The apparent success of Stalin’s totalitarian Communist regime in the Soviet Union contrasted strongly with the seeming failure of liberal parliamentary governments in western Europe during the 1930s. Stalin was less of a threat to European peace, however, than the aggressively militaristic regime established in Germany after 1933 by Adolf Hitler. Hitler’s rise to power signalled the breakdown of the system created by the Treaty of Versailles in 1919 and the democratic Weimar Republic.
The fact that someone like Hitler
could become the ruler of a major European country was itself a demonstration
of the crisis of democracy.
Hitler had very little education and an extremely narrow view of the
world. As a young man in Austria, he
had been won over to the racist ideas that were so popular in early
twentieth-century Europe, and especially to a violent prejudice against
Jews. He served in the German army
during World War I, and found that being part of a violent struggle gave
meaning to his life. After the war, he
plunged into the milieu of bitterly frustrated and unemployed ex-soldiers who
could not accept Germany’s defeat.
Speaking at first to small groups, he discovered that he had a real talent
as an orator. He soon became head
of one of the many small racist and anti-democratic movements that sprang up in
post-war Germany, the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, the ‘Nazis.’ Hitler’s abilities as a propagandist and organizer
turned this group into the largest and noisiest right-wing movement in Munich,
Germany’s second-largest city. During
the inflation crisis of 1923, Hitler thought the moment had come to seize power
and create a dictatorship like the one Mussolini had established in Italy. The German Army dispersed his followers and
this ‘Beer Hall putsch’ ended in failure; Hitler was arrested and spent
about a year in prison. Most Germans
forgot about him and his Nazi movement as their country entered the brief period
of prosperity from 1924 to 1929.
Hitler and his small group of loyal
followers remained convinced that circumstances would eventually turn in their
favor. After the failure of his attempt
to seize power by force in 1923, Hitler shifted to a strategy of legality: he would defeat the democratic Weimar
Republic by taking advantage of its rules.
When the Great Depression hit Germany in 1930, this disaster for
his country gave him his chance.
Hitler’s propaganda blamed Jews, Communists, and the leaders of the
Weimar government for rising unemployment.
In parliamentary elections held in mid-1930, the Nazi vote rose
dramatically, to 18 per cent; by July 1932, it reached 37 per cent,
making the Nazis by far the largest party in the country. Hitler used calculated violence to increase
tension and make the public eager for some solution that could restore peace in
the streets.
By the beginning of 1933, Germany’s
conservative politicians were ready to take a chance on Hitler. Putting him in charge of the government
would restore order and keep them from having to make compromises with the
left-wing parties. Since Hitler had no
previous political experience, they were sure he would soon discredit himself
and they would be able to take over.
Hitler was thus neither elected by the voters, nor did he have to seize
power by force: he was invited to
become Chancellor of Germany by the country’s conservative elected
president, Hindenburg, on 30 January 1933.
Once in power, Hitler quickly
demonstrated that his opponents had badly underestimated him. He moved quickly to ban other political
parties and trade unions and put their leaders in concentration camps run by
his loyal followers. He intimidated the
German parliament into passing an Enabling Act that allowed him to issue
laws by decree. In a process called Gleichschaltung
(roughly, “getting everything on the same wavelength”), almost every
organization in the country was bullied into choosing leaders who were Nazi
supporters, so that any possibility of organizing opposition was ended. Hitler put his threats against the Jews into
practice, beginning with laws barring them from most professions and
government jobs and soon expanding to laws forbidding marriage and sexual
contact between Jews and non-Jews.
In Germany, Hitler’s government was
popular because its program of rearmament put people back to work, and
Hitler announced that he would undo the restrictions imposed by the Versailles
treaty. Rather than standing up to
Hitler, most other European governments were anxious to avoid trouble with him,
a policy that came to be known as “appeasement.” Step by step, Hitler moved to divide the
other European powers and strengthen Germany’s position. In 1936, he sent troops into the Rhineland,
territory bordering France that was supposed to remain demilitarized under the
Versailles treaty. In 1938, he annexed
his native Austria, and his threat of starting a war led England and France to
allow him to seize territory from one of Germany’s neighbors, Czechoslovakia,
under the Munich agreement.
When Hitler violated the terms of
the Munich agreement in early 1939, England and France finally began to prepare
seriously to resist him. Although
neither country had good relations with the Soviet Union, both had assumed that
Stalin would join in a coalition against Hitler, since the two totalitarian
dictators always denounced each other.
Instead, on 23 August 1939, Hitler and Stalin made a treaty, the “Nazi-Soviet
pact,” under which they agreed to divide up Poland. When Hitler attacked Poland on 1 Sept. 1939,
England and France found themselves alone in opposing him. Hitler’s attack marked the beginning of
the Second World War in Europe (fighting in Asia had been going on since
1931).
I.
Hitler’s
Rise to Power
A.
Hitler’s
Background (1889-1918)
1. Youthful frustrations
2. the experience of the Great
War
B.
Founding
a Movement (1919-1923)
1. racism and opposition to
democracy
2. oratory and organizing
skills
3. the ‘Beer Hall’ putsch of
November 1923
C.
The
Conquest of Power (1923-1933)
1. the strategy of legality
2. the impact of the Depression
3. the elections of 1932
4. weakness of opposition to
Hitler
5. Hindenburg’s fateful choice
II.
The
Nazis in power (1933-1939)
A.
The
takeover (1933)
1. installing dictatorship
2. ‘Gleichschaltung’
3. anti-semitic laws
B.
Hitler
and Europe
1. Rearmament and the Rhineland
(1936)
2. appeasement and Munich
(1938)
3. the Nazi-Soviet pact (1939)
III. Could Hitler Have Been Stopped?