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00:00La república de la república
00:30La república de la república
01:00La república de la república
01:29La república de la república
01:31La república de la república
01:35La república de la república
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02:17La república de la república
02:19La república de la república
02:21La república de la república
02:22¡Gracias!
02:52¡Gracias!
02:53¡Gracias!
02:54¡Gracias!
02:55¡Gracias!
02:56¡Gracias!
02:57¡Gracias!
02:58¡Gracias!
02:59From this political uncertainty rose a demagogue,
03:02an unexpected leader who promised to revive Germany to the powerful country it once was.
03:09Adolf Hitler converted democracy into a dictatorship,
03:14causing the fall of the Weimar Republic.
03:22The First World War was a catastrophe for Germany.
03:34Huge casualties affected morale.
03:36Shortages and starvation plagued the home front.
03:39And on November 9, 1918,
03:42after a series of mutinies by German sailors and soldiers,
03:46the Kaiser had abdicated and fled the country.
03:52The following day, a provisional government was announced,
03:55made up of members of the Socialist Democratic Party
03:58and the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany,
04:02shifting power from the military.
04:06With peace declared and the Kaiser gone,
04:09Germany needed to establish a new constitution that would move the country forward,
04:14after accepting responsibility for World War I.
04:21Guy Walters is an acclaimed historian and author of several best-selling books,
04:26with a particular interest in the Second World War and elements of the German Third Reich.
04:32It's effectively gone from a monarchy, with Kaiser Wilhelm having almost absolute power,
04:40to a world in which the Allies are saying,
04:43listen, you need to have a more liberal form of government,
04:46like we have in France, the United States, Great Britain,
04:50and what the Allies call for is for the Germans to adopt a form of liberal democracy.
04:56This is the start of what's known as the Weimar Republic.
05:00It is now a Germany without a monarch, it's a Germany with a president.
05:06It's seen as a new form of stable, grown-up governance for Germany.
05:11Unfortunately, as we'll see, it simply doesn't work.
05:17On February 6, 1919, the National Assembly met in the town of Weimar,
05:23and formed the Weimar Coalition.
05:26They also elected SDP leader Friedrich Ebert as president of the Weimar Republic.
05:35The basic format of the government was based around a president, a chancellor, and a parliament,
05:40known as the Reichstag.
05:45The president was elected by a popular vote to a seven-year term,
05:49and held real political power, controlling the military,
05:53and having the ability to call for new Reichstag elections.
06:00New constitutional elements were added, such as Article 48,
06:04which allowed the president to assume emergency powers,
06:07suspend civil rights, and operate without the consent of the Reichstag for a limited period of time.
06:16The chancellor was responsible for appointing a cabinet,
06:19and running the day-to-day operations of the government.
06:25Ideally, the chancellor was to come from the majority party in the Reichstag,
06:29or, if no majority existed, from a coalition.
06:35The Reichstag, in turn, was also elected by a popular vote,
06:38with its seats distributed proportionally.
06:42This meant when the Social Democratic Party won 21.7% of the popular vote in 1920,
06:48it was allocated roughly 21.7% of the 459 seats available.
06:57This system ensured that Germans had a voice in government that they'd never had before,
07:03but it also allowed for a massive proliferation of parties
07:07that could make it difficult to gain a majority or form a governing coalition.
07:22The most important issue facing the government was the terms of the peace treaty.
07:26Throughout the war, the German propaganda machine had stressed to the German people
07:31that Germany was fighting a just war against the aggression of the Entente powers,
07:37Russia, France, and Great Britain.
07:40The transition to democracy had given hope to the German people
07:44that their country would be treated leniently,
07:47and that the final peace settlements after the war would be acceptable.
07:50On June 28, 1919, the Treaty of Versailles was signed,
07:58outlining peace terms between the victorious Allies and Germany.
08:03The treaty ordered Germany to reduce its military,
08:07take responsibility for World War I,
08:10relinquish some of its territory,
08:12and pay extortionate reparations to the Allies.
08:16It also prevented Germany from joining the League of Nations at that time.
08:21The First World War had an absolutely devastating effect on Germany.
08:27Well, the first simple reason is that she lost the war.
08:30You know, if you lose wars, you never end up in a particularly happy place.
08:34But actually, the First World War was particularly punishing.
08:38Why? Because the Allies gathered together at the Palace of Versailles
08:42to sign what was known as the Treaty of Versailles.
08:46Now, in that treaty, they took away a lot from Germany.
08:50It wasn't just going, you lost too bad,
08:53it was actually saying, you've lost and some.
08:56What we're going to do is to take away your colonies,
08:59we're going to take away some of your coal fields,
09:02they're going to make you demilitarized,
09:04so we're going to strip your army and navy right down,
09:07you're not allowed an air force.
