- 3 months ago
From the fragile democracy of the Weimar Republic to the brutal tyranny of the Nazi regime, this in-depth series explores how Germany's descent into chaos paved the way for Adolf Hitler's rise to power. After World War I, Germany faced economic collapse, political instability, and widespread social unrest, creating the perfect storm for radical ideologies to flourish. Tracing the Nazis' emergence from the fringes of politics to their consolidation of power, the series reveals the pivotal events, propaganda, and policies that reshaped Germany into a totalitarian state. Through a deep dive into the Reichstag Fire, the Enabling Act, and the use of fear and nationalism, it examines how the Nazis dismantled democratic institutions and silenced opposition. Explore how their ideology pervaded society, from education to culture, as they built a war machine driven by racial superiority and territorial ambition. The series also examines the global response to Hitler's early aggression, the failure of appeasement, and the eventual eruption of World War II. Richly detailed and grounded in historical analysis, this series offers a comprehensive look at how the Nazis' path from obscurity to domination changed Germany and set the world on a catastrophic course, leaving a legacy of lessons for future generations.
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00:00In the chaos of post-World War I Germany, a fragile democracy crumbled under the weight of
00:09economic despair, political infighting and national humiliation. From the ashes of the
00:15Weimar Republic, a man emerged, ambitious, calculating and ruthless, promising to restore
00:21glory but leading the world to the brink of destruction. The Nazi party kind of growing
00:27in the background but actually not very popular during that period of the sort of early to
00:31mid-1920s and the time that the Nazi party really comes to the fore is in the aftermath
00:38of the Wall Street crash with the impact of the world depression on Germany too.
00:57Adolf Hitler's meteoric ascent to power, exposing the manipulative propaganda, the fervent
01:03nationalism and the eerie cult of personality that fuelled his regime.
01:08The head of state, he's now dead and gone. It now means that one man can take on all the top
01:30roles for himself. That man, of course, is Adolf Hitler.
01:51The First World War was a catastrophe for Germany. Huge casualties affected morale, shortages and starvation plagued the home front.
01:59And on November 9th, 1918, after a series of mutinies by German sailors and soldiers, the Kaiser had abdicated and fled the country.
02:06The following day, a provisional government was announced, made up of members of the Social Democratic Party and the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany, shifting power from the military.
02:22With peace declared and the Kaiser gone, Germany needed to establish a new constitution that would move the country forward after accepting responsibility for World War One.
02:29It's effectively gone from a monarchy with Kaiser Wilhelm having, you know, almost absolute power, to a world in which the Allies are saying, listen, you know, you need to have a more liberal form of government like we have in France.
02:40The United States, the United States, Great Britain, Great Britain and what the Allies call for is for the Germans to adopt a form of liberal democracy.
02:47This is the start of what's known as the Weimar Republic. It is now a Germany without a monarch. It's a Germany with a president.
02:52It's seen as a new form of stable, grown up governance for Germany. Unfortunately, as we'll see, it simply doesn't work.
03:07It's a Germany with a president.
03:09It's seen as a new form of stable, grown-up governance for Germany.
03:14Unfortunately, as we'll see, it simply doesn't work.
03:20On February 6th, 1919,
03:23the National Assembly met in the town of Weimar
03:26and formed the Weimar Coalition.
03:29They also elected SDP leader Friedrich Ebert
03:32as president of the Weimar Republic.
03:37The basic format of the government was based around a president,
03:40a chancellor, and a parliament, known as the Reichstag.
03:46The president was elected by a popular vote to a seven-year term
03:50and held real political power, controlling the military
03:54and having the ability to call for new Reichstag elections.
04:00New constitutional elements were added, such as Article 48,
04:05which allowed the president to assume emergency powers,
04:08suspend civil rights, and operate without the consent of the Reichstag
04:12for a limited period of time.
04:14The chancellor was responsible for appointing a cabinet
04:19and running the day-to-day operations of the government.
04:22Ideally, the chancellor was to come from the majority party in the Reichstag,
04:29or if no majority existed, from a coalition.
04:35The Reichstag, in turn, was also elected by a popular vote
04:38with its seats distributed proportionally.
04:41This meant when the Social Democratic Party won 21.7% of the popular vote in 1920,
04:48it was allocated roughly 21.7% of the 459 seats available.
04:54This system ensured that Germans had a voice in government that they had never had before,
05:02but it also allowed for a massive proliferation of parties
05:05that could make it difficult to gain a majority or form a governing coalition.
05:09The most important issue facing the government was the terms of the peace treaty.
05:24Throughout the war, the German propaganda machine had stressed to the German people
05:28that Germany was fighting a just war against the aggression of the Entente powers,
05:33Russia, France, and Great Britain.
05:37The transition to democracy had given hope to the German people
05:41that their country would be treated leniently
05:43and that the final peace settlements after the war would be acceptable.
05:48On June 28, 1919, the Treaty of Versailles was signed,
05:53outlining peace terms between the victorious allies and Germany.
05:58The treaty ordered Germany to reduce its military,
06:02take responsibility for the World War I,
06:05relinquish some of its territory,
06:07and pay extortionate reparations to the Allies.
