“The first politician to tour the country by air during an election campaign, Hitler issued an endless stream of slogans to win potential supporters over. He would make Germany great again. He would give Germans work once more. He would put Germany first.” thenation.com/article/the-wa…
“He would revive the nation’s rusting industries, laid to waste by the economic depression. He would crush the alien ideologies—socialism, liberalism, communism—that were undermining the nation’s will to survive and destroying its core values.” -German historian, Volker Ulrich
Ullrich quotes a police report on one of Hitler’s early speeches, in which he “used vulgar comparisons” and “did not shy away from the cheapest allusions.” Full of base allegations and vile stereotypes, they were precisely designed to gain maximum attention from the media...
...and maximum reaction from the crowds he addressed. When he declared that fines were of no use against those he called Jewish criminals, his listeners interrupted him with chants of “Beatings! Hangings!”
...the politicians of the other parties, he insisted, were hopelessly venal and corrupt and should be put in jail....liberal newspapers that criticized Hitler were, as Goebbels put it, the “Jewish lying press.”
Few took Hitler seriously or thought that he would actually put his threats against the country’s tiny Jewish minority, his rants against feminists, left-wing politicians, homosexuals, pacifists, and liberal newspaper editors, into effect.
Fewer still believed his vow to quit the League of Nations, the forerunner of the United Nations. But within a few months of taking office, he did all of these things—and much more.
Nazi propaganda mocked disabled people; within a few years, they were being sterilized and then exterminated. Hitler railed against the roving bands of criminals who were destroying law and order...
...illegal Polish immigrants were deported. Germany pulled out of international organizations and tore up treaties with cynical abandon, dismantling or emasculating the structures of international cooperation erected after World War I...
German politics from 1/30-4/30/1933 is essentially the story of how the Nazis shut down the country’s democratic institutions, destroyed the freedom of its press & media, & created a one-party state in which opposition was punishable by imprisonment, banishment, or even death.
There was nothing underhanded about these changes: Nazi leaders gave clear warnings about what they planned to do. But too few people saw them as a threat before they came to power.
With the disappearance of a free, critical media & the subordination of law-enforcement agencies, the path was open for an expansion of political corruption at every level...the Nazi regime was, among other things, a kleptocracy; it was dependent on patronage and clientelism.
Hitler ostentatiously refused a salary as head of the German government, but he made sure that he earned royalties from the display of his face on postage stamps, which brought him enormous wealth. Well before the war, the Nazi leaders had become millionaires.
Germans were already practicing democracy under the kaiser: Political parties were strong & becoming stronger; legislative institutions were gaining more power; & a range of newspapers & magazines fostered vigorous public debate, despite the attempts of the gov’t to censor them.
In 1933, the provincial Nazi government in Prussia—the state that covered over half of Germany’s territory—was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. But the Nazis ignored this ruling, as they did the thousands of prosecutions brought by local and regional authorities...
The courts could be ignored, not least because Hitler’s gov’t was able to govern by exec. order after the burning down of the Reichstag. A lone Dutch anarchist was found guilty of the fire, but the Nazis portrayed it as a terrorist act by Communists in a conspiracy to take power.
The Nazi seizure of power was carried out step-by-step through the first half of 1933, each step disguised as a seemingly legal act.
Hitler didn’t attain supreme power on a wave of popularity. On the contrary, in the last free elections of the Weimar Republic, the left-wing parties—the Communists and Social Democrats—won more votes and gained more seats in the national parliament than the Nazis did.
...they were fatally divided, spending as much time fighting each other as they did trying to stop Hitler from establishing a dictatorship. Their rhetoric was feeble in comparison, their supporters less fanatical, their electoral propaganda less powerful and less sophisticated.
The concentration of political and legislative power in the cabinet didn’t last long. Beneath the surface appearance of normality, the cabinet was being marginalized as Hitler appointed his own cronies & disciples to new positions or pushed out his conservative coalition partners
Hitler made sure that the armed forces were on his side by giving them massive increases in funding & a huge new armaments program...His program for making Germany great again included a new aggressive attitude in international affairs.
Hitler’s seizure and remaking of the state was buttressed by a wholesale reorganization of the education system and an effort to redefine German culture. The intellectual quality of German universities, which had led the world in research before 1933, plummeted.
Before Hitler took over, 1/5 of all university students were enrolled in the humanities; by the eve of the war, that portion had been cut in half, in a student body that was itself shrinking rapidly, from a total of 104,000 in all universities in 1931 to just under 41,000 in 1939
The regime’s assault on culture extended to its policy toward the arts, which were “coordinated” by Goebbels in a Reich Chamber of Culture that ended funding for modern painting, sculpture, and music, and banned allegedly subversive artists from working.
The main objective of Nazi education and culture was not to distract people from issues of political importance; it was to instill a new sense of patriotism. Pupils were made to salute the flag before school every morning...
History lessons were turned into a celebration of German heroes from the past. Geography was Nazified in order to justify German claims on other parts of Europe...Such exercises pointed to the fact that the regime constantly targeted minorities to mobilize approval and support.
Elections & referendums were put to the voters, & they routinely delivered majorities in favor of whatever the gov’t proposed - results achieved by depriving opponents of the vote, by manipulating the electoral process, & by intimidating the great mass of people.
Hitler was a conspiracy theorist without equal: Influenced by a bizarre forgery known as the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion”, he believed, perhaps as early as 1919, when he used these views into his first-ever recorded speech—that there was a worldwide conspiracy of Jews...
...that Jews, directed by a secret cabal probably located somewhere in Paris, to overthrow the German race, annihilate its culture, and render it impotent before its enemies. All Jews everywhere, no matter their political views, were part of this vast plot.
Hitler deprived Jews of German citizenship, robbed them of their livelihoods, stripped them of their possessions, forced as many of them as he could to emigrate by making their existence in Germany a living hell...
Ordinary Germans were not won over by such acts of persecution and destruction; only a minority applauded them. But the great mass of Germans did nothing to stop any of this. Civil courage was in short supply in a country cowed into submission...