09:08All these massive punishments were inflicted on the Germans.
09:12And then to make it even worse,
09:15the Allies said, and you've got to pay for the war.
09:18This was known as reparations.
09:20And in today's money, it was worth about half a trillion dollars.
09:25And there was one big problem.
09:27Germany had no money.
09:29So you're basically asking a beggar if he can lend you
09:33or give you back half a trillion dollars.
09:36He doesn't have it, and Germany certainly didn't have it.
09:39Reactions from the German people were extremely negative.
09:43There were protests in the Reichstag and out on the streets.
09:47Along with the loss of land and overseas colonies,
09:51Germany had to deal with the humiliation of accepting responsibility for the war,
09:55which the German public didn't agree with.
10:02Dr. Lisa Pine is an associate professor in history
10:06and a leading international expert on issues relating to the history of Nazi Germany.
10:12She has a strong interest in the mechanisms of this dictatorial regime
10:17and its impact on German society.
10:21The Treaty of Versailles was very much seen by the Germans
10:24as a diktat, a dictated treaty.
10:27So this sense that the army perhaps wouldn't have lost the war
10:31had they had the chance to go on on the battlefield.
10:35One of the other effects of the First World War on Germany
10:39was it totally polarized political life.
10:42You had a lot of soldiers coming back from the front feeling that the war had been going well
10:46and yet suddenly the government back home in Berlin had surrendered.
10:50Why had it done that? Why had the Kaiser let them down?
10:54And so you have what arises is something called the stab in the back myth.
11:00This idea that all those brave soldiers at the front didn't lose to the allies,
11:04they actually lost to their leaders back home who supposedly stabbed them in the back.
11:08Now those soldiers come back and they form lots of very militaristic units which are known as the Free Corps or the Fry Corps.
11:18And it's from that kind of groundswell, a very nationalist, very angry, very resentful opinion,
11:25that you start seeing these little parties like the Nazi party being formed.
11:33The Weimar government was then associated with failure in World War One,
11:38since it had signed the Treaty of Versailles, which had ended the war.
11:41Many nationalists believe the government had sold Germany out to its enemies,
11:47ending the war too soon and allowing the country to be controlled.
11:52Due to the public unhappiness with the Weimar Republic,
11:56many German citizens look towards radical and extremist parties
12:01who are opposing the political situation in Germany.
12:03What you start to see in the early 1920s is this sort of development, almost like a kind of fungus,
12:11on the ground of all these small political parties from different parts of the political spectrum.
12:17You know, you've got Communist Party, you know, growing up on the left,
12:21you've got things like the Nazi Party growing up on the right,
12:24and you've got tons of these little parties, many of which have extremely vicious agendas.
12:31They didn't like the Kaiser, some of them like the Kaiser,
12:36some of them want democracy, some of them want communism or fascism.
12:40You know, there is a whole kind of maelstrom, a mixture of very radical,
12:45very defined, very virulent type of politics emerging in Germany.
12:49It's a very poisonous cocktail indeed.
12:53One party in particular was beginning to surface, the Nazi Party.
13:00The National Socialist German Workers' Party had been established in 1919
13:06and were promoting radical views.
13:10One theory that the Nazi Party had developed was the stab in the back theory,
13:15which regarded the loss of World War I and who was to blame.
13:20What any extreme movement needs is a kind of legend or a kind of myth
13:24or a kind of myth or a kind of enemy to kick against.
13:28And the Nazis and Hitler created plenty of enemies,
13:32some of which were actual enemies, like the communists.
13:35You could say that they were genuine enemies of the Nazis
13:37because they're at different ends of the political spectrum.
13:40But also, what Hitler also whipped up and what he encouraged
13:44was this idea that the German soldier who had fought in the First World War
13:48had been stabbed in the back by his political masters in Berlin
13:52and that's why the war was lost
13:55and that's why Germany faced this shame of defeat.
13:59And so what Hitler's saying is,
14:01listen to those soldiers, those former soldiers,
14:04you know, I can actually reverse this.
14:07I could not only, you know, put a rifle or a spade in your hand
14:10and make you feel proud, but I can also get Germany back,
14:14her pride and her wealth and her status in the world.
14:18At the end of the First World War,
14:21there was a lot of social and economic dislocation
14:24and upheaval in Germany.
14:26And there was a sense, particularly by groups on the far right,
14:30and there were a lot of them,
14:32so the Nazi Party was just one of dozens, actually.
14:35And there's a sense on the far right in particular,
14:38but in other groups in society too,
14:41that the army had been stabbed in the back.
14:43So this whole myth or legend arose,
14:45called the Dolchstoss, the stab in the back.
14:47And there was this sense that the army had been stabbed in the back
14:50by this group, what the Nazis and the others on the far right,
14:54called the November criminals,
14:56who signed the Treaty of Versailles
14:58in the aftermath of the First World War.