06:11It also prevented Germany from joining the League of Nations at that time.
06:17The First World War had an absolutely devastating effect on Germany.
06:21Well, the first simple reason is that she lost the war.
06:24You know, if you lose wars, you never end up in a particularly happy place.
06:28But actually, the First World War was particularly punishing.
06:32Why? Because the Allies gathered together at the Palace of Versailles
06:36to sign what was known as the Treaty of Versailles.
06:39Now, in that treaty, they took away a lot from Germany.
06:44It wasn't just going, you lost too bad.
06:46It was actually saying, you've lost and some.
06:49What we're going to do is to take away your colonies.
06:52We're going to take away some of your coal fields.
06:54We're going to make you demilitarise.
06:56So we're going to strip your army and navy right down.
06:59You're not allowed an air force.
07:01All these massive punishments were inflicted on the Germans.
07:04And then to make it even worse, the Allies said,
07:08and you've got to pay for the war.
07:11This was known as reparations.
07:13And in today's money, it was worth about half a trillion dollars.
07:17And there was one big problem.
07:19Germany had no money.
07:22So you're basically asking a beggar if he can lend you
07:25or give you back half a trillion dollars.
07:27He doesn't have it.
07:28And Germany certainly didn't have it.
07:30Reactions from the German people were extremely negative.
07:35There were protests in the Reichstag and out on the streets.
07:39Along with the loss of land and overseas colonies,
07:42Germany had to deal with the humiliation
07:44of accepting responsibility for the war,
07:47which the German public didn't agree with.
07:50The Treaty of Versailles was very much seen by the Germans
07:53as a diktat, a dictated treaty.
07:56So this sense that the army perhaps wouldn't have lost
07:59the war had they had the chance to go on on the battlefield.
08:04One of the other effects of the First World War on Germany
08:07was it totally polarised political life.
08:10You had a lot of soldiers coming back from the front
08:12feeling that the war had been going well
08:14and yet suddenly the government back home in Berlin
08:17had surrendered.
08:18Why had it done that?
08:19Why had the Kaiser let them down?
08:21And so you have what arises is something called
08:24the stab in the back myth.
08:27This idea that all those brave soldiers at the front
08:29didn't lose to the allies.
08:31They actually lost to their leaders back home
08:34who supposedly stabbed them in the back.
08:36Now those soldiers come back and they form lots of very militaristic units
08:42which are known as the Free Corps or the Fry Corps.
08:45And it's from that kind of groundswell, a very nationalist, very angry,
08:51very resentful opinion, that you start seeing these little parties
08:54like the Nazi party being formed.
09:00The Weimar government was then associated with failure in World War One
09:04since it had signed the Treaty of Versailles, which had ended the war.
09:09Many nationalists believed the government had sold Germany out to its enemies,
09:13ending the war too soon and allowing the country to be controlled.
09:18Due to the public unhappiness with the Weimar Republic,
09:21many German citizens looked towards radical and extremist parties
09:25who were opposing the political situation in Germany.
09:28What you start to see in the early 1920s is this sort of development,
09:34almost like a kind of fungus on the ground,
09:37of all these small political parties from different parts
09:40of the political spectrum.
09:42You know, you've got Communist Party, you know, growing up on the left,
09:45you've got things like the Nazi Party growing up on the right,
09:48and you've got tons of these little parties,
09:51many of which have extremely vicious agendas.
09:55They didn't like the Kaiser, some of them like the Kaiser,
09:59some of them want democracy, some of them want communism or fascism.
10:03There is a whole kind of maelstrom, a mixture of very radical,
10:08very defined, very virulent type of politics emerging in Germany.
10:12It's a very poisonous cocktail indeed.
10:16One party in particular was beginning to surface, the Nazi Party.
10:20The National Socialist German Workers' Party,
10:25better known as the Nazi Party, had been established in 1919
10:29and were promoting radical views.
10:32One theory that the Nazi Party had developed
10:35was the stab in the back theory,
10:37which regarded the loss of World War One and who was to blame.
10:41What any extreme movement needs is a kind of legend or a kind of myth
10:47or a kind of enemy to kick against.
10:49And the Nazis and Hitler created plenty of enemies,
10:53some of which were actual enemies, like the communists.
10:55You could say that they were genuine enemies of the Nazis
10:58because they're at different ends of the political spectrum.
11:01But also, what Hitler also whipped up and what he encouraged
11:05was this idea that the German soldier who had fought in the First World War
11:09had been stabbed in the back by his political masters in Berlin
11:13and that's why the war was lost
11:15and that's why Germany faced this shame of defeat.
11:19And so what Hitler's saying is,
11:21listen to those soldiers, those former soldiers,
11:24you know, I can actually reverse this.
11:26I can not only, you know, put a rifle or a spade in your hand
11:30and make you feel proud, but I can also get Germany back,
11:34her pride and her wealth and her status in the world.
11:38At the end of the First World War,
11:40there was a lot of social and economic dislocation
11:43and upheaval in Germany.
11:45And there was a sense, particularly by groups on the far right,
11:49and there were a lot of them,
11:51so the Nazi Party was just one of dozens actually.
