how hitler rose to power essay

The Rise of Hitler to Power Essay

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Introduction

The weimar republic, anti-semitism, reference list.

Adolf Hitler rose to power as the chancellor of Germany in 1933 through a legal election and formed a coalition government of the NSDAO-DNVP Party. Many issues in Hitler’s life and manipulations behind the curtains preceded this event.

Hitler and the Nazi party rose to power propelled by various factors that were in play in Germany since the end of World War I. The weak Weimar Republic and Hitler’s anti-Semitism campaigns and obsession were some of the factors that favored Hitler’s rise to power and generally the Nazi beliefs (Bloxham and Kushner 2005: 54).

Every public endorsement that Hitler received was an approval for his hidden Nazi ideals of dictatorship and Semitism regardless of whether the Germans were aware or not.

Hitler’s pathway to power was rather long and coupled with challenges but he was not ready to let go; he held on to accomplish his deeply rooted obsessions and beliefs; actually, vote for Hitler was a vote for the Holocaust.

Hitler joined the German Worker’s Party in the year 1919 as its fifth member. His oratory talent and anti-Semitism values quickly popularized him and by 1920, he was already the head of propaganda.

The party later changed its name to Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartel (NSDPA) and formed paramilitary groups in the name of security men or gymnastics and sports division.

It was this paramilitary formed by Hitler that would cause unrest later to tarnish the name of the communists leading to distrust of communism by the Germans and on the other hand rise of popularity of the Nazi (Burleigh 1997: 78).

A turning point of Hitler took place when he led the Beer Hall Putsch, in a failed coup de tat and the government later imprisoned him on accusations of treason. The resulting trial earned him a lot of publicity, he used the occasion to attack the Weimar republic, and later while in prison, he rethought his approach to get into power.

The military defeat and German revolution in November 1918 after the First World War saw the formation of Weimar republic.The military government handed over power to the civilian government and later on revolutions in form of mutinies, violent uprisings and declaration of independence occurred until early 1919.

Then there was formation of constituent assembly and promulgated of new constitution, which included the infamous article 48. None of the many political parties could gain a majority vote to form government and therefore many small parties formed a coalition government.

What followed were a short period of political stability mainly because of the coalition government in place and the later the signing of the Treaty of Versailles in June 1919. Many factors caused the rise of the Nazi party to power.

The most notable factor was his ability to take advantage of Germany’s poor leadership, economical and political instability.

The Weimar’s Republic collapse under pressure due to hyperinflation and civil unrest was the result of Hitler’s ability to manipulate the German media and public while at the same time taking advantage of the country’s poor leadership (Schleunes 1990: 295).

The period between 1921 and 1922, Germany was struggling with economic instability due to high inflation and hyperinflation rates prior to the absolute collapse of the German currency. The German mark became almost useless resulting into instability-fuelled unrest in many sectors of the economy. To counter the effects, the government printed huge amounts of paper money.

Germany had to sign the unforgiving treaty of Versailles, which the Weimar Republic was responsible for and was later to become the ‘noose around Germany’s neck’, a situation that caused “feelings of distrust, fear, resentment, and insecurity towards the Weimar Republic” (Bartov 2000: 54).

Hitler built on these volatile emotions and offered the option of a secure and promising leadership of the extremist Nazi party as opposed to the weak and unstable coalition government of the Weimar republic. Dippel notes, “Hitler’s ability to build upon people’s disappointed view of the hatred of the treaty of Versailles was one of the major reason for the Nazi party’s and Hitler’s rise to power” (1996: 220).

The Treaty of Versailles introduced the German population to a period of economic insatiability and caused an escalation of hard economic standards. The opportunistic appearance of an extremist group that promised better options than the prevailing situation presented a temptation to the vulnerable Germans to accept it (Dippel 1996: 219).

During the period of hyperinflation, unemployment rose sharply and children were largely malnourished. The value of people’s savings spiraled downwards leading to low living standards and reduction in people buying power.

People became desperate and started a frantic search for a better alternative to the Weimar Government. Germany in a state of disillusionment became a prey to the convincing promises of Hitler. Hitler promised full employment and security in form of a strong central government.

The Weimar republic also faced political challenges from both left-wingers and right-wingers. The communists wanted radical changes like those one implemented in Russia while the conservatives thought that the Weimar government was too weak and liberal.

The Germans longed for a leader with the leadership qualities of Bismark especially with the disillusionment of the Weimar republic. They blamed the government for the hated Versailles treaty and they all came out to look for a scapegoat to their overwhelming challenges (Thalmann and Feinermann 1990: 133).

In their bid to look for scapegoats, many Germans led by Hitler and Nazi party blamed the German Jews for their economic and political problems.

Hitler made a failed attempt to seize power through a coup de tat that led to his arrest and imprisonment. In prison, he wrote a book that was later to become the guide to Nazism known as Mein Kampf (My Struggle).

The book reflected Hitler’s obsessions to nationalism, racism, and anti-Semitism and he insisted that Germans belonged to a superior race of Aryans meaning light-skinned Europeans. According to Hitler, the greatest enemies of the Aryans were the Jews and therefore the Germans should eliminate them at all costs since they were the genesis of all their misfortunes.

These views on Semitism could trace its genesis in history from which it Historians suspect that Hitler’s ideas were rooted. In this view, Christians persecuted Jews mainly because of their difference in beliefs.

Nationalism in the 19 th century caused the society to view Jews as ethnic outsiders while Hitler viewed Jews not as members of a religion but as a unique race (Longerich 2006: 105). Consequently, he blamed the German’s defeat on a conspiracy of Marxists, Jews, corruption of politicians and businesspersons.

Hitler urged the Germans on the need to unite into a great nation so that the slaves and other inferior races could bow to their needs (Bergen 2003: 30). He further advocated for removal and elimination of the Jews from the face of the earth to create enough space for ‘great nation’.

He spread propaganda that for Germany to unite into one great nation it required a strong leader one he believed to be destined to become.

These Semitism views contributed to the sudden change of fortunes for the Nazi party and Hitler because the conditions were appropriate. The Germans were desperate for some hope in the midst of frustrating times due to the failure of the Weimar republic and rising communism (Stone 2004: 17).

They involuntarily yielded to the more appealing Nazism values especially with the promises of destroying communism and improved living standards.

However, in accepting the Nazi party and Hitler, the Germans were giving in to Semitism, which was deeply rooted in the core values of Nazism, and Hitler had clearly outlined them in the Mein Kampf, which laid out his ideas and future policies.

Hitler’s well timed and precise way of “introducing the secure option of Nazism at an appropriate time and taking advantage of a disjointed Weimar republic that faced unprecedented challenges” (Cohn-Sherbok 1999: 12) was one of the many reasons that underscored Hitler’s fame.

He promised a strong and united German nation very timely when the German nation had suffered a dent to their pride and union due to the defeat in the First World War. Hitler’s promise of a strong and powerful nation began to look very appealing causing a large proportion of Germans, who were in disillusionment, to divert their support the Nazi Party (Gordon 1987: 67).

Hitler’s opportunistic approach and perfectly timed cunning speeches as well as his manipulation of certain circumstance were significant reasons for the rise of Nazism and Hitler in Germany.

During the Great depression and release from prison, Hitler introduced large-scale propaganda and at the same time manipulated the media with his ideas. This led to the Nazi supporter’s increase of detests against their opposition and many Germans believed in the cunning lies of Hitler (Kaplan 1999: 45).

He managed to spread lies against the communist society and a case in point is when a communist supporter set the Reichstag building ablaze in one of the civil unrests in Germany, supposedly.

This event caused the communism society to loose popularity and allowed Hitler to activate the enabling act when he came to power. The act marked a turning point in the success of Hitler’s dictatorship and Historians accredit it as the foundation of the Nazi rule.

The communists later realized that the Nazis were responsible for the act at Reichstag building and the act meant to provoke hatred between the communists and Nazi supporters.

Hitler had a very charming personality that made him very easy to get along with people. His likable character and oratory skills enabled him to put forward the strong sense of authority that the Weimar Republic lacked.

This, in combination with other factors, made him very appealing to the desperate Germans, making them believe in the Nazi ideals like Semitism and supporting the Nazi party while concurrently fueling hatred of the ruling Weimar Republic.

Hitler’s ability to manipulate circumstances and situation in the favor of himself and his Nazi Party was reason for their success to rise to power. Hitler waited patiently to take hold of the realms of power before unleashing his full force of dictatorship and hatred for the Jews, which led to the holocaust. It is therefore just to state that every Hitler’s vote was a vote for the holocaust.

Bartov, O., ed., The Holocaust: origins, implementation, aftermath , Routledge, London/New York, 2000.

Bergen, D. L., War & Genocide: a concise history of the Holocaust , 2 nd ed., Rowman & Littlefield, 2003.

Bloxham, D. & T. Kushner, The Holocaust. Critical historical approaches , Manchester University Press, Manchester, 2005.

Burleigh, M., Ethics and Extermination. Reflections on Nazi Genocide, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1997.

Cohn-Sherbok, D., Understanding the Holocaust , Cassell. London/New York, 1999.

Dippel, J. H., Bound upon a Wheel of Fire. Why so many German Jews made the tragic decision to remain in Nazi Germany , Basic Books, New York, 1996.

Gordon, A. S., Hitler, Germans and the ‘Jewish Question’ , Blackwell, Oxford, 1987.

Kaplan, M., Between dignity and despair: Jewish life in Nazi Germany , New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Longerich, P., The Unwritten Order. Hitler’s Role in the Final Solution, Tempus, The Mill, GLS, 2006.

Schleunes, K. A., The Twisted Road to Auschwitz. Nazi Policy towards German Jews, 1933-9, University of Illinois Press, Urbana, 1990.

Stone, D., Histories of the Holocaust , Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2004.

Thalmann, R. & E. Feinermann, Crystal night, 9-10 November 1938 , Thames and Hudson, London, 1990.

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Adolf Hitler

By: History.com Editors

Updated: April 30, 2024 | Original: October 29, 2009

Adolf Hitler, the leader of Germany’s  Nazi Party , was one of the most powerful and notorious dictators of the 20th century. After serving with the German military in World War I , Hitler capitalized on economic woes, popular discontent and political infighting during the Weimar Republic to rise through the ranks of the Nazi Party.

In a series of ruthless and violent actions—including the Reichstag Fire and the Night of Long Knives—Hitler took absolute power in Germany by 1933. Germany’s invasion of Poland in 1939 led to the outbreak of  World War II , and by 1941, Nazi forces had used “blitzkrieg” military tactics to occupy much of Europe. Hitler’s virulent  anti-Semitism  and obsessive pursuit of Aryan supremacy fueled the murder of some 6 million Jews, along with other victims of the  Holocaust . After the tide of war turned against him, Hitler committed suicide in a Berlin bunker in April 1945.

Adolf Hitler was born on April 20, 1889, in Braunau am Inn, a small Austrian town near the Austro-German frontier. After his father, Alois, retired as a state customs official, young Adolf spent most of his childhood in Linz, the capital of Upper Austria.

Not wanting to follow in his father’s footsteps as a civil servant, he began struggling in secondary school and eventually dropped out. Alois died in 1903, and Adolf pursued his dream of being an artist, though he was rejected from Vienna’s Academy of Fine Arts.

After his mother, Klara, died in 1908, Hitler moved to Vienna, where he pieced together a living painting scenery and monuments and selling the images. Lonely, isolated and a voracious reader, Hitler became interested in politics during his years in Vienna, and developed many of the ideas that would shape Nazi ideology.

Military Career of Adolf Hitler

In 1913, Hitler moved to Munich, in the German state of Bavaria. When World War I broke out the following summer, he successfully petitioned the Bavarian king to be allowed to volunteer in a reserve infantry regiment.

Deployed in October 1914 to Belgium, Hitler served throughout the Great War and won two decorations for bravery, including the rare Iron Cross First Class, which he wore to the end of his life.

Hitler was wounded twice during the conflict: He was hit in the leg during the Battle of the Somme in 1916, and temporarily blinded by a British gas attack near Ypres in 1918. A month later, he was recuperating in a hospital at Pasewalk, northeast of Berlin, when news arrived of the armistice and Germany’s defeat in World War I .

Like many Germans, Hitler came to believe the country’s devastating defeat could be attributed not to the Allies, but to insufficiently patriotic “traitors” at home—a myth that would undermine the post-war Weimar Republic and set the stage for Hitler’s rise.

After Hitler returned to Munich in late 1918, he joined the small German Workers’ Party, which aimed to unite the interests of the working class with a strong German nationalism. His skilled oratory and charismatic energy helped propel him in the party’s ranks, and in 1920 he left the army and took charge of its propaganda efforts.

In one of Hitler’s strokes of propaganda genius, the newly renamed National Socialist German Workers Party, or  Nazi Party , adopted a version of the swastika—an ancient sacred symbol of  Hinduism , Jainism and Buddhism —as its emblem. Printed in a white circle on a red background, Hitler’s swastika would take on terrifying symbolic power in the years to come.

By the end of 1921, Hitler led the growing Nazi Party, capitalizing on widespread discontent with the Weimar Republic and the punishing terms of the Versailles Treaty . Many dissatisfied former army officers in Munich would join the Nazis, notably Ernst Röhm, who recruited the “strong arm” squads—known as the Sturmabteilung (SA)—which Hitler used to protect party meetings and attack opponents.

Beer Hall Putsch 

On the evening of November 8, 1923, members of the SA and others forced their way into a large beer hall where another right-wing leader was addressing the crowd. Wielding a revolver, Hitler proclaimed the beginning of a national revolution and led marchers to the center of Munich, where they got into a gun battle with police.

Hitler fled quickly, but he and other rebel leaders were later arrested. Even though it failed spectacularly, the Beer Hall Putsch established Hitler as a national figure , and (in the eyes of many) a hero of right-wing nationalism.

'Mein Kampf' 

Tried for treason, Hitler was sentenced to five years in prison, but would serve only nine months in the relative comfort of Landsberg Castle. During this period, he began to dictate the book that would become " Mein Kampf " (“My Struggle”), the first volume of which was published in 1925.

In it, Hitler expanded on the nationalistic, anti-Semitic views he had begun to develop in Vienna in his early twenties, and laid out plans for the Germany—and the world—he sought to create when he came to power.

Hitler would finish the second volume of "Mein Kampf" after his release, while relaxing in the mountain village of Berchtesgaden. It sold modestly at first, but with Hitler’s rise it became Germany’s best-selling book after the Bible. By 1940, it had sold some 6 million copies there.

Hitler’s second book, “The Zweites Buch,” was written in 1928 and contained his thoughts on foreign policy. It was not published in his lifetime due to the poor initial sales of “Mein Kampf.” The first English translations of “The Zweites Buch” did not appear until 1962 and was published under the title “Hitler's Secret Book.” 

Obsessed with race and the idea of ethnic “purity,” Hitler saw a natural order that placed the so-called “Aryan race” at the top.

For him, the unity of the Volk (the German people) would find its truest incarnation not in democratic or parliamentary government, but in one supreme leader, or Führer.

" Mein Kampf " also addressed the need for Lebensraum (or living space): In order to fulfill its destiny, Germany should take over lands to the east that were now occupied by “inferior” Slavic peoples—including Austria, the Sudetenland (Czechoslovakia), Poland and Russia.

The Schutzstaffel (SS) 

By the time Hitler left prison, economic recovery had restored some popular support for the Weimar Republic, and support for right-wing causes like Nazism appeared to be waning.

Over the next few years, Hitler laid low and worked on reorganizing and reshaping the Nazi Party. He established the Hitler Youth  to organize youngsters, and created the Schutzstaffel (SS) as a more reliable alternative to the SA.

Members of the SS wore black uniforms and swore a personal oath of loyalty to Hitler. (After 1929, under the leadership of Heinrich Himmler , the SS would develop from a group of some 200 men into a force that would dominate Germany and terrorize the rest of occupied Europe during World War II .)

Hitler spent much of his time at Berchtesgaden during these years, and his half-sister, Angela Raubal, and her two daughters often joined him. After Hitler became infatuated with his beautiful blonde niece, Geli Raubal, his possessive jealousy apparently led her to commit suicide in 1931.

Devastated by the loss, Hitler would consider Geli the only true love affair of his life. He soon began a long relationship with Eva Braun , a shop assistant from Munich, but refused to marry her.

The worldwide Great Depression that began in 1929 again threatened the stability of the Weimar Republic. Determined to achieve political power in order to affect his revolution, Hitler built up Nazi support among German conservatives, including army, business and industrial leaders.

