How hitler came to power

How Adolf Hitler rose to power

By Stephanie Pappas Contributions from Jonathan Gordon published 30 March 22

How did Hitler evolve from a homeless artist to a murderous tyrant?

Adolf Hitler was the unremarkable artist who rose to become the dictator of Germany and the instigator of the Holocaust. Given the devastation left in Hitler’s wake, a major question for historians of the 20th century has been how Hitler captured the German imagination and came to power.

He was not, as a person, a charismatic character; biographer Ian Kershaw described him as an «empty vessel outside his political life.» He had few genuine friends, an overinflated view of his own intellect and no inborn connections to propel him to the top.

Nor did Hitler have especially original ideas; the German Workers’ Party he joined in 1919, which would become the Nazi Party under his leadership, was just one of approximately 70 right-wing groups in Germany after World War I, Kershaw wrote in the biography «Hitler: 1889-1936 Hubris (opens in new tab) » (W.W. Norton & Company, 1998).

But in the chaos of post-World War I Germany, it was Hitler’s group that would gain dominance — and that was not a matter of luck, said Karl Schleunes, author of «The Twisted Road to Auschwitz: Nazi Policy Toward German Jews, 1933-39 (opens in new tab) » (University of Illinois Press, 1970).

«What makes the German Workers’ Party different from the other 69 groups is that they don’t have a Hitler, whose speaker talent and tactics are really quite effective,» Schleunes said.

And once he achieved fame, Hitler was able to cover up his rather off-putting personality with media images of a cultured gentleman beloved by children and animals.

The early years

Hitler’s early life does not hint at his future. The son of a low-level civil servant in Austria, Hitler was groomed by his harsh, authoritarian father to become a bureaucrat as well. Other than the beatings from his father, the future dictator’s early childhood was relatively normal, but he became sullen and friendless in adolescence, according to Kershaw’s biography. He never finished high school and, from 1905 to 1907, sponged off of his mother.

In 1907, Hitler famously failed to win admission to art school, kicking off a period in which he lived in Vienna, making grand pronouncements about art, architecture and culture, but rarely making any serious effort to secure a future in art himself. In 1909, he ended up living for a time in a flophouse for the homeless. He soon turned to supporting himself by selling cheap paintings of city scenes.

In 1913, Hitler went to Munich, fleeing Austrian authorities who’d noticed that he’d dodged mandatory military service there. It was in the German military, however, that Hitler would find direction — and a springboard into politics.

Service in World War I gave Hitler a place in the world for the first time, Kershaw wrote, even as many of his fellow soldiers viewed him as a bit of a socially awkward oddball and prude. Germany admitted defeat in the war as Hitler rested in a hospital, recovering from a mustard gas attack. He returned to his regiment in Munich, Schleunes said, where he ultimately got a job with the information unit, working in military intelligence.

It was this job that put him on a collision course with the German Workers’ Party. Hitler had long held right-wing nationalist views, but in a «critical development,» Schleunes said, the army sent him to attend university lectures on German history, socialism and bolshevism — from a right-wing perspective.

In particular, Hitler ate up the words of a right-wing economist, Gottfried Feder, and a right-wing historian, Karl Alexander von Müller. It was Müller who noticed that Hitler had a talent for rhetoric, and his recommendations helped Hitler land a job in the intelligence unit as a spy keeping tabs on the German Workers’ Party, Schleunes said.

Gaining power

It was Hitler’s power as a speaker that turned him from informer to party member, Schleunes said. During a German Workers’ Party lecture, someone suggested that it might be best for Bavaria to break from the rest of Germany, splintering the country. Hitler, a German nationalist, was appalled and argued against the idea. The leader of the party, impressed with his speaking style, asked him to join the party. A few days later, on Sept. 12, 1919, Hitler became the 55th member of the party, with the full permission of the army.