11:54And there's a sense on the far right in particular,
11:57but in other groups in society too,
11:59that the army had been stabbed in the back.
12:01So this whole myth or legend arose,
12:03called the Dolchstoss, the stab in the back.
12:05And there was this sense that the army had been stabbed
12:08in the back by this group,
12:10what the Nazis and the others on the far right
12:12called the November criminals,
12:14who signed the Treaty of Versailles
12:16in the aftermath of the First World War.
12:22Although many different variations of this theory existed,
12:26the Nazi Party proclaimed that Germany was betrayed
12:29by those on the home front,
12:31which led to the loss of the war,
12:33rather than their defeat on the battlefield.
12:37Shifting the blame to what they referred to
12:39as the November criminals,
12:41Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party bought into the myth
12:44that Jews and Communists had betrayed the country
12:47and brought a left-wing government to power
12:49that had wanted to throw in the towel.
12:51Providing the country with a scapegoat
12:54meant more and more individuals supported the Nazi Party.
12:58They had established the enemy
13:00and had a full plan for how they were going to remove them
13:03and make Germany great again.
13:08By blaming the Jews for the defeat,
13:10Hitler had created a stereotypical enemy,
13:13someone to point the blame at
13:15and encourage the party supporters to do the same.
13:17Getting rid of the Jews would solve all of Germany's problems,
13:22or so he claimed.
13:25With economic struggles and no positive way of life,
13:28the German people liked the policies
13:30that the Nazi Party was outlining
13:32and support continued to grow.
13:34One of the overlooked successes of the Weimar government
13:47was skilfully renegotiating and restructuring its debts
13:51and bringing the economy back under control.
14:06Article 48 was used frequently by liberal chancellors
14:10to take immediate action to stabilize the economy.
14:13However, the high reparations payments and costs of war
14:17had devastating consequences.
14:21The cost of living in Germany rose 12 times between 1914 and 1922,
14:27compared to three in the United States.
14:32The German government faced the classic dilemma,
14:35cut government spending in an attempt to balance the budget
14:38or increase it in an attempt to jumpstart the economy.
14:41When the government sought to pay reparations simply by printing more money,
14:48the value of German currency rapidly declined, leading to hyperinflation.
14:56The early period of the Weimar Republic was beset
14:59with quite a lot of economic, social and political problems.
15:02So there's inflation, there's all sorts of economic difficulties,
15:07and they really rose to a peak in 1923 with the hyperinflation.
15:12So very common is the image of a German person in the street
15:16literally carrying a wheelbarrow full of money
15:19to pay for an everyday item like a loaf of bread.
15:22So just this sense of the devaluation of the currency
15:24and the hyperinflation brought about in this period.
15:27So there were lots and lots of different problems
15:29in those early years of the Weimar Republic.
15:34In January 1920, the exchange rate was 64.8 marks to $1.
15:40In November 1923, it was way over 1 billion marks to $1.
15:46This economic disaster had social consequences as well.
15:52Since Germany couldn't keep up with repayments of the reparations,
15:56the French and Belgian armies invaded the Ruhr region of Germany,
16:00the main area of industrialism.
16:03The French aimed to extract the unpaid reparations
16:06and therefore took control of key industries and natural resources.
16:11The Weimar government instructed the Ruhr workers to go on strike
16:15instead of helping the French.
16:17The occupation of the Ruhr worsened the economic crisis in Germany.
16:20One of the things that particularly sticks in the crore of Hitler
16:26and other politicians like him is the fact that the French have seized the Ruhr,
16:31this important and absolutely vital industrial area.
16:35Now, without the Ruhr, you know, it helps to cripple Germany's economy still further.
16:40And, of course, it benefits the French economy enormously.
16:42It's just yet another kick in the teeth for the Germans.
16:46For thinking, you know, we've lost the Ruhr,
16:49we've lost the coal fields of the Tsar,
16:51we've had the Rhineland demilitarised,
16:53we've lost our colonies in China and Africa,
16:56and we're having to pay lots of war loans back,
16:59which we don't have any money to do so.
17:01You know, if you look at it, it seems to be a complete disaster.
17:03Of course, that's what it became.
17:08Many Germans who considered themselves middle class
17:11found themselves destitute.
17:14Heinrich Brüning, who became chancellor in 1930,
17:17chose the deeply unpopular option of an austerity programme
17:21which cut spending,
17:23and those programmes designed precisely to help those most in need.
17:27Prices ran out of control
17:29and many people couldn't afford to live or survive.
17:31Poverty was at an all-time high.
17:37By autumn of 1923,
17:39it cost more to print the money than the notes themselves were worth.
17:43During the hyperinflation crisis,
17:45workers were often paid twice per day,
17:48because prices rose so fast
17:50their wages were virtually worthless by lunchtime.
17:54Unsurprisingly,
17:56the impact of hyperinflation dissolved a lot of support for the government,
17:59and people began looking towards uprisings and extremist parties
18:03to deliver the answers to their crisis.
18:08As the currency collapsed,
18:10so did the policy of passive resistance.
18:12The Nazi Party continued to grow support within this time.
18:16Once again, Hitler expressed his anti-Semitism,
18:19declaring that since Jews ran the banks,
18:23they were responsible for the economic mess Germany found itself in.