The Third Reich

In 1932, Hitler ran against the war hero Paul von Hindenburg for president, and received 36.8 percent of the vote. With the government in chaos, three successive chancellors failed to maintain control, and in late January 1933 Hindenburg named the 43-year-old Hitler as chancellor, capping the stunning rise of an unlikely leader.

January 30, 1933 marked the birth of the Third Reich, or as the Nazis called it, the “Thousand-Year Reich” (after Hitler’s boast that it would endure for a millennium).

HISTORY Vault: Third Reich: The Rise

Rare and never-before-seen amateur films offer a unique perspective on the rise of Nazi Germany from Germans who experienced it. How were millions of people so vulnerable to fascism?

Reichstag Fire 

Though the Nazis never attained more than 37 percent of the vote at the height of their popularity in 1932, Hitler was able to grab absolute power in Germany largely due to divisions and inaction among the majority who opposed Nazism.

After a devastating fire at Germany’s parliament building, the Reichstag, in February 1933—possibly the work of a Dutch communist, though later evidence suggested Nazis set the  Reichstag fire  themselves—Hitler had an excuse to step up the political oppression and violence against his opponents.

On March 23, the Reichstag passed the Enabling Act, giving full powers to Hitler and celebrating the union of National Socialism with the old German establishment (i.e., Hindenburg ).

That July, the government passed a law stating that the Nazi Party “constitutes the only political party in Germany,” and within months all non-Nazi parties, trade unions and other organizations had ceased to exist.

His autocratic power now secure within Germany, Hitler turned his eyes toward the rest of Europe.

In 1933, Germany was diplomatically isolated, with a weak military and hostile neighbors (France and Poland). In a famous speech in May 1933, Hitler struck a surprisingly conciliatory tone, claiming Germany supported disarmament and peace.

But behind this appeasement strategy, the domination and expansion of the Volk remained Hitler’s overriding aim.

By early the following year, he had withdrawn Germany from the League of Nations and begun to militarize the nation in anticipation of his plans for territorial conquest.

Night of the Long Knives

On June 29, 1934, the infamous Night of the Long Knives , Hitler had Röhm, former Chancellor Kurt von Schleicher and hundreds of other problematic members of his own party murdered, in particular troublesome members of the SA.

When the 86-year-old Hindenburg died on August 2, military leaders agreed to combine the presidency and chancellorship into one position, meaning Hitler would command all the armed forces of the Reich.

Persecution of Jews

On September 15, 1935, passage of the Nuremberg Laws deprived Jews of German citizenship, and barred them from marrying or having relations with persons of “German or related blood.”

Though the Nazis attempted to downplay its persecution of Jews in order to placate the international community during the 1936 Berlin Olympics (in which German-Jewish athletes were not allowed to compete), additional decrees over the next few years disenfranchised Jews and took away their political and civil rights.

In addition to its pervasive anti-Semitism, Hitler’s government also sought to establish the cultural dominance of Nazism by burning books, forcing newspapers out of business, using radio and movies for propaganda purposes and forcing teachers throughout Germany’s educational system to join the party.

Much of the Nazi persecution of Jews and other targets occurred at the hands of the Geheime Staatspolizei (GESTAPO), or Secret State Police, an arm of the SS that expanded during this period.

Outbreak of World War II

In March 1936, against the advice of his generals, Hitler ordered German troops to reoccupy the demilitarized left bank of the Rhine.

Over the next two years, Germany concluded alliances with Italy and Japan, annexed Austria and moved against Czechoslovakia—all essentially without resistance from Great Britain, France or the rest of the international community.

Once he confirmed the alliance with Italy in the so-called “Pact of Steel” in May 1939, Hitler then signed a non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union . On September 1, 1939, Nazi troops invaded Poland, finally prompting Britain and France to declare war on Germany.

Blitzkrieg 

After ordering the occupation of Norway and Denmark in April 1940, Hitler adopted a plan proposed by one of his generals to attack France through the Ardennes Forest. The blitzkrieg (“lightning war”) attack began on May 10; Holland quickly surrendered, followed by Belgium.

German troops made it all the way to the English Channel, forcing British and French forces to evacuate en masse from Dunkirk in late May. On June 22, France was forced to sign an armistice with Germany.

Hitler had hoped to force Britain to seek peace as well, but when that failed he went ahead with his attacks on that country, followed by an invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941.

After the attack on Pearl Harbor that December, the United States declared war on Japan, and Germany’s alliance with Japan demanded that Hitler declare war on the United States as well.

At that point in the conflict, Hitler shifted his central strategy to focus on breaking the alliance of his main opponents (Britain, the United States and the Soviet Union) by forcing one of them to make peace with him.

Concentration Camps

Beginning in 1933, the SS had operated a network of concentration camps, including a notorious camp at Dachau , near Munich, to hold Jews and other targets of the Nazi regime.

After war broke out, the Nazis shifted from expelling Jews from German-controlled territories to exterminating them. Einsatzgruppen, or mobile death squads, executed entire Jewish communities during the Soviet invasion, while the existing concentration-camp network expanded to include death camps like Auschwitz -Birkenau in occupied Poland.

In addition to forced labor and mass execution, certain Jews at Auschwitz were targeted as the subjects of horrific medical experiments carried out by eugenicist Josef Mengele, known as the “Angel of Death.” Mengele’s experiments focused on twins and exposed 3,000 child prisoners to disease, disfigurement and torture under the guise of medical research.

Though the Nazis also imprisoned and killed Catholics, homosexuals, political dissidents, Roma (gypsies) and the disabled, above all they targeted Jews—some 6 million of whom were killed in German-occupied Europe by war’s end.

End of World War II

With defeats at El-Alamein and Stalingrad , as well as the landing of U.S. troops in North Africa by the end of 1942, the tide of the war turned against Germany.

As the conflict continued, Hitler became increasingly unwell, isolated and dependent on medications administered by his personal physician.

Several attempts were made on his life, including one that came close to succeeding in July 1944, when Col. Claus von Stauffenberg planted a bomb that exploded during a conference at Hitler’s headquarters in East Prussia.

Within a few months of the successful Allied invasion of Normandy in June 1944, the Allies had begun liberating cities across Europe. That December, Hitler attempted to direct another offensive through the Ardennes, trying to split British and American forces.

But after January 1945, he holed up in a bunker beneath the Chancellery in Berlin. With Soviet forces closing in, Hitler made plans for a last-ditch resistance before finally abandoning that plan.

How Did Adolf Hitler Die?

At midnight on the night of April 28-29, Hitler married Eva Braun in the Berlin bunker. After dictating his political testament,  Hitler shot himself  in his suite on April 30; Braun took poison. Their bodies were burned according to Hitler’s instructions.

With Soviet troops occupying Berlin, Germany surrendered unconditionally on all fronts on May 7, 1945, bringing the war in Europe to a close.

In the end, Hitler’s planned “Thousand-Year Reich” lasted just over 12 years, but wreaked unfathomable destruction and devastation during that time, forever transforming the history of Germany, Europe and the world.

William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich iWonder – Adolf Hitler: Man and Monster, BBC . The Holocaust : A Learning Site for Students, U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum .

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Hitler Comes to Power

By 1933, Adolf Hitler was a well-known figure with widespread support. He did not seize power in Germany. Rather, a series of political and economic crises helped him rise to power legally. 

[caption=d42f08d8-408e-476e-ac60-b79c912ff55f] - [credit=d42f08d8-408e-476e-ac60-b79c912ff55f]

On January 30, 1933, Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor of Germany by German President Paul von Hindenburg. Hitler was the leader of the Nazi Party. The full name of the Nazi Party was the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. Its members were often called Nazis. The Nazis were radically right-wing, antisemitic, anticommunist, and antidemocratic. 

There are some misconceptions about how Hitler came to power. It is important to understand that: 

• Hitler did not seize power in a coup; 
• and Hitler was not directly elected to power.  

Hitler and the Nazi Party came to power through Germany’s legal political processes.

Hitler was appointed chancellor in 1933 because, at the time, the Nazi Party was popular in Germany. However, the Nazi Party was not always so popular. In fact, when the Nazi movement first began in the early 1920s, it was small, ineffective, and marginal.  

What was Germany like in the early 1920s? 

The early 1920s in Germany were a time of social, economic, and political unrest. This unrest was a direct result of World War I (1914–1918). Germany lost the war. As a result, the German Empire collapsed. It was replaced by a new democratic republic. This new German government was called the Weimar Republic. In June 1919, German leaders of the Weimar Republic were forced to sign the Treaty of Versailles. This treaty punished Germany for starting World War I.

In the early 1920s, the Weimar Republic (1918–1933) faced political and economic problems. Wartime devastation had resulted in an economic crisis. German war debts led to hyperinflation and the devaluation of currency. 

There were also political movements that tried to overthrow the new government. They ranged from the far left to the far right on the political spectrum.

Their members were reacting to post World War I discontent in Germany. But they were also fostering and sowing more discontent, and sometimes even violence. One group that caused particular alarm was the German Communist Party. A much less prominent new political group was the Nazi Party. 

What was the Nazi Party like in the 1920s?

The Nazi Party was one of many radical new political movements active in Germany during the early 1920s. The Nazi Party was based in the city of Munich. But the movement gained attention across Germany in November 1923. That month, the Nazis—led by Adolf Hitler—attempted to violently seize power. This failed coup is known as the Beer Hall Putsch. 

Hitler and the Nazis changed tactics after they failed to overthrow the government by violence. Beginning in the mid-1920s, they focused their efforts on winning elections. But the Nazi Party did not immediately succeed in attracting voters. In 1928, the Nazi Party won less than 3 percent of the national vote in elections to the German parliament. 

Beginning in 1930, however, the Nazi Party started to win more votes. Their success was largely the result of an economic and political crisis in Germany. 

What was the German economic and political situation like in the early 1930s? 

In the early 1930s, Germany was in an economic and political crisis.

Beginning in fall 1929, there was a world economic crisis known as the Great Depression. Millions of Germans lost their jobs. Unemployment, hunger, poverty, and homelessness became serious problems in Germany in the early 1930s. 

The German government failed to solve the problems caused by the Great Depression. Germany was politically divided. This made passing new laws almost impossible because of disagreements in the German parliament. Many Germans lost faith in their leaders’ ability to govern. 

Radical political groups like the Nazi Party and the Communist Party became more prominent. They took advantage of the economic and political chaos. They used propaganda to attract Germans who were fed up with the political stalemate. 

How did Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party attract voters in the early 1930s? 

Germany held parliamentary elections in September 1930. This was almost a year into the Great Depression. The Nazis won 18 percent of the vote. This shocked some Germans, especially those who recognized that the Nazis were an extremist, fringe political movement.

Adolf Hitler and the Nazis won followers by promising to create a strong Germany. The Nazis promised to

• fix the economy and put people back to work; 
• return Germany to the status of a great European, and even world, power;
• regain territory Germany had lost in World War I;
• create a strong authoritarian German government; 
• and unite all Germans along racial and ethnic lines.   

The Nazis played on people’s hopes, fears, and prejudices. They also offered scapegoats. They falsely claimed that Jews and Communists were to blame for Germany’s problems. This claim was part of the Nazis’ antisemitic and racist ideology. 

How did Adolf Hitler come to power in 1933?

The Nazis continued to win over voters in the early 1930s. In the July 1932 parliamentary elections, the Nazis won 37 percent of the vote. This was more votes than any other party received. In November 1932, the Nazi share of the vote fell to 33 percent. However, this was still more votes than any other party won. 

The Nazi Party’s electoral successes made it difficult to govern Germany without them. Hitler and the Nazis refused to work with other political parties. Hitler demanded to be appointed as chancellor. German President Paul von Hindenburg initially resisted this demand. However, he gave in and appointed Hitler as Chancellor of Germany on January 30, 1933. 

Hindenburg appointed Hitler to this position as the result of a political deal. Certain conservative politicians convinced President Hindenburg to make the appointment. They wanted to use the Nazi Party’s popularity for their own purposes. They mistakenly believed that they could control Hitler.  

In January 1933, Hitler did not immediately become a dictator. When he became chancellor, Germany’s democratic constitution was still in effect. However, Hitler transformed Germany by manipulating the democratic political system. Hitler and other Nazi leaders used existing laws to destroy German democracy and create a dictatorship. 

In August 1934, President Hindenburg died. Hitler proclaimed himself Führer (leader) of Germany. From that point forward, Hitler was the dictator of Germany. 

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Germany lost World War I . In the 1919 Treaty of Versailles , the victorious powers (the United States, Great Britain, France, and other allied states) imposed punitive territorial, military, and economic provisions on defeated Germany. In the west, Germany returned Alsace-Lorraine to France. It had been seized by Germany more than 40 years earlier. Further, Belgium received Eupen and Malmedy; the industrial Saar region was placed under the administration of the League of Nations for 15 years; and Denmark received Northern Schleswig. Finally, the Rhineland was demilitarized; that is, no German military forces or fortifications were permitted there. In the east, Poland received parts of West Prussia and Silesia from Germany. In addition, Czechoslovakia received the Hultschin district from Germany; the largely German city of Danzig became a free city under the protection of the League of Nations; and Memel, a small strip of territory in East Prussia along the Baltic Sea, was ultimately placed under Lithuanian control. Outside Europe, Germany lost all its colonies. In sum, Germany forfeited 13 percent of its European territory (more than 27,000 square miles) and one-tenth of its population (between 6.5 and 7 million people).

A crowd of saluting Germans surrounds Adolf Hitler's car as he leaves the Reich Chancellery following a meeting with President Paul von Hindenburg. Berlin, Germany, November 19, 1932.

A march supporting the Nazi movement during an election campaign in 1932. Berlin, Germany, March 11, 1932.

June 28, 1919 Treaty of Versailles Germany loses World War I in November 1918. Germans are shocked and horrified. Many people, including Adolf Hitler, refuse to believe that the loss is real. They falsely blame Jews and Communists for Germany’s defeat. 

This shock is intensified in June 1919, when Germany is forced to sign the Treaty of Versailles. The Treaty makes Germany accept responsibility for the war. Many Germans feel that the Treaty’s terms are too harsh. Germany has to make huge payments for damage caused by the war (war reparations). Also, according to the Treaty, the German army is limited to 100,000 troops. Finally, Germany is forced to transfer territory to its neighbors. The Nazi Party makes overturning the Treaty of Versailles a key part of its political platform. Many Germans welcome this Nazi promise. 

November 8 – 9, 1923 Beer Hall Putsch In the early 1920s, the Nazi Party is a small extremist group. They hope to seize power in Germany by force. On November 8–9, 1923, Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party attempt to overthrow the government of the state of Bavaria. They begin at a beer hall in the city of Munich. The plotters hope to march on Berlin. But they fail miserably. The Munich police kill more than a dozen of Hitler’s supporters. Hitler and others are arrested, tried, and convicted of treason. This attempted coup d'état is called the Beer Hall Putsch. 

The failure of the Beer Hall Putsch encourages Nazi leaders to change their strategy. Instead of using force, the Nazis focus on winning elections. 

October 24 and 29, 1929 Stock market crash in New York The stock market crashes in New York and sparks a worldwide economic crisis. This crisis is called the Great Depression. By the end of the 1920s, the American and German economies have become closely intertwined. This economic connection is a direct result of financial negotiations relating to World War I reparations payments. Thus, the stock market crash impacts Germany almost overnight. In Germany, about six million people are unemployed by June 1932. These economic conditions make Nazi promises more attractive to voters. 

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The Nazi rise to power

Courtesy of The Wiener Holocaust Library Collections.

The end of the First World War marked the beginning of a period of political and economic instability in Germany. As a result of this instability, many small, extremist political groups appeared.

This section will explore how democracy collapsed and one such party, the NSDAP, or Nazi Party, rose to power in Germany.

Topics in this section

The aftermath of the First World War

The Weimar Republic

The early years of the Nazi Party

How did the Nazi consolidate their power?

Continue to next section

Life in Nazi-controlled Europe

What happened in september.

On 13 September 1933, the Nazis made ‘racial science’ compulsory in every German school.

On 15 September 1935, the Reichstag passed the Nuremburg Laws, institutionalizing the Nazi's racist theories.

On 1 September 1939, Germany invaded Poland, starting the Second World War.

On 21 September 1939, Heydrich issued the Schnellbrief, which ordered the creation of Jewish Councils in Polish towns.

On 3 September 1941, the first experimental gassings were carried out at Auschwitz.

Ch. 27 The Interwar Period

Hitler’s rise to power, 30.5.3: hitler’s rise to power.

