book brought together, in inflamed language, the
racialist and expansionist ideas he had been propagating in his
popular beer-hall harangues.

After being released from prison, Hitler vowed to work within the
parliamentary system to avoid a repeat of the Beer Hall Putsch
setback. In the 1920s, however, the Nazi Party was still a fringe
group of ultraextremists with little political power. It received only
2.6 percent of the vote in the Reichstag elections of 1928.

But the worldwide economic depression and the rising power of

labor unions and communists convinced increasing numbers of
Germans to turn to the Nazi Party. The Nazis fed on bank failures
and unemployment—proof, Hitler said, of the ineffectiveness of
democratic government. Hitler pledged to restore prosperity, create
civil order (by crushing industrial strikes and street demonstrations
by communists and socialists), eliminate the influence of Jewish
financiers, and make the fatherland once again a world power.
By 1932, the Nazis were the largest political party in the Reichstag.
In January of the following year, with no other leader able to
command sufficient support to govern, President Paul von
Hindenburg appointed Hitler chancellor of Germany. Shortly
thereafter, a fire broke out in the Reichstag building in Berlin, and
authorities arrested a young Dutch communist who confessed to
starting it.

Hitler used this episode to convince President Hindenburg to

declare an emergency decree suspending many civil liberties
throughout Germany, including freedom of the press, freedom of
expression, and the right to hold public assemblies. The police were
authorized to detain citizens without cause, and the authority
usually exercised by regional governments became subject to
control by Hitler’s national regime.

Almost immediately, Hitler began dismantling Germany’s

democratic institutions and imprisoning or murdering his chief
opponents. When Hindenburg died the following year, Hitler took the
titles of führer, chancellor, and commander in chief of the army. He
expanded the army tremendously, reintroduced conscription, and
began developing a new air force—all violations of the Treaty of
Versailles.

Hitler’s military spending and ambitious public-works programs,

including building a German autobahn, helped restore prosperity.
His regime also suppressed the Communist Party and purged his
own paramilitary storm troopers, whose violent street
demonstrations alienated the German middle class.
This bloodletting—called the “Night of the Long Knives”—was
hugely popular and welcomed by the middle class as a blow struck
for law and order. In fact, many Germans went along with the full
range of Hitler’s policies, convinced that they would ultimately be
advantageous for the country.

In 1938, Hitler began his long-promised expansion of national

boundaries to incorporate ethnic Germans. He colluded with
Austrian Nazis to orchestrate the Anschluss, the annexation of
Austria to Germany. And in Hitler’s most brazenly aggressive act
yet, Czechoslovakia was forced to surrender the Sudetenland, a
mountainous border region populated predominantly by ethnic
Germans.

The Czechs looked to Great Britain and France for help, but hoping
to avoid war—they had been bled white in World War I—these
nations chose a policy of appeasement. At a conclave held at
Munich in September 1938, representatives of Great Britain and
France compelled Czech leaders to cede the Sudetenland in return
for Hitler’s pledge not to seek additional territory. The following
year, the German army swallowed up the remainder of
Czechoslovakia.

British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, one of the signers of the

Munich pact, had taken Hitler at his word. Returning to Britain with
this agreement in hand, he proudly announced that he had achieved
“peace with honor. I believe it is peace for our time.”

A year later, German troops stormed into Poland.

The Nazi Party in World War II:-

When Germany started World War II, it came as the logical outcome of Hitler’s
plans—known to Germans since the publication of Mein Kampf (1926)—and of
his systematic preparations since 1933. From the beginning, the Nazis did not
intend to establish a new order of authoritarianism and inequality for Germany
alone. Therein Nazism imitated communism. Its dynamism was bound to
expand and to spread. By its own nature it could not recognize any limits to its
own volition, only limits set by opposed superior forces. To a certain extent
World War II repeated the pattern of World War I: great initial German military
successes, the forging of a large-scale coalition against Germany, the loss of the
war because of German overreaching and conduct.

Prior to Germany’s invasion of Poland, local Nazi affiliates had been present in
areas outside the Reich, typically where there existed a sizable population of
German descent. One notable group was the German-American Bund, a pro-
Nazi paramilitary organization in the United States that was secretly funded
and organized by the German government. These Nazi client organizations
typically existed on the fringes of political life, but Germany’s early military
successes brought them to the fore, especially in occupied territories. On April
9, 1940, German troops invaded Norway, and Vidkun Quisling, the leader of the
small Norwegian National Socialist (Nasjonal Samling, or National Union) party
immediately proclaimed a “national government.” Quisling’s party had virtually
no domestic support, and his government collapsed within a week.
Nevertheless, Quisling continued to serve the Nazi occupation forces, and he
was named “minister president” in February 1942. German troops also
occupied Denmark; although the Danish Nazi Party never managed to achieve
a position of political prominence, it was able to orchestrate the creation of a
Danish “Free Corps” of volunteers who fought on the Eastern Front as
members of the Waffen-SS.

The outbreak of war also saw the full implementation of the Nazi Party’s “final
solution to the Jewish question” in all areas controlled by the Third Reich. The
ultimate goal of the Nazis’ anti-Semitic ideology was nothing less
than Vernichtung (“annihilation”) of Europe’s Jewish population. Jews in
occupied territories were forced into ghettoes or systematically killed. Mass
shootings by Einsatzgruppen units gave way to the industrialized murder of
millions in concentration and extermination camps. The Nazis killed victims
from other groups—homosexuals, Roma, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Poles, and
political opponents were chief among them—but the destruction of European
Jewry remained paramount in the eyes of the Third Reich. In German-occupied
Europe, out of a prewar population of about 8.3 million Jews, some 6 million
were killed or died in extermination camps of starvation or disease.