18:27The German economy had completely crumbled,
18:32although this didn't result in the collapse of the Weimar Republic.
18:35However, it shook the faith of many Germans who began looking towards radical parties to drag them out of the economic rubble.
18:44The confusion caused by hyperinflation led Adolf Hitler to believe that he could take power in Munich in November 1923,
18:52leading the Beer Hall Putsch.
18:55However, the attempt failed.
18:58In 1923, Hitler thought that he was in a strong enough position,
19:03with a lot of different kinds of patronage and support from military circles, to stage a coup,
19:09so a putsch, a kind of takeover of power.
19:12And he decided to do this in the city of Munich,
19:14so that it became known as the Munich Beer Hall Putsch.
19:18However, it was a crisis and a fiasco,
19:21and the Nazi Party actually fell apart afterwards.
19:25Some of its members wounded, some of them becoming martyrs too.
19:28But essentially Hitler was placed into jail at Landsberg,
19:31so he was imprisoned in Landsberg, and that was where he wrote Mein Kampf.
19:36Hitler believed that the government of Germany was so unpopular that many Germans would support him.
19:41He was even planning a march on Berlin after his success in Munich.
19:46Hitler was arrested and tried for high treason.
19:50He was found guilty and sentenced to five years in prison.
19:53This seemed like the end for Hitler, and for the Nazi Party.
20:02In April 1925, former war veteran Paul von Hindenburg was elected as president of the Weimar.
20:08Hindenburg was instinctively conservative and anti-socialist.
20:13It's hard to imagine a more kind of old-school, aristocratic,
20:17Prussian-stroke-German figure than old Hindenburg.
20:21You know, he looks the model of this kind of bewhiskered president.
20:25And he regards Hitler as what Hitler was in the First World War, a little corporal.
20:30And that's what a lot of people from Hindenburg's Juncker class, as it was called, referred to Hitler as.
20:37So as Hitler starts climbing the ladders of power, as he gets nearer and nearer the top,
20:42and indeed when it comes to the stage in which Hitler is going to actually take the chancellorship,
20:46for chancellorship, Hindenburg still thinks this man's the little corporal.
20:52This man is someone we grandees can still control.
20:56But what they don't know is that they basically let the most dangerous animal into their zoo imaginable,
21:02and Hitler is just going to basically eat everyone alive.
21:05Even Hindenburg. They have no defense once they've let Hitler in.
21:08From the very beginning of his presidency, Hindenburg used his presidential powers,
21:14and therefore had a far greater influence than Ebert ever had on the membership of coalition governments.
21:20He made it very clear that he did not wish for any constraints on his presidential power.
21:27A new foreign minister, Gustav Stresemann, brought new life to the Weimar Republic, bringing economic stabilization.
21:34After 1923 into 1924, things seemed to settle down a little bit.
21:42So the period from 1924 to 1928 of the Weimar years were very much a period of progress,
21:50that the Weimar government had a chance to put into place a recovery of Germany.
21:55So in terms of both her position at home, but also how Germany was regarded in Europe,
22:01kind of as a European nation as well.
22:02So that sense of what Germany's international reputation was like changed as well during the course of the mid-1920s.
22:09So then it's a period of more stability.
22:12We've got a situation in Germany where there's quite a lot of progressive life going on.
22:17So women have got the vote for the first time since 1919, and they can be elected to parliament.
22:23Lots of progressive, different kinds of policies in education,
22:26but also lots of progress in the arts and in cultural life, the Bauhaus movement in architecture as well.
22:34So those kinds of things, we see quite a lot of progress in German society in the 1920s and a lot of hope.
22:39But at the same time, and I think this is quite interesting, at the same time, we've got the Nazi party developing kind of in a sense almost in the background.
22:49So not at the forefront of anyone's attention during these years, because the popular attentions kind of enjoying the 1920s, the kind of swinging 1920s.
22:57You know, with the cabaret lifestyle and the women now taking jobs in the cities as typists and in office jobs and these kind of new glamorous jobs that hadn't been open to them before.
23:09And at the same time, we kind of got this sort of conservative and right wing backlash against that kind of progress that typified Weimar society.
23:16So it's kind of quite an interesting time. And then the Nazis, in a sense, they're sort of in the background in this way, but very, very busy building themselves, building up the party and building up its propaganda and its profile.
23:33Payments of reparations continued, and the Ruhr was no longer controlled by the French.
23:38A new currency, the Rentenmark, was established, which brought worth back to the currency.
23:43Industry began moving again, and unemployment decreased slightly.
23:50Stresserman borrowed money from the US to help pay back war reparations, a scheme known as the Doors Plan.
23:57He also managed to get Germany a place in the League of Nations.
24:02Morale in Germany was looking up. Resistance was decreasing, and more people were moving on with their lives peacefully.
24:09However, in 1929, the Wall Street crash in the US came to affect the German economy once again, sparking the beginning of the Great Depression.
24:20The global economic downturn, created by the Great Depression in America, had devastating repercussions for the Weimar Republic.
24:29As the panic hit Wall Street, the US government pressed its former allies, Britain and France, to repay their war debts.
