Nazism in Germany: Hitler's rise and consolidation of power

1From 2.6% to power in under five years

In May 1928 the Nazi Party was a small extremist group. Less than five years later its leader, Adolf Hitler, was head of the German government. Study Figure 1 before reading on.

Figure 1. Nazi votes before and after the Wall Street Crash.

Analysing the source. The jump came after the Depression began: from 2.6% in 1928 to 18.3% in 1930 and 37.3% in July 1932, when the Nazis won 230 of 608 seats and became the largest party. But notice two more things. The Nazis never won a majority in a free election, and their vote fell in November 1932. Hitler did not simply win power; he was given it, as you will see.

2Why the Nazis rose

1. Resentment of the Treaty of Versailles. Many Germans blamed the Weimar politicians who had signed it, and believed the lie that the army had been "stabbed in the back".
2. Economic disasters. Hyperinflation in 1923 ruined savers; the Depression after 1929 threw millions out of work, with unemployment close to 30%.
3. Weak democracy. Under proportional representation, no party had a majority; governments were short-lived coalitions, and from 1930 chancellors ruled by presidential emergency decrees.
4. Fear of communism. The Communist vote also grew; businessmen, landowners and the middle class saw Hitler as a barrier against revolution.
5. Propaganda and organisation. Joseph Goebbels used rallies, posters, radio and film; the Nazis promised "work and bread" and blamed Jews and communists for every problem.
6. Violence. The SA (Brownshirts), the party's street army, attacked opponents and created an atmosphere of disorder that the Nazis then promised to end.
7. A deal with the old elite. After several failed governments, the former chancellor Franz von Papen and others persuaded President Hindenburg to appoint Hitler, believing they could control him.

Hitler had tried force once before: his Beer Hall Putsch in Munich on 8 and 9 November 1923 failed, and in prison he wrote Mein Kampf ("My Struggle"). After that he chose to win power through elections and deals, and then destroy democracy from inside.

3How Hitler consolidated his power

Figure 2. From Chancellor to dictator in eighteen months.

Article 1. Laws of the Reich may be enacted by the Reich government as well as by the procedure laid down in the Constitution of the Reich. […]

Article 2. The laws enacted by the Reich government may depart from the Constitution of the Reich, provided they do not concern the institution of the Reichstag and the Reichsrat as such. […]

Source A. The Enabling Act ("Law to Remedy the Distress of People and Reich"), 23 March 1933, translated by Ganzaa.

Analysing the source. The law looks short and technical, but Article 1 took law-making away from the elected parliament and Article 2 allowed those laws to break the Constitution. The Reichstag voted away its own power. Communist deputies had already been arrested and SA men stood in the hall during the vote; only the Social Democrats voted against.

4Life in the Nazi state

• Terror. The secret police (Gestapo) and the SS, led by Heinrich Himmler, arrested opponents without trial; the first concentration camps opened in 1933.
• Propaganda and censorship. Goebbels' ministry controlled newspapers, radio and film. On the night of 10 to 11 May 1933 students and SA men burned books by Jewish, socialist and other banned writers.
• Youth. Schools taught Nazi ideas and racial "science"; boys joined the Hitler Youth, girls the League of German Girls.
• Persecution of Jews. A boycott of Jewish shops in April 1933 was followed by the Nuremberg Laws of 15 September 1935, which took away Jews' citizenship and banned marriage between Jews and other Germans. In the Kristallnacht pogrom of 9 to 10 November 1938, synagogues and Jewish shops were attacked across Germany. These steps led towards the Holocaust, the genocide of six million Jews, which you studied in Senior 1.
• Rearmament and expansion. Conscription returned in 1935, troops entered the demilitarised Rhineland in 1936, Austria was annexed in March 1938 and Czechoslovakia was broken up in 1938 and 1939, all breaking the Treaty of Versailles.

5Discuss

In Senior 2 you studied how the ideology that led to the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi was spread by propaganda, newspapers and radio for years before 1994. Compare this with Nazi propaganda against Jews. What does the comparison teach about why Rwanda's Constitution makes the fight against genocide ideology a fundamental principle?