The rise and fall of Hitler

OVERVIEW ESSAY

The War in Europe

26

HOW DID HITLER HAPPEN?

ONLINE RESOURCES

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The Axis Powers in Europe Video

What Would You Do? Scenario:

Standing Up to Hitler

Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor of

Germany in 1933 following a series of electoral

victories by the Nazi Party. He ruled absolutely

until his death by suicide in April 1945. Upon

achieving power, Hitler smashed the nation’s

democratic institutions and transformed

Germany into a war state intent on conquering

Europe for the benefit of the so-called

Aryan

race. His invasion of Poland on September

1, 1939, triggered the European phase of

World War II. During the course of the war,

Nazi military forces rounded up and executed

11 million victims they deemed inferior or

undesirable—“life unworthy of life”—among

them Jews, Slavs, homosexuals, and Jehovah’s

Witnesses.

Hitler had supreme authority as

führer

(leader

or guide), but could not have risen to power

or committed such atrocities on his own. He

had the active support of the powerful German

officer class and of millions of everyday citizens

who voted for the National Socialist German

Workers’ (Nazi) Party and hailed him as a

national savior in gigantic stadium rallies.

How were Hitler and the Nazis possible? How

did such odious characters take and hold

power in a country that was a world pacesetter

in literature, art, architecture, and science, a

nation that had a democratic government and a

free press in the 1920s?

Hitler rose to power through the Nazi Party,

an organization he forged after returning as a

wounded veteran from the annihilating trench

warfare of World War I. He and other patriotic

Germans were outraged and humiliated by

authority flowed downward from a supreme

national leader. In the new Germany, all citizens

would unselfishly serve the state, or

Volk

;

democracy would be abolished; and individual

rights sacrificed for the good of the

führer

state. The ultimate aim of the Nazi Party was to

seize power through Germany’s parliamentary

system, install Hitler as dictator, and create a

community of racially pure Germans loyal to

their

führer

, who would lead them in a campaign

of racial cleansing and world conquest.

OVERVIEW ESSAY

The War in Europe

27

HOW DID HITLER HAPPEN?

authority flowed downward from a supreme

national leader. In the new Germany, all citizens

would unselfishly serve the state, or

Volk

;

democracy would be abolished; and individual

rights sacrificed for the good of the

führer

state. The ultimate aim of the Nazi Party was to

seize power through Germany’s parliamentary

system, install Hitler as dictator, and create a

community of racially pure Germans loyal to

their

führer

, who would lead them in a campaign

of racial cleansing and world conquest.

Hitler blamed the Weimar Republic’s weakness

on the influence of Germany’s Jewish and

communist minorities, who he claimed were

trying to take over the country. “There are only

two possibilities,” he told a Munich audience

in 1922. “Either victory of the

Aryan

, or

annihilation of the

Aryan

and the victory of the

Jew.” The young Hitler saw history as a process

of racial struggle, with the strongest race—the

Aryan

race—ultimately prevailing by force of

arms. “Mankind has grown great in eternal war,”

Hitler wrote. “It would decay in eternal peace.”

Jews represented everything the Nazis found

repugnant: finance capitalism (controlled,

the Nazis believed, by powerful Jewish

financiers), international communism (Karl

Marx was a German Jew, and the leadership

of the German Communist Party was heavily

Jewish), and modernist cultural movements like

psychoanalysis and swing music. Nazi Party

foreign policy aimed to rid Europe of Jews and

other “inferior” peoples, absorb pure-blooded

Aryans into a greatly expanded Germany—a

“Third Reich”—and wage unrelenting war

on the Slavic “hordes” of Russia, considered

by Hitler to be

Untermenschen

(subhuman).

Once conquered, the Soviet Union would be

ruled by the German master race, which would

exterminate or subdue millions of Slavs to create

n 1938, Hitler began his long-promised

expansion of national boundaries to incorporate

ethnic Germans. He colluded with Austrian

Nazis to orchestrate the

Anschluss

, the

annexation of Austria to Germany. And in

Hitler’s most brazenly aggressive act yet,

Czechoslovakia was forced to surrender the

Sudetenland, a mountainous border region

populated predominantly by ethnic Germans.

The Czechs looked to Great Britain and

France for help, but hoping to avoid war—they

had been bled white in World War I