This Day in History [1933] - Hitler Takes Power

Disclaimer: this is not an endorsement of Adolf Hitler or the Nazis.  

On this day in 1933, German President Paul von Hindenburg asked Nazi leader Adolf Hitler to become Chancellor of Germany and form a government.  Beginning with the failed Beer Hall Putsch in November 1923, this was the culmination of a ten-year effort by Hitler and the Nazis to achieve supreme power in Germany.  Hitler had tried to take power by force with the Beer Hall Putsch, but it was unsuccessful.  After the failed coup attempt, Hitler was tried and jailed for treason.  He served eight months of a five-year prison sentence.  During his time of confinement, Hitler decided the only way to achieve power was to do so legally.  He also wrote his memoir, Mein Kampf.  It was only part autobiography, in which he ranted against democrats, Communists, and Jews, on whom he blamed all of society’s ills.  Mein Kampf was also Hitler’s blueprint for what was to come.  Here are the “cliff notes” on what led to this day in history.

The Germany that came out of the First World War was not the Germany that entered it.  Germany was an empire, ruled by the Hohenzollern monarchs, the last of whom was Kaiser Wilhelm II.  After over four years of war, Germany’s military leaders [Field Marshal von Hindenburg and General Ludendorff] concluded the war could not end with a German military victory.  The German population, exhausted by four years of war and the British blockade, lost faith in the Kaiser.  Prince Max of Baden took charge of a new government as Chancellor and negotiated for a peace based on Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points.  His government included representatives of the largest party in the Reichstag, the Social Democratic Party of Germany [leader:  Friedrich Ebert].  Germany’s High Seas Fleet had been in port since the Battle of Jutland in 1916.  Admiral Reinhard Scheer decided there would be one last “glory ride” against the British Royal Navy to restore the “valor” of the German Navy.  German sailors in Kiel, who viewed this as a suicide mission, would have none of this and mutinied.  The sailors formed a soldiers' and a workers' council on the Bolshevik Soviet model.  Soldiers and workers around Germany sympathized with the Kiel sailors and formed councils of their own. 

This revolution spread throughout Germany.  While Kaiser Wilhelm was at his army headquarters in Spa, Belgium, he learned that revolution spread to Berlin.  On November 9^th, SPD deputy chairman Philipp Scheidemann declared that the Kaiser had abdicated and that Germany was a republic.  This was news to the Kaiser, who had hoped to lead the army back to Germany to put down the revolution.  General Wilhelm Groener [who replaced Ludendorff in late October 1918] told Wilhelm he lost the confidence of the army and the army would not follow him.  Wilhelm went into exile in the Netherlands to live out his remaining years.  The same day as Wilhelm’s “abdication” Prince Max handed over his office to Friedrich Ebert.  Ebert and Groener soon made an agreement.  In return for the army’s pledged loyalty to the new civilian government, Ebert promised to call a constituent assembly, take prompt action against leftist [especially Communist] uprisings, and allow professional officers to maintain military command.   The army and the paramilitary Freikorps indeed put down leftist uprisings, the biggest of which was the Spartacist Uprising in January 1919.

Under the terms of the Treaty of Versailles that ended World War I, Germany was to pay the Allies reparations [£6,600,000,000].  Part of the reparations to the Allies [mostly France] was to come in the form of raw materials [coal, timber].  So onerous were the payments in raw industrial materials that German factories were unable to function, and by January 1923 Germany defaulted on its reparation payments.  After the German default, France occupied Germany’s Ruhr region to extract the reparations themselves.  As this happened, the German economy went further into a tailspin.   Before the occupation, hyperinflation was so bad one had to pay billions of Reichsmarks to pay for a loaf of bread.  The US stepped in with the Dawes Plan to loan Germany money to pay their reparations debts.  This helped stabilize the German economy, but unemployment was still at 15 percent.  When the stock market crashed and the Great Depression began, the US banks called in their loans.  Once they did the German economy sank into the abyss.  Millions more were put out of work.  Unemployment rose to 30 percent.  The government didn’t have any answers to the problems that beset Germany.