Hitler became a fiery speaker on the beer-hall circuit and was willing to risk the humiliation of low turnout by organizing rallies in large spaces, Kershaw wrote. His organizing talents propelled him to the top of the party’s leadership.

In 1920, Hitler and the other leaders of the party changed its name from the German Workers’ Party to the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, or «Nazi» for short). In 1921, Hitler was voted chairman of the party and took total control. The once-tiny group began to draw new members, absorbing other right-wing groups, Schleunes said.

Hitler remained a cold presence in person. «He’s not an interesting conversationalist,» Schleunes said. «He’s really sort of a dull person, except when he appears before an audience, when somehow, a switch is turned on. He could milk an audience and shape it and get it to feel.»

If Hitler’s speaking abilities gave him the roots to flourish in the early Nazi Party, the chaos and resentment of Germany at the time were the soil that made his growth possible.The German people were in shock after losing World War I, Schleunes said. They’d been told throughout the war that they were winning. They faced food and coal shortages, and ended the war with millions killed and wounded. But these sacrifices were necessary, according to the army, because victory was close.

«They’re told that for four years, and suddenly, they’re told that ‘We lost the war,'» Schleunes said. To understand how such a thing could happen, many turned to conspiracy theories — particularly, the theory that Jewish people on the home front had stabbed Germany in the back. «The situation, for someone like Hitler, is ripe,» Schleunes said.

A wider popularity

Violence marked Hitler’s early rise. By 1923, he was emboldened enough to attempt to overthrow the government of Bavaria by force, which he hoped would eventually lead to the overthrow of the national government in Berlin.

This «Beer Hall Putsch» failed, but there was widespread sympathy for Hitler’s aims, Schleunes said. His trial became a megaphone broadcasting his ideas, and his light 9-month stint in prison gave him the opportunity to dictate the «almost unreadable» but wildly popular biography «Mein Kampf,» Schleunes said.

«Hitler was smart enough to realize after the failure of his “Beer Hall Putsch” that he and his party could not come to power with violence against the institutions of the state, especially the army and the police,» said Dr Benjamin Hett, author of «The Death of Democracy: Hitler’s Rise to Power and the Downfall of the Weimar Republic (opens in new tab) » (Henry Holt and Co, 2018). «They could only come to power by getting inside the system, and the path to that was through winning elections».

There were many factors that led to Hitler’s more widespread acceptance in Germany, from economic depression to the country’s hatred of the Treaty of Versailles that ended World War I. But Hitler managed to expand his appeal from the beer-soaked halls of Munich to the rest of the country, in part via the mass media.

In 1932, he ran for president and struggled to reach middle-class voters, said Despina Stratigakos, a historian of architecture and the author of «Hitler at Home (opens in new tab) » (Yale University Press, 2015). To rehabilitate his personal image, he focused on his domestic portrayal. Instead of downplaying his transient, rather lonely personal history, Hitler and his propaganda team started to foreground his personal life.

«He’s being presented as a good man, a moral man, and the evidence for that comes from his private life,» Stratigakos told Live Science. «It’s fabricated, but it’s very effective.»

Hitler lost the 1932 election, but gained the support of many influential industrial interests. When the parliamentary elections failed to establish a majority government, Germany’s president Paul von Hindenburg caved to outside pressure and named Hitler chancellor (the role of chancellor in Germany is similar to that of Prime Minister in other parliamentary systems, and Germany had both a president elected by the people and a chancellor representing the majority party in the government).

In 1933, the Reichstag building was set on fire, which Hitler used as a pretext to seize emergency powers and detain his political enemies. With communists and other leftists under arrest, he was able to push a law called the Enabling Act through parliament. The Enabling Act allowed Hitler’s cabinet to institute legislation without parliamentary consent.

With the backing of the conservative German National People’s Party (DNVP) and with the left-leaning Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) barred from attending the vote on 24 March 1933, Hitler’s proposal was passed by 444 votes to 94, a key step in usurping the democratic institutions of the state.

