Hitlers Rise 1919- 1933 Flashcards
Be able to describe the rise of Hitler
Overview of Hitler
Adolf Hitler was born in Austria in 1889. He moved to Munich in 1913 and became obsessed with all things German. He fought in the First World War and his experience confirmed his views that Germany had a special destiny. He was shocked by Germany’s defeat and the outcome of the Treaty of Versailles.
Describe Hitler’s early political career.
With World War One over, Hitler returned to Munich and set on a path that eventually led him to become the leader of the Nazi party.
1919 – Hitler joined the German Worker’s Party (DAP), a right-wing group led by Anton Drexler.
1920 – Hitler became the Party’s leading public speaker and propagandist.
1920 – The group changed its name to the National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP) – or Nazis for short.
1921 – Hitler was elected Party Chairman and leader of the Nazis.
Hess,Goering, Streicher and Rohm were selected as some of his party supporters.
What was the 25 point programme.
Under Hitler’s leadership the Nazi party quickly developed a 25-Point Programme, a list of the policies it would introduce if it came to power.
Key Nazi beliefs contained in the 25-Point Programme:
- A strong Germany - the Treaty of Versailles should be abolished and all German-speaking people united in one country.
- Führer - the idea that there should be a single leader with complete power rather than a democracy.
- Social Darwinism - the idea that the Aryan race was superior and Jews were ‘subhuman’.
- Autarky - the idea that Germany should be economically self-sufficient.
- That Germany was in danger - from communists and Jews, who had to be destroyed.
- Lebensraum - the need for ‘living space’ for the German nation to expand.
What was the appeal of the Nazis?
In the 1920s, the Nazis tried to appeal to a lot of different members of society. The 25-Point Programme had policies that were:
Socialist:
farmers should be given their land
pensions should improve
public industries such as electricity and water should be owned by the state
Nationalist:
all German-speaking people should be united in one country
the Treaty of Versailles should be abolished
there should be special laws for foreigners
Racist:
Jews should not be German citizens.
Immigration should be stopped.
Fascist:
focused on creating a strong central government
government control of the newspapers
How quickly did the Nazi party grow?
When Hitler joined the German Workers’ Party he became its 55th member. By the end of 1920 the newly named Nazi Party recorded a membership of 2,000 and during the upheaval of the hyperinflation crisis its membership grew rapidly, to 20,000 by the time of the Munich Putsch in November 1923.
What was the role and impact of the SA?
In 1921 Hitler assembled a large group of unemployed young men and former soldiers, known as the Storm Troopers (Sturmabteilung) or SA, as the Nazi Party’s private army:
They gained the nickname ‘Brownshirts’, after their brown shirted uniforms.
Their role was to protect party meetings, march in Nazi rallies and intimidate political opponents by breaking up their meetings.
Many of the SA men were former soldiers. Some were upset with the way they had been treated after World War One and saw the government as the ‘November Criminals’.
After the failure of the Munich Putsch, the SA was reorganised.
It began to be used to intimidate voters into voting for the Nazi Party.
However, the Nazi Party was not the only organisation to have a paramilitary group. The communists also had similar elements.
By 1932 the SA had 400,000 members. This number swelled to an estimated two million by the time Hitler came to power in 1933, largely due to unemployed men joining up during the Great Depression.
What was the Munich Putsch?
In November 1923, Hitler tried to take advantage of the hyperinflation crisis facing the Weimar government by trying to launch a revolution in Munich – known as the Munich Putsch. It seemed like the perfect opportunity to take power, but poor planning and misjudgement resulted in failure and the subsequent imprisonment of Adolf Hitler.
What were the causes that led to Hitler attempting the Munich Putsch in 1923?
By 1923, the Nazi party had 55,000 members and was stronger than ever before.
The Weimar Republic was in crisis due to hyperinflation.
In September 1923, the Weimar government had called off the general strike, and German nationalists were furious with the government.
Hitler thought he would be helped by important nationalist politicians in Bavaria.
Hitler had a huge army of SA members, but he knew he would lose control of them if he did not give them something to do.
Hitler hoped to copy Mussolini - the Italian fascist leader - who had come to power in Italy in 1922 by marching on Rome.
