But in this lecture, I'm going to explore the question of how Hitler came to power.

I'm going to look at three broad themes.

Firstly,

I'm going to look at the context in which Nazism emerged

and specifically at the conditions of crisis that made Nazis impossible.

Then I'm going to try and look at the appeal of Nazism as a mass movement.

And then finally,

I'm going to look more closely at the

steps by which a dictatorship was established between 1930

1934.

So to start with the context,

historians commonly described the Weimar Republic

as the classic crisis of a modern

democracy.

In some ways,

I think that that image sells short

the many optimistic alternative visions of Germany's future

that were there in the 19 twenties.

The 19 twenties contains many different possible

futures, and Nazism isn't even necessarily the most likely one.

But there's no doubting nonetheless that Germany was suffering a

multi dimensional crisis in the period from 1918 onwards.

Firstly, it experienced constant political crisis.

1918 sees the collapse of the old imperial monarchy,

the establishment of a new, fledgling, quite weak republic,

which is beset by constant attacks from the extreme left and the extreme right,

but which also I think has has has great difficulty trying to

get the moderate left and the moderate right to work together,

the most obvious indicator of which

is the challenge of building sustainable, solid coalition governments.

It struggles for the same reason.

To establish a strong sense of legitimacy among

broad sections of the middle class in particular.

Secondly,

Germany is suffering from near constant economic crisis in the 19 twenties.

There is the impact of a lost war to contend with.

There is the profound impact of the hyperinflation of 1923.

There's the stagnation, the rising unemployment of the 19 twenties,

when all of the weaknesses of the Weimar economy become apparent.

And, of course,

there's the devastating impact of the Depression from

1929 onwards with the Wall Street crash,

Unemployment is the key characteristic of the German

economy, particularly from 1931 onwards,

when the Depression really hits its deepest point.

Mass unemployment creates this profound sense of crisis in

a sense that things cannot go on like this.

Even the Republic supporters by this stage have a sense of

profound disillusionment about the way that things have worked out.

I think we can also point.

This is slightly more complex or harder to put your finger on.

But I think we can point to a profound sense of cultural crisis in the 19 twenties to

especially on the conservative right,

for whom the Weimar Republic represents a world they no longer understand.

The most obvious sign of disorder for them

is probably visible in the sphere of gender,

where the presence of lots of

emasculated men, disabled veterans of the first World War,

who were walking around on crutches, unable to work provide for their family

contrasts with the image of female emancipation that's so central to the

promise of the republic. It creates for them a sense of a world turned upside down

that needs putting back into its natural order

as they see it.

We can also, I think, point to what we would describe as a crisis of civil society,

and here we might focus on the problem of violence.

Now again, that can be overstated. Most war veterans

come back from the First World War,

wanting never to have anything to do with war or violence again, in their lives.

But nonetheless,

the war witnesses the entry of violence into the political culture

of Germany.

Paramilitary activism,

uniforms

marching, the singing of military songs,

the Nazis with the essay, They're storm troopers.

The brown shirts are perhaps the most obvious manifestation of this,

but they're not the only one.

You just have to think of the title of Hitler's book, Mein Kampf, My Struggle,

My Fight, My Battle to

to Think about the ways in which the violence of the first World War starts to shape,

how people imagine

political activism in the 19 twenties.

So this all feeds them into a sort of sense of overarching crisis,

bequeathed by defeat itself by this I,

by the loss of territory by the imposition of reparations by the national

humiliation that the war guilt clause represents

by the demilitarisation of the Rhineland.

All of this generates a sense of profound national resentment

upon which Nazism can capitalise. So these are the conditions of crisis,

in which Nazism gradually and eventually flourishes.

It offers simple messages of national renewal

national revival

messages offered by a charismatic leader who seems

to embody a new style of politics.

His active, his uncompromising his dynamic.

He's committed to getting things done,

especially in the Depression. Hitler builds a very broad basis of support.

The backbone of the support of Nazism is probably in the German middle classes,

but it is much broader than that.

It's particularly strong in rural and small town areas.

It appeals to youth. It appeals to those who hitherto hadn't voted

for. Broad sections of German society are profound, and, I think very overstated.

Fear

of the left, especially of communism,

provides much of the

justification for overcoming any misgivings that they may

feel about aspects of what Hitler offers.

Hitler projects an image of himself as channelling the will of the people,

and he's very successful at that.

He also is very good at contrasting the dynamism of his mass movement,

anchored in the desires of ordinary Germans

with what he represents as the failings of parliamentary democracy, Hitler is,

in a sense, the ultimate populist.