“In the wake of this law came what the Nazis called ‘Gleichschaltung’, or coordination, a process in which any organization at all that could possibly form the basis of opposition was abolished or taken over by the Nazis,” said Hett. “This process was largely completed by July of 1933, when all political parties except the Nazis were formally outlawed.”

As Hitler strong-armed his way to dictatorship, profiles of him rusticating in his residence in Obersalzberg, Bavaria, portrayed him as a cultured gentleman, beloved by dogs and children. Working with the architect Gerdy Troost, Hitler created a space with an expansive Great Hall that seemed inspired by the artist salons of pre-World War I Munich, Stratigakos said. German and English language magazines printed fluffy pieces on the Führer at home.

«Even the American Dog Kennel Gazette had this feature on Hitler as a dog lover,» Stratigakos said. These cozy, domestic scenes helped soften the image of the Hitler. The strategy was so successful that the most-sold images of 1934 were pictures of Hitler at home playing with his dogs or with children.

Through his organization, oratory and public relations, Hitler «the nonentity, the mediocrity, the failure,» as Kershaw called him, had become not only the chancellor of Germany, but a beloved celebrity. The transformation was complete.

Additional resources

Bibliography

Stephanie Pappas is a contributing writer for Live Science, covering topics ranging from geoscience to archaeology to the human brain and behavior. She was previously a senior writer for Live Science but is now a freelancer based in Denver, Colorado, and regularly contributes to Scientific American and The Monitor, the monthly magazine of the American Psychological Association. Stephanie received a bachelor’s degree in psychology from the University of South Carolina and a graduate certificate in science communication from the University of California, Santa Cruz.

How Did Adolf Hitler Happen?

Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor of Germany in 1933 following a series of electoral victories by the Nazi Party. He ruled absolutely until his death by suicide in April 1945.

Adolf Hitler’s Rise to Power

Hitler had supreme authority as führer (leader or guide), but could not have risen to power or committed such atrocities on his own. He had the active support of the powerful German officer class and of millions of everyday citizens who voted for the National Socialist German Workers’ (Nazi) Party and hailed him as a national savior in gigantic stadium rallies.

How were Hitler and the Nazis possible? How did such odious characters take and hold power in a country that was a world pacesetter in literature, art, architecture, and science, a nation that had a democratic government and a free press in the 1920s?

Paying the crushing reparations destabilized the economy, producing ruinous, runaway inflation. By September 1923, four billion German marks had the equal value of one American dollar. Consumers needed a wheelbarrow to carry enough paper money to buy a loaf of bread.

Hitler, a mesmerizing public speaker, addressed political meetings in Munich calling for a new German order to replace what he saw as an incompetent and inefficient democratic regime. This New Order was distinguished by an authoritarian political system based on a leadership structure in which authority flowed downward from a supreme national leader.

In the new Germany, all citizens would unselfishly serve the state, or Volk; democracy would be abolished; and individual rights sacrificed for the good of the führer state. The ultimate aim of the Nazi Party was to seize power through Germany’s parliamentary system, install Hitler as dictator, and create a community of racially pure Germans loyal to their führer, who would lead them in a campaign of racial cleansing and world conquest.

“Either victory of the Aryan, or annihilation of the Aryan and the victory of the Jew.”

Hitler blamed the Weimar Republic’s weakness on the influence of Germany’s Jewish and communist minorities, who he claimed were trying to take over the country. “There are only two possibilities,” he told a Munich audience in 1922. “Either victory of the Aryan, or annihilation of the Aryan and the victory of the Jew.” The young Hitler saw history as a process of racial struggle, with the strongest race—the Aryan race—ultimately prevailing by force of arms. “Mankind has grown great in eternal war,” Hitler wrote. “It would decay in eternal peace.”

Jews represented everything the Nazis found repugnant: finance capitalism (controlled, the Nazis believed, by powerful Jewish financiers), international communism (Karl Marx was a German Jew, and the leadership of the German Communist Party was heavily Jewish), and modernist cultural movements like psychoanalysis and swing music.