Summarise the events of the Munich Putsch.
During the hyperinflation crisis of 1923, Hitler saw an opportunity. People across the country had many different ideas about how Germany was being run. The individual states had different identities that affected how politics was run in that area. In Bavaria, (capital – Munich) the majority of the population were Catholic and things were quite traditional. This meant that many within that state intensely disliked the new Weimar government and saw them as weak. Hitler thought he would take advantage of this and plotted with two nationalist politicians - Kahr and Lossow - to take over Munich in a revolution.
Hitler collected the SA and told them to be ready to rebel.
But then, on 4 October 1923, Kahr and Lossow called off the rebellion. This was an impossible situation for Hitler, who had 3,000 troops ready to fight.
On the night of 8 November 1923, Hitler and 600 SA members burst into a meeting that Kahr and Lossow were holding at the local Beer Hall. Waving a gun at them, Hitler forced them to agree to rebel - and then let them go home. The SA took over the army headquarters and the offices of the local newspaper.
The next day, 9 November 1923, Hitler and the SA went into Munich on what they thought would be a triumphal march to take power. However, Kahr had called in police and army reinforcements. There was a short scuffle in which the police killed 16 members of the SA.
Hitler fled, but was arrested two days later.
What were the consequences of the Munich Putsch?
Consequences of the Munich Putsch
The Munich Putsch was a failure in the short term, but it was also an important event in the Nazis’ rise to power. As a result of the Putsch:
Short term failure:
The Nazi party was banned, and Hitler was prevented from speaking in public until 1927.
Hitler was tried for high treason (betraying his country) and sentenced to five years in prison.
Long term success:
He was sentenced in April and out of prison by December. During his time in the comfortable Landsberg Prison, he wrote ‘Mein Kampf’ – a propaganda book setting out Nazi beliefs. Millions of Germans read it, and Hitler’s ideas became very well-known.
The fact that the judge had been so lenient with the sentence and that Hitler had served so little time suggests that some people in authority had sympathy with Hitler and what he had tried to do.
Hitler realised that he would never come to power by revolution and that he would have use democratic means, so he reorganised the party to enable it to take part in elections.
What factors within Germany led to the rise of Hitler
His rise to power was the result of many factors: the impact of the Depression, the weaknesses of Weimar democracy and the strengths of the Nazi party.
The impact of the Depression on Germany
In October 1929 the Wall Street Crash on the US stock exchange brought about a global economic depression. In Europe, Germany was worst affected because American banks called in all of their foreign loans at very short notice. These loans, agreed under the Dawes Plan in 1924, had been the basis for Germany’s economic recovery from the disaster of hyperinflation. The loans funded German industry and helped to pay reparations. Without these loans German industry collapsed and a depression began:
The most obvious consequence of this collapse was a huge rise in unemployment. Over the winter of 1929-30 the number of unemployed rose from 1.4 million to over 2 million. By the time Hitler became Chancellor in January 1933 one in three Germans were unemployed, with the figure hitting 6.1 million. Industrial production had also more than halved over the same period.
The impact of unemployment
The rise in unemployment significantly raised government expenditure on unemployment insurance and other benefits.
Germans began to lose faith in democracy and looked to extreme parties on the both the Left (the communists) and the Right (the Nazis) for quick and simple solutions.
Political failure
In March 1930 the German Chancellor, Hermann Müller, resigned when his government could not agree on how to tackle the rise in government spending caused by the rise in unemployment. He was replaced by Heinrich Brüning. His policies were ineffective in dealing with the unemployment crisis and further undermined Germans’ faith in democracy:
In July 1930 Chancellor Brüning cut government expenditure, wages and unemployment pay. This added to the spiral of decline and unemployment continued to rise, as well as making those who had lost their jobs even poorer.
However, Brüning could not get the Reichstag to agree to his actions, so President Hindenburg used Article 48 of the Weimar constitution, which gave the President the power to pass laws by decree, to govern. This undermined democracy and weakened the power of the Reichstag – arguably opening the way for Hitler’s later dictatorship.