15:05Although many different variations of this theory existed,
15:08the Nazi Party proclaimed that Germany was betrayed by those on the home front,
15:14which led to the loss of the war,
15:16rather than their defeat on the battlefield.
15:19Shifting the blame to what they referred to as the November criminals,
15:24Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party bought into the myth that Jews and Communists
15:29had betrayed the country,
15:31and brought a left-wing government to power that had wanted to throw in the towel.
15:34Providing the country with a scapegoat meant more and more individuals supported the Nazi Party.
15:42They had established the enemy and had a full plan of how they're going to remove them
15:47and make Germany great again.
15:49By blaming the Jews for the defeat, Hitler had created a stereotypical enemy, someone to point the blame at and encourage the party supporters to do the same.
16:03Getting rid of the Jews would solve all of Germany's problems, or so he claimed.
16:08With economic struggles and no positive way of life, the German people liked the policies that the Nazi Party was outlining, and support continued to grow.
16:21One of the overlooked successes of the Weimar government was skillfully renegotiating and restructuring its debts,
16:35and bringing the economy back under control.
16:52Article 48 was used frequently by liberal chancellors to take immediate action to stabilize the economy.
16:58However, the high reparations payments and costs of war had devastating consequences.
17:06The cost of living in Germany rose twelve times between 1914 and 1922, compared to three in the United States.
17:15The German government faced the classic dilemma, cut the government's spending in an attempt to balance the budget,
17:25or increase it in an attempt to jumpstart the economy.
17:31When the government sought to pay reparations simply by printing more money,
17:36the value of German currency rapidly declined, leading to hyperinflation.
17:40The early period of the Weimar Republic was beset with quite a lot of economic, social and political problems.
17:50So there's inflation, there's all sorts of economic difficulties, and they really rose to a peak in 1923 with the hyperinflation.
17:59So very common is the image of a German person in the street literally carrying a wheelbarrow full of money to pay for an everyday item like a loaf of bread.
18:10So just this sense of the devaluation of the currency and the hyperinflation brought about in this period.
18:16So there were lots and lots of different problems in those early years of the Weimar Republic.
18:19In January 1920, the exchange rate was 64.8 marks to $1.
18:29In November 1923, it was way over 1 billion marks to $1.
18:35This economic disaster had social consequences as well.
18:39Since Germany couldn't keep up with the repayments of the reparations, the French and Belgium armies invaded the Ruhr region of Germany, the main area of industrialism.
18:52The French aimed to extract the unpaid reparations and therefore took control of key industries and natural resources.
18:59The Weimar government instructed the Ruhr workers to go on strike instead of helping the French.
19:07The occupation of the Ruhr worsened the economic crisis in Germany.
19:12One of the things that particularly sticks in the core of Hitler and other politicians like him is the fact that the French have seized the Ruhr, this important and absolutely vital industrial area.
19:25Now, without the Ruhr, you know, it helps to cripple Germany's economy still further.
19:32And, of course, it benefits the French economy enormously.
19:35It's just yet another kick in the teeth for the Germans who are thinking, you know, we've lost the Ruhr, we've lost the coal fields of the Tsar,
19:43we've had the Rhineland demilitarized, we've lost our colonies in China and Africa,
19:47and we're having to pay lots of war loans back, which we don't have any money to do so.
19:53You know, if you look at it, it seems to be a complete disaster.
19:57Of course, that's what it became.
20:00Many Germans who considered themselves middle class found themselves destitute.
20:04Heinrich Brüning, who became chancellor in 1930, chose the deeply unpopular option of an austerity program which cut spending,
20:15and those programs designed precisely to help those most in need.
20:19Prices ran out of control, and many people couldn't afford to live or survive.
20:24Poverty was at an all-time high.
20:29In autumn 1923, it cost more to print the money than the notes themselves were worth.
20:36During the hyperinflation crisis, workers were often paid twice per day,
20:42because the prices rose so fast their wages were virtually worthless by lunchtime.
20:46Unsurprisingly, the impact of hyperinflation dissolved a lot of support for the government,
20:54and people began looking towards uprisings and extremist parties to deliver the answers to their crisis.
21:01As the currency collapsed, so did the policy of passive resistance.
21:07The Nazi Party continued to grow support within this time.
21:11Once again, Hitler expressed his anti-Semitism, declaring that since Jews ran the banks,
21:19they were responsible for the economic mess Germany found itself in.
21:26The German economy had completely crumbled,
21:29although this didn't result in the collapse of the Weimar Republic.
21:33However, it shook the faith of many Germans,
21:36who began looking towards radical parties to drag them out of the economic rubble.
21:41The confusion caused by hyperinflation led Adolf Hitler to believe he could take power in Munich in November 1923,
21:50leading the Beer Hall Putsch.