In 1933, the Nazi Party became the largest elected party in the German Reichstag, Hitler was appointed Chancellor, and the Reichstag passed the Enabling Act. This began the transformation of the Weimar Republic into Nazi Germany, a one-party dictatorship based on the totalitarian and autocratic ideology of National Socialism.

Learning Objective

Describe the events that led to Hitler becoming chancellor

• Hitler’s rise to power occurred throughout the 1920s and early 1930s. He first gained prominence in the right-wing German Workers’ Party, which in 1920 changed its name to the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, commonly known as the Nazi Party.
• In the early 1930s, the Nazi Party gained more seats in the German Reichstag (parliament), and by 1933 it was the largest elected party, which led to Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor on January 30, 1933.
• Following fresh elections won by his coalition, the Reichstag passed the Reichstag Fire Decree, which suspended key civil liberties of German citizens, and Enabling Act, which gave the Hitler’s Cabinet the power to enact laws without the involvement of the Reichstag.
• With the passing of these two laws, Hitler’s power in government became nearly absolute and he soon used this power to eliminate all political opposition through both legal and violent means.
• On August 2, 1934, President Hindenburg died. Based on a law passed by the Reichstag the previous day, Hitler became head of state as well as head of government, and was formally named as F ührer und Reichskanzler (leader and chancellor), thereby eliminating the last legal avenue by which he could be removed from office.
• Over the next few years, Hitler continued to consolidate his power, taking care to give his dictatorship the appearance of legality, by eliminating many military officials and taking personal command of the armed forces.

Hitler Runs for President

The Great Depression provided a political opportunity for Hitler. Germans were ambivalent about the parliamentary republic, which faced challenges from right- and left-wing extremists. The moderate political parties were increasingly unable to stem the tide of extremism, and the German referendum of 1929, which almost passed a law formally renouncing the Treaty of Versailles and making it a criminal offence for German officials to cooperate in the collecting of reparations, helped to elevate Nazi ideology. The elections of September 1930 resulted in the break-up of a grand coalition and its replacement with a minority cabinet. Its leader, chancellor Heinrich Brüning of the Centre Party, governed through emergency decrees from President Paul von Hindenburg. Governance by decree became the new norm and paved the way for authoritarian forms of government. The Nazi Party (NSDAP) rose from obscurity to win 18.3 percent of the vote and 107 parliamentary seats in the 1930 election, becoming the second-largest party in parliament.

Brüning’s austerity measures brought little economic improvement and were extremely unpopular. Hitler exploited this by targeting his political messages specifically at people who had been affected by the inflation of the 1920s and the Depression, such as farmers, war veterans, and the middle class.

Hitler ran against Hindenburg in the 1932 presidential elections. A January 1932 speech to the Industry Club in Düsseldorf won him support from many of Germany’s most powerful industrialists. Hindenburg had support from various nationalist, monarchist, Catholic, and republican parties, as well as some social democrats. Hitler used the campaign slogan “Hitler über Deutschland” (“Hitler over Germany”), a reference to his political ambitions and campaigning by aircraft. He was one of the first politicians to use aircraft travel for political purposes and utilized it effectively. Hitler came in second in both rounds of the election, garnering more than 35 percent of the vote in the final election. Although he lost to Hindenburg, this election established Hitler as a strong force in German politics.

Appointment as Chancellor

The absence of an effective government prompted two influential politicians, Franz von Papen and Alfred Hugenberg, along with several industrialists and businessmen, to write a letter to Hindenburg. The signers urged Hindenburg to appoint Hitler as leader of a government “independent from parliamentary parties,” which could turn into a movement that would “enrapture millions of people.”

Hindenburg reluctantly agreed to appoint Hitler as chancellor after two further parliamentary elections—in July and November 1932—did not result in the formation of a majority government. Hitler headed a short-lived coalition government formed by the NSDAP and Hugenberg’s party, the German National People’s Party (DNVP). On January 30, 1933, the new cabinet was sworn in during a brief ceremony in Hindenburg’s office. The NSDAP gained three posts: Hitler was named chancellor, Wilhelm Frick Minister of the Interior, and Hermann Göring Minister of the Interior for Prussia. Hitler had insisted on the ministerial positions to gain control over the police in much of Germany.

Hitler, Chancellor of Germany: Hitler, at the window of the Reich Chancellery, receives an ovation on the evening of his inauguration as chancellor, January 30, 1933.

Reichstag Fire and March Elections

As chancellor, Hitler worked against attempts by the NSDAP’s opponents to build a majority government. Because of the political stalemate, he asked Hindenburg to again dissolve the Reichstag, and elections were scheduled for early March. On February 27, 1933, the Reichstag building was set on fire. Göring blamed a communist plot, because Dutch communist Marinus van der Lubbe was found in incriminating circumstances inside the burning building. According to the British historian Sir Ian Kershaw, the consensus of nearly all historians is that van der Lubbe actually set the fire. Others, including William L. Shirer and Alan Bullock, are of the opinion that the NSDAP itself was responsible. At Hitler’s urging, Hindenburg responded with the Reichstag Fire Decree of 28 February, which suspended basic rights and allowed detention without trial. The decree was permitted under Article 48 of the Weimar Constitution, which gave the president the power to take emergency measures to protect public safety and order. Activities of the German Communist Party (KPD) were suppressed, and some 4,000 KPD members were arrested.

In addition to political campaigning, the NSDAP engaged in paramilitary violence and the spread of anti-communist propaganda in the days preceding the election. On election day, March 6, 1933, the NSDAP’s share of the vote increased to 43.9 percent, and the party acquired the largest number of seats in parliament. Hitler’s party failed to secure an absolute majority, necessitating another coalition with the DNVP.

The Enabling Act

To achieve full political control despite not having an absolute majority in parliament, Hitler’s government brought the Enabling Act to a vote in the newly elected Reichstag. The Act—officially titled the Gesetz zur Behebung der Not von Volk und Reich (“Law to Remedy the Distress of People and Reich”)—gave Hitler’s cabinet the power to enact laws without the consent of the Reichstag for four years. These laws could (with certain exceptions) deviate from the constitution. Since it would affect the constitution, the Enabling Act required a two-thirds majority to pass. Leaving nothing to chance, the Nazis used the provisions of the Reichstag Fire Decree to arrest all 81 Communist deputies (in spite of their virulent campaign against the party, the Nazis allowed the KPD to contest the election) and prevent several Social Democrats from attending.

On March 23, 1933, the Reichstag assembled at the Kroll Opera House under turbulent circumstances. Ranks of SA (Nazi paramilitary) men served as guards inside the building, while large groups outside opposing the proposed legislation shouted slogans and threats toward the arriving members of parliament. The position of the Centre Party, the third largest party in the Reichstag, was decisive. After Hitler verbally promised party leader Ludwig Kaas that Hindenburg would retain his power of veto, Kaas announced the Centre Party would support the Enabling Act. The Act passed by a vote of 441–84, with all parties except the Social Democrats voting in favor. The Enabling Act, along with the Reichstag Fire Decree, transformed Hitler’s government into a de facto legal dictatorship.

Dictatorship

Having achieved full control over the legislative and executive branches of government, Hitler and his allies began to suppress the remaining opposition. The Social Democratic Party was banned and its assets seized. While many trade union delegates were in Berlin for May Day activities, SA stormtroopers demolished union offices around the country. On May 2, 1933, all trade unions were forced to dissolve and their leaders were arrested. Some were sent to concentration camps.

By the end of June, the other parties had been intimidated into disbanding. This included the Nazis’ nominal coalition partner, the DNVP; with the SA’s help, Hitler forced its leader, Hugenberg, to resign on June 29. On July 14, the NSDAP was declared the only legal political party in Germany. The demands of the SA for more political and military power caused anxiety among military, industrial, and political leaders. In response, Hitler purged the entire SA leadership in the Night of the Long Knives, which took place from June 30 to July 2, 1934. Hitler targeted Ernst Röhm and other SA leaders who, along with a number of Hitler’s political adversaries (such as Gregor Strasser and former chancellor Kurt von Schleicher), were rounded up, arrested, and shot. While the international community and some Germans were shocked by the murders, many in Germany believed Hitler was restoring order.

On August 2, 1934, Hindenburg died. The previous day, the cabinet had enacted the “Law Concerning the Highest State Office of the Reich.” This law stated that upon Hindenburg’s death, the office of president would be abolished and its powers merged with those of the chancellor. Hitler thus became head of state as well as head of government and was formally named as Führer und Reichskanzler (leader and chancellor). With this action, Hitler eliminated the last legal avenue by which he could be removed from office.

As head of state, Hitler became supreme commander of the armed forces. The traditional loyalty oath of servicemen was altered to affirm loyalty to Hitler personally, by name, rather than to the office of supreme commander or the state. On August 19, the merger of the presidency with the chancellorship was approved by 90 percent of the electorate voting in a plebiscite.

In early 1938, Hitler used blackmail to consolidate his hold over the military by instigating the Blomberg-Fritsch Affair. Hitler forced his War Minister, Field Marshal Werner von Blomberg, to resign by using a police dossier that showed that Blomberg’s new wife had a record for prostitution. Army commander Colonel-General Werner von Fritsch was removed after the Schutzstaffel (SS paramilitary) produced allegations that he had engaged in a homosexual relationship. Both men fell into disfavor because they objected to Hitler’s demand to make the Wehrmacht (German armed forces) ready for war as early as 1938. Hitler assumed Blomberg’s title of Commander-in-Chief, thus taking personal command of the armed forces. On the same day, sixteen generals were stripped of their commands and 44 more were transferred; all were suspected of not being sufficiently pro-Nazi. By early February 1938, 12 more generals had been removed.

Hitler took care to give his dictatorship the appearance of legality. Many of his decrees were explicitly based on the Reichstag Fire Decree and hence on Article 48 of the Weimar Constitution. The Reichstag renewed the Enabling Act twice, each time for a four-year period. While elections to the Reichstag were still held (in 1933, 1936, and 1938), voters were presented with a single list of Nazis and pro-Nazi “guests” which carried with well over 90 percent of the vote. These elections were held in far-from-secret conditions; the Nazis threatened severe reprisals against anyone who didn’t vote or dared to vote no.

Attributions

• “Reichstag Fire Decree.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reichstag_Fire_Decree . Wikipedia CC BY-SA 3.0 .
• “Night of the Long Knives.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_of_the_Long_Knives . Wikipedia CC BY-SA 3.0 .
• “Hitler’s Rise to Power.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolf_Hitler%27s_rise_to_power . Wikipedia CC BY-SA 3.0 .
• “Adolf Hitler.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolf_Hitler . Wikipedia CC BY-SA 3.0 .
• “Enabling Act of 1933.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enabling_Act_of_1933 . Wikipedia CC BY-SA 3.0 .
• “Bundesarchiv_Bild_146-1972-026-11,_Machtübernahme_Hitlers.jpg.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolf_Hitler#/media/File:Bundesarchiv_Bild_146-1972-026-11,_Machtubernahme_Hitlers.jpg . Wikipedia CC BY-SA 3.0 .
• Boundless World History. Authored by : Boundless. Located at : https://courses.lumenlearning.com/boundless-worldhistory/ . License : CC BY-SA: Attribution-ShareAlike

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The Rise of the Nazi Party

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About This Lesson

In a previous lesson, students explored the politics, culture, economics, and social trends in Germany during the years of the Weimar Republic (1919 to 1933), and they analyzed the strength of democracy in Germany during those years. In this lesson, students will continue the unit’s historical case study by reexamining politics in the Weimar Republic and tracing the development of the National Socialist German Workers’ (Nazi) Party throughout the 1920s and early 1930s.

Students will review events that they learned about in the previous lesson and see how the popularity of the Nazis changed during times of stability and times of crisis. They will also analyze the Nazi Party platform and, in an extension about the 1932 election, compare it to the platforms of the Social Democratic and Communist Parties. By tracing the progression of the Nazis from an unpopular fringe group to the most powerful political party in Germany, students will extend and deepen their thinking from the previous lesson about the choices that individuals can make to strengthen democracy and those that can weaken it.

This lesson includes multiple, rich extension activities if you would like to devote two days to a closer examination of the rise of the Nazi Party.

Essential Questions

Unit Essential Question: What does learning about the choices people made during the Weimar Republic, the rise of the Nazi Party, and the Holocaust teach us about the power and impact of our choices today?

Guiding Questions

How did the Nazi Party, a small and unpopular political group in 1920, become the most powerful political party in Germany by 1933?

Learning Objectives

• Through class discussion and a written response, students will examine how choices made by individuals and groups contributed to the rise of the Nazi Party in the 1920s and 1930s.
• Students will label the 1920 Nazi Party platform and use it to draw conclusions about the party’s universe of obligation and core values.

What's Included

This lesson is designed to fit into one 50-min class period and includes:

• 5 activities
• 2 teaching strategies
• 2 readings, available in English and in Spanish
• 2 assessments
• 3 extension activities

Additional Context & Background

Adolf Hitler, an Austrian-born corporal in the German army during World War I, capitalized on the anger and resentment felt by many Germans after the war as he entered politics in 1919, joined the small German Workers’ Party, and quickly became the party’s leader. By February 1920, Hitler had given it a new name: the National Socialist German Workers’ Party ( Na tionalso zi alistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei ), or Nazi, for short. 

Originally drafted in 1920, the Nazi Party platform (see the reading National Socialist German Workers’ Party Platform ) reflects a cornerstone of Nazi ideology: the belief in race science and the superiority of the so-called Aryan race (or “German blood”). For the Nazis, so-called “German blood” determined whether one was considered a citizen. The Nazis believed that citizenship should not only bestow on a person certain rights (such as voting, running for office, or owning a newspaper); it also came with the guarantee of a job, food, and land on which to live. Those without “German blood” were not citizens and therefore should be deprived of these rights and benefits.

Fueled by post-war unrest and Hitler’s charismatic leadership, thousands joined the Nazis in the early 1920s. In an attempt to capitalize on the chaos caused by runaway hyperinflation, Hitler attempted to stage a coup (known as the Beer Hall Putsch) in Munich to overthrow the government of the German state of Bavaria on November 23, 1923. The attempt failed and resulted in several deaths. Hitler and several of his followers were arrested, but rather than diminish his popularity, Hitler’s subsequent trial for treason and imprisonment made him a national figure.

At the trial, a judge sympathetic to the Nazis’ nationalist message allowed Hitler and his followers to show open contempt for the Weimar Republic, which they referred to as a “Jew government.” Hitler and his followers were found guilty. Although they should have been deported because they were not German citizens (they were Austrian citizens), the judge dispensed with the law and gave them the minimum sentence—five years in prison. Hitler only served nine months, and the rest of his term was suspended.

During his time in prison, Hitler wrote Mein Kampf (My Struggle). In the book, published in 1925, he maintained that conflict between the races was the catalyst of history. Because he believed that the “Aryan” race was superior to all others, he insisted that “Aryan” Germany had the right to incorporate all of eastern Europe into a new empire that would provide much-needed Lebensraum , or living space, for it. That new empire would also represent a victory over the Communists, who controlled much of the territory Hitler sought. Hitler, like many conservative Germans, regarded both Communists and Jews as enemies of the German people. He linked the Communists to the Jews, using the phrase “Jewish Bolshevism” and claiming that the Jews were behind the teachings of the Communist Party. (The Bolsheviks were the communist group that gained power in Russia in 1917 and established the Soviet Union.) The Jews, according to Hitler, were everywhere, controlled everything, and acted so secretly and deviously that few could detect their influence.

By 1925, Hitler was out of prison and once again in control of the Nazi Party. The attempted coup had taught him an important lesson. Never again would he attempt an armed uprising. Instead, the Nazis would use the rights guaranteed by the Weimar Constitution—freedom of the press, the right to assemble, and freedom of speech—to win control of Germany.

However, in 1924 the German economy had begun to improve. By 1928, the country had recovered from the war and business was booming. As a result, fewer Germans seemed interested in the hatred that Hitler and his Nazi Party promoted. The same was true for other extreme nationalist groups. In the 1928 elections, the Nazis received only about 2% of the vote.

Then, in 1929, the stock market crashed and the worldwide Great Depression began. Leaders around the world could not stop the economic collapse. To an increasing number of Germans, democracy appeared unable to rescue the economy, and only the most extreme political parties seemed to offer clear solutions to the crisis.

The Communist Party in Germany argued that to end the depression, Germany needed a government like the Soviet Union’s: the government should take over all German land and industry from capitalists, who were only interested in profits for themselves. Communists promised to distribute German wealth according to the common good. The Nazis blamed the Jews, Communists, liberals, and pacifists for the German economic crisis. They promised to restore Germany’s standing in the world and Germans’ pride in their nation as well as end the depression, campaigning with slogans such as “Work, Freedom, and Bread!”