Now,

as the Depression deepens,

the Nazi party becomes the largest party that

culminates in the elections of July 1932.

By this point at the latest, the Nazi party can't be ignored.

It's become a force in German politics, that everyone else just can't get past

The problem for Hitler, of course, is,

firstly that he still doesn't have a majority in the Reichstag,

the German Parliament, uh, and secondly, that that wouldn't in any case be enough.

Because, as

as as many historians have pointed out, from 1930 onwards,

the Reichstag becomes progressively marginalised as a centre of power.

For many years, broad sections of Germany's economic,

administrative military elites had been pushing an anti democratic agenda

centred on reversing the achievements of the revolution of 1918 to 1919.

When the conservative nationalist general powerful Hindenburg

became president in the mid 19 twenties,

replacing

the social Democrat Friedrich Ebert,

they increasingly found a favourable ear right at the centre, the top of power to

so in March 1930 With the failure of what was

to become what was to be the final democratic coalition,

Hindenburg was able to use his emergency powers to instal

an authoritarian government. Under Heinrich Bruning,

Bruning was the first of three chancellors to

govern without the support of the right tag.

He was eventually succeeded

by the shorter lived governments of von Papen

and Fritzsche Lakisha

and the presence of these

three increasingly authoritarian governments between 1930

1933

marked a major step in the road to the destruction of our, um, our democracy

and the establishment of the dictatorship.

I think the German example reminds us here

both the populist Dictatorships are rarely established overnight,

and that bypassing,

undermining,

downgrading the importance of Parliament's

is a move straight out of the classic authoritarian playbook.

Now, however, all but the most

reactionary of figures around Hindenburg recognised that in the long run,

a modern industrial society

could not be governed without some sort of mass consent.

And essentially, the governments of Bruning, Papen and Schleicher

can be seen as three failed attempts to find

the basis for an authoritarian government of the right

that excluded Hitler and his mass support.

It's the failure to do that that led the conservative establishment

to accept reluctantly eventually

that it had to bring Hitler in.

So what matters here is to emphasise that Hitler's appointment

was not the product of a conspiracy of the elites,

but it was a product of division and weakness of the conservative elites.

They were strong enough to destroy the republic,

but they were not strong enough to impose their own

idea of a perfect replacement

now, conversely, of course, Hitler became chancellor in January 1933

but he didn't have total power at that point.

The Nazis were a minority in his first Cabinet, for starters,

but

the Nazis had both the right and the Prussian interior ministries,

which meant that they controlled the police

and in the defence minister, Bloomberg. They had a figure sympathetic to

the Nazis, to which meant that effectively they could rely upon the army.

And if you control the police

and you control the army,

those are the key kind of power centres to

hold in conditions where you're trying to impose a dictatorship

over the coming months, Then Hitler was remarkably successful in sweeping away

all the alternative power centres that still remained.

So the Reichstag fire in February

provides the pretext for the suspension of all civil liberties,

a ferocious attack on the Communists above all,

many of whom are murdered, incarcerated, driven into exile.

The elections of March 1933

they consolidate Hitler's coalition, Uh, and with the enabling act,

the powers of the Reichstag are then passed permanently to the government.

The wave of terror that follows intimidated what remains of the opposition

into silence during

the first concentration camp is established in March 1933.

And those political parties which hadn't been destroyed or or

hadn't to solve themselves were formally banned in July 1933

at which point Germany becomes a one party state.

Finally,

in the summer of 1934 Hitler eliminated the internal party opposition

that had crystallised around Anstrom

and the essay

This Is the Night of the Long knives.

This is a crucial moment in several respects,

not only most obviously because it asserts Hitler's, uh,

supreme authority in the in the movement as the undisputed fewer,

but because it's supported and it's validated by the military and the judiciary.

Essentially, the supposed pillars of law and order and decency

had

had connived in a massive act of extra judicial political murder.

This marks, I think, a major moral lapse,

a key moment in Germany's descent into the politics of violence.

Shortly thereafter,

Hindenburg died and Hitler effectively assumed his functions to so that

the presidency is also abolished as a alternative centre of power.

And that's really the point at which the dictatorship is fully established.

Is there a moment where Hitler could have been stopped?

Is there a moment where it was too late or it had become inevitable?

I think the lesson here is, firstly,

that many conservatives underestimated Hitler's drive and ambition

and the danger it represented.

Secondly,

I think it reminds us that the democratic edifice was,

and perhaps always is a very fragile.

Indeed.

In the absence of a robust defence,

parliamentary democracy is blown away by the

forces of populist nationalism very quickly indeed,

in 1933

1934.