21:53However, the attempt failed.
21:56In 1923, Hitler thought that he was in a strong enough position,
22:00with a lot of different kinds of patronage and support from military circles,
22:05to stage a coup, so a putsch, a kind of takeover of power.
22:09And he decided to do this in the city of Munich,
22:12so it became known as the Munich Beer Hall Putsch.
22:16However, it was a crisis and a fiasco,
22:19and the Nazi Party actually fell apart afterwards.
22:23Some of its members wounded, some of them becoming martyrs too.
22:25But essentially Hitler was placed into jail at Landsberg,
22:30so he was imprisoned in Landsberg, and that was where he wrote Mein Kampf.
22:34Hitler believed that the government of Germany was so unpopular
22:38that many Germans would support him.
22:40He was even planning a march on Berlin after his success in Munich.
22:45Hitler was arrested and tried for high treason.
22:49He was found guilty and sentenced to five years in prison.
22:52This seemed like the end for Hitler, and for the Nazi Party.
23:02In April 1925, former war veteran Paul von Hindenburg
23:08was elected as president of the Weimar.
23:11Hindenburg was instinctively conservative and anti-socialist.
23:15It's hard to imagine a more kind of old-school, aristocratic,
23:22Prussian-stroke-German figure than old Hindenburg.
23:26You know, he looks the model of this kind of bewhiskered president.
23:29And he regards Hitler as what Hitler was in the First World War,
23:35a little corporal.
23:36And that's what a lot of people from Hindenburg's Juncker class,
23:40as it was called, referred to Hitler as.
23:41So as Hitler starts climbing the ladders of power,
23:44as he gets nearer and nearer the top,
23:46and indeed when it comes to the stage in which Hitler
23:50is going to actually take the chancellorship,
23:53Hindenburg still thinks,
23:55this man's the little corporal.
23:57This man is someone we grandees can still control.
24:01But what they don't know is that they basically let the most dangerous animal
24:05into their zoo imaginable, and Hitler is just going to basically eat everyone alive,
24:11even Hindenburg.
24:12They have no defense once they've let Hitler in.
24:16From the very beginning of his presidency,
24:19Hindenburg used his presidential powers and therefore had a greater influence
24:23than Ebert ever had on the membership of coalition governments.
24:26He made it very clear that he did not wish for any constraints on his presidential power.
24:33A new foreign minister, Gustav Stresemann,
24:37brought new life to the Weimar Republic, bringing economic stabilization.
24:42After 1923 into 1924, things seemed to settle down a little bit.
24:50So the period from 1924 to 1928 of the Weimar years were very much a period of progress
24:58that the Weimar government had a chance to put into place a recovery of Germany.
25:04So in terms of both her position at home, but also how Germany was regarded in Europe,
25:09kind of as a European nation as well.
25:11So that sense of what Germany's international reputation was like changed as well
25:16during the course of the mid-1920s.
25:18So then it's a period of more stability.
25:21We've got a situation in Germany where there's quite a lot of progressive life going on.
25:26So women have got the vote for the first time since 1919,
25:30and they can be elected to parliament.
25:33Lots of progressive, different kinds of policies in education,
25:36but also lots of progress in the arts and in cultural life, the Bauhaus movement in architecture as well.
25:44So those kinds of things.
25:45We see quite a lot of progress in German society in the 1920s and a lot of hope.
25:50But at the same time, and I think this is quite interesting, at the same time,
25:54we've got the Nazi party developing kind of in a sense almost in the background.
25:59So not at the forefront of anyone's attention during these years,
26:03because the popular attentions kind of enjoying the 1920s, the kind of swinging 1920s.
26:08You know, with the cabaret lifestyle and the women now taking jobs in the cities as typists
26:15and in office jobs and these kind of new glamorous jobs that hadn't been open to them before.
26:20And at the same time, we've kind of got this sort of conservative and right-wing backlash
26:25against that kind of progress that typified Weimar society.
26:29So it's kind of quite an interesting time.
26:30And then the Nazis, in a sense, they're sort of in the background in this way,
26:36but very, very busy building themselves, building up the party
26:39and building up its propaganda and its profile.
26:44Payments of reparations continued and the Ruhr was no longer controlled by the French.
26:50A new currency, the Rentenmark, was established,
26:54which brought worth back to the currency.
26:56Industry began moving again and unemployment decreased slightly.
27:03Stresemann borrowed money from the U.S. to help pay back war reparations,
27:08a scheme known as the Dawes Plan.
27:11He also managed to get Germany a place in the League of Nations.
27:16Morale in Germany was looking up.
27:19Resistance was decreasing and more people were moving on with their lives peacefully.
27:23However, in 1929, the Wall Street crash in the U.S. came to affect the German economy once again,
27:32sparking the beginning of the Great Depression.