Many saw the Nazis as an attractive alternative to democracy and communism. Among them were wealthy industrialists who were alarmed by the growth of the Communist Party and did not want to be forced to give up what they owned. Both the Communists and the Nazis made significant gains in the Reichstag (German parliament) elections in 1930.

In 1932, Hitler became a German citizen so that he could run for president in that year’s spring election. His opponents were Ernst Thälmann, the Communist candidate, and Paul von Hindenburg, the independent, conservative incumbent. In the election, 84% of all eligible voters cast ballots, and the people re-elected President Hindenburg. Hitler finished second. But in elections for the Reichstag held four months later, the Nazis’ popularity increased further. They won 37% of the seats in the legislature, more than any other party, and 75 seats more than their closest competitor, the Social Democrats.

President Hindenburg and his chancellors could not lift Germany out of the depression. Their popular support began to shrink. In January 1933, Hindenburg and his advisors decided to make a deal with Hitler. He had the popularity they lacked, and they had the power he needed. Hindenburg’s advisors believed that the responsibility of being in power would make Hitler moderate his views. They convinced themselves that they were wise enough and powerful enough to “control” Hitler. They were also certain that he, too, would fail to end the depression. When he failed, they would step in to save the nation. But they were tragically mistaken.

Related Materials

• Reading National Socialist German Workers’ Party Platform

Preparing to Teach

A note to teachers.

Before teaching this text set, please review the following information to help guide your preparation process.

The Power of Individual and Collective Choices

As in the past two lessons about the Weimar Republic, it is important that students can identify those junctures or moments in the history of the Nazi Party’s rise where individuals and groups made choices “for the good” that had horrific consequences. This helps to show that history isn’t inevitable and that history is made through our individual and collective choices.

Vocabulary in the Nazi Party Platform

The reading National Socialist German Workers’ Party Platform contains a number of vocabulary terms that students may find unfamiliar. You might need to pre-teach or be prepared to explain the following terms: national self-determination , revocation , surplus , and alien (in the context of a foreigner).

Previewing Vocabulary

In addition to the terms above in the Nazi Party platform, the following are key vocabulary terms used in this lesson:

• Political party

Add these words to your Word Wall , if you are using one for this unit, and provide necessary support to help students learn these words as you teach the lesson.

• Teaching Strategy Word Wall

Save this resource for easy access later.

Lesson plans.

Reflect on Societal Values

• As students transition from learning about various aspects of German society during the years of the Weimar Republic to tracing the rise of the Nazi Party during those same years, it can be helpful to pause for a moment to reflect on how the values of a society are shaped. Ask students to spend a few minutes responding in their journals to the following prompt: Who or what shapes the values of a society? What roles do political and business leaders, the media, artists, and education play? What roles do individual citizens play?
• After students have had a few minutes to write, let them share their thinking in a brief discussion.

Analyze Key Events in the Nazis’ Rise to Power

• Explain to students that they are now going to learn about the rise of the Nazi Party in Germany, and throughout this unit they will observe how the Nazis shaped the values of German society.
• The video Hitler’s Rise to Power, 1918–1933 (09:30) provides an overview of the beginning of the Nazi Party in the early years of the Weimar Republic and the party’s growth in relation and reaction to key events in Germany in the 1920s. Explain to students that as they watch this video, they will recognize events that they learned about in the previous two class periods about the Weimar Republic, but now they will focus on how those events affected the growth the Nazi Party in Germany.
• The National Socialist German Workers’ Party
• Na tionalso zi alistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei
• Students can then see how “Nazi” is an abbreviation of the first word of the party’s name in German. Tell students that they may see and hear a variety of related names for the Nazis in resources throughout this unit, including National Socialists and the initials NSDAP.
• Pass out the handout Hitler’s Rise to Power, 1918–1933 Viewing Guide and instruct students to respond to the questions with information from the video as they watch. To help students prepare to answer, have them read the questions before watching.
• Show the video Hitler’s Rise to Power, 1918–1933 to the class. You might choose to pause the video so students can add to their notes or, if time permits, consider showing the video twice in a row.
• Debrief the video by reviewing the questions on the viewing guide and discussing the information students recorded, helping them fill in important ideas they may have missed. You might have students debrief in groups of three or four, or you might go over the viewing guide as a whole group.
• As you discuss the video with students, emphasize the choices that individuals, other than Hitler, made during this time period that contributed to the Nazis’ rise to popularity and power. You might ask students to underline on the viewing guide evidence of where individuals and groups made such choices and record a list of these key moments on the board.
• Video Hitler's Rise to Power: 1918-1933

Analyze the Nazi Party Platform

• Pass out the reading National Socialist German Workers’ Party Platform .
• Explain that a political platform is an official statement by a party of its beliefs and positions on important issues. Read aloud with students the platform of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party from the handout.
• Do any categories appear multiple times or seem to get more or less attention?
• What might the list of provisions suggest about the message the Nazis wanted to convey to German voters?
• Pass out the handout What Did the Nazis Believe? and instruct students to answer the true/false statements using evidence from the Nazi platform. It is important for students, as they progress through this unit, to have a firm basic understanding of the Nazis’ core beliefs, and this activity will allow students to examine the Nazi platform more closely. You might ask students to underline where in the platform they found evidence to support each of their true/false choices.
• Use the Think, Pair, Share strategy to have students share and discuss their responses to the handout What Did the Nazis Believe? As students share their answers, make sure that they also cite the part of the platform that helped them determine each answer.
• Finally, ask students to use the evidence they have so far to illustrate what the Nazis believe should be Germany’s universe of obligation. They can draw concentric circles (similar to the handout they used in Lesson 4) in their journals to help illustrate the Nazi universe of obligation visually.
• Teaching Strategy Read Aloud
• Teaching Strategy Think-Pair-Share

Discuss the Appointment of Hitler as Chancellor

• It is important for students to end the lesson with the understanding that while Hitler was never elected president (and the Nazis never won a majority of the Reichstag seats), he was appointed chancellor by President Paul von Hindenburg as a result of the popularity of the Nazi Party and other political circumstances. If necessary, review the branches of government in the Weimar Republic in order to help students understand the relationship between the president and chancellor.
• The reading Hitler in Power explains how Hitler’s appointment came about. You might either read aloud this handout with the class or use it to create a mini-lecture if you don’t have time for students to complete the reading in class.
• Reading Hitler in Power

Revisit the “Bubbling Cauldron” Metaphor

• After discussing Hitler’s appointment, return to the handout The Bubbling Cauldron from Lesson 8. Students completed the graphic organizer on this handout before learning about the rise of the Nazi Party during the years of the Weimar Republic. Now that they have learned about the Nazis’ rise, ask them to revisit their work. What would they add now? Is there anything they would erase or change?
• Give students a few minutes to complete the handout, and then lead a class discussion about how what students learned in this lesson has affected their understanding of the Weimar Republic.

Check for Understanding

• Assign students to write a short reflection in response to the following prompt:  What did the Nazis think were the most important problems facing Germany? What solutions did they propose? Why do you think so many Germans supported the Nazi Party by the 1930s?
• Re-examine students’ The Bubbling Cauldron handouts after they have added new ideas from this lesson. Look for evidence that students recognize the Nazis as one of many influences that shaped German society during the years of the Weimar Republic.

Extension Activities 

 Explore the 1932 German Elections in Depth

If you can devote an additional day to the rise of the Nazi Party in Germany, consider teaching the lesson Choices in the Weimar Republic Elections . This lesson provides students with the opportunity to explore the issues at play in the 1932 Reichstag election from the viewpoints of German citizens with different perspectives and values. The lesson helps students understand the complexity of the choices citizens make at the voting booth and leads to additional insight into the appeal of not only the Nazi Party but also the Social Democratic and Communist Parties in Germany at the time.

Analyze an Image of the 1932 Ballot

To deepen their understanding of the challenges democracy faced during the Weimar years, show students the image 1932 Reichstag Election Ballot , and then lead a discussion with the following questions:

• How many parties were on the ballot in 1932? How many parties are typically represented in the legislature of your country?
• What might be the benefit of having so many political parties competing in an election? What might be the drawbacks?
• In a democracy, is it important for election winners to receive a majority of the vote? Why or why not?
• Image 1932 German Election Ballot

Share 1932 German Election Results

• Which political parties in Germany gained and lost seats between 1928 and 1932? Why did some parties and candidates become more appealing as the depression took hold in 1929?
• If all Germans lived through the same economic, political, and cultural events, why didn’t all Germans vote the same way?
• Is it significant that Hitler lost the presidential election and that the Nazis never held a majority of the seats in the Reichstag? How could other parties have worked together to keep the Nazis from controlling the government?

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Hitler's Rise to Power: A Timeline

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Adolf Hitler's rise to power began during Germany's interwar period, a time of great social and political upheaval. Within a matter of years, the Nazi Party was transformed from an obscure group to the nation's leading political faction .

April 20: Adolf Hitler is born in Braunau am Inn, Austria -Hungary. His family later moves to Germany .

August: Hitler joins the German military at the start of World War I . Some historians believe this is the result of an administrative error; as an Austrian citizen, Hitler should not be allowed to join the German ranks.

October: The military encourages a civilian government to form, fearing blame for an inevitable defeat. Under Prince Max of Baden , they sue for peace.

November 11: World War I ends with Germany signing an armistice .

March 23: Benito Mussolini  forms the National Fascist Party in Italy . Its success will be a huge influence on Hitler .

June 28: Germany is forced to sign the Treaty of Versailles , which imposes strict sanctions on the country. Anger at the treaty and the weight of reparations will destabilize Germany for years.​

July 31: A socialist interim German government is replaced by the official creation of the democratic Weimar Republic .

September 12: Hitler joins the German Workers’ Party , having been sent to spy on it by the military.

February 24: Hitler becomes increasingly important to the German Workers’ Party with his speeches . The group declares a Twenty-Five Point Program to transform Germany.

July 29: Hitler is able to become chairman of his party, which is renamed the National Socialist German Workers’ Party , or NSDAP.

October 30: Mussolini turns luck and division into an invitation to run the Italian government . Hitler notes his success.

January 27: Munich holds the first Nazi Party Congress .

November 9: Hitler believes the time is right to stage a coup. Aided by a force of SA brownshirts, the support of WW1 leader Erich Ludendorff , and browbeaten locals, he stages the Beer Hall Putsch . It fails.

April 1: Having turned his trial into a grandstand for his ideas and become known across Germany, Hitler is given a derisory five-month prison sentence.

December 20: Hitler is released from jail, where he has written the beginning of " Mein Kampf ."

February 27: The NSDAP had moved away from Hitler's influence during his absence; now free, he reasserts control, determined to pursue a notionally legal course to power.

April 5: Prussian, aristocratic , right-leaning war leader Paul von Hindenburg is elected president of Germany.

July: Hitler publishes " Mein Kampf ," a ranting exploration of what passes as his ideology.

November 9: Hitler forms a personal bodyguard unit separate from the SA, known as the SS.

May 20: Elections to the Reichstag yield just 2.6% of the vote to the NSDAP.

October 4: The New York Stock Market begins to crash , causing a great economic depression in America and around the world. The German economy was made dependent on the United States by the Dawes plan, and it began to collapse.

January 23: Wilhelm Frick becomes the interior minister in Thuringia , the first Nazi to hold a notable position in the German government.

March 30: Heinrich Brüning takes charge of Germany via a right-leaning coalition. He wishes to pursue a deflationary policy to counter economic depression .

July 16: Facing defeat over his budget, Brüning invokes Article 48 of the constitution, which allows the government to pass laws without Reichstag consent. It is the start of a slippery slope for failing German democracy and the start of a period of rule by Article 48 decrees.

September 14: Boosted by the rising unemployment rate , the decline of center parties, and a turn to both left and right extremists , the NSDAP wins 18.3% of the vote and becomes the second-largest party in the Reichstag .

October: The Harzburg Front was formed to organize Germany’s right-wing into a workable opposition to the government and the left. Hitler joins.

January: Hitler is welcomed by a group of industrialists. His support is broadening and gathering money.

March 13: Hitler comes a strong second in the presidential elections; Hindenburg misses out on the election on the first ballot.

April 10: Hindenburg defeats Hitler at the second attempt to become president.

April 13: Brüning’s government bans the SA and other groups from marching.

May 30: Brüning is forced to resign; Hindenburg is talked into making Franz von Papen chancellor .

June 16: The SA ban is revoked.

July 31: The NSDAP polls 37.4% and becomes the largest party in the Reichstag.

August 13: Papen offers Hitler the post of vice-chancellor, but Hitler refuses, accepting nothing less than being chancellor .

August 31: Hermann Göring , long a leading Nazi and a link between Hitler and the aristocracy, becomes president of the Reichstag and uses his new power to manipulate events.

November 6: In another election, the Nazi vote shrinks slightly.

November 21: Hitler turns down more government offers, wanting nothing less than to be chancellor.

December 2: Papen is forced out, and Hindenburg is influenced into appointing the general, and prime right-wing manipulator, Kurt von Schleicher, chancellor.

January 30: Schleicher is outmaneuvered by Papen, who persuades Hindenburg that Hitler can be controlled; the latter is made chancellor , with Papen vice-chancellor.

February 6: Hitler introduces censorship .

February 27: With elections looming, the Reichstag is set on fire by a communist .

February 28: Citing the attack on the Reichstag as evidence of a mass communist movement, Hitler passes a law ending civil liberties in Germany.

March 5: The NSDAP, riding on the communist scare and aided by a now tame police force boosted by masses of SA, polls at 43.9%. The Nazis ban the communists .

March 21: During the "Day of Potsdam," the Nazis open the Reichstag in a carefully stage-managed act that tries to show them as heirs of the Kaiser.

March 24: Hitler passes the Enabling Act; it makes him a dictator for four years.

July 14: With other parties banned or splitting up, the NSDAP becomes the only political party left in Germany.

June 30: During the "Night of the Long Knives," dozens are killed as Hitler shatters the power of the SA, which had been challenging his goals. SA leader Ernst Röhm is executed after trying to merge his force with the army.

July 3: Papen resigns.

August 2: Hindenburg dies. Hitler merges the posts of chancellor and president, becoming the supreme leader of Nazi Germany .

O'Loughlin, John, et al. “ The Geography of the Nazi Vote: Context, Confession, and Class in the Reichstag Election of 1930. ”  Annals of the Association of American Geographers , vol. 84, no. 3, 1994, pp. 351–380, doi:10.1111/j.1467-8306.1994.tb01865.x

" Adolf Hitler: 1924-1930. " Holocaust Encyclopedia. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

" Adolf Hitler: 1930-1933. " Holocaust Encyclopedia. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Von Lüpke-Schwarz, Marc. " Voting in the Midst of Nazi Terror. " Deutsche Welle. 5 Mar. 2013

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Home — Essay Samples — History — Adolf Hitler — Adolf Hitler’s Ascent to Power: A Historical Analysis

Adolf Hitler's Ascent to Power: a Historical Analysis

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Why was Adolf Hitler significant?

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Adolf Hitler

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• Public Broadcasting Service - American Experience - Hitler and Goebbels: A Deadly Partnership
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Hitler was of great historical importance—a term that does not imply a positive judgment—because his actions changed the course of the world. He was responsible for starting World War II , which resulted in the deaths of more than 50 million people. It also led to the extension of the Soviet Union ’s power in eastern, central, and Balkan Europe, enabled a communist movement to eventually achieve control in China , and marked the decisive shift of power away from western Europe and toward the United States and the Soviet Union. In addition, Hitler was responsible for the Holocaust , the state-sponsored killing of six million Jews and millions of others.

Hitler’s rise to power traces to 1919, when he joined the German Workers’ Party that became the Nazi Party . With his oratorical skills and use of propaganda, he soon became its leader. Hitler gained popularity nationwide by exploiting unrest during the Great Depression , and in 1932 he placed second in the presidential race. Hitler’s various maneuvers resulted in the winner, Paul von Hindenburg , appointing him chancellor in January 1933. The following month the Reichstag fire occurred, and it provided an excuse for a decree overriding all guarantees of freedom. Then on March 23 the Enabling Act was passed, giving full powers to Hitler. When Hindenburg died on August 2, 1934, the chancellorship and the presidency were merged, and Hitler secured his position as Führer (“leader”).