Nazi Party foreign policy aimed to rid Europe of Jews and other “inferior” peoples, absorb pure-blooded Aryans into a greatly expanded Germany—a “Third Reich”—and wage unrelenting war on the Slavic “hordes” of Russia, considered by Hitler to be Untermenschen (subhuman).

Once conquered, the Soviet Union would be ruled by the German master race, which would exterminate or subdue millions of Slavs to create lebensraum (living space) for their own farms and communities. In a conquered and racially cleansed Russia, they would work on model farms and factories connected to the homeland by new highways, called autobahns.

Hitler was the ideologue as well as the chief organizer of the Nazi Party. By 1921, the party had a newspaper, an official flag, and a private army—the Sturmabteilung SA (storm troopers)—made up largely of unemployed and disenchanted WWI veterans. By 1923, the SA had grown to 15,000 men and had access to hidden stores of weapons. That year, Hitler and WWI hero General Erich Ludendorff attempted to overthrow the elected regional government of Bavaria in a coup known as the Beer Hall Putsch.

The regular army crushed the rebellion and Hitler spent a year in prison—in loose confinement. In Landsberg Prison, Hitler dictated most of the first volume of his political autobiography, Mein Kampf (My Struggle). The book brought together, in inflamed language, the racialist and expansionist ideas he had been propagating in his popular beer-hall harangues.

Adolf Hitler and German President Paul von Hindenburg, shortly after Hindenburg asked Hitler to become chancellor in 1933. (Image: Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-S38324.)

Adolf Hitler giving the Nazi salute at a rally in Nuremburg in 1928. (Image: National Archives and Records Administration, 242-HAP-1928(46).)

By 1932, the Nazis were the largest political party in the Reichstag. In January of the following year, with no other leader able to command sufficient support to govern, President Paul von Hindenburg appointed Hitler chancellor of Germany. Shortly thereafter, a fire broke out in the Reichstag building in Berlin, and authorities arrested a young Dutch communist who confessed to starting it.

Hitler used this episode to convince President Hindenburg to declare an emergency decree suspending many civil liberties throughout Germany, including freedom of the press, freedom of expression, and the right to hold public assemblies. The police were authorized to detain citizens without cause, and the authority usually exercised by regional governments became subject to control by Hitler’s national regime.

Almost immediately, Hitler began dismantling Germany’s democratic institutions and imprisoning or murdering his chief opponents. When Hindenburg died the following year, Hitler took the titles of führer, chancellor, and commander in chief of the army. He expanded the army tremendously, reintroduced conscription, and began developing a new air force—all violations of the Treaty of Versailles.

Hitler’s military spending and ambitious public-works programs, including building a German autobahn, helped restore prosperity. His regime also suppressed the Communist Party and purged his own paramilitary storm troopers, whose violent street demonstrations alienated the German middle class.

This bloodletting—called the “Night of the Long Knives”—was hugely popular and welcomed by the middle class as a blow struck for law and order. In fact, many Germans went along with the full range of Hitler’s policies, convinced that they would ultimately be advantageous for the country.

In 1938, Hitler began his long-promised expansion of national boundaries to incorporate ethnic Germans. He colluded with Austrian Nazis to orchestrate the Anschluss, the annexation of Austria to Germany. And in Hitler’s most brazenly aggressive act yet, Czechoslovakia was forced to surrender the Sudetenland, a mountainous border region populated predominantly by ethnic Germans.

The Czechs looked to Great Britain and France for help, but hoping to avoid war—they had been bled white in World War I—these nations chose a policy of appeasement. At a conclave held at Munich in September 1938, representatives of Great Britain and France compelled Czech leaders to cede the Sudetenland in return for Hitler’s pledge not to seek additional territory. The following year, the German army swallowed up the remainder of Czechoslovakia.