27:36The global economic turndown created by the Great Depression in America
27:41had devastating repercussions for the Weimar Republic.
27:44As the panic hit Wall Street, the U.S. government pressed its former allies, Britain and France, to repay their war debts.
27:54Not having the money, Britain and France pressed Germany for more reparations payments, causing an economic depression.
28:02If you are someone with no money to pay you lots of money, they're really not going to be able to do it.
28:08And in order to do it, they're then going to have to borrow money off someone else to pay you back.
28:12Now, that's what Germany does. America offers Germany loans to pay back the war reparations to America and to Britain and to France.
28:24So, what you have is this sort of circle of income going across the Atlantic to Germany,
28:30and then some of which ends up trickling back to France and Britain and the United States.
28:35Now, that might work fine if the world's economy is okay.
28:39Well, 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.
28:53And you have one of the greatest depressions the world's economy has ever seen.
28:58Now, of course, what does that mean? The Americans are going to go,
29:00Ah, well, we're no longer going to loan Germany any money, and actually any money we want back.
29:07And the Germans are going, but if we don't have this money, we can't keep our industry going.
29:13And then Britain and France and other countries around the world are going, we need these markets to sell things to.
29:20That's collapsing, that's collapsing. Everything's starting to collapse.
29:23Now, 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.
29:34But even in those countries, you had a lot of political instability as a result of the Depression, this worldwide slump.
29:41But in Germany, it's far, far worse, because, of course, what you're mixing there is basically bankruptcy with political extremism.
29:49And that is a very poisonous brew indeed. And this is what gives rise to more and more votes going to extremist parties.
29:59Why? Because they're saying, Weimar has failed, and we can offer the solutions.
30:05We've got something definite that these old men simply don't have.
30:08A 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.
30:22Two months after Adolf Hitler was released from prison, the Nazi party was reestablished and growing in numbers once again.
30:30The roots of Adolf Hitler's rise to power lie in the disaster of the economic crash in 1929 and the subsequent Depression.
30:43The Wall Street crash and the rise in unemployment had the important effect of further dividing German politics.
30:49During the Weimar years, the Nazis very much in the background, but very much building their profile and their propaganda and their organization.
30:59But 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.
31:15And 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 too also by political chaos.
31:30So the succession of short governments, one after another, including a grand coalition government, unable really to deal with the economic crisis.
31:38Article 48, which was the presidential decree, was called into place and used quite a number of times in this period.
31:45So it's kind of a sense that the normal workings of governments just weren't working.
31:50And 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.
32:01On March 29, 1930, the finance expert Heinrich Brüning had been appointed the successor of Chancellor Mueller by Paul von Hindenburg after months of political lobbying by General Kurt von Schleicher on behalf of the military.
32:23The 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.
32:37The economic turn down lasted until the second half of 1932, when there were the first indications of a rebound.
32:47By this time, though, the Weimar Republic had lost all credibility with the majority of Germans.
32:53The 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.
33:07As, however, 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 favor of his opponents, in particular, Adolf Hitler.
33:22After 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.
33:37So 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.
33:50So 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 organized.
33:59So he organized the party into the different regions, so the different Gau, each region with its own regional leader or Gauleiter.
34:06And then he also organized the party very cleverly, horizontally as well.
34:10This idea that there were Nazi organizations right across different sectors of the economy or of profession or occupation.
34:19So, 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.
34:32So 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.
34:53The Reichstag general elections on September 14, 1930, resulted in an enormous political shift.
35:0418.3% of the vote went to the Nazis, five times the percentage compared to 1928.
35:12This had devastating consequences for the Republic.
35:15The other thing that's really important is the extent of the economic despair.
35:21So we've got to remember that there's five million unemployed in Germany by the winter of 1930 to 31, and that goes up another million to six million by 1932.
35:33So that's a very, very huge unemployment statistic.
35:37And, 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.
35:49There was no longer a majority in the Reichstag, even for a great coalition of moderate parties.
35:57And it encouraged the supporters of the Nazis to bring out their claim to power with increasing violence and terror.
36:04After 1930, the Republic slid more and more into a state of potential civil war.
36:10By late 1931, conservatism as a movement was dead, and the time was coming when Hindenburg would drop Brünig and come to terms with Hitler.
36:23Hindenburg himself was no less a supporter of an anti-democratic counter-revolution represented by Hitler.
36:30On May 30, 1932, Brünig resigned after no longer having Hindenburg support.
36:39Five weeks earlier, Hindenburg had been re-elected as president with Brünig's active support, running against Hitler.
36:48Hindenburg then appointed Franz von Papen as the new chancellor.
36:52Von 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.
37:04Von Papen was closely associated with the industrialist and landowning classes, and pursued an extreme conservative policy along Hindenburg's lines.