Hitler had an overriding ambition for territorial expansion, which was largely driven by his desire to reunify the German peoples and his pursuit of Lebensraum , “living space” that would enable Germans to become economically self-sufficient and militarily secure. Such goals were greeted with support by many within Germany who resented the harsh terms of the Treaty of Versailles , which had ended World War I . Through various means he was able to annex Austria and Czechoslovakia with little resistance in 1938–39. Then on September 1, 1939, Germany invaded Poland , which had been guaranteed French and British military support should such an event occur. Two days later both countries declared war on Germany, launching World War II .

A key figure of Hitler’s inner circle was Joseph Goebbels , minister of propaganda and a fervent follower whom Hitler selected to succeed him as chancellor. However, Goebbels only held the post for one day before committing suicide. Also notable were Hermann Göring , who was a leader of the Nazi Party and one of the primary architects of the Nazi police state in Germany; Heinrich Himmler , who was second in power to Hitler; Joachim von Ribbentrop , foreign minister and chief negotiator of various treaties; Martin Bormann , who was one of Hitler’s closest lieutenants; and Walther Funk , an economist who served as president of the Reichsbank.

As Soviet troops entered the heart of Berlin , Hitler committed suicide on April 30, 1945, in his underground bunker. Although there is some speculation about the manner of his death, it is widely believed that he shot himself. Eva Braun , whom he had recently married, also took her own life. According to his wishes, both bodies were burned and buried. Almost immediately, however, conspiracy theories began. The Soviets initially claimed that they were unable to confirm Hitler’s death and later spread rumors that he was alive. According to subsequent reports, however, the Soviets recovered his burnt remains, which were identified through dental records. Hitler’s body was secretly buried before being exhumed and cremated, with the ashes scattered in 1970.

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Adolf Hitler (born April 20, 1889, Braunau am Inn , Austria—died April 30, 1945, Berlin , Germany) was the leader of the Nazi Party (from 1920/21) and chancellor ( Kanzler ) and Führer of Germany (1933–45). His worldview revolved around two concepts: territorial expansion and racial supremacy . Those themes informed his decision to invade Poland , which marked the start of World War II , as well as the systematic killing of six million Jews and millions of others during the Holocaust.

Hitler’s father, Alois (born 1837), was illegitimate . For a time he bore his mother’s name, Schicklgruber, but by 1876 he had established his family claim to the surname Hitler. Adolf never used any other surname.

After his father’s retirement from the state customs service, Adolf Hitler spent most of his childhood in Linz , the capital of Upper Austria . It remained his favourite city throughout his life, and he expressed his wish to be buried there. Alois Hitler died in 1903 but left an adequate pension and savings to support his wife and children. Although Hitler feared and disliked his father, he was a devoted son to his mother, who died after much suffering in 1907. With a mixed record as a student, Hitler never advanced beyond a secondary education . After leaving school, he visited Vienna , then returned to Linz, where he dreamed of becoming an artist. Later, he used the small allowance he continued to draw to maintain himself in Vienna. He wished to study art, for which he had some faculties , but he twice failed to secure entry to the Academy of Fine Arts. For some years he lived a lonely and isolated life, earning a precarious livelihood by painting postcards and advertisements and drifting from one municipal hostel to another. Hitler already showed traits that characterized his later life: loneliness and secretiveness, a bohemian mode of everyday existence, and hatred of cosmopolitanism and of the multinational character of Vienna.

In 1913 Hitler moved to Munich . Screened for Austrian military service in February 1914, he was classified as unfit because of inadequate physical vigour; but when World War I broke out, he petitioned Bavarian King Louis III to be allowed to serve, and one day after submitting that request, he was notified that he would be permitted to join the 16th Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment. After some eight weeks of training, Hitler was deployed in October 1914 to Belgium , where he participated in the First Battle of Ypres . He served throughout the war, was wounded in October 1916, and was gassed two years later near Ypres . He was hospitalized when the conflict ended. During the war, he was continuously in the front line as a headquarters runner; his bravery in action was rewarded with the Iron Cross , Second Class, in December 1914, and the Iron Cross, First Class (a rare decoration for a corporal), in August 1918. He greeted the war with enthusiasm, as a great relief from the frustration and aimlessness of civilian life. He found discipline and comradeship satisfying and was confirmed in his belief in the heroic virtues of war .

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The Forgotten History of Hitler’s Establishment Enablers

Hitler is so fully imagined a subject—so obsessively present on our televisions and in our bookstores—that to reimagine him seems pointless. As with the Hollywood fascination with Charles Manson , speculative curiosity gives retrospective glamour to evil. Hitler created a world in which women were transported with their children for days in closed train cars and then had to watch those children die alongside them, naked, gasping for breath in a gas chamber. To ask whether the man responsible for this was motivated by reading Oswald Spengler or merely by meeting him seems to attribute too much complexity of purpose to him, not to mention posthumous dignity. Yet allowing the specifics of his ascent to be clouded by disdain is not much better than allowing his memory to be ennobled by mystery.

So the historian Timothy W. Ryback’s choice to make his new book, “ Takeover: Hitler’s Final Rise to Power ” (Knopf), an aggressively specific chronicle of a single year, 1932, seems a wise, even an inspired one. Ryback details, week by week, day by day, and sometimes hour by hour, how a country with a functional, if flawed, democratic machinery handed absolute power over to someone who could never claim a majority in an actual election and whom the entire conservative political class regarded as a chaotic clown with a violent following. Ryback shows how major players thought they could find some ulterior advantage in managing him. Each was sure that, after the passing of a brief storm cloud, so obviously overloaded that it had to expend itself, they would emerge in possession of power. The corporate bosses thought that, if you looked past the strutting and the performative antisemitism, you had someone who would protect your money. Communist ideologues thought that, if you peered deeply enough into the strutting and the performative antisemitism, you could spy the pattern of a popular revolution. The decent right thought that he was too obviously deranged to remain in power long, and the decent left, tempered by earlier fights against different enemies, thought that, if they forcibly stuck to the rule of law, then the law would somehow by itself entrap a lawless leader. In a now familiar paradox, the rational forces stuck to magical thinking, while the irrational ones were more logical, parsing the brute equations of power. And so the storm never passed. In a way, it still has not.

Podcast: The New Yorker Radio Hour Adam Gopnik considers Hitler’s rise to power.

Ryback’s story begins soon after Hitler’s very incomplete victory in the Weimar Republic’s parliamentary elections of July, 1932. Hitler’s party, the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (its German initials were N.S.D.A.P.), emerged with thirty-seven per cent of the vote, and two hundred and thirty out of six hundred and eight seats in the Reichstag, the German parliament—substantially ahead of any of its rivals. In the normal course of events, this would have led the aging warrior Paul von Hindenburg, Germany’s President, to appoint Hitler Chancellor. The equivalent of Prime Minister in other parliamentary systems, the Chancellor was meant to answer to his party, to the Reichstag, and to the President, who appointed him and who could remove him. Yet both Hindenburg and the sitting Chancellor, Franz von Papen, had been firm never-Hitler men, and naïvely entreated Hitler to recognize his own unsuitability for the role.

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The N.S.D.A.P. had been in existence since right after the Great War, as one of many völkisch , or populist, groups; its label, by including “national” and “socialist,” was intended to appeal to both right-wing nationalists and left-wing socialists, who were thought to share a common enemy: the élite class of Jewish bankers who, they said, manipulated Germany behind the scenes and had been responsible for the German surrender. The Nazis, as they were called—a put-down made into a popular label, like “Impressionists”—began as one of many fringe and populist antisemitic groups in Germany, including the Thule Society, which was filled with bizarre pre- QAnon conspiracy adepts. Hitler, an Austrian corporal with a toothbrush mustache (when Charlie Chaplin first saw him in newsreels, he assumed Hitler was aping his Little Tramp character), had seized control of the Party in 1921. Then a failed attempt at a putsch in Munich, in 1923, left him in prison, but with many comforts, much respect, and paper and time with which to write his memoir, “Mein Kampf.” He reëmerged as the leader of all the nationalists fighting for election, with an accompanying paramilitary organization, the Sturmabteilung (S.A.), under the direction of the more or less openly homosexual Ernst Röhm, and a press office, under the direction of Joseph Goebbels. (In the American style, the press office recognized the political significance of the era’s new technology and social media, exploiting sound recordings, newsreels, and radio, and even having Hitler campaign by airplane.) Hitler’s plans were deliberately ambiguous, but his purposes were not. Ever since his unsuccessful putsch in Munich, he had, Ryback writes, “been driven by a single ambition: to destroy the political system that he held responsible for the myriad ills plaguing the German people.”

Ryback skips past the underlying mechanics of the July, 1932, election on the way to his real subject—Hitler’s manipulation of the conservative politicians and tycoons who thought that they were manipulating him—but there’s a notable academic literature on what actually happened when Germans voted that summer. The political scientists and historians who study it tell us that the election was a “normal” one, in the sense that the behavior of groups and subgroups proceeded in the usual way, responding more to the perception of political interests than to some convulsions of apocalyptic feeling.

The popular picture of the decline of the Weimar Republic—in which hyperinflation produced mass unemployment, which produced an unstoppable wave of fascism—is far from the truth. The hyperinflation had ended in 1923, and the period right afterward, in the mid-twenties, was, in Germany as elsewhere, golden. The financial crash of 1929 certainly energized the parties of the far left and the far right. Still, the results of the July, 1932, election weren’t obviously catastrophic. The Nazis came out as the largest single party, but both Hitler and Goebbels were bitterly disappointed by their standing. The unemployed actually opposed Hitler and voted en masse for the parties of the left. Hitler won the support of self-employed people, who were in decent economic shape but felt that their lives and livelihoods were threatened; of rural Protestant voters; and of domestic workers (still a sizable group), perhaps because they felt unsafe outside a rigid hierarchy. What was once called the petite bourgeoisie, then, was key to his support—not people feeling the brunt of economic precarity but people feeling the possibility of it. Having nothing to fear but fear itself is having something significant to fear.

It was indeed a “normal” election in that respect, responding not least to the outburst of “normal” politics with which Hitler had littered his program: he had, in the months beforehand, damped down his usual ranting about Jews and bankers and moneyed élites and the rest. He had recorded a widely distributed phonograph album (the era’s equivalent of a podcast) designed to make him seem, well, Chancellor-ish. He emphasized agricultural support and a return to better times, aiming, as Ryback writes, “to bridge divides of class and conscience, socialism and nationalism.” By the strange alchemy of demagoguery, a brief visit to the surface of sanity annulled years and years of crazy.

The Germans were voting, in the absent-minded way of democratic voters everywhere, for easy reassurances, for stability, with classes siding against their historical enemies. They weren’t wild-eyed nationalists voting for a millennial authoritarian regime that would rule forever and restore Germany to glory, and, certainly, they weren’t voting for an apocalyptic nightmare that would leave tens of millions of people dead and the cities of Germany destroyed. They were voting for specific programs that they thought would benefit them, and for a year’s insurance against the people they feared.

Ryback spends most of his time with two pillars of respectable conservative Germany, General Kurt von Schleicher and the right-wing media magnate Alfred Hugenberg. Utterly contemptuous of Hitler as a lazy buffoon—he didn’t wake up until eleven most mornings and spent much of his time watching and talking about movies—the two men still hated the Communists and even the center-left Social Democrats more than they did anyone on the right, and they spent most of 1932 and 1933 scheming to use Hitler as a stalking horse for their own ambitions.

Schleicher is perhaps first among Ryback’s too-clever-for-their-own-good villains, and the book presents a piercingly novelistic picture of him. Though in some ways a classic Prussian militarist, Schleicher, like so many of the German upper classes, was also a cultivated and cosmopolitan bon vivant, whom the well-connected journalist and diarist Bella Fromm called “a man of almost irresistible charm.” He was a character out of a Jean Renoir film, the regretful Junker caught in modern times. He had no illusions about Hitler (“What am I to do with that psychopath?” he said after hearing about his behavior), but, infinitely ambitious, he thought that Hitler’s call for strongman rule might awaken the German people to the need for a real strongman, i.e., Schleicher. Ryback tells us that Schleicher had a strategy he dubbed the Zähmungsprozess , or “taming process,” which was meant to sideline the radicals of the Nazi Party and bring the movement into mainstream politics. He publicly commended Hitler as a “modest, orderly man who only wants what is best” and who would follow the rule of law. He praised Hitler’s paramilitary troops, too, defending them against press reports of street violence. In fact, as Ryback explains, the game plan was to have the Brown Shirts crush the forces of the left—and then to have the regular German Army crush the Brown Shirts.

Schleicher imagined himself a master manipulator of men and causes. He liked to play with a menagerie of glass animal figurines on his desk, leaving the impression that lesser beings were mere toys to be handled. In June of 1932, he prevailed on Hindenburg to give the Chancellorship to Papen, a weak politician widely viewed as Schleicher’s puppet; Papen, in turn, installed Schleicher as minister of defense. Then they dissolved the Reichstag and held those July elections which, predictably, gave the Nazis a big boost.

Ryback spends many mordant pages tracking Schleicher’s whirling-dervish intrigues, as he tried to realize his fantasy of the Zähmungsprozess . Many of these involved schemes shared with the patriotic and staunchly anti-Nazi General Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord (familiar to viewers of “Babylon Berlin” as Major General Seegers). Hammerstein was one of the few German officers to fully grasp Hitler’s real nature. At a meeting with Hitler in the spring of 1932, Hammerstein told him bluntly, “Herr Hitler, if you achieve power legally, that would be fine with me. If the circumstances are different, I will use arms.” He later felt reassured when Hindenburg intimated that, if the Nazi paramilitary troops acted, he could order the Army to fire on them.

Yet Hammerstein remained impotent. At various moments, Schleicher, as the minister of defense, entertained what was in effect a plan for imposing martial law with himself in charge and Hammerstein at his side. In retrospect, it was the last hope of protecting the republic from Hitler—but after President Hindenburg rejected it, not out of democratic misgivings but out of suspicion of Schleicher’s purposes, Hammerstein, an essentially tragic figure, was unable to act alone. He suffered from a malady found among decent military men suddenly thrust into positions of political power: his scruples were at odds with his habits of deference to hierarchy. Generals became generals by learning to take orders before they learned how to give them. Hammerstein hated Hitler, but he waited for someone else of impeccable authority to give a clear direction before he would act. (He went on waiting right through the war, as part of the equally impotent military nexus that wanted Hitler dead but, until it was too late, lacked the will to kill him.)

The extra-parliamentary actions that were fleetingly contemplated in the months after the election—a war in the streets, or, more likely, a civil confrontation leading to a military coup—seemed horrific. The trouble, unknowable to the people of the time, is that, since what did happen is the worst thing that has ever happened, any alternative would have been less horrific. One wants to shout to Hammerstein and his cohorts, Go ahead, take over the government! Arrest Hitler and his henchmen, rule for a few years, and then try again. It won’t be as bad as what happens next. But, of course, they cannot hear us. They couldn’t have heard us then.

Ryback’s gift for detail joins with a nice feeling for the black comedy of the period. He makes much sport of the attempts by foreign journalists resident in Germany, particularly the New York Times’ Frederick T. Birchall, to normalize the Nazi ascent—with Birchall continually assuring his readers that Hitler, an out-of-his-depth simpleton, was not the threat he seemed to be, and that the other conservatives were far more potent in their political maneuvering. When Papen made a speech denying that Hitler’s paramilitary forces represented “the German nation,” Birchall wrote that the speech “contained dynamite enough to change completely the political situation in the Reich.” On another occasion, Birchall wrote that “the Hitlerites” were deluded to think they “hold the best cards”; there was every reason to think that “the big cards, the ones that will really decide the game,” were in the hands of people such as Papen, Hindenburg, and, “above all,” Schleicher.

Ryback, focussing on the self-entrapped German conservatives, generally avoids the question that seems most obvious to a contemporary reader: Why was a coalition between the moderate-left Social Democrats and the conservative but far from Nazified Catholic Centrists never even seriously attempted? Given that Hitler had repeatedly vowed to use the democratic process in order to destroy democracy, why did the people committed to democracy let him do it?

Many historians have jousted with this question, but perhaps the most piercing account remains an early one, written less than a decade after the war by the émigré German scholar Lewis Edinger, who had known the leaders of the Social Democrats well and consulted them directly—the ones who had survived, that is—for his study. His conclusion was that they simply “trusted that constitutional processes and the return of reason and fair play would assure the survival of the Weimar Republic and its chief supporters.” The Social Democratic leadership had become a gerontocracy, out of touch with the generational changes beneath them. The top Social Democratic leaders were, on average, two decades older than their Nazi counterparts.