The rise of extremism
During the economic depression between 1930 and 1933, many people were affected and poverty hit Germany hard. Extreme political parties offering simple solutions to their problems appeared at both ends of the political spectrum. Between 1930 and 1933, support for the extreme right-wing Nazis and the extreme left-wing communists soared.
By 1932 parties committed to the destruction of the Weimar Republic held 319 seats out of a total of 608 in the Reichstag, with many workers turning to communism. The communists had their own version of the SA, the Communist Red Fighting League, which broke up opposition party meetings. They confronted the police in street battles, and clashed with the Nazis’ SA as well. However, ultimately, the party that did better out of all this unrest were the Nazis.
What are the reasons for the growth in support of the Nazi Party?
Reasons for the growth in support of the Nazi Party
In 1928, the Nazis had only 12 seats in the Reichstag; by July 1932 they had 230 seats and were the largest party.
The appeal of Hitler and the Nazis
Because the Nazis’ 25 Point Programme appealed to people all over the country from all walks of life, they became popular. Other extremist groups like the communists only really appealed to the industrial workers in Germany’s cities and couldn’t keep up.
Wealthy businessmen: were frightened communists would take their wealth away and did not want to see any more increase in support for them. To combat this, they began to give money to Hitler and the Nazis, hoping they would gain more seats – not the communists.
The middle-class: were generally quite traditional and were not convinced by the Weimar democracy. Hitler promised them a strong government and won their votes.
Nationalists: they blamed the legacy of the Treaty of Versailles and reparations for causing the depression and so lent their support to the Nazis who had promised to make Germany strong again.
Rural areas: The Nazis appealed to people in the countryside - especially middle class shopkeepers and craftsmen, farmers and agricultural labourers.
The effects of propaganda
Nazi propaganda was controlled by Joseph Goebbels and had three main themes:
The Führer cult. Hitler was always portrayed as Germany’s saviour – the man who would rescue the country from the grip of depression.
Volksgemeinschaft (people’s community). This was the idea that the Nazis would create one German community that would make religion or social class less relevant to people.
Scapegoating the Jews (and others) for Germany’s ills. Jews were often portrayed as sub-human, or as a threat to both the racial purity and economic future of the country.
Hitler was a great speaker with an extraordinary power to win people over. Goebbels’ propaganda campaign was very effective (he used aeroplanes to bring Hitler to speak across the country, radios to broadcast important speeches and rallies to make supporters excited) and brought huge support for the Nazis by targeting specific groups of society with different slogans and policies to win their support.
The work of the SA
The SA played a part in the Nazis’ increasing popularity by:
intimidating the Nazis’ political opponents – especially the communists – by turning up at their meetings and attacking them
providing opportunities for young, unemployed men to become involved in the party
protecting Hitler and other key Nazis when they organised meetings and made speeches
What are the chain of events that led to Hitler’s appointment?
Chancellors in this period were normally weak because proportional representation made it hard for political parties to gain a majority of seats meaning the Chancellor found it difficult to control the Reichstag. By 1932 President Hindenburg had to use Article 48 to pass almost every law.
It was against this backdrop that the events of 1932 ad 1933 unfolded.
Major events leading to Hitler becoming Chancellor
1932
April – Presidential election. Hitler came second to Hindenburg, who won 53 per cent of the vote to Hitler’s 36.8 per cent.
May – Brüning resigned as Chancellor. Hindenburg appointed Franz Von Papen, a conservative, as his replacement.
July – Reichstag elections. The Nazis became the largest party with 230 seats. Hitler demanded to be made Chancellor but Papen remained.
November – Reichstag elections called by Von Papen to try to win a majority in parliament. Nazis lost 34 seats but remained the largest party with 196 seats.
December – Von Papen resigned. Hindenburg appointed Kurt Von Schleicher, an army general, as Chancellor. Von Schleicher tried to split the Nazis by asking a leading Nazi called Gregor Strasser to be his Vice Chancellor. Hitler forced Strasser to decline.
1933
January – Von Papen and Hindenburg turned to Hitler, appointing him as Chancellor with Von Papen as Vice Chancellor. They believed they could control Hitler and get him to do what they wanted.
When did Hitler become chancellor?
30th January 1933