37:15This government was to be expected to assure itself of the cooperation of Hitler.
37:19Since the republicans and socialists were not ready to take action, and the conservatives had shot their political bolt, Hitler and Hindenburg were certain to achieve power.
37:36Majorities and even coalitions in the Reichstag were difficult to form among an increasingly large number of extremist parties, left and right.
37:45Elections were held more and more frequently.
37:49Since most parties opposed the new government, von Papen had the Reichstag dissolved and called for new elections.
37:57The general elections on July 31, 1932, showed majority gains for the Nazis, who won 37.2% of the vote, overtaking the social democrats as the largest party in the Reichstag.
38:12In the July 1932 elections, that was when the Nazi Party reached the height of its electoral success.
38:23Actually, by November 1932, they'd lost two million votes.
38:26So it was kind of those last month 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.
38:37Because I think maybe some of the popular support for the Nazi Party was declining by the end of 1932.
38:42July 1932 resulted in the question as to now what part the immense Nazi Party would play in the government of the country.
38:55The Nazi Party owed its huge increase to an influx of workers, unemployed, despairing peasants and middle class people.
39:03They wanted a renewed Germany and a new organization of German society.
39:11Therefore, Hitler refused ministry under von Papen and demanded the chancellorship for himself, but was rejected by Hindenburg on August 13, 1932.
39:22There was still no majority in the Reichstag for any government.
39:28As a result, the Reichstag was dissolved and elections took place once more in the hope that a stable majority would result.
39:36A 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.
39:55By 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.
40:07I 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,
40:20suspected that the person they were electing would end up committing one of the worst genocides the world has ever seen.
40:28Yes, of course they knew he was anti-Semitic, but then a lot of people in Europe and America and elsewhere were anti-Semitic.
40:38It was a pretty standard prejudice.
40:41It's not acceptable, of course, but it was out there and it was just almost part of life.
40:47You have something called drawing of anti-Semitism in which people, even in the politist society, were anti-Semitic.
40:53The anti-Semitic 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
41:06and indeed, of course, during the war with the eventual genocide or attempted genocide of European Jews.
41:14If Hitler was anti-Semitic, 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.
41:23So I think that, you know, Hitler, yes, was unpalatable in an enormous number of ways, but to your average voter in Germany before the Nazis came to power,
41:33he looked like someone who had some solutions, he looked like someone who had vigour, relative youth, strength, will, this important word, will.
41:44Hitler refers to the triumph of the will often.
41:47And so you think, well, actually, Weimar's not doing much.
41:50You know, you've got all these sort of crusty old useless Democrats not doing very much.
41:55Why not make Germany great again?
41:58Eventually, conservatives hoping to control him and capitalize on his popularity brought him into the government.
42:07However, Hitler used the weakness written into the Weimar Constitution, like Article 48, to subvert it and assume dictatorial power.
42:17In 1932, the Nazi Party became the largest political party in parliament.
42:23It's a 1932 election when the Nazis take 230 seats in the parliament that actually makes everybody turn around and realize this isn't just a kind of rabble.
42:36This isn't just some kind of bloke who's good at making speeches and, you know, you know, foam-flecked oratory.
42:44This is something more than that, that this party has got an appeal right across the board.
42:49It's seen first as a bulwark, as a barrier against communism.
42:54Many Germans have seen what's happened in Russia becoming the Soviet Union, and they fear for that greatly.
43:01But another thing that Hitler also appeals to is not just kind of the man in the street, if you like.
43:07What he's also done is had a lot of very, very secret and important meetings with German industrialists.
43:14And he said to the captains of industry, you know, he said to various financiers, you know, I'm not a threat to you.
43:21You know, I am not someone who wants to sort of rip apart factories.
43:26You know, I want to work with you guys.
43:28You know, I need your industrial might.
43:31We all need your industrial might.
43:32And so what he's doing is he's appealing to both rich and poor.
43:35So you see a lot of the kind of Juncker old school class have quite a lot of respect for the Nazi party and happily vote for it.
43:45Franz von Papen stepped down and was succeeded by General von Schleicher as chancellor on December 3rd.
43:53Schleicher's bold and unsuccessful plan was to build a majority in the Reichstag by uniting the trade unionist left wings in the various parties,
44:02including that of the Nazis led by Gregor Strasser.
44:06This did not prove successful either.
44:09Adolf Hitler learned from von Papen that the general had no authority to abolish the Reichstag parliament,
44:17whereas any majority of seats did.
44:21The cabinet under a previous interpretation of Article 48 ruled without a sitting Reichstag,
44:28which could vote only for its own dissolution.
44:32Hitler also learned that all past crippling Nazi depths were to be relieved by German big business.