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Worse, the Social Democrats remained in the grip of a long struggle with Bismarckian nationalism, which, however oppressive it might have been, still operated with a broad idea of legitimacy and the rule of law. The institutional procedures of parliamentarianism had always seen the Social Democrats through—why would those procedures not continue to protect them? In a battle between demagoguery and democracy, surely democracy had the advantage. Edinger writes that Karl Kautsky, among the most eminent of the Party’s theorists, believed that after the election Hitler’s supporters would realize he was incapable of fulfilling his promises and drift away.

The Social Democrats may have been hobbled, too, by their commitment to team leadership—which meant that no single charismatic individual represented them. Proceduralists and institutionalists by temperament and training, they were, as Edinger demonstrates, unable to imagine the nature of their adversary. They acceded to Hitler’s ascent with the belief that by respecting the rules themselves they would encourage the other side to play by them as well. Even after Hitler consolidated his power, he was seen to have secured the Chancellorship by constitutional means. Edinger quotes Arnold Brecht, a fellow exiled statesman: “To rise against him on the first night would make the rebels the technical violators of the Constitution that they wanted to defend.”

Meanwhile, the centrist Catholics—whom Hitler shrewdly recognized as his most formidable potential adversaries—were handicapped in any desire to join with the Democratic Socialists by their fear of the Communists. Though the Communists had previously made various alliances of convenience with the Social Democrats, by 1932 they were tightly controlled by Stalin, who had ordered them to depict the Social Democrats as being as great a threat to the working class as Hitler.

And, when a rumor spread that Hitler had once spat out a Communion Host, it only made him more popular among Catholics, since it called attention to his Catholic upbringing. Indeed, most attempts to highlight Hitler’s personal depravities (including his possibly sexual relationship with his niece Geli, which was no secret in the press of the time; her apparent suicide, less than a year before the election, had been a tabloid scandal) made him more popular. In any case, Hitler was skilled at reassuring the Catholic center, promising to be “the strong protector of Christianity as the basis of our common moral order.”

Hitler’s hatred of parliamentary democracy, even more than his hatred of Jews, was central to his identity, Ryback emphasizes. Antisemitism was a regular feature of populist politics in the region: Hitler had learned much of it in his youth from the Vienna mayor Karl Lueger. But Lueger was a genuine populist democrat, who brought universal male suffrage to the city. Hitler’s originality lay elsewhere. “Unlike Hitler’s anti-Semitism, a toxic brew of pseudoscientific readings and malignant mentoring, Hitler’s hatred of the Weimar Republic was the result of personal observation of political processes,” Ryback writes. “He hated the haggling and compromise of coalition politics inherent in multiparty political systems.”

Second only to Schleicher in Ryback’s accounting of Hitler’s establishment enablers is the media magnate Alfred Hugenberg. The owner of the country’s leading film studio and of the national news service, which supplied some sixteen hundred newspapers, he was far from an admirer. He regarded Hitler as manic and unreliable but found him essential for the furtherance of their common program, and was in and out of political alliance with him during the crucial year.

Hugenberg had begun constructing his media empire in the late nineteen-teens, in response to what he saw as the bias against conservatives in much of the German press, and he shared Hitler’s hatred of democracy and of the Jews. But he thought of himself as a much more sophisticated player, and intended to use his control of modern media in pursuit of what he called a Katastrophenpolitik —a “catastrophe politics” of cultural warfare, in which the strategy, Ryback says, was to “flood the public space with inflammatory news stories, half-truths, rumors, and outright lies.” The aim was to polarize the public, and to crater anything like consensus. Hugenberg gave Hitler money as well as publicity, but Hugenberg had his own political ambitions (somewhat undermined by a personal aura described by his nickname, der Hamster) and his own party, and Hitler was furiously jealous of the spotlight. While giving Hitler support in his media—a support sometimes interrupted by impatience—Hugenberg urged him to act rationally and settle for Nazi positions in the cabinet if he could not have the Chancellorship.

What strengthened the Nazis throughout the conspiratorial maneuverings of the period was certainly not any great display of discipline. The Nazi movement was a chaotic mess of struggling in-groups who feared and despised one another. Hitler rightly mistrusted the loyalty even of his chief lieutenant, Gregor Strasser, who fell on the “socialist” side of the National Socialists label. The members of the S.A., the Storm Troopers, meanwhile, were loyal mainly to their own leader, Ernst Röhm, and embarrassed Hitler with their run of sexual scandals. The N.S.D.A.P. was a hive of internal antipathies that could resolve only in violence—a condition that would endure to the last weeks of the war, when, standing amid the ruins of Germany, Hitler was enraged to discover that Heinrich Himmler was trying to negotiate a separate peace with the Western Allies.

The strength of the Nazis lay, rather, in the curiously enclosed and benumbed character of their leader. Hitler was impossible to discourage, not because he ran an efficient machine but because he was immune to the normal human impediments to absolute power: shame, calculation, or even a desire to see a particular political program put in place. Hindenburg, knowing of Hitler’s genuinely courageous military service in the Great War, appealed in their meetings to his patriotism, his love of the Fatherland. But Hitler, an Austrian who did not receive German citizenship until shortly before the 1932 election, did not love the Fatherland. He ran on the hydrogen fuel of pure hatred. He did not want power in order to implement a program; he wanted power in order to realize his pain. A fascinating and once classified document, prepared for the precursor of the C.I.A. , the O.S.S., by the psychoanalyst Walter Langer, used first-person accounts to gauge the scale of Hitler’s narcissism: “It may be of interest to note at this time that of all the titles that Hitler might have chosen for himself he is content with the simple one of ‘Fuehrer.’ To him this title is the greatest of them all. He has spent his life searching for a person worthy of the role but was unable to find one until he discovered himself.” Or, as the acute Hungarian American historian John Lukacs, who spent a lifetime studying Hitler’s psychology, observed, “His hatred for his opponents was both stronger and less abstract than was his love for his people. That was (and remains) a distinguishing mark of the mind of every extreme nationalist.”

In November of 1932, one more Reichstag election was held. Once again, it was a bitter disappointment to Hitler and Goebbels—“a disaster,” as Goebbels declared on Election Night. (An earlier Presidential election had also reaffirmed Hindenburg over the Hitler movement.) The Nazi wave that everyone had expected failed to materialize. The Nazis lost seats, and, once again, they could not crack fifty per cent. The Times explained that the Hitler movement had passed its high-water mark, and that “the country is getting tired of the Nazis.” Everywhere, Ryback says, the cartoonists and editorialists delighted in Hitler’s discomfiture. One cartoonist showed him presiding over a graveyard of swastikas. In December of 1932, having lost three elections in a row, Hitler seemed to be finished.

The subsequent maneuverings are as dispiriting to read about as they are exhausting to follow. Basically, Schleicher conspired to have Papen fired as Chancellor by Hindenburg and replaced by himself. He calculated that he could cleave Gregor Strasser and the more respectable elements of the Nazis from Hitler, form a coalition with them, and leave Hitler on the outside looking in. But Papen, a small man in everything except his taste for revenge, turned on Schleicher in a rage and went directly to Hitler, proposing, despite his earlier never-Hitler views, that they form their own coalition. Schleicher’s plan to spirit Strasser away from Hitler and break the Nazi Party in two then stumbled on the reality that the real base of the Party was fanatically loyal only to its leader—and Strasser, knowing this, refused to leave the Party, even as he conspired with Schleicher to undermine it.

Then, in mid-January, a small regional election in Lipperland took place. Though the results were again disappointing for Hitler and Goebbels—the National Socialist German Workers’ Party still hadn’t surmounted the fifty-per-cent mark—they managed to sell the election as a kind of triumph. At Party meetings, Hitler denounced Strasser. The idea, much beloved by Schleicher and his allies, of breaking a Strasser wing of the Party off from Hitler became obviously impossible.

Hindenburg, in his mid-eighties and growing weak, became fed up with Schleicher’s Machiavellian stratagems and dispensed with him as Chancellor. Papen, dismissed not long before, was received by the President. He promised that he could form a working majority in the Reichstag by simple means: Hindenburg should go ahead and appoint Hitler Chancellor. Hitler, he explained, had made significant “concessions,” and could be controlled. He would want only the Chancellorship, and not more seats in the cabinet. What could go wrong? “You mean to tell me I have the unpleasant task of appointing this Hitler as the next Chancellor?” Hindenburg reportedly asked. He did. The conservative strategists celebrated their victory. “So, we box Hitler in,” Hugenberg said confidently. Papen crowed, “Within two months, we will have pressed Hitler into a corner so tight that he’ll squeak!”

“The big joke on democracy is that it gives its mortal enemies the tools to its own destruction,” Goebbels said as the Nazis rose to power—one of those quotes that sound apocryphal but are not. The ultimate fates of Ryback’s players are varied, and instructive. Schleicher, the conservative who saw right through Hitler’s weakness—who had found a way to entrap him, and then use him against the left—was killed by the S.A. during the Night of the Long Knives, in 1934, when Hitler consolidated his hold over his own movement by murdering his less loyal lieutenants. Strasser and Röhm were murdered then, too. Hitler and Goebbels, of course, died by their own hands in defeat, having left tens of millions of Europeans dead and their country in ruins. But Hugenberg, sidelined during the Third Reich, was exonerated by a denazification court in the years after the war. And Papen, who had ushered Hitler directly into power, was acquitted at Nuremberg ; in the nineteen-fifties, he was awarded the highest honorary order of the Catholic Church.

Does history have patterns or merely circumstances and unique contingencies? Certainly, the Germany of 1932 was a place unto itself. The truth, that some cycles may recur but inexactly, is best captured in that fine aphorism “History does not repeat itself, but it sometimes rhymes.” Appropriately, no historian is exactly sure who said this: widely credited to Mark Twain , it was more likely first said long after his death.

We see through a glass darkly, as patterns of authoritarian ambition seem to flash before our eyes: the demagogue made strong not by conviction but by being numb to normal human encouragements and admonitions; the aging center left; the media lords who want something like what the demagogue wants but in the end are controlled by him; the political maneuverers who think they can outwit the demagogue; the resistance and sudden surrender. Democracy doesn’t die in darkness. It dies in bright midafternoon light, where politicians fall back on familiarities and make faint offers to authoritarians and say a firm and final no—and then wake up a few days later and say, Well, maybe this time, it might all work out, and look at the other side! Precise circumstances never repeat, yet shapes and patterns so often recur. In history, it’s true, the same thing never happens twice. But the same things do. ♦

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The Nazis Rise to Power

Subject: History

Age range: 14-16

Resource type: Unit of work

Last updated

30 August 2024

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A wide-ranging collection of 8 purposeful lessons covering the Nazis rise to power. They include PowerPoints and supportive materials. These lessons enable all students to maximise their potential by raising key questions and presenting focused thought-provoking exercises. They will also enable students to develop a range of essential skills.

• Who was Adolf Hitler? – An exercise that ties Hitler’s experiences to Nazi policies.
• Characteristics of the Nazi Party – A task that ties the Nazi Party’s Twenty-Five Point Programme to an analytical framework.
• The Development of the Nazi Party - A nice little group exercise that can be made competitive and fun.
• The Nazi Party: an election winning machine - An exercise that sets out to encourage a focus on what was important about the way the Nazis organised for electoral success.
• The Nazi Vote - An exercise, with a focus on potential questions, to consolidate what your class has learned about who voted for the Nazis.
• Gleichshaltung - Two exercises that encourage an analysis of Gleichshaltung
• The Night of the Long Knives – A fun way to look at what happened as well as the reasons for it.
• A Fire, a Decree and an Act - An exercise that encourages linkage, good explanations and shows how knowledge can be applied to potential exam questions.

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Weimar and Nazi Germany

A wide-ranging collection of 31 purposeful lessons covering Weimar and Nazi Germany. They include PowerPoints and supportive materials. These lessons enable all students to maximise their potential by raising key questions and presenting focused thought-provoking exercises. They will also enable students to develop a range of essential skills.

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Photography and the Holocaust : Then and Now – Essay #10: “A Brief History of Israel & Zionism & the Rise of the New Jew” by Robert Hirsch

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This essay, the 10th in the series, examines the role of photo-based imagery in the post-Holocaust world of Jewish self-determination that lead to the restoration of Israel as a Jewish homeland. To understand how this came about, it is crucial to have a basic knowledge of the 3000 year-old Jewish history in Israel.

A Brief History of Israel & Zionism & the Rise of the New Jew

by Robert Hirsch 2024

VASA Journal on Images and Culture ( VJIC ), Theme Editor and Writer

  www.lightresearch.net

This essay examines the role of photo-based imagery in the post-Holocaust world of Jewish self- determination that lead to the restoration of Israel as a Jewish homeland. To understand how this came about, it is crucial to have a basic understanding of the 3000 year-old Jewish history in Israel. Due to the number of countries and people affected, select examples represent the uncountable other events, locations, and people.

Additional information about specific images can be found at the end of this essay (Image Notes). Images have been minimally adjusted to facilitate online viewing, but have not been overtly edited from their source.

The hollow horn plays wasted words Proves to warn that he not busy being born Is busy dying

Bob Dylan (Robert Zimmerman) “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding),” 1964.

Jewish Self-Determination: The Restoration of Israel

World War II saw European civilization slide into a moral abyss and the Jews were the odd man out – universally despised and rejected in a treacherous sea of grievance and loathing. Jews had no place to escape to, no safe sanctuary. They were unwanted human waste who were not connected to the place upon which they stood. Subliminally, all Holocaust images raise the existential question of how do caustically shunned and displaced people, who had violently lost everything, salvage their history and identity? How does one deal with the anxiety of wandering and impending doom when the place you once called home is no longer your home and is actively trying to kill you?

After the war ended with the unconditional surrender of Germany and Japan, only about 5% of Americans thought more refugees should be allowed into the country. The U.S. quota system of 1923 allowed only 1,500 Jewish refugees into the country. [1] Other countries were no more welcoming. The British continued to greatly limit Jewish immigration to Eretz Israel (the Land of Israel, whose territory matches the land of biblical Israel) until it turned the area over to the United Nations. [2]

10.01 American Institute Public Opinion Poll, December 1945. American Institute of Public Opinion. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC.

Caption: “Should we permit more persons from Europe to come to this country each year than we did before the war, should we keep the number about the same, or should we reduce the number?” A May 7, 2023 poll by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research shows about 4 in 10 U.S. adults say the level of immigration and asylum-seekers should be lowered, while about 2 in 10 say they should be higher, according to the poll. About a third want the numbers to remain the same. See: www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/americans-divided-on-immigration-and-refugees-new-ap-poll-says

A Brief & Concise History of Israel and Judea

The people of modern-day Israel share the same language and culture shaped by the Jewish heritage and religion that had passed through generations starting with the founding father Abraham (ca. 1800 BCE). Jews have had a continuous presence in the land of Eretz Israel for the past 3,300 years as the indigenous population. [3] The history of Israel itself dates back to the Iron Age (1200-550 BCE), when two Israelite kingdoms, Israel and Judea (aka Judah), controlled much of the north, while the Philistines occupied its southern coast (the word “Jew” comes from Judea). The First Temple was built in 1000 BCE by King Solomon after King David conquered Jerusalem and made it his capital. The Temple was first destroyed in 586 BC by Nebuchadnezzar, the King of Babylon, when he conquered Jerusalem. The Second Temple period (586 BCE-AD 70) is marked by the return of Jews to Jerusalem from their exile in Babylon in 538 BCE. The Persians went on to conquer the Babylonian Empire in 539 BCE. There are significant archaeological remains from the Second Temple period, including the Kidron Valley tombs, the Western Wall, Robinson’s Arch, the Herodian residential quarter, numerous other tombs, and walls.

See: Alex Winston, “City of David: Jerusalem’s ancient capital and modern vision,” The Jerusalem Post , April 27, 2024, www.jpost.com/business-and-innovation/real-estate/article-798607?vgo_ee=i8QASWG30Z1AhBdPKK1p%2Fs5VhTXrSpT2a9M6n1mPoOsjPt59hxmQZA%3D%3D%3AjHO60j3jKDgg1X7ZgBAFez0t3j7Va11q

Judaea, now part of modern day Israel, had been a Roman ally since the second century BC and became a Roman province in 6 CE. However, Roman suppression of Jewish life escalated provoking a full-scale revolt in 66 CE. Superior Roman forces, led by Titus, were finally victorious, razing Jerusalem and the Second Temple to the ground (70 CE) and defeating the last Jewish outpost against Roman subjugation and slavery at Masada (73 CE). Hundreds of thousands of Jews were killed and thousands were sold into slavery, and rest fled from their homeland. The Romans then renamed Judaea – Syria Palestine. [4] This was meant to erase Jewish identification with the land and punish the rebellious Jews by naming the country after their biblical enemies, the Philistines, a group of people originally from the Aegean coastline (modern-day Greece and Turkey).