24:39Not having the money, Britain and France pressed Germany for more reparations payments, causing an economic depression.
24:45If you are someone with no money to pay you lots of money, they're really not going to be able to do it.
24:52And in order to do it, they're then going to have to borrow money off someone else to pay you back.
24:57Now that's what Germany does. America offers Germany loans to pay back the war reparations to America and to Britain and to France.
25:07So what you have is this sort of circle of income going across the Atlantic to Germany, and then some of which ends up trickling back to France and Britain and the United States.
25:18Now that might work fine if the world's economy is OK.
25:22But what happens in 1929? You have Black Thursday, you have the Depression, the slump, the Wall Street Index crashing through the floor, you know, in almost a matter of hours.
25:35And you have one of the greatest depressions the world's economy has ever seen.
25:40Now, of course, what does that mean? The Americans are going to go, ah, well, we're no longer going to loan Germany any money.
25:45And actually any money we've loaned, we want back. And the Germans are going, but if we don't have this money, we can't keep our industry going.
25:55And then Britain and France and other countries around the world are going, we need these markets to sell things to.
26:01That's collapsing. That's collapsing. Everything's starting to collapse.
26:05Now, of course, that's going to have a devastating effect on even the most stable form of political system, as you have, say, in Britain or the United States.
26:13But even in those countries, you had a lot of political instability as a result of the Depression, this worldwide slump.
26:21But in Germany, it's far, far worse because, of course, what you're mixing there is basically bankruptcy with political extremism.
26:30And that is a very poisonous brew indeed. And this is what gives rise to more and more votes going to extremist parties.
26:38Why? Because they're saying Weimar has failed and we can offer the solutions.
26:44We've got something definite that these old men simply don't have.
26:47A crucial factor in the rise of Nazism was the ability of the party to expand and provide a political home for those discontented with the state of the Weimar.
27:00Two months after Adolf Hitler was released from prison, the Nazi Party was re-established and growing in numbers once again.
27:10The roots of Adolf Hitler's rise to power lie in the disaster of the economic crash on 1929 and the subsequent depression.
27:18The Wall Street crash and the rise in unemployment had the important effect of further dividing German politics.
27:29During the Weimar years, the Nazis very much in the background, but very much building their profile and their propaganda and their organisation.
27:36But it's really after 1929, with the impact of the Wall Street crash and the Great Depression on Germany, that the Nazi Party really came into its own and really from that point managed to attract very, very large numbers of voters and supporters.
27:52And the reason for this is that in that period, so with the height of the depression in Germany, a lot of economic distress really despair, accompanied really to also by political chaos.
28:06So the succession of short governments one after another, including a grand coalition government, unable really to deal with the economic crisis.
28:14Article 48, which was the presidential decree, was called into place and used quite a number of times in this period.
28:20So it's kind of a sense that the normal workings of governments just weren't working.
28:25And then the use of presidential decree, this kind of emergency use, being called into use more and more often, is signifying these very difficult political and economic circumstances.
28:36On March 29, 1930, the finance expert Heinrich Brüning had been appointed the successor of Chancellor Müller by Paul von Hindenburg after months of political lobbying by General Kurt von Schleicher on behalf of the military.
28:52The new government was expected to lead a political shift towards conservatism based on the emergency powers granted to the president by the constitution since it had no majority support in the Reichstag.
29:09The economic downturn lasted until the second half of 1932, when there were first indications of a rebound.
29:17By this time though, the Weimar Republic had lost all credibility with the majority of Germans.
29:22The bulk of German capitalists and landowners originally gave support to the conservative experiment, not from any personal liking for Brüning, but believing the conservatives would best serve their interests.
29:35As the mass of the working class and also of the middle classes turned against Brüning, more of the great capitalists and landowners declared themselves in favour of his opponents, in particular Adolf Hitler.
29:49After Hitler came out of prison, he picked up the pieces of his party that was in disarray and really forged his position once again as the leader of the party and indeed developing from that to be the leader of the nation.
30:06So this kind of whole cult of the Fuhrer, cult of the leader surrounding him from this point during the mid 1920s, that once he comes to power, that cult of the leader just expands to the whole nation.
30:17So certainly at this point in the mid 1920s, he's sort of rebuilding the party now, very much trying to make sure that it was very well organised.
30:26So he organised the party into the different regions, so the different Gau, each region with its own regional leader or Gauleiter.
30:34And then he also organised the party very cleverly, horizontally as well.
30:38This idea that there were Nazi organisations right across different sectors of the economy or of profession or occupation.
30:46So for example, there was the Nazi Teachers' Association, the Nazi Jurists' Association, the Nazi Doctors' Association, as well as students' associations, women's groups and youth groups as well.
30:59So there's this kind of build-up, this kind of groundswell of build-up of support for the party through the mid 1920s, that once the Depression hits, then in that period from 1929 up until he comes to power in 1933, he's really able to manipulate that basis of support that's already been established.
31:18The Reichstag general elections on September 14, 1930, resulted in an enormous political shift.
31:2818.3% of the vote went to the Nazis, five times the percentage compared to 1928.
31:35This had devastating consequences for the Republic.
