Good Men Do Nothing: How Hitler Conquered Germany
From the perspective of history, there is a danger that Hitler is seen as an inevitability. Far more interesting to focus on the Nazi excesses once they were in power (more lurid), the Second World War they directly caused (more exciting) and their dramatic downfall (more… dramatic) than to ask how they rose in the first place.
If pushed, most people who know something about the era will point vaguely to it being the fault of the French and their draconian reparation demands after the First World War, and add something about the interwar Weimar Republic in Germany being “weak” in some fashion. Something something hyperinflation, or words to that effect.
This is not to say that these are not contributory causes, and indeed they are part of the story. So too were the central figures of the Nazi party, at their heart a man who spent the entire interwar period as something between a revolutionary, a provocateur and a hooligan. Hitler pushed the authorities so far in his disruptive antics that spent time in prison for his actions.
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But his decade of demagoguery and rabble rousing paid off, and his rise, when it came, was shockingly fast and so sudden as to be almost unexpected. As late as the middle of 1932 the Republic still existed as a democracy, but in just a few months it was replaced by a fascist dictatorship.
How did the Weimar Republic give way to autocracy? How did Hitler, a petty and an unpleasant man, place himself and his Nazi thugs at the heart of the new reality? And can any lessons be learned from this history, to ensure such a thing is never allowed to happen again?
A Free and Fair Election
By the time of the 1932 Federal Elections in Germany, the country found itself at the bottom of an economic pit three years in the making. The Great Depression had tripled unemployment to almost 30%: almost six million people were unemployed and industrial production had halved.
Through the mid and late 1920s Germany had been governed by a “grand coalition” of pro-republican parties, but in 1930 this alliance collapsed. By 1932 the three years of economic disaster were married to two years of fragmented politicking, with multiple fringe parties gaining traction and no consensus on how to run the country.
Chief among these parties was the NSDAP, the Nazi party, who had gained 95 seats in the 1930 election and cast themselves as visionaries for a better, stronger Germany. At this time the Nazis were also unencumbered by the baggage that comes from actual government: they were untested, but that also meant they were unsullied with failure.
But the first election the Nazis tried to win in 1932 was not the federal one. In March there were Presidential elections in Germany, and when Hitler ran for President he was beaten, narrowly, by a pro-democracy coalition which had gathered around the ancient but venerable war hero Paul von Hindenburg.
This election set the stage for what came later. The Nazi party, as is common with such fascist undertakings, was a cult of personality as much as a party of policy, and when the Presidential elections characterized Hitler as the obvious alternative as a leader to the establishment it also brought his Nazis to the fore.
And the Nazis were certainly on the rise. Membership had grown five time in two years to a million and a half people, and the party also operated a slick propaganda machine, controlling some 125 newspapers by 1932.
The coalition in power seemed unable to reach on consensus on nearly anything, which allowed the Nazis to style them as weak and divided, which was entirely fair. An election was not even due in 1932, but came about because of the collapse of the ruling coalition once again.
But with these elections the Nazis, still, fell short. They won a huge number of seats and became the largest party in the German Parliament, but they lacked an overall majority. They could prevent a coalition of moderates from governing, but they could not themselves rule.
The Chancellor and leader of Parliament, Franz von Papen, would have to form a government that included the Nazis for the first time, and Hitler’s price for his support was telling. In return for Papen remaining Chancellor, Hitler’s personal brownshirted militia known as the Sturmabteilung, the stormtroopers, would be made legal.
This government however did not even last the year. An overwhelming no-confidence vote in the coalition formed by Papen swept the government away and led to elections being held, again, in November 1932.
The Nazis lost ground slightly in these elections, and it seemed that something had to be done before their star faded forever. By a stroke of chance so lucky as to seem suspicious, the Nazis got exactly what they were looking for.
In February 1933, the Reichstag building, seat of the German government, was burned down, apparently by a Durch communist. The true story of what happened may never be fully known, but this atrocity allowed the Nazis to sweep in with their (now legal) private army and arrest large swatches of their political opponents.
Hitler had been appointed Chancellor, replacing Papen, in January 1933. The conservatives still held many posts in the cabinet and believed they could “tame” Hitler into ruling by consensus, and maybe they were even right at the time. But the Reichstag Fire changed that.
The elections which were held in March 1933 were subject to extreme voter intimidation from the Sturmabteilung, who were pretending to monitor the voting but were actually ensuring its outcome. A united Germany would not have free elections again until 1990.
And yet again, even with a vice-like control over everything from the top job to the vote counting, the Nazis failed to claim a majority. Hitler required the vote of the cooperative Center Party to receive temporary, emergency powers as Chancellor which allowed him to act as he saw fit and suspend the democratic process.
Hitler tried to style this decision as one made for the good of the country and Europe. With his brownshirts surrounding the building, he spoke to the gathered members of the government and said “It is for you, gentlemen of the Reichstag to decide between war and peace.”
He got his powers, and the rest is history. Hitler was given four years as a dictator but did not even wait one: he immediately got to work dismantling all political parties aside from the Nazis. All other parties were illegal by July 1933.
Hindenburg, still President and the only other German leader to rival Hitler, died in August 1934. By this point Hitler had the support of the army, and it would take more than a decade, a combined invasion by the rest of Europe, the Soviet Union and the United States, the destruction of much of Germany, and a bullet from a Walther PPK to remove him.
Header Image: Hitler and Hindenburg, March 21, 1933. A turning point in history. Source: Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-S38324 / CC BY-SA 3.0 DE.