In 132 CE, the surviving Jews of Judea rose up against their Roman oppressors for the second time in a century. In the initial stages of what has come to be called the Bar Kochba Revolt, the Romans got the worst of it. So the legions adjusted their strategy. Rather than concentrate on suppressing the rebels, the Romans decided to annihilate the entire Jewish population of the Land of Israel.

The results were horrific. Ancient historian Cassius Dio wrote of the Jews: “50 of their most important outposts and 985 of their most famous villages were razed to the ground. 580,000 men were slain in the various raids and battles, and the number of those that perished by famine, disease and fire was past finding out. Thus, nearly the whole of Judea was made desolate.” [5]

Thus making “Palestine” a cancellation of Jewish existence.

This was followed by the Rashidun Caliphate, which was the first of four successive caliphs to rule after Muhammad’s death in 632 CE. During its existence (632-661) the Muslim empire became a powerful cultural, economic, and military force that rapidly expanded and conquered much of the Middle East, including parts of modern-day Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Syria, and Egypt and lead to an influx of Arabs in these areas. [6]

Eventually, the area was conquered by the Ottoman Empire in 1516. Despite its religious significance, Jerusalem remained a provincial backwater until World War I, when the Turks who had formed an alliance with Germany were defeated in 1918, leading to the dissolution of the Sultanate and the British taking control of Palestine. During the war, in 1917, the British government had issued The Balfour Declaration announcing its support for the establishment of a “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine. [7] The city of Jerusalem has over time been attacked 52 times, captured and recaptured 44 times, besieged 23 times, and destroyed twice. The oldest part of the city was settled in the 4th millennium BCE, making it one of the oldest cities in the world.

In the aftermath of World War I, the victorious British and French Allies enacted the Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916 that divided the former Ottoman Provinces of the Middle East between themselves, creating 38 new countries. Thirty seven were Muslim-majority including Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon. In 1922 the League of Nations gave Britain mandatory power over Palestine and adopted the Balfour Declaration as international law, which would partition the British Mandate into Jewish and Arab states. This was followed by the San Remo Resolution of April 25, 1920 in which the Supreme Council of the Allied Powers (Great Britain, France, Italy, Japan, with the U.S. acting as an observer) adopted a 500 word document that defined the future political landscape of the Middle East out of the defunct Ottoman Empire. The Arabs received equivalent national rights in all the remaining parts of the Middle East – over 96% of the total area formerly governed by the Ottoman Turks. This was adopted by the League of Nations as international law in 1922. After 1,850 years of foreign occupation, oppression, and banishment by a succession of foreign powers (Romans, Byzantines, Sassanid Persians, Arab Caliphates, Crusaders, Mameluks, and Ottoman Turks), the modern nation of Israel was finally conceived. Those who label Jews as colonial intruders who steal other people’s land is at best false propaganda. Howard Jacobson wrote:

I don’t call for supine obedience to Zionism from Jews, only that they get their own history right in a matter of such importance. Zionism wasn’t a colonial enterprise, they should know that. In fact, Zionism wasn’t any one thing. There were many Zionisms, some more idealistic than others, but the founding of Israel wasn’t an act of colonial depredation. Fleeing from pogroms isn’t colonising. Returning to one’s old home, as Jews had been returning to it for centuries, isn’t colonising. A refugee isn’ t a colonist . [9]

Arab Pogroms in Hebron of 1929 and Jaffa of 1936

Arab efforts to prevent Jewish migration into Palestine led to an interminable civil, political, and armed struggle between the Palestinian Arabs and Jews. Early morning on Saturday, Aug. 24, 1929, some 3,000 Muslim men armed with swords, clubs, axes, and daggers went from Jewish house to Jewish house in the holy city of Hebron, stabbing, raping, and in some cases castrating and burning their victims alive. Jewish children watched as their parents were butchered by their Arab neighbors. Infants were killed in their mothers’ arms. Houses and synagogues were looted and torched. Sixty-seven unarmed Jewish men, women, and children were murdered that day. One of the world’s most ancient Jewish communities, composed of some 800 people before the massacre, was decimated, along with centuries of coexistence that had made Hebron a model of peace between Jews and Muslims. In the aftermath of the attack, the British authorities that ruled Palestine forced the Jews of Hebron to evacuate, turning them into refugees. Jews had lived in Hebron since biblical times, their lives centered around the Tomb of the Patriarchs, where Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebecca, Jacob and Leah are believed to be buried. Much like the Jews who were killed on Oct. 7, 2023 were not settlers, the Jews killed in Hebron in 1929 were not Zionists, all they wanted was to be Jewish. The Hebron massacre of 1929 is not only ground zero of the Arab-Israeli conflict, but also a vital prequel for anyone wishing to understand or resolve the existential war Israel is fighting.

10.06 American Colony (Jerusalem), Photo Department. Synagogue desecrated and looted by Arab rioters , Hebron, August 23 to 31, 1929. Variable dimensions. Gelatin silver print. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C.

In April 1936, the Muslims of Jaffa rampaged through the streets, beating Jews, wrecking Jewish businesses and homes, killing 14 Jews and forcing 12,000 Jews to flee Jaffa as refugees. This pogrom morphed into an armed Arab Rebellion against British rule from 1936 to 1939, which lead to the British halting nearly all Jewish immigration, cutting off their avenue of escape ahead of the Holocaust. In turn, this lead to an armed Jewish Revolt against the British in mid-1940s. In 1947 the British government announced it would end its Mandate. That same year the United Nations General Assembly adopted a plan to create independent Arab and Jewish States, which would be economically connected along with a Special International Regime that would control Jerusalem and its environs.

10.07 Unknown photographer. British Police Dispersing Arab Rioters Protesting Jewish Immigration in Jaffa , 1936. Variable dimensions. Gelatin silver print. French News Agency, Gallica Digital Library.

International law, including the UN Charter, refers to both banks of the Jordan river, since 1920, as Palestine/Land of Israel as the “national home of the Jewish people.” The same international law, including the UN Charter, accepted the partition of the country in 1922 after 78% of it, located on the left bank of the Jordan river, was handed over to the Arabs and the remaining, on the right bank of the river, to the Jews. The Jews accepted the partition and the Arabs rejected it. The Arab Higher Committee (AHC), which was the de facto government of the Palestinian Arabs, circulated a paper, declaring: “The Arabs have taken into their own hands the final solution of the Jewish problem. The problem will be solved only in blood and fire. The Jews will soon be driven out.” [10] Thus on November 30, 1947 an open war began with full-scale Arab rioting, stoning, and killing Jews in and around Jerusalem and Tel-Aviv. [11]

It is vital to know that there never has been a Palestinian state – the area was a province of the Ottoman Empire. The term “Palestinian” only entered English and other European languages in the 1870s and referred to both the land’s Arab and Jewish inhabitants. The goal of the first Palestine Arab Congress (1919) was not to create an independent Arab state, but to attach Palestine to Greater Syria. It should also be noted that at least 25% of the Arab Congress’s leaders discreetly sold land for Jewish settlements. They did however create a Muslim religious authority, the Supreme Muslim Council, under Hajj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, who led a violent revolt against both the British and the Jews in 1936 that was ultimately crushed by the British. [12] In Berlin, where he spent most of the war, Husseini undertook a fusion of Nazism and Islamism [13] as they shared the same enemies [14] and sought a world without Jews.. [15] Husseini personally contributed to the German war machine by recruiting Bosnian Muslims for the Waffen SS and organizing intelligence operations in the Middle East. In 1945 he went to Cairo to lead the Palestinian Arab campaign against the creation of Israel. [16] Matthias Küntzel, Nazis, Islamic Antisemitism and the Middle East , Routledge: London & New York, 2003.

10.09 Unknown photographer. Adolf Hitler talking to Grand Mufti Haj Amin el Husseini , Berlin 1941. Dimensions variable. Gelatin silver print. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC.

Caption: This is from a newsreel of the first meeting of Hitler and Grand Mufti Haj Amin el Husseini in Berlin. The Führer confirmed that the “struggle against a Jewish homeland in Palestine” would be part of the struggle against the Jews. Hitler stated that: he would “continue the struggle until the complete destruction of Jewish-Communist European empire”; and when the German army was in proximity to the Arab world, Germany would issue “an assurance to the Arab world” that “the hour of liberation was at hand.” It would then be al-Husayni’s “responsibility to unleash the Arab action that he has secretly prepared.” The Führer stated that Germany would not intervene in internal Arab matters and that the only German “goal at that time would be the annihilation of Jewry living in Arab space under the protection of British power.” In 1941Husseini also met with Benito Mussolini, the Duce (Leader) of Fascist Italy to get his backing. See: https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/hajj-amin-al-husayni-key-dates

The Allied victory offered European Jews the opportunity to discard the odious chains of restrictions and violent subjugation that had been imposed upon them by both Christian and Muslim societies, to become an autonomous people able to create their own future free from outside domination. [17] To make sure they would never find themselves in such a helpless situation again, many survivors of the Holocaust embraced Zionism with the goal of re-establishing Israel as an anti-colonial, anti-fascist, secular, socialistic state.

Zionism is the movement for the self-determination and statehood for the Jewish people in their ancestral homeland of Israel. Zion is the biblical term for both the land of Israel and Jerusalem (more on Zionism in the next section). At the first Zionist conference of those in the displaced persons (DP) camps in Bavaria, they demanded to permanently dissolve the European Diaspora, lift the British restrictions on immigration to Palestine, and expedite immigration to Eretz Israel. In essence, Zionism supports the birth of a Jewish state in the form of a republic, the only one in the Mideast. Essentially, Jews imagined Eretz Israel into existence. [18]

10.10 Unknown photographer. Unrestricted Immigration Demonstration . Variable dimensions. Gelatin silver print. Vad Vashem, Jerusalem, Israel.

The Holocaust was the culmination of centuries of Christians and Muslims separating and persecuting one group of people who were different from the majority, the Jews, and equating them as the cause of their society’s problems. History has shown that the Jews were oppressed because they did not have a government to protect their rights and no place to escape violent persecution; they needed a home of their own where they could protect themselves and be themselves. [19]

These chronic existential threats lead to the formation of Zionism. as a nationalist movement of Jewish self-determination, which originated in central and eastern Europe. Zionists were motivated by a historical vision of their future identity in their ancient homeland, rather than an imperial strategy or economic vision, or desire to dominate the local population. [20] It’s roots date back to the sixteenth century when wide-spread hatred of the Jews lead their religious leaders to call for Jews to re-establish a Jewish nation in its ancestorial homeland in what is now Israel. Zionism was officially established as a political organization in 1897 by Austrian journalist Theodor Herzl and was later championed by Chaim Weizmann and Nahum Sokolow. Zionism sought to inspire the Jewish people to revive the Hebrew language and re-establish control over their culture, education, history, religion, and traditions. Zionism wanted to give Jews, not only a state of their own, but a sense of agency and dignity that had been lost in exile; as one slogan put it, Jews would go to Palestine “to build, and to be built.”

Herzl dreamed of a democratic Jewish national state in which all citizens, including Arabs, would possess political equality and share in the its economic and social benefits. It is important to note that at this time, there was no Arab national movement in existence anywhere nor were there any Arab democracies. Arab nationalism did not emerge as a political force until World War I, when the British cultivated it in to undermine the Ottoman Empire.

10.12. Ephraim Moses Lilien. Theodor Herzl on a balcony , Basel, Switzerland, December 1901. Dimensions variable. Gelatin silver print. Shapell Manuscript Foundation.

The Rise of a New Jewish Consciousness: The New Jew

In preparing for immigration to the startup nation of Eretz Israel, a key role was performed by the kibbutzim (farming collectives) that had been active in the interwar period, primarily in Poland. Kibbutz Buchenwald was the first agricultural training camp established in 1945. [21] Generally, the kibbutzim were part of the DP camps, but their members lived independently in separate facilities. Their mission was to ready their members for Aliyah (emigration) to Eretz Israel, which included Hebrew and history lessons as well as agricultural training.

10.14 Unknown photographer. A group of children work in the garden of the Stuttgart displaced persons’ camp , Stuttgart, [Wuerttemberg] Germany, 1946-1949. Among those pictured is Lova Warszawczyk, on the far left; Bronia Graudens, fourth from the left, in back; Aviva Rosenzweig (later Goldring, front, far right); and Hadasa Gassenbauer, in front, center, hair up in braids and holding a shovel. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC, courtesy of Larry Warick.

Theodor Herzl defined the image of this New Jew in his 1902 utopian novel Altneuland ( Old-New Land ), which was a response to the failure of the Enlightenment values to benefit Jews. [22] Herzl viewed Zionism as the arrival of an authentic image of the Jew in a state without the idea of God or any dogmatization, a utopian concept similar to Nietzsche’s “new European man” (Ubermensch) who generates their own values based on their life experiences and strives to enhance humanity. [23]

At the turn of the twentieth century, the New Jew was a strong, mythic warrior-poet-farmer, a productive kibbutz member, who would defend her/himself while working the Holy Land. Instead of traditional Jewish intellectualism and studying the Talmud, such action figures would learn how to make the desert bloom. [24]

These New Jews would leave the painful struggle of the diaspora behind, abandoning ancient mysterious rituals, and reinvent themselves as free people in their ancient homeland. This break from the past, was an existential revolution. It emphasized the renewal of Jewish identity by means of committing to a life that valued authentic Jewish aesthetic, cultural, and moral values instead of those that imposed by majority cultures.

10.16 The New Jew by Anna Louise Strong. Pamphlet cover. National Library of Australia.

The first organized group of New Jews were known as the Sabras who were the proto Israelis—the first generation, born in the 1930s and 1940s, to grow up in the Zionist settlement in Palestine (in Hebrew, Sabra refers to the prickly fruit of a species of cactus). Emersed in the ethos of the Zionist labor movement and the communal ideals of the kibbutz and moshav (a cooperative agricultural settlement), they planned and worked to make State of Israel a reality. Their attitude was the difference between being in control as opposed to being controlled. If God was unwilling or unable to stop the murder of Jews and their culture, Jews must do it for themselves because the universe is indifferent at best.

For a people devoted to textual study, the invention of photography was a pivotal event for Jews, on par with Gutenberg. Photographs lead to a changing attitude that gave Jews permission to disregard the Torah’s prohibition of making graven images for the purpose of idol worship. [25] This can be seen in the work of Alfred Stieglitz whose goal was to demonstrate that photographers could make work on par with other fine artists. [26] This also opened the way for other Jews, such as Paul Strand and Lisette Model, to play a larger role in the development of modern photographic language. However, in the shtetls of eastern Europe, many Jews still did not want to be photographed. In A Vanished World (1983) Roman Vishniac wrote:

A man with a camera was always suspected of being a spy. Moreover, the Jews did not want to be photographed, due to a misunderstanding of the prohibition against making graven images (photography had not been invente when the Torah was written!). I was forced to use a hidden camera . [27]

10.19 Unknown photographer. Sabra Fighters , 1948. Variable dimensions. Gelatin silver print. Photographs of Sabras were meant to give physical form to their concept of the New Jew.

The New Jew photographs reveal a radical change in self-identity from studious to physical. Jews realized that the only way to throw off the shackles of Christian and Islamic society limitations were to assert their freedom to be different, because the other societies were not going to change. [28] The New Jew was saying that we have not been able to utilize all our capabilities under the present systems and that the only way that this is going to be possible is through creating a nation where Jews are free to be Jews. This is what the 1948 war was about. The photographs of the New Jews in Palestine not only reflect this reality, but also interpret it by portraying aspects of Jewish life that had not been previously depicted, suppressed or intentionally maligned. They were non-conformists who were free and independent and were not going to be defined by as vermin.

10.20 Unknown photographer. Jewish combatants , Israel, May 20, 1948. Variable dimensions. Gelatin silver print. Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone.

Agency of Snapshots

The world had reduced the Jewish people to their imposed Jewishness , regardless of their abilities, beliefs, character, and interests. Post war amateur snapshots as seen through Jewish eyes helped to create and define new Jewish personal, group identities, and accomplishments. They were acts of healing and optimism in the aftermath of the Holocaust. Their photographs can also be seen as a secular pursuit of redemption that brought together divergent streams of Jewish life. It was also a break from how European photographers depicted the area. [29]

These nonprofessional snapshots located the raw energy of that time and place along with a resolve to flourish amid adversity. Their informal nature are more like improvised jazz than structured classical music. This spontaneity adds a genuine sense to the snapshots as there is often a personal connection between the picture maker and the subject(s), which infuses emotional value.