31:41The other thing that's really important is the extent of the economic despair.
31:45So we've got to remember that there's five million unemployed in Germany by the winter of 1930-31, and that goes up another million to six million by 1932.
31:56So that's a very, very huge unemployment statistic. And of course Hitler's really putting himself forward as a leader who will get Germany out of these very, very dire economic circumstances, who will make Germany great again.
32:12There was no longer a majority in the Reichstag, even for a great coalition of moderate parties.
32:19And it encouraged the supporters of the Nazis to bring out their claim to power with increasing violence and terror.
32:26After 1930, the Republic slid more and more into a state of potential civil war.
32:32By late 1931, conservatism as a movement was dead, and the time was coming when Hindenburg would drop Brüning and come to terms with Hitler.
32:45Hindenburg himself was no less a supporter of an anti-democratic counter-revolution represented by Hitler.
32:51On May 30, 1932, Brüning resigned after no longer having Hindenburg's support.
33:02Five weeks earlier, Hindenburg had been re-elected as president with Brüning's active support, running against Hitler.
33:09Hindenburg then appointed Franz von Papen as the new chancellor.
33:14Von Papen lifted the ban on the SA, imposed after the street riots, in an unsuccessful attempt to secure the backing of Hitler and the Nazi Party.
33:26Papen was closely associated with the industrialist and land-owning classes, and pursued an extreme conservative policy along Hindenburg's lines.
33:37This government was to be expected to assure itself of the cooperation of Hitler.
33:42Since the republicans and socialists were not yet ready to take action, and the conservatives had shot their political bolt, Hitler and Hindenburg were certain to achieve power.
33:57Majorities and even coalitions in the Reichstag were difficult to form among an increasing large number of extremist parties, left and right.
34:07Elections were held more and more frequently.
34:10Since most parties opposed the new government, von Papen had the Reichstag dissolved and called for new elections.
34:17The general elections on July 31, 1932, showed major gains for the Nazis, who won 37.2% of the vote, overtaking the Social Democrats as the largest party in the Reichstag.
34:31In the July 1932 elections, that was when the Nazi Party reached the height of its electoral success.
34:41Actually, by November 1932, they'd lost two million votes.
34:45So it was kind of those last months were kind of a difficult moment for the party, but it kind of all sort of fell into place with the political maneuverings and the machinations, just in time really in a way.
34:55Because I think maybe some of the popular support for the Nazi Party was declining by the end of 1932.
35:01July 1932 resulted in the question as to now what part the immense Nazi Party would play in the government of the country.
35:13The Nazi Party owed its huge increase to an influx of workers, unemployed, despairing peasants and middle-class people.
35:22They wanted a renewed Germany and a new organization of German society.
35:28Therefore, Hitler refused ministry under Papen and demanded the chancellorship for himself, but was rejected by Hindenburg on August 13, 1932.
35:40There was still no majority in the Reichstag for any government.
35:44As a result, the Reichstag was dissolved, and elections took place once more in the hope that a stable majority would result.
36:02A combination of political and economic dissatisfaction, some of it dating back to the founding of the Republic, helped create the conditions for Hitler's rise to power.
36:12By drawing together the fringe nationalist parties into his Nazi Party, Hitler was able to gain a sufficient number of seats in the Reichstag to make him a political player.
36:24I would strongly suggest that the vast, overwhelming majority of people who voted for Adolf Hitler, who looked at Adolf Hitler in the late 1920s and early 1930s,
36:36suspected that the person they were elected would end up committing one of the worst genocides the world has ever seen.
36:44Yes, of course they knew he was antisemitic, but then a lot of people in Europe and America and elsewhere were antisemitic.
36:53It was a pretty standard prejudice. It's not acceptable, of course, but it was out there and it was just almost part of life.
37:02You have something called drawing of antisemitism, in which people, even in the politest society, were antisemitic.
37:08The antisemitic nature of the Nazi Party wasn't hidden, but I think there was never a sense that it would unleash the kinds of policies that came about during the 1930s.
37:21And indeed, of course, during the war with the eventual genocide or attempted genocide of European Jews.
37:27If Hitler was antisemitic, that wasn't necessarily a problem. And of course, just because someone's a racist doesn't necessarily mean they actually want to go around murdering people.
37:36So I think that, you know, Hitler, yes, was unpalatable in an enormous number of ways.
37:42But your average voter in Germany before the Nazis came to power, he looked like someone who had some solutions.
37:50He looked like someone who had vigour, relative youth, strength, will, this important word will.
37:57Hitler refers to the triumph of the will often.
37:59And so you think, well, actually, Weimar's not doing much.
38:03You know, you've got all these sort of crusty old useless Democrats not doing very much.
38:08Why not make Germany great again?
38:10Eventually, conservatives, hoping to control him and capitalise on his popularity, brought him into the government.
38:18However, Hitler used the weaknesses written into the Weimar Constitution, like Article 48, to subvert it and assume dictatorial power.
38:27In 1932, the Nazi Party became the largest political party in Parliament.
38:33It's the 1932 election when the Nazis take 230 seats in the parliament that actually makes everybody turn around and realise this isn't just a kind of rabble.
