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East Germany Hitler and the Rise of National Socialism
Adolf Hitler was born in the Austrian border town of Braunau
am Inn in 1889. At the age of seventeen, Hitler was refused
admission to the Vienna Art Academy because of his lack of
talent. He remained in Vienna, where he led a Bohemian existence,
acquiring an ideology based on belief in the Germanic master race
and a form of anti-Semitism that blamed social and political
crises on Jewish subversive activities. Hitler remained in Vienna
until 1913, when he moved to Munich to avoid the draft. After
serving in the German army during World War I, he joined the
right-wing Bavarian German Workers' Party in 1919. The following
year, the party changed its name to the National Socialist German
Workers' Party (National-Sozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei--
NSDAP); the members were known as Nazis, a term derived from the
German pronunciation of "National". In 1921 Hitler assumed
leadership of the NSDAP.
As führer (leader) of the NSDAP, Hitler reorganized the party
on a monolithic basis and encouraged the assimilation of other
radical right-wing groups. He was assisted by Ernst Röhm,
Dietrich Eckart, and Alfred Rosenberg. Röhm's Stormtroopers
(Sturmabteilung--SA) constituted Hitler's private army. Eckart
published the Völkischer Beobachter, the official party
newspaper. Rosenberg, the party ideologist, developed slogans and
symbols and conceived the use of the swastika, the future emblem
of the Third Reich. Under Hitler's leadership, the NSDAP
denounced the republic and the "November criminals" who had
signed the Treaty of Versailles. The postwar economic slump won
the party a following among unemployed ex-soldiers, the lower
middle class, and small farmers; in 1923 membership totaled
55,000. General Ludendorff supported the former corporal in his
beer hall putsch of November 1923, an attempt to overthrow the
Bavarian government. The putsch failed, and Hitler was imprisoned
until December 1924. In prison he wrote Mein Kampf, the
Nazi ideological tract.
After the failure of the putsch, Hitler chose "legal
revolution" as the road to power and then pursued a double goal.
First, the NSDAP employed propaganda to create a national mass
party capable of seizing power through electoral successes.
Second, the party developed a bureaucratic structure and prepared
to assume the functions of
state. Beginning in 1924, numerous Nazi cells sprang up in
parts of northern Germany; the northern groups were consolidated
with the Munich-Bavarian party core. The NSDAP bureaucracy was
established in 1926. The SA, which was subordinated to
centralized political control, functioned primarily to train
party members and to supervise the Hitler Youth (Hitlerjugend--
HJ). Postwar youth and university students increasingly formed
the core of the NSDAP membership. In 1927 the NSDAP organized the
first Nuremberg party congress, a mass political rally. By 1928
party membership exceeded 100,000; the Nazis, however, polled
only 2.6 percent of the vote in the May Reichstag elections.
The NSDAP, a mere splinter party in 1928, began its rise to
power the following year. The original breakthrough was the July
1929 alliance with the DNVP. Alfred Hugenberg, a DNVP leader,
arranged the alliance for the purpose of launching a plebiscite
against the Young Plan on the issue of reparations. Hugenberg,
owner of a large chain of news media enterprises, considered the
spellbinding Hitler to be a useful drummer who would attract the
masses. The DNVP-NSDAP union brought the NSDAP within the
framework of a socially influential coalition of the
antirepublican right. As a result, Hitler's party acquired
respectability and access to financial resources from a number of
industrialists.
Had it not been for the economic depression of 1929, however,
Hitler might have faded out of Germany's history. The depression
greatly augmented political and social instability. By 1932
German unemployment figures had reached more than 6 million out
of a population of 65 million. The situation caused the middle
class, which had not fully recovered from the inflation of 1923,
to lose faith in the economic system and in its future. The NSDAP
exploited the situation, making an intensified appeal to the
unemployed middle-class urban and rural masses and blaming the
Treaty of Versailles and reparations for the developing crisis.
Nazi propaganda attacked the Weimar political "system," the
"November criminals," Marxists, internationalists, and Jews. In
addition to promising a solution to the economic crisis, the
NSDAP offered the German people a sense of national pride, the
acquisition of lebensraum (living space), and the restoration of
order. The racist concept of the "superior" Aryan requiring
defense against foreign intrusion, i.e., Jews, was also
proclaimed.
Frequent elections had to be held because no workable
majority was possible in the Reichstag; the economic depression
was causing an increase in votes only for the extremist parties.
The cabinet crises of the depression years led to increased
experimentation with authoritarian methods of rule. The most
important consequence of this experimentation was President
Hindenburg's appointment of chancellors whose politics favored
the right. In the spring of 1930, Hindenburg appointed Heinrich
Brüning as chancellor. The NSDAP won 18.3 percent of the vote
that year and emerged as the second strongest Reichstag party
(following the SPD, which had 38.2 percent). The KPD polled 13.1
percent of the vote. In 1931 the DNVP, which was devastatingly
defeated in the elections, joined with the NSDAP to form the
Harzburg Front coalition against Brüning's government. Under
orders from Moscow, the KPD cooperated with the NSDAP in an
attempt to destroy the Weimar Republic. Under attack from both
sides, the Brüning government survived only until June 1932.
In July 1932, the NSDAP more than doubled its 1930 Reichstag
representation and became the strongest German party. In the
November 1932 election, however, NSDAP popularity declined as the
economic depression began to abate. The KPD increased its
representation in this election. In the same year, a group of
conservative and antirepublican aristocrats and industrialists,
thinking they could use to their advantage the wave of discontent
that had contributed to Hitler's rise in popularity, supported
the NSDAP with funds. Meanwhile, Brüning's successor, Franz von
Papen, a strong authoritarian who wished to establish a corporate
state under aristocratic leadership and thus circumvent the
problems of parliamentary politics, sought NSDAP-DNVP support in
May 1932. He, however, met with Hitler's refusal. After the
electoral success of the NSDAP in the July 1932 elections, Hitler
also refused Papen's offer to join the cabinet as vice
chancellor.
General Kurt von Schleicher, having forced Papen's
resignation, was appointed chancellor in December 1932. Unable to
form a coalition in the Reichstag, Schleicher also offered Hitler
the vice chancellorship, but the führer was determined to hold
out for the highest government post. When Schleicher was
dismissed, he and Papen, intriguing separately, prevailed upon
President Hindenburg to appoint Hitler chancellor of a coalition
government. On January 30, 1933, by entirely legal means, Adolf
Hitler became chancellor of the republic.
Data as of July 1987
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