44:38Outmaneuvered by von Papen and Hitler on plans for the new cabinet,
44:43and having lost Hindenburg's confidence, Schleicher asked for new elections.
44:49On January 28th, von Papen described Hitler to Paul von Hindenburg as only a minority part of an alternative von Papen-arranged government.
45:00On January 30th, 1933, Hindenburg accepted the new Papen-Nationalist-Hitler coalition,
45:09with the Nazis holding only three of eleven cabinet seats.
45:13So Hindenburg himself was not fond of Hitler.
45:18He sort of very much regarded him as this upstart, didn't particularly like or trust him.
45:24But I think what's important in this period in the early 1930s is that Hitler's got this entree to Berlin high society,
45:32to those people who have influence with the president.
45:36And 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.
45:46So that by the time that January 1933 comes, and that Hindenburg offers Hitler the chancellorship,
45:53because not much earlier on he'd rejected the vice chancellorship,
45:57so Hitler wasn't having the second position, he wanted the top position.
46:01So by the time that January 1933 came, and Hindenburg offered him that position of chancellor,
46:08he'd sort of accepted that this was going to be the case,
46:12because he wanted to use the populist support that the Nazi party had.
46:16And again, I think the other thing about Hindenburg and some of the other sort of more conservative
46:21and the kind of military elites in German society,
46:24I think they thought that they would be able to keep Hitler in control somehow.
46:29So it was kind of almost wanting their cake and eating it, but of course they couldn't.
46:34So they kind of thought they could use Hitler's massive support and this great electoral wave,
46:40the kind of popular support of the German people for this party.
46:43So they kind of wanted to harness and use that, but at the same time to harness in the more violent side of the party,
46:50or the kind of uglier sides of the party, and somehow to tame Hitler.
46:54There's this idea that they'd be able to assimilate him into what they wanted him to be,
46:59and to tame him out of the worst excesses of the party.
47:03Hindenburg, despite his misgivings about the Nazis' goals and about Hitler as a person,
47:11reluctantly agreed to von Poppen's theory that, with Nazi popular support on the wane,
47:17Hitler could now be controlled as chancellor.
47:22After a brief struggle for power, Hitler was named chancellor in January 1933.
47:28This would be the end of the Weimar Republic.
47:33When Hitler's appointed chancellor in January 1933, it's very tempting to suppose,
47:38that's it, he's in power, he's totally in control.
47:41You've got to remember that for the first few years of the Nazis being in power,
47:47they never really felt as in power as we may today think them to be.
47:54Of course, by the time the war broke out, they had absolute control of Germany,
47:59and indeed other places too.
48:02But actually, you only have to look at the diaries of people like Goebbels, the propaganda minister,
48:07Albert Speer, who ended up becoming the armaments minister, and people like that,
48:11to realise they were very worried, and Hitler was very, very worried, about public opinion.
48:17Because he was worried that if public opinion turned against him,
48:20he would lose power, like any conventional politician.
48:23So even though he had passed things like the Enabling Act,
48:26which had given him absolute power, and had made him head of state,
48:30and had given him enormous powers to do what he liked,
48:33he still worried that the German people, if he put a foot wrong,
48:37would turn against him and boot him out.
48:43The Reichstag fire on February 27th, 1933,
48:46was blamed by Hitler's government on the communists,
48:50and Hitler used the emergency to obtain President von Hindenburg's ascent
48:55to the Reichstag fire decree the following day.
48:59The Reichstag fire is still somewhat shrouded in mystery.
49:04You know, who burned it down?
49:06It doesn't really matter in the end,
49:08because what happens is the Nazis use the burning down of the Reichstag
49:13in order to say, there's a national emergency,
49:17we need more powers to deal with these sort of, you know,
49:20reds and communists and all these sort of very dangerous figures,
49:24burning down the Reichstag and things like this.
49:26What will happen next? We need more powers.
49:28The Fuhrer, the leader, Adolf Hitler, he needs more powers too.
49:32And so what you have as a result is the Enabling Act,
49:35which ultimately gives the Nazi Party and Hitler absolute power.
49:39But even then, they're still worried about what people think about them.
49:43You know, this is not a government that actually wants to do everything
49:47in defiance of the people.
49:49It wants to do things for the majority of the people,
49:51but it wants to do it in a very Nazi way.
49:54The decree invoked Article 48 of the Weimar Constitution
50:01and suspended a number of constitutional protections of civil liberties,
50:06allowing the Nazi government to take swift and harsh action
50:09against political meetings, arresting, and in some cases,
50:13murdering members of the Communist Party.
50:16Within weeks, Hitler invoked Article 48 of the Weimar Constitution
50:23to squash many civil rights and suppress members of the Communist Party.
50:28In March 1933, Hitler introduced the Enabling Act
50:34to allow him to pass laws without the approval of Germany's parliament or president.