38:47This isn't just some kind of bloke who's good at making speeches and, you know, foam-flecked oratory.
38:55This is something more than that, that this party has got an appeal right across the board.
38:59It's seen first as a bulwark, as a barrier against communism.
39:03Many Germans have seen what's happened in Russia becoming the Soviet Union and they fear for that greatly.
39:11But another thing that Hitler also appeals to is not just kind of the man in the street, if you like, what he's also done is had a lot of very, very secret and important meetings with German industrialists.
39:23And he said to the captains of industry, you know, he said to various financiers, you know, I'm not a threat to you.
39:30You know, I am not someone who wants to sort of rip apart factories.
39:35You know, I want to work with you guys. You know, I need your industrial might.
39:39We all need your industrial might. And so what he's doing is he's appealing to both rich and poor.
39:44So you see a lot of the kind of Juncker old school class have quite a lot of respect to the Nazi Party and happily vote for it.
39:53Franz von Papen stepped down and was succeeded by General von Schleicher as chancellor on December 3rd.
40:00Schleicher's bold and unsuccessful plan was to build a majority in the Reichstag by uniting the trade unionist left wings in the various parties, including that of the Nazis led by Gregor Strasser.
40:13This did not prove successful either.
40:16Adolf Hitler learned from von Papen that the general had no authority to abolish the Reichstag parliament, whereas any majority of seats did.
40:28The cabinet under a previous interpretation of Article 48 ruled without a sitting Reichstag, which could vote only for its own dissolution.
40:38Hitler also learned that all past crippling Nazi debts were to be relieved by German big business.
40:45Outmaneuvered by von Papen and Hitler on plans for the new cabinet and having lost Hindenburg's confidence, Schleicher asked for new elections.
40:55On January 28th, von Papen described Hitler to Paul von Hindenburg as only a minority part of an alternative von Papen arranged government.
41:05On January 30th, 1933, Hindenburg accepted the new Papen-Nationalist-Hitler coalition with the Nazis holding only 3 of 11 cabinet seats.
41:19So Hindenburg himself was not fond of Hitler. He sort of very much regarded him as this upstart, didn't particularly like or trust him.
41:27But I think what's important in this period in the early 1930s is that Hitler's got this entree to Berlin high society, to those people who have influence with the president.
41:39And they're, if not exactly bending his ear, they're kind of making Hitler's path to leadership a little bit easier in that way.
41:48So that by the time that January 1933 comes and that Hindenburg offers Hitler the chancellorship, because not much earlier on he'd rejected the vice chancellorship,
41:59so Hitler wasn't having the second position, he wanted the top position.
42:03So by the time that January 1933 came and Hindenburg offered him that position of Chancellor,
42:10he'd sort of accepted that this was going to be the case because he wanted to use the populist support that the Nazi party had.
42:18And again, I think the other thing about Hindenburg and some of the other sort of more conservative and the kind of military elites in German society,
42:25I think they thought that they would be able to keep Hitler in control somehow.
42:30So it was kind of almost wanting their cake and eating it, but of course they couldn't.
42:34So they kind of thought they could use Hitler's massive support in this great electoral wave,
42:40the kind of popular support of the German people for this party.
42:43So they kind of wanted to harness and use that, but at the same time to harness in the more violent side of the party
42:49or the kind of uglier sides of the party and somehow to tame Hitler.
42:53There's this idea that they'd be able to assimilate him into what they wanted him to be and to tame him out of the worst excesses of the party.
43:02Hindenburg, despite his misgivings about the Nazis' goals and about Hitler as a person,
43:10reluctantly agreed to Papen's theory that with Nazi popular support on the wane,
43:15Hitler could now be controlled as Chancellor.
43:21After a brief struggle for power, Hitler was named Chancellor in January 1933.
43:26This would be the end of the Weimar Republic.
43:29When Hitler's appointed Chancellor in January 1933, it's very tempting to suppose that's it.
43:37He's in power. He's totally in control.
43:39You've got to remember that for the first few years of the Nazis being in power,
43:44they never really felt as in power as we may today think them to be.
43:51Of course, by the time the war broke out, they had absolute control of Germany and indeed other places too.
43:59But actually, you only have to look at the diaries of people like Goebbels, the propaganda minister,
44:04Albert Speer, who ended up becoming the armaments minister,
44:07and people like that to realise they were very worried.
44:09And Hitler was very, very worried about public opinion.
44:13Because he was worried that if public opinion turned against him,
44:16he would lose power like any conventional politician.
44:19So even though he had passed things like the Enabling Act,
44:22which had given him absolute power and had made him head of state,
44:25and had given him enormous powers to do what he liked,
44:28he still worried that the German people, if he put a foot wrong,
44:32would turn against him and boot him out.
44:35The Reichstag fire on February 27th, 1933, was blamed by Hitler's government on the communists,
44:45and Hitler used the emergency to obtain President von Hindenburg's assent
44:49to the Reichstag fire decree the following day.
44:55The Reichstag fire is still somewhat shrouded in mystery.
44:58You know, who burned it down?