Germans lost confidence in the economy and in their political institutions.  The Weimar Republic was the first attempt to establish constitutional liberal democratic government in Germany.  Democracy was new to Germany, and many Germans didn’t like it.  They preferred the old, imperial order.  The Weimar Republic represented a compromise: German conservatives and industrialists had transferred power to the Social Democrats to avert a possible Bolshevik-style takeover.  The January 1919 National Assembly elections produced the Weimar coalition, which included the SPD, the German Democratic Party (DDP), and the Center Party. The anti-republican, conservative German National People's Party (DNVP) and the German People's Party (DVP) combined received 10.3 percent of the vote. The Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany, which had split from the SPD during the war, won 8 percent of the vote. But the lifespan of the Weimar coalition was brief, and the Weimar political system, which was achieving gains for both extreme left and extreme right, soon became radicalized.²  Such was the fragmentation of Weimar politics that during its 14-year lifespan, there were 20 different governments.  The Social Democrats came to be identified with the onerous Versailles Treaty and the economic struggles of Germany.  The National Socialist German Workers Party [the Nazis] and the Communists grew their support at the expense of the above-named parties.

Nazism became a true mass movement only after the beginning of the Great Depression.  But even then, the Nazis never gained a majority of the people's vote. Nazism generally appealed to only a third of the German people, and these came from its lower classes, armed forces and war industries.  The Great Depression gave Hitler a chance to blame the status quo, and he expertly exploited the people's misery to increase his political power. In elections held in September 1930, the Nazis won 18 percent of the vote, increasing their seats in the Reichstag to 107 [up from the 12 seats they achieved in 1928], second only to the Social Democrats [143].  By July 1932, the Nazis held 230 seats in the Reichstag.  They were the largest party in Germany, but yet they did not govern.  Between the Nazis and the Communists, they had a “negative majority” in the Reichstag.  They wouldn’t serve in a government together, nor would they become coalition partners with other parties in the Reichstag.  Chancellor Heinrich Brüning [German Center Party] tried to stem the effects of the Great Depression by tightening credit and rolling back wage increases.  These moves were unpopular.  Brüning lost the confidence of the Reichstag, but was able to govern via Article 48 of the Weimar Constitution, which allowed Hindenburg to rule by decree. 

Hindenburg fired Brüning and replaced with Franz von Papen [at General Kurt von Schleicher’s urging].  Von Papen had almost no support in the Reichstag.  Like Brüning before him, he relied on Article 48 presidential decrees to govern.  He lasted six months, after which the Nazis forced a no-confidence vote in the Reichstag and hence another election.  The Nazis lost 34 seats in November 1932, and von Papen replaced by von Schleicher himself.  Von Schleicher tried to split the Nazi party by aligning himself with Gregor Strasser, a left-wing opponent of Hitler’s within the party.  But unbeknownst to von Schleicher, Hitler had almost total confidence from other Nazi party leaders.  Von Schleicher tried to make common cause with Social Democratic labor unions and the Christian labor unions, but they wanted nothing to do with him.  Given this lack of support, von Schleicher tried to get Hindenburg to dissolve the Reichstag.  Instead, Hindenburg fired him.  Von Papen had taken note of the Nazis’ declining support between July-November 1932.  Von Papen, other politicians, and several other industrialists and businessmen convinced Hindenburg that since the Nazis’ electoral support was in decline, they could “control” Hitler.  On January 30, 1933 Hitler got the call to form a government.  Hitler’s first cabinet consisted of only three Nazis [himself, Herman Göring, and Wilhelm Frick].  Upon his appointment as Chancellor, Hitler convinced Hindenburg to hold new Reichstag elections in March 1933 to break the political stalemate.

To be continued…

Hitler’s First Cabinet

Office	Incumbent	Political Party
Chancellor	Adolf Hitler	Nazi
Vice Chancellor	Franz von Papen	None
Minister of Foreign Affairs	Konstantin von Neurath	None
Minister of the Interior	Wilhelm Frick	Nazi
Minister of Finance	Lutz Graf Schwerin von Krosigk	None
Minister of Defense	Werner von Blomberg	None – career military
Minister without Portfolio	Hermann Göring	Nazi
Minister of Justice	Franz Gűnter	German National People’s Party
Minister of Economics	Alfred Hugenberg	German National People’s Party
Minister of Food and Agriculture	Alfred Hugenberg	German National People’s Party
Minister of Labor	Franz Seltde	German National People’s Party
Minister of Postal Affairs	Paul Freiherr von Eltz-Rübenach	None
Minister of Transport	Paul Freiherr von Eltz-Rübenach	None

¹Weimar Germany and the Rise of the Nazis, Excerpted from East Germany: A Country Study, Stephen R. Burant, ed. (Washington, D. C.: Federal Research Division of the Library of

Congress, 1987), pg. 5.

²Ibid., pg. 3-4.