British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, one of the signers of the Munich pact, had taken Hitler at his word. Returning to Britain with this agreement in hand, he proudly announced that he had achieved “peace with honor. I believe it is peace for our time.”

A year later, German troops stormed into Poland.

How Did Hitler Come to Power?

How did Hitler come to power? The process occurred over multiple decades. Hitler’s rise to power started when he became politically involved and joined the Deutsche Arbeiterspartei. From there he worked himself up in the party, which later became the Nazi Party, through charm, violence and cunning negotiations. He was an excellent speaker and surrounded himself with people who, like him, were not afraid to use violence to fulfil their political objectives. At one stage, Hitler recognized that he was one of the best speakers in the Nazi party and demanded that they make him party leader or he would walk out. They conceded and he became party leader.

Rise of the Nazi Party

The grim atmosphere of the early 1930s greatly contributed to the rise of Hitler’s Nazi Party as it left the Germans desperate for a strong leader. They considered the German government to be weak and the actions of Bruning, the chancellor only added to the bitterness of the German nation. They suffered due to the harsh conditions of the Treaty of Versailles and the Great Depression left many with huge financial problems, which were only worsened by the chancellor’s decision to cut unemployment pay and wages. Thanks to a very successful propaganda campaign focused on the poor and the suffering, the Nazi Party rose from only 12 seats in Reichstag in 1928 to becoming the largest party in 1932 with 230 seats.

Hitler’s Takeover

Although the Nazi Party had become very powerful, they lost close to two million votes in the November 1932 Reichstag elections, which meant that they only had 33 percent of the vote, and not the majority they needed. Papen, who wanted the position of vice chancellor and thought he could control Hitler, convinced Hindenburg to form a coalition with the Nazis and appoint Hitler as chancellor. Hindenburg finally gave in and appointed Hitler as chancellor. Hitler’s final grab for power was when he negotiated with the Reichstag members to give him temporary “emergency” powers for four years, enabling him to act without the consent of parliament or the German constitution. While negotiations were taking place, his large military force was surrounding parliament with the threat of war, should they refuse. They didn’t have much of a choice but grant him what he wanted and Hitler became absolute ruler of Germany.

This article is part of our larger selection of posts about Adolph Hitler. To learn more, click here for our comprehensive guide to the life of Adolph Hitler.

Rise to power of Adolf Hitler

Discharged from the hospital amid the social chaos that followed Germany’s defeat, Hitler took up political work in Munich in May–June 1919. As an army political agent, he joined the small German Workers’ Party in Munich (September 1919). In 1920 he was put in charge of the party’s propaganda and left the army to devote himself to improving his position within the party, which in that year was renamed the National-sozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei ( Nazi). Conditions were ripe for the development of such a party. Resentment at the loss of the war and the severity of the peace terms added to the economic woes and brought widespread discontent. This was especially sharp in Bavaria, due to its traditional separatism and the region’s popular dislike of the republican government in Berlin. In March 1920 a coup d’état by a few army officers attempted in vain to establish a right-wing government.

Munich was a gathering place for dissatisfied former servicemen and members of the Freikorps, which had been organized in 1918–19 from units of the German army that were unwilling to return to civilian life, and for political plotters against the republic. Many of these joined the Nazi Party. Foremost among them was Ernst Röhm, a staff member of the district army command, who had joined the German Workers’ Party before Hitler and who was of great help in furthering Hitler’s rise within the party. It was he who recruited the “strong arm” squads used by Hitler to protect party meetings, to attack socialists and communists, and to exploit violence for the impression of strength it gave. In 1921 these squads were formally organized under Röhm into a private party army, the SA (Sturmabteilung). Röhm was also able to secure protection from the Bavarian government, which depended on the local army command for the maintenance of order and which tacitly accepted some of his terrorist tactics.