45:00It doesn't really matter in the end,
45:02because what happens is the Nazis use the burning down of the Reichstag
45:07in order to say, there's a national emergency,
45:10we need more powers to deal with these sort of, you know,
45:14reds and communists and all these sort of very dangerous figures
45:17of burning down the Reichstag and things like this.
45:19What will happen next? We need more powers.
45:21The Fuhrer, the leader, Adolf Hitler, he needs more powers too.
45:25And so what you have as a result is the Enabling Act,
45:28which ultimately gives the Nazi Party and Hitler absolute power.
45:32But even then, they're still worried about what people think about them.
45:36You know, this is not a government that actually wants to do everything in defiance of the people.
45:41It wants to do things for the majority of the people,
45:43but it wants to do it in a very Nazi way.
45:46The decree invoked Article 48 of the Weimar Constitution
45:54and suspended a number of constitutional protections of civil liberties,
45:58allowing the Nazi government to take swift and harsh action against political meetings,
46:03arresting or in some cases murdering members of the Communist Party.
46:07Within weeks, Hitler invoked Article 48 of the Weimar Constitution
46:14to squash many civil rights and suppress members of the Communist Party.
46:21In March 1933, Hitler introduced the Enabling Act
46:25to allow him to pass laws without the approval of Germany's parliament or president.
46:29This act would and did bring Hitler and the Nazi Party unfettered dictatorial powers.
46:35This bill, which receives the necessary two-thirds majority with the aid of the center party,
46:44grants full legislative powers to the cabinet without requiring the assent of the Reichstag.
46:50It is the formal basis of Hitler's power for the remainder of the Third Reich.
46:56To make sure the Enabling Act was passed,
46:59Hitler forcibly prevented communist parliament members from voting.
47:03Once it became law, Hitler was free to legislate as he saw fit
47:07and establish his dictatorship without any checks and balances.
47:12Once Hitler has come to power, he consolidates his rule extremely quickly.
47:18And again, it's sort of very unexpected from the idea that they were going to be able to tame this politician.
47:24So it's a sort of sense of underestimation, both of Hitler and of the Nazi Party as well,
47:29as something that was new and that had a widespread appeal.
47:35What Hitler did very quickly after he came to power was to consolidate his control.
47:40And he did this in a number of ways.
47:42First of all, by what they called coordination or the streamlining of society.
47:47So again, it was if anyone wanted to belong to a youth group, it had to be an Nazi youth group.
47:52So all of the others were destroyed or banned.
47:55Destruction of the trade unions as well astonishingly quickly.
47:58And that was the strongest and biggest trade union movement in Europe.
48:02And that's replaced by the German Labour Front.
48:05So this kind of process of coordination, streamlining society, trying to get people on side.
48:11And then the other really important developments through 1934 was, first of all,
48:17that the army had to swear an oath of personal loyalty to Hitler himself.
48:22So it's not to the state anymore, but a personal oath of loyalty to Hitler himself.
48:27And then, of course, when President Hindenburg died in August 1934,
48:31it's kind of the last sort of element of restraint or possible control has now disappeared.
48:38Hindenburg's death is kind of the final nail in the coffin of any semblance of sort of the Weimar Republic
48:46or any hope of liberal democracy.
48:49He represents a kind of a hangover from the Weimar period.
48:54He was still, you know, the head of state. He's now dead and gone.
49:00So after all of the things that have been put into place, like the Enabling Act and other policies,
49:06in those first months the Nazis came to power.
49:09So now, after Hindenburg's death, Hitler's position is unchallenged.
49:13He's the Führer, he's Chancellor and President all rolled into one, as it were.
49:18So he is the ultimate power and the ultimate authority.
49:21It now means that one man can take on all the top roles for himself.
49:28That man, of course, is Adolf Hitler.
49:30The change in political tactics and organization in the mid-1920s allowed Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party
49:51to take advantage of legislation and gain the support of the German public.
49:56The collapse of democracy and the circumstances under which Hitler was made Chancellor in 1933
50:02paved the way for a dictatorship in Germany, and the Nazi Party would consolidate their power,
50:07leading to a totalitarian state.
50:10If you want to be a dictator and your party wants to be the only party in charge, what are you going to do?
50:15Well, you've got to ban every other political party. So that's what Hitler does.
50:19What else represents a bigger threat to Nazism?
50:22Well, communism and also the trade union movement, which is obviously traditionally quite leftist.
50:28So what does Hitler do? He bans that as well.
50:31So that's basically got rid of two massive power blocks that can threaten him.
50:36Now, what he does is he replaces things like the unions with his own kind of Nazi form of unionism.
50:43And you have all these kind of labor fronts and various of these sort of Nazi bodies and functionaries
50:50who run them are all obedient to Adolf Hitler rather than potentially rivals to him.
50:55Or they don't even represent any other form of political thinking.
50:58Everybody has got to feel and think in the same way.
51:03This is called coming together. This is called Gleichaltung.
51:07And this is a really important part of the kind of Nazi dream, if you like.
51:11Everybody's marching in the same direction, doing the same thing together.
51:16This is not a place in which individualism is to be encouraged.
51:20With Adolf Hitler considered the savior that Germany needed, the support and political backing he obtained
51:26allowed him to take over an entire country, with its people unaware of the horrors that were about to unfold.
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