10.21 Unknown photographer. Kibbutz members working at the stone quarry of kibbutz Ein-Harod , 1941. Variable dimensions. Gelatin silver print. Government Press Office.

In the U.S. these vernacular characteristics were incorporated into the work of a number of post-war Jewish working-class street photographers such as Vivian Cherry, Louis Faurer, Sid Grossman, and William Klein, [30] which greatly influenced photographic practice. It was somewhat formalized during the 1960s in what was referred to as the snapshot aesthetic, [31] which rejected the canons of modernism and included photographers such as Lee Friedlander and Garry Winogrand. Years later, these attributes can be seen in photographs that were exhibited covering the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, which were made by anyone in the vicinity with a camera. [32]

10.22 Sid Grossman. Coney Island , 1947. 7-7/8 x 8 inches. Gelatin silver print. Howard Greenburg Gallery, NY.

Caption: As a member of the Photo League, Grossman believed that photographs should serve a social-political purpose. Grossman was a driving force in the organization’s activism between 1938 and 1949. Grossman, who was a member of the Communist Party, was blacklisted and resigned from the League, which led to its collapse in 1951.

Fascism offers people freedom from the self, ridding people of the burden of personal responsibility and the need to critically think. Authoritarianism makes a point to stand in the light of others, instead of building space for one and another, producing a place where one dumps their Jungian shadow self. The New Jew snapshots are examples of the innovative agency they adopted. These photographs acted as vessels into an imagined future community stating: We make decisions, we chose, we act to make order out of the chaos the world continues to thrust upon us. The New Jews refused to be treated as passive objects who were acted upon by forces beyond their control. Their snapshots of everyday moments are intimate, personal pictures meant to be carried in one’s wallet, tacked on a wall, and/or pasted into an album, as opposed to heroic-size work that can only be placed in large businesses, galleries, and museums. They contain no pretense, nor academic aestheticization or theories. Instead these makers are generating their own existential meaning that utilizes photography as a way of revealing and negotiating the complexities of human existence. Ultimately, they are uncomplicated photographs that straight-forwardly state: This is how it was.

10.24 Robert Capa. A young French Jew working at a settlement , Israel, 1948-1950. 10 × 8.25 inches. Gelatin silver print. ©Robert Capa © International Center of Photography / Magnum Photos.

Caption: Robert Capa (Endre Ernő Friedmann), a Jewish refugee from Hungary’s rampant antisemitism, made trips to Israel from 1948-1950. There he made hundreds of dynamic and lyrical photographs conveying his sense that “Everywhere, the land is alive.” [33] This work first appeared in Report on Israel (1950) by Irwin Shaw and Robert Capa.

To be continued…

The world-wide appeasement of Shia Hamas’s atrocities and kidnappings/hostages of October 7, 2023 in Israel is a result of abject antisemitism, obstructionism, historical denialism, and violent irredentism. It represents a worldwide failure to believe what Hamas, an Iranian proxy and internationally recognized terrorist organization, says, does, and intends to do. This is in spite Hamas’s cynical strategy of utilizing human shields. Hamas’s goal is to maximize the number of Gazans who die and in that way build international pressure until Israel is forced to end the war before Hamas is wiped out. Hamas’s survival depends on support in the court of international opinion, which is overpowering but often wrong. This strategy relies on making this war as bloody as possible for civilians, until Israel is forced to relent, leaving Hamas in power of Gaza.” [34] This is a classic example of how Jewish security choices depend on the disposition of the neighboring population. It shockingly demonstrates how the largest slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust has revived overt worldwide antisemitism that calls for the destruction of Israel and denys Hamas’s atrocities. At this moment, I watch students chanting: Hamas we love you , We support your rockets , Burn Tel Aviv to the ground , We are Hamas , and globalize the Intifada (Leftist version of the Replacement Theory). None of these students are chanting for Hamas to free the hostages. Instead of condemning the carnage, these students blatantly defend Hamas’s actions in the name of the oppressed, although their faces are often covered with keffiyehs. The only issues that matter to these people are those that portray the Jews as the world’s ultimate white oppressors.

This large spike in world-wide Jew hatred holds the Jewish dysphoria responsible for the policies of a country they do not live in and for a government they did not elect. No one is demanding the eradication of El Salvador, Hungry or India. No one defaces Chinese restaurants because Beijing imprisons the Uyghurs in concentration camps and occupies Tibet. Most people can’t even find Sudan on a map, the site of the world’s worst humanitarian crisis that involves 45 million people and includes conflict-related starvation, sexual violence, and ethnic-based killings. [35] Where is the outrage about “cutting”(female genital mutilation) in Muslim-majority countries, such as Gambia, which usually involves removing the clitoris and labia minora of girls between the ages of 10 and 15? This practice has affected more than 230 million women to enforce Sharia beliefs and laws of sexual purity, obedience and control. [36] And finally, not a word about the oppression Palestinians have endured in Jordan and Lebanon.

AW 10.02 Amir Cohen. Hamas Blood stained child’ s bed , 2023. Variable dimensions. Digital file. Aftermath of a deadly infiltration by Hamas gunmen in Kibbutz Nir Oz, Israel. Reuters.

In terms of ethic cleaning, in 1945 there were approximately 995,000 Jews living in Muslim countries today there are about 6000. Yet Jews are charged with genocide, not as an objection to so-called occupation, but a lie that justifies opposing Jews “by any means necessary,” which includes killing parents in front of their children, raping women, kidnapping toddlers, murdering babies along with burning and mutilating Jews. Chanting “from the river to the sea,” is not a critique of the Israel’s policies, rather it is a call for genocide against the Jewish state and the Jewish people. It demonstrates how malicious words can lead to deadly action that includes persecuting minorities and opponents, oppressing women, and stifling freedom of expression.

Despotic Hamas made a point of photographing their massacre and sexual assaults because they took pleasure in committing these acts against Jews. Even though their videos offer proof of the delight they had murdering people, that same night people in Gaza celebrated the rupture of civilized behavior that was carried out by their leadership. Despite the devastation, a recent poll, conducted by a Palestinian survey organization, reports that 71% of respondents in Gaza and in the West Bank believe Hamas was correct in launching the October attack and 93% said they did not believe Hamas has committed war crimes. Over 60% said they want Hamas to remain in power. [37] What this makes clear is that Hamas cannot function without the widespread participation of the people of Gaza, making the massacre that Hamas carried out a societal crime – a collective action to implement a Muslim Final Solution upon the Jewish problem.

People have chronically made Jews mirrors of the world, but the hatred they see is really their own. In turn, this has made Israel the “Jew” of nations. In our era when identity overwhelms all other considerations, when everyone is either an oppressor or oppressed, it is imperative that Jews do not allow outsiders to define who they are and what they believe. Such acts of domination, intimidation, subjugation that make Jews greedy, subhuman (Der Untermensch), disease carrying parasites, who are simultaneously capitalists and communists puppet masters that control the world, would never be tolerated in the U.S. against any other minority group. Yet here we are. Jews either must find ways to survive in this jungle or they will only exist in museums or zoos. Today, campus mobs are coming for the Jews, but tomorrow they come for you.

Remember, Remember, Remember:

Never again Means Never Again!

Special thanks to Dr. Gary Nickard for copy editing.

Robert Hirsch is an artist, author, curator, educator, photographic historian and former Director of CEPA and Southern Light Galleries. Hirsch’s work has been exhibited in over 200 international solo and group exhibitions. His visual and written projects can be viewed at www.lightresearch.net

[1] In 1948, Congress passed the Displaced Persons Act, authorizing 200,000 displaced persons to enter the United States without being counted against the immigration quotas. The act did not include any special provisions for Jewish DPs. Between the establishment of the DP camps in 1945 and the closure of the last camp in 1957, about 140,000 Jewish Holocaust survivors immigrated to the U.S.

[2] The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, “Bystanders, Rescuers or Perpetrators? The Neutral Countries and the Shoah” (PDF) offers a trans-national, comparative perspective on the varied reactions of the neutral countries to the Nazi persecution and murder of the European Jews. It examines the often ambivalent policies of these states towards Jewish refugees as well as towards their own Jewish nationals living in German-occupied countries. Download at: www.holocaustremembrance.com/resources/publications/bystanders-rescuers-or-perpetrators-neutral-countries-and-shoah

[3] See: Alex Winston, “City of David: Jerusalem’s ancient capital and modern vision,” The Jerusalem Post , April 27, 2024, www.jpost.com/business-and-innovation/real-estate/article-798607?vgo_ee=i8QASWG30Z1AhBdPKK1p%2Fs5VhTXrSpT2a9M6n1mPoOsjPt59hxmQZA%3D%3D%3AjHO60j3jKDgg1X7ZgBAFez0t3j7Va11q

[4] James Sinkinson, “How the Palestinians Got Their Name: The True Story,” Facts and Logic About the Middle East ( FLAME ), March 28, 2023, www.factsandlogic.org/how-the-palestinians-got-their-name-the-true-story/b

[5] Benjamin Kerstein, “The word ‘Palestine’ is Genocide,” Jewish News Syndicate, January 22, 2024, www.jns.org/the-word-palestine-is-genocide/?_se=ZmVkZXJpY28uYmVudHNpa0B0aW4uaXQ%3D

[6] See: Rashidun Caliphate: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rashidun_Caliphate

[7] See: “Pre-State Israel: The San Remo Conference (April 19-26, 1920),” Jewish Virtual Library , www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/the-san-remo-conference

[8] Anti-Israel Activist Vandalizes Portrait of Arthur Balfour, Who Supported Jewish Homeland, www.algemeiner.com/2024/03/08/anti-israel-activist-vandalizes-portrait-arthur-balfour-who-supported-jewish-homeland/

[9] Howard Jacobson, “The founding of Israel wasn’t a colonial act – a refugee isn’t a colonist,” The New Stateman , November 29, 2023. www.newstatesman.com/ideas/2023/11/founding-israel-palestine-anti-semitism

[10] Efraim Karsh, The Arab-Israeli Conflict: The Palestine War 1948 , Oxford: Osprey Publishing, 2002, 8.

[11] Ibid, 28.

[12] David Patterson, “Islamic Jihad and the Holocaust: From Hitler to Hamas,” Socio-Historical Examination of Religion and Ministry , Vol. 4, No. 1, pp. 60-79, Summer 2022.

[13] Holocaust Encyclopedia, “Hajj Amin al-Husayni: War Time Propagandist,” United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC. https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/hajj-amin-al-husayni-wartime-propagandist

[14] Al-Husseini declared that the Germans and the Arabs had the same enemies: “the English, the Jews, and the Communists.” He proposed an Arab revolt all across the Middle East to fight the Jews and the English, who still ruled Palestine and controlled Iraq and Egypt; and the French, who controlled Syria and Lebanon. He also wanted to form an Arab legion, using Arab prisoners from the French Empire who were then POWs inside Germany. He also asked Hitler to declare publicly, as the German government had privately, that it favored “the elimination of the Jewish national home” in Palestine. For details see: Oren Kessler, Palestine 1936: The Great Revolt and the Roots of the Middle East Conflict , Landam, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2023.

[15] TOI Staff, “Full official record: What the mufti said to Hitler” The Times of Israel , October 21, 2015, www.timesofisrael.com/full-official-record-what-the-mufti-said-to-hitler/

[16] Matthias Küntzel, Nazis, Islamic Antisemitism and the Middle East , Routledge: New York and London, 2023.

[17] Jacob Kornbluh, “Marjorie Taylor Greene doubles down on view that United States should be a Christian nation,” Forward , April 2, 2023, https://forward.com/fast-forward/542070/marjorie-taylor-greene-doubles-down-on-view-that-united-states-should-be-a-christian-nation/ and David French, “What Is Christian Nationalism, Exactly?,” the New York Times, www.nytimes.com/2024/02/25/opinion/christian-nationalism.html

[18] The early twentieth century also saw the birth of Marcus Garvey’s Back to Africa movement. In “The Principles of The Universal Negro Improvement Association” (1922), Garvey made the case that self-determination was the only path to equality, which would lead to worldwide motivation toward Black liberation. However, Gravey was a Black separatist who envisioned a unified Africa, ruled by himself, which would enact laws to ensure black racial purity. See: https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/1922-marcus-garvey-principles-universal-negro-improvement-association/ More at: David Van Leeuwen, “Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association,” National Humanities Center, https://nationalhumanitiescenteerr.org/tserve/twenty/tkeyinfo/garvey.htm

[19] Jews were and are weary of having to explain themselves to the rest of the world. They wanted/needed to be in a place where they did not have to explain themselves, a place where they were already known. Zionism was a return to their history – a place to be with and reckon with their own culture of Talmudic learning and dispute.

[20] See: Tom Segev in One Palestine , Complete : Jews and Arabs under the British mandate .

[21] Meyer Levin (ed), “Journal of Kibbutz Buchenwald,” Commentary , June 1946, www.commentary.org/articles/with-introduction/journal-of-kibbutz-buchenwald/

[22] See: Shlomo Avineri, “Rereading Herzl’s Old-New Land,” Jewish Review of Books, Summer 2012, https://jewishreviewofbooks.com/articles/213/rereading-herzls-old-new-land/?login=1704842433

[23] See: Jacob Golomb, Thus Spoke Herzl: Nietzsche’s Presence in Theodor Herzl’s Life and Work , Nietzsche and Zion . Ithaca; London: Cornell University Press: 2004, 23–45.

[24] In the 1950s and early 1960s, U.S. Hebrew students, including the author, went door to door in their neighbors to raise funds to plant trees in Israel ($1 per tree). I felt an historic sense of social involvement when I first saw these mature trees in Israel.

[25] “You shall have no other gods beside Me. You shall not make for yourself a sculptured image, or any likeness of what is in the heavens above or on the earth below, or in the waters under the earth.” (Exodus 20:3-40).

[26] See: Robert Hirsch, Seizing the Light: A Social and Aesthetic History of Photography , Third Edition, Routledge: New York & London, 2017, 201-204.

[27] Roman Vishniac, A Vanished World , New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, paperback, 1986, Preface, N.pag.

[28] Arab-Islamic empires non-Muslim subjects were called dhimmi who were offered protection in return for a special tax (jizya). However, they faced various forms of official and non-official discrimination and were not treated as equals, thus emphasizing the social superiority of Muslims. See: https://katz.sas.upenn.edu/resources/blog/what-do-you-know-dhimmi-jewish-legal-status-under-muslim-rule Also see: Mark Wagner, “What Do You Know? Dhimmi, Jewish Legal Status under Muslim Rule,” November 30, 2018, University of Pennsylvania, Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies, November 30, 2028, https://katz.sas.upenn.edu/resources/blog/what-do-you-know-dhimmi-jewish-legal-status-under-muslim-rule

[29] For a quick introduction see: The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe/Photography , https://yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Photography

[30] See: Max Kozloff, Karen Levitov, Johanna Goldfeld, New York Capital of Photography , New York: Jewish Museum & New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002. Plus Deborah Dash Moore, Walkers in the City: Jewish Street Photographers of Midcentury New York , Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2023.

[31] See: Robert Hirsch, “Nathan Lyons on the Snapshot,” CEPA Journal , Winter, 1992-1993, N.pag.

Available at: https://lightresearch.net/light/nathan-lyons-on-the-snapshot

[32] See: Gilles Peress, Michael Shulan, Charles Traub, Alice Rose George, Here Is New York: A Democracy of Photographs , New York and Zurich: Scalo Verlag, 2002.

[33] See: Stuart Schoffman, “Robert Capa’s Road to Jerusalem,” Jewish Review of Books , Winter, 2016, https://jewishreviewofbooks.com/articles/1969/robert-capas-road-to-jerusalem/?login=1714175705

[34] David Brooks, “What Would You Have Israel Do to Defend Itself?, The New York Times , March 24, 2024, www.nytimes.com/2024/03/24/opinion/gaza-israel-war.html

[35] Linda Thomas-Greenfield, “The Unforgivable Silence on Sudan,” The New York Times , March 18, 2024, www.nytimes.com/2024/03/18/opinion/sudan-famine-humanitarian-aid.html?searchResultPosition=1

[36] Ruth Maclean, “Gambia Moves Toward Overturning Landmark Ban on Female Genital Cutting,” The New York Times , March 18, 2024, www.nytimes.com/2024/03/18/world/africa/gambia-female-genital-cutting.html?searchResultPosition=1

[37] Valerie Richardson, “Over 70% of Palestinians say Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israelis was right decision: Poll,” The Washington Times , March 22, 2024, www.washingtontimes.com/news/2024/mar/22/over-70-palestinians-say-oct-7-hamas-attack-israel/

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