*Includes pictures
*Includes online resources and a bibliography for further reading
It is often claimed that Adolf Hitler rose to power in Germany through democratic means, and while that is a stretch, it is true that he managed to become an absolute dictator as Chancellor of Germany in the 1930s through a mixture of politics and intimidation. Ironically, he had set such a course only because of the failure of an outright coup attempt known as the Beer Hall Putsch about a decade earlier.
At the close of World War I, Hitler was an impoverished young artist who scrapped by through selling souvenir paintings, but within a few years, his powerful oratory brought him to the forefront of the Nazi party in Munich and helped make the party much more popular. A smattering of followers in the hundreds quickly became a party of thousands, with paramilitary forces like the SA backing them, and at the head of it all was a man whose fiery orations denounced Jews, communists and other "traitors" for bringing upon the German nation the Treaty of Versailles, which had led to hyperinflation and a wrecked economy.
During the first few years of the decade, the government in Munich had actually supported the fledgling Nazi party as a counterweight against the communists, which had attempted a coup years earlier, but it would nearly come back to haunt the authorities on November 8, 1923, when Hitler and his forces attempted to start a revolution and take over the city. Backed by men like Rudolf Hess, Hermann Goering, and Ernst Rohm, Hitler and the Nazis came perilously close to succeeding, and they may have been undone only because of the SA's refusal to initiate violence against German police and Army members.
By the following day, the police and Army put down the putsch, which climaxed with a short firefight in which the man standing next to Hitler was killed by a shot through the lungs, a bullet that came close to striking the future Fuhrer in the torso. However, despite being the instigator and being arrested in its aftermath as a traitor, the political atmosphere not only saved Hitler from a potential death sentence but practically made him a sympathetic figure. He would end up serving less than a year in prison (during which he dictated Mein Kampf to Hess), and as soon as he was released he went back to working with the Nazis, now convinced that the path to power lay through peaceful means.
Still, the struggling Weimar Republic had become a breeding ground for extremist politics, including two opposed and powerful authoritarian entities: the right-wing National Socialists and the left-wing KPD Communist Party. As the 1930s dawned, these two totalitarian groups held one another in a temporary stalemate, enabling the fragile ghost of democracy to continue a largely illusory survival for a few more years.
That stalemate was broken in dramatic fashion on a bitterly cold night in late February 1933, and it was the Nazis who emerged decisively as the victors. A single act of arson against the famous Reichstag building proved to be the catalyst that propelled Adolf Hitler to victory in the elections of March 1933, which set the German nation irrevocably on the path towards World War II. That war would plunge much of the planet into an existential battle that ultimately cost an estimated 60 million lives.
The History and Legacy of Germany's Most Controversial Events Between World War I and World War II chronicles the most notorious events in German history in the 1920s and 1930s. Along with pictures of important people, places, and events, you will learn about them like never before.