Adolf Hitler's Rise to Power

Adolf Hitler's Rise to Power is a frequently searched topic on Google and YouTube, but until this week, there was little to be found in terms of an academic lecture on the subject.  This week, I released a half hour lecture on Hitler's Rise to Power that is divided into three parts and is availabe on my YouTube channel.

Part I (1889-1921)

Click above to view the first part of my lecture on Hitler's Rise to Power.

The first part of the lecture starts at the beginning with Hitler's birth in Austria.  As a boy, he encountered two philosophies that would impact him for the rest of his life:  Pan-Germanism and Antisemitism.  One of the most prominent politicians in Austria during Hitler's youth was Karl Lueger, the mayor of Vienna, whose Christian Social Party employed antisemitic propaganda in its campaign posters.

Hitler left Austria for Bavaria shortly before World War I and after the war broke out, he enlisted in the German Army.  For a brief time after the war ended, Hitler continued his military service, embedding himself in the radical German Workers Party as a government agent.  In this capacity, he became sympathetic to the party's anti-capitalist, anti-Marxist, and anti-Semitic messages and continued as an active member after he was discharged from the army. 

Far-right parties like the German Workers Party embraced conspiracy theories, such as the "stabbed in the back" myth, which held Jews and Marxists responsible for the German defeat in World War I.  Those who subscribed to this way of thinking believed that Germany had lost World War I because of internal enemies.  After all, how else could Germany have been defeated by a coalition of British, French, and American forces representing two of the three largest industrialized nations of the day?

In 1920, the German Workers Party re-branded itself as the National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP).  Hitler played a key role in expanding the radical party's appeal both in his capacity as a gifted public speaker and in designing the party's swastika logo himself.  In 1921, Hitler was elected as the leader of the National Socialist German Workers Party. 

This 1919 Austrian cartoon is representative of propaganda promoting the "Stabbed in the Back" myth after World War I.

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Hitler and the Nazi Party

Part II (1921-1929)

Click above to view the second part of my lecture on Hitler's Rise to Power.

The 1920s transformed Hitler's National Socialist German Workers Party from a relatively unknown fringe party into one of the leading political parties in Germany.  In 1923, the Nazis attempted a paramilitary coup known as the Beer Hall Putsch.  This attempt to overthrow the German government by force was unsuccessful and led to the imprisonment of Hitler and other Nazi Party leaders.  While in prison, Hitler wrote Mein Kampf (My Struggle), a two volume work that was part biography and part political manifesto.  Mein Kampf became a hugely popular work that allowed Hitler to share his political ideology with the disaffected classes in Weimar Germany.

​Nazi Propaganda

Hitler was released from prison after serving only 264 days of his sentence.  Like Vladimir Lenin before him and Fidel Castro after him, Hitler would first engage in a sloppy attempt to overthrow the government before doing it successfully at a later time.

​While in prison, Hitler changed his strategy for taking power, realizing that his party's future success was dependent on relying on the legitimate political process in order to seize political power rather than through a violent revolution.  To this end, he relied heavily on his propaganda arm, headed by Joseph Goebbels, and his party's paramilitary wing of storm troopers known as the SA (Sturmabteilung).  ​

Many Nazi propaganda posters like these are available at the German Propaganda Archive.

Nazi propaganda often depicted idealized forms of storm troopers and workers in addition to spreading messages of Germany's liberation from Jewish oppressors and foreign powers.  Even with the help of its massive propaganda arm, the National Socialists posted a pitiful ninth place finish in the 1928 election.  During the "Golden Age" of the Weimar Republic, the vast majority voters were not at all receptive to the Nazi Party's radical message.  However, that would change with the onset of the Great Depression in 1929.

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Part III (1929-1933)

Click above to view the third part of my lecture on Hitler's Rise to Power.

The Great Depression was a major turning point for the Nazi Party because the parties in power lost the public trust and people became more open to supporting fringe parties.  Nazi propaganda went into overdrive, targeting workers and veterans who felt betrayed by the governing coalition.  Hitler's status as a World War I "front soldier" was placed at the center of the campaign.  Simply put, Hitler was a man who could make Germany great again, so to speak.

In the 1930 elections, Hitler's Nazi Party came in second place, capturing nearly 20% of the vote.  Even more shocking was that the Communist Party finished third with 13% of the vote.  Combined with the first place Social Democratic Party, parties that were sympathetic to Marxist ideologies captured nearly 40% of the votes cast.  This alarmed centrists and conservatives, who feared the formation of a Marxist coalition.  While the Nazis were seen as a fringe party, they were not Marxist, which opened some centrist and right wing leaders to make a "deal with the devil" in order to prevent a communist takeover of the government.

Hitler as Chancellor of Germany

Hitler understood these fears and used them, reaching out to business leaders and moderating the socialist tone of the Nazi message and emphasizing its anti-Marxist positions.  In the 1932 election, the National Socialists finished in first place, followed by the Social Democrats and the Communists.  In 1933, President Paul von Hindenburg reluctantly named Hitler as Chancellor of Germany to lead a coalition government with the German National People's Party.  
​Hindenburg's advisors believed that Hitler could be controlled and moderated once he took over the government, but Hitler did not simply aspire to be the head of a coalition government.  He still had the same aim he'd had in the early 1920s:  to become the leader of a militaristic, single party German state.  

The PowerPoint slides for this lecture are available on my PowerPoints Page.

In a moment of crisis, it is nearly always effective to blame an unpopular group for the crisis.

When the Reichstag building caught fire in 1933, Hitler and the Nazis were quick to blame the Communists for starting the fire.  To this day, it is unknown how the fire started or who started it, but what matters is that Hitler was successful in convincing the German people that the Communists were up to no good.  In the March 1933 elections, Hitler's party gained seats and the Communists lost seats.

President Hindenburg's Reichstag Fire Decree suspended civil liberties and allowed Hitler's government to arrest anyone suspected of having anything to do with the Reichstag fire or of any activities against the government.  Hitler used this opportunity to arrest Communist members of the Reichstag.  This eliminated one more set of opponents and put Hitler one step closer to achieving the dictatorial power he sought.

Hitler's final move was to pass the Enabling Act, a constitutional amendment that allowed Hitler and his cabinet to dictate laws without the approval of the Reichstag.  The Enabling Act required 2/3 of those present to pass, which the Nazis achieved by invalidating the seats held by arrested Communists and by securing the support of the Catholic parties (presumably by promising to protect the rights of German Catholics and Catholic schools) and the German National People's Party.  Only the Social Democrats voted in opposition.  The following year, Hitler succeeded in dissolving all other political parties and placed himself at the head of a single party state.