Hitler's rise to power 1919-1933

Hitler joined the Nazi Party in 1919 and was influential in defining its beliefs. He also led the Munich
Putsch in 1923. However, from 1924 to 1929 the unpopular party gained little electoral success.

Adolf Hitler (1889-1945)

 Hitler was born and raised in Austria.

 As a child his upbringing was not always happy, but he later wrote about how close he was
to his mother.
 He wanted to become an artist and tried to enter art school in Vienna, but was rejected.
 In Vienna, Hitler spent time as a vagrant (drifting from place to place) and in boarding
houses.
 He left Vienna and went to Germany in order to avoid military service.
 However, when World War One started, Hitler was caught up in the excitement and joined
the army.
 Many of his early experiences influenced what he wrote in his book, Mein Kampf.
Adolf Hitler fought in the German army during World War One. He was badly wounded
twice and won two Iron Crosses for bravery. Germany’s surrender in November 1918 was a
shock to him and had a profound effect on his political views. Like many other German
people at the time, he felt they had been ‘stabbed in the back’ by politicians:

 Many Germans hated the government for signing the armisticein November 1918 - and
called them the 'November Criminals'.
 Many people were led to believe that Jews in the army and government had encouraged the
surrender.
 The German government also signed the Treaty of Versailles, which blamed and punished
Germany for starting the war. As many German families had lost their men during the war,
this was especially hard to bear.

The German Workers' Party and the start of the Nazis

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.
 The early Nazi Party - beliefs and
structure
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.

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
 Membership and growth
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.

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.

The Munich Putsch and the lean years,

1923-29
The Munich Putsch

Adolf Hitler during 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.

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.
Summary of events
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.

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.

The party rebuilds, 1924-29

Hitler was released from jail after the Munich Putsch in December 1924. He committed the
Nazis to democratic politics – taking part in elections – and began to reorganise the party,
strengthening his authority as leader and beginning to build a national party structure.
However, the period up to 1929 is known as the Nazi Party’s ‘lean years’ because two
apparently contradictory things were happening to it:

 it was growing in size – its membership increased from 27,000 in 1925 to 130,000 in 1929
 but it struggled to win seats in the Reichstag:
Election May 1924 Dec 1924 May 1928

Number of seats won by the Nazis 32 14 12

Total number of seats in the Reichstag 472 493 491

Development of the Nazi Party

Party reorganisation
The decision to pursue power through democratic methods meant the party needed a national
structure to attract members, develop polices and campaign. Hitler put this in place during
1925 and 1926.

New structure of the Nazi Party:

Propaganda
Mein Kampf
While in jail Hitler wrote a book called Mein Kampf (My Struggle), which was an
autobiography-cum-manifesto, laying out his political beliefs and ambitions. Many of the
ideas contained in the books directly informed Nazi policy after 1933 under the Third Reich,
including:

 The belief that the Jews were an inferior race to the German Aryans, and also represented a
threat to the German state.
 The need to destroy the parliamentary system of government and replace it with that of a
single, strong dictator.
 Germany’s requirement for Lebensraum, or living space, to house its growing population.
This required Germany to expand to the East into Poland and Russia.
Developing techniques
Josef Goebbels – the Berlin Gauleiter at this time – was clever because he experimented with
new techniques and methods to share the Nazis’ message. Posters started to show Hitler as a
strong leader, speeches were arranged in public places and rallies were held to capture
people’s enthusiasm.

The Bamberg Conference, 1926

Hitler called a special Nazi Party conference on 14 February 1926 at Bamberg in southern
Germany in response to tension between the northern and southern sections of the party.
During his time in jail disagreements had grown between the two sections:

 the northern section, led by a man named Gregor Strasser, was keen to emphasise
the socialist elements of the 25-Point Programme to attract support from the workers
 the southern section more interested in the nationalist and racist policies in order to attract
support from the middle classes and farmers
The results of the conference were:

 Hitler insisted that policies which could be painted as communist, such as taking land from
rich noblemen, would not be pursued.
 However, the conference did reaffirm the 25-Point Programme, with its socialist ideas, as
the party’s policy platform.
 In addition, Hitler established the Fuhrerprinzip, or ‘Leader Principle’, the idea that the
party’s leader was in absolute control and all members must follow his directions.
No dissent from this was expected or tolerated.

Reasons for limited support for the Nazi Party, 1924–28

Joseph Goebells
Despite all of this development of the party, by 1928 the Nazis were still on the fringes of
politics in Weimar Germany for several reasons:
 Gustav Stresemann’s economic policies had helped Germany a lot. After 1923, the
introduction of a new currency and the Dawes Plan had helped to turn Weimar’s economy
around and Germans began to feel more prosperous.
 As a result of this, Germany was also more politically stable. Germans voted for moderate
parties who supported the Republic, rather than more extreme parties like the Nazis who
wanted to abolish it.
 At a time of stability, scaremongering and playing on people’s fears was less likely to
work. The Nazis’ messages about the dangers posed by Jews and the need to abolish
democracy largely fell on deaf ears.
 Hitler was jailed and then banned from speaking in public until 1927 after the Munich
Putsch. This prevented the party from campaigning effectively.
 The Nazi Party was under constant pressure from the Weimar authorities following the
Munich Putsch. Several times it was banned nationally or in certain parts of Germany.
Nevertheless, the party was developing effective propaganda techniques under its Berlin
Gauleiter, Joseph Goebbels, which would enable it to capitalise on the economic disaster that
was to strike Germany from 1929 onwards.

1.

The growth in support for the Nazis,

1929-32
Hitler was appointed Chancellor in January 1933. 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.

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 Versaillesand 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
 How Hitler became Chancellor, 1932-33
 The chain of events that led to Hitler’s appointment as Chancelloron 30 January 1933
is a complicated one.
 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