Timeline

Hello, I'm Richard Evans.

I'm Regions professor emeritus of history at Cambridge University,

And I'm the author of a three volume history of Nazi Germany published by Penguin.

I'm going to talk about the Weimar Republic and the rise of the Nazis.

First of all, I'll give a timeline very quickly,

and then I'll go into a number of analytical sections,

which are about questions that are commonly asked

about why Hitler and the Nazis achieved power.

Did proportional representation in the Weimar Constitution

create political instability allowing the Nazis into power?

Did the power

and personality of the president of the Weimar Republic

undermine the republic?

Was the Weimar Republic undermined by the post war inflation

and hyperinflation?

Or was it destroyed

by the Great Depression that set in

after the Wall Street crash of 1929?

Did Hitler

come

to power

legally?

Was he voted in by a majority of the population,

were the acts that provided the basis for his dictatorial power, legal or not?

And I finished just by summarising the whole

set of questions and my answers to them.

This is the first module.

It's the timeline of the rise of Nazism and the triumph of Hitler.

There's no

Nazism without Hitler.

He is essential to it,

and he plays a central role in it from start to finish.

He was born on the 20th of April

18 89 in Austria,

but he failed in his ambition to become an artist

and became a very active, very extreme right wing German nationalist.

He believed that German speaking Austria should be united with

the German empire he listed in the German army,

not the Austrian army.

In 1914 at the start of World War

when Germany was defeated in November 1918,

Hitler was outraged and this really this what

turned him into a far right nationalist politician.

He blamed the defeat of Germany not on military factors,

but on what's called a stab in the back.

The idea that Jewish agitators at home on the home front

let the army down and caused its defeat.

And he was sent by the German army to observe a small right wing

group called the German Workers' Party,

where he began speaking and soon discovered a talent for oratory.

In 1921 he became leader of this party,

changed name to the National Socialist German Workers' Party.

He thought that the Nazis could attain power on

the lines of Mussolini's so called march on Rome,

his coup in Italy in 1922.

But when Hitler tried this

in November 1923 in Munich, he was shot down

in a hail of bullets. He was slightly injured.

A couple of the Nazis were killed, and he was sentenced to a period in, well,

not too harsh imprisonment, so called fortress confinement.

When he was released, Hitler pull the party back together again,

but it wasn't very successful.

It's very important to note that even in 1928

the Nazis own only 12.6% of the national elections. That's a real fringe party.

Hitler alone can't really make it succeed. He requires a

big upheaval and disaster in German politics and society.

And this came with the Wall Street crash, the collapse of American capitalism,

withdrawal of loans from German industries and banks,

and massive unemployment in Germany. In uh, the early 19 thirties, by 1932

there were two real factors which are important.

First of all, 35% or more unemployment,

absolute disaster, businesses crashing, banks collapsing,

and secondly,

the democratic system had really gone into deep crisis.

In 1930

the grand coalition government of parties

supporting the banana republic fell because

it was unable to agree on measures to deal with the Depression.

And from this time onwards from March 1930

really,

the republic was governed by decree because every vote in

the Reichstag in the national parliament ended in a deadlock

in September 1930 the Nazis rocketed to over 100 Reichstag seats,

became the second largest party after the Social Democrats.

In March 1932 Hitler stood against the aged president Hindenburg,

a war hero from World War One,

and got 37% of the vote. Hindenburg, of course, won with 53% of the vote.

But it was important campaign to get the Nazis on the map in July

1932 a new right chancellor who was close to Hindenburg and like him,

believed in an authoritarian system a bit like the Kaiser's German empire.

Without the Kaiser

rolling back democracy, uh, defeating, outlawing or curbing the Social Democrats

and, uh, he pop in France from path in,

this new chancellor deposed the government of Prussia.

Germany is a federal system. Prussia covered more than half the country.

So the fact that the government of Prussia was

led by the Social Democrats is really important.

And with this essentially illegal deposition of the

Russian government of the Social Democrats rule by decree

and the last major obstacle to the destruction

of the republic was removed July 1932.

The Nazis got 230 seats in the Reichstag, becoming the largest single party,

13.7 million votes.

No middle class parties and liberals and conservatives collapsed.

All their votes had gone to the Nazis.

The Catholic Centre Party, the Social Democrats, kept most of their votes.

They lost some.

But as the Communists continued to improve

and increase their representation in November 1932

the Nazis actually lost votes. Because the economy is beginning to recover.

The Communists now got 100 seats,

and so pop and Hindenburg and the circle around them thought they could use

Nazism and its mass political base to push through their own reactionary reforms.

From 30th January 1933 they appointed Hitler Rife Chancellor.

Now, this is not the seizure of power.

It was the accomplishments, the achievement of office for Hitler.

He had to turn the fact that he was the chancellor, head of

a coalition government in which most

of the Cabinet representatives were conservatives and not

Nazis had to turn that into dictatorship.

There were two moments in which were crucial for turning

office

into power

for turning the right chancellorship into a dictatorship. First was on

the 27 28th of

February 1933 when a lone

Dutch radical young man called marinas Vandals

burned down the Reichstag building.

The Nazis have sometimes been accused of doing themselves was

absolutely no evidence at all that they were involved.

It was a chance which the Nazis seized on,

got President Hindenburg to suspend civil liberties by

decree and began arresting Communists and Social Democrats.

And on the 23rd of March,

following elections in which the Nazis still failed

to achieve a majority even though they were

now able to basically suppress opposition parties

and stop them campaigning

23rd of March 1933 the Nazis got the Reichstag support two thirds majority to

alter the constitution so that laws were made by Hitler and the Cabinet and not

by the Reichstag or by the president.

Underlying these

quasi legal justifications for dictatorship

was mass violence on the street,

and by the summer of 1933 Hitler has established a one party state.

He'd either persuaded or forced or blackmailed

the other parties into dissolving themselves,

and they were now formally banned. Concentration camps were set up.

Up to 200,000 of the opponents of Nazis were jailed in these concentration camps,

brutally mistreated

and released only on promise of not engaging in politics.

There was a kind of coda to this in 1934 because the storm troopers,

now over four million strong, were extremely, uh, disorderly.

They were still on the rampage,

although their main resolute for of suppressing opposition had now gone,

and they were threatening under their leader and learn to take over from the army.

The army was limited in its numbers 200,000 by the

Treaty of Versailles at the end of World War One,

but the leaders of the army still had a good leader of power.

They were well equipped. They had a lot of military experience,

and they now told Hitler,

either you suppress the stormtroopers or we will take over.

So after a lot of hesitation, Hitler

arrested the Stormtrooper leaders had else room shot.

And

this was followed in the summer of 1934 by the death of the aged president,

Hindenburg and Hitler declaring himself the furor or the leader of Germany.

So that's a timeline

of the Nazi seizure of power.