50:39This act would and did bring Hitler and the Nazi Party unfettered dictatorial powers.
50:48This bill, which receives the necessary two-thirds majority
50:52with the aid of the center party, grants full legislative powers to the cabinet
50:57without requiring the assent of the Reichstag.
51:01It is the formal basis of Hitler's power for the remainder of the Third Reich.
51:07To make sure the Enabling Act was passed,
51:10Hitler forcibly prevented Communist Parliament members from voting.
51:14Once it became law, Hitler was free to legislate as he saw fit
51:19and establish his dictatorship without any checks and balances.
51:24Once Hitler has come to power, he consolidates his rule extremely quickly.
51:29And again, it's sort of very unexpected from the idea
51:32that they were going to be able to tame this politician.
51:35So it's a sort of sense of underestimation both of Hitler and of the Nazi Party as well
51:41as something that was new and that had a widespread appeal.
51:47What Hitler did very quickly after he came to power was to consolidate his control.
51:52And he did this in a number of ways.
51:54First of all, by what they call coordination or the streamlining of society.
51:59So again, it was if anyone wanted to belong to a youth group, it had to be a Nazi youth group.
52:05So all of the others were destroyed or banned.
52:08Destruction of the trade unions as well astonishingly quickly.
52:11And that was the strongest and biggest trade union movement in Europe.
52:15And that's replaced by the German Labour Front.
52:18So this kind of process of coordination, streamlining society, trying to get people on side.
52:25And then the other really important developments through 1934 was, first of all,
52:31that the army had to swear an oath of personal loyalty to Hitler himself.
52:36So it's not to the state anymore, but a personal oath of loyalty to Hitler himself.
52:42And then, of course, when President Hindenburg died in August 1934,
52:46it's kind of the last sort of elements of restraint or possible control has now disappeared.
52:53Hindenburg's death is kind of the final nail in the coffin of any semblance of sort of the Weimar Republic
53:02or any hope of liberal democracy.
53:05He represents a kind of a hangover from the Weimar period.
53:10He was still, you know, the head of state. He's now dead and gone.
53:16So after all of the things that have been put into place,
53:19like the Enabling Act and other policies in those first months, the Nazis came to power.
53:25So now after Hindenburg's death, Hitler's position is unchallenged.
53:30He's the Führer, he's chancellor, and president all rolled into one, as it were.
53:35So he is the ultimate power and the ultimate authority.
53:39It now means that one man can take on all the top roles for himself.
53:45That man, of course, is Adolf Hitler.
53:47The change in political tactics and organization in the mid-1920s allowed Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party
54:02to take advantage of legislation and gain support of the German public.
54:06The collapse of democracy and the circumstances under which Hitler was made chancellor in 1933 paved the way for a dictatorship in Germany,
54:21and the Nazi party would consolidate their power, leading to a totalitarian state.
54:28If you want to be a dictator and your party wants to be the only party in charge, what are you going to do?
54:35Well, you've got to ban every other political party.
54:37So that's what Hitler does.
54:39What else represents a bigger threat to Nazism?
54:42Well, communism and also the trade union movement, which is obviously traditionally quite leftist.
54:48So what does Hitler do? He bans that as well.
54:51So, you know, that's basically got rid of two massive power blocks that can threaten him.
54:56Now, what he does is he replaces things like the sort of unions with his own kind of Nazi form of unionism.
55:03And you have all these kind of labor fronts and various of these sort of Nazi bodies and functionaries who run them
55:11who are all obedient to Adolf Hitler rather than potentially rivals to him.
55:16Or they don't even represent any other form of political thinking.
55:19Everybody has got to feel and think in the same way.
55:24This is called coming together. This is called Gleichaltung.
55:28And this is a really important part of the kind of Nazi dream, if you like.
55:32Everybody's marching in the same direction, doing the same thing together.
55:38This is not a place in which individualism is to be encouraged.
55:42With Adolf Hitler considered the savior that Germany needed, the support and political backing he obtained allowed him to take over an entire country.
55:55With his people unaware of the horrors that were about to unfold.
56:01And this is not a place in peace.
56:03And he's beenieni by the very least.
56:04We got to move on now.
56:06If you want to move on now, you've got to move on now.
56:07There's no danger.
56:08It's not a place where you've been essays are.
56:09This is something that you might have to make.
56:10And it's impossible to understand.
56:13And he's going to go the same way,
56:14You know what?
56:15You know what?
56:16We're going to be.
56:17You know what?
56:18A conscience that would threaten him as a writer.
56:19A conscience that would threaten him to come back.
56:20I think that if you're you're living here at the same time.
56:21It's impossible to be a place for a moment.
56:22And you know what?
56:24You can't do that.
56:25You know what?
56:26You can never win a narrative.
56:27Gracias por ver el video.
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