Conditions were favourable for the growth of the small party, and Hitler was sufficiently astute to take full advantage of them. When he joined the party, he found it ineffective, committed to a program of nationalist and socialist ideas but uncertain of its aims and divided in its leadership. He accepted its program but regarded it as a means to an end. His propaganda and his personal ambition caused friction with the other leaders of the party. Hitler countered their attempts to curb him by threatening resignation, and because the future of the party depended on his power to organize publicity and to acquire funds, his opponents relented. In July 1921 he became their leader with almost unlimited powers. From the first he set out to create a mass movement, whose mystique and power would be sufficient to bind its members in loyalty to him. He engaged in unrelenting propaganda through the party newspaper, the Völkischer Beobachter (“Popular Observer,” acquired in 1920), and through meetings whose audiences soon grew from a handful to thousands. With his charismatic personality and dynamic leadership, he attracted a devoted cadre of Nazi leaders, men whose names today live in infamy— Johann Dietrich Eckart (who acted as a mentor for Hitler), Alfred Rosenberg, Rudolf Hess, Hermann Göring, and Julius Streicher.

The climax of this rapid growth of the Nazi Party in Bavaria came in an attempt to seize power in the Munich (Beer Hall) Putsch of November 1923, when Hitler and General Erich Ludendorff tried to take advantage of the prevailing confusion and opposition to the Weimar Republic to force the leaders of the Bavarian government and the local army commander to proclaim a national revolution. In the melee that resulted, the police and the army fired at the advancing marchers, killing a few of them. Hitler was injured, and four policemen were killed. Placed on trial for treason, he characteristically took advantage of the immense publicity afforded to him. He also drew a vital lesson from the Putsch—that the movement must achieve power by legal means. He was sentenced to prison for five years but served only nine months, and those in relative comfort at Landsberg castle. Hitler used the time to dictate the first volume of Mein Kampf, his political autobiography as well as a compendium of his multitudinous ideas.

Hitler’s ideas included inequality among races, nations, and individuals as part of an unchangeable natural order that exalted the “ Aryan race” as the creative element of mankind. According to Hitler, the natural unit of mankind was the Volk (“the people”), of which the German people was the greatest. Moreover, he believed that the state existed to serve the Volk—a mission that to him the Weimar German Republic betrayed. All morality and truth were judged by this criterion: whether it was in accordance with the interest and preservation of the Volk. Parliamentary democratic government stood doubly condemned. It assumed the equality of individuals that for Hitler did not exist and supposed that what was in the interests of the Volk could be decided by parliamentary procedures. Instead, Hitler argued that the unity of the Volk would find its incarnation in the Führer, endowed with perfect authority. Below the Führer the party was drawn from the Volk and was in turn its safeguard.

The greatest enemy of Nazism was not, in Hitler’s view, liberal democracy in Germany, which was already on the verge of collapse. It was the rival Weltanschauung, Marxism (which for him embraced social democracy as well as communism), with its insistence on internationalism and economic conflict. Beyond Marxism he believed the greatest enemy of all to be the Jew, who was for Hitler the incarnation of evil. There is debate among historians as to when anti-Semitism became Hitler’s deepest and strongest conviction. As early as 1919 he wrote, “Rational anti-Semitism must lead to systematic legal opposition. Its final objective must be the removal of the Jews altogether.” In Mein Kampf, he described the Jew as the “destroyer of culture,” “a parasite within the nation,” and “a menace.”

During Hitler’s absence in prison, the Nazi Party languished as the result of internal dissension. After his release, Hitler faced difficulties that had not existed before 1923. Economic stability had been achieved by a currency reform and the Dawes Plan had scaled back Germany’s World War I reparations. The republic seemed to have become more respectable. Hitler was forbidden to make speeches, first in Bavaria, then in many other German states (these prohibitions remained in force until 1927–28). Nevertheless, the party grew slowly in numbers, and in 1926 Hitler successfully established his position within it against Gregor Strasser, whose followers were primarily in northern Germany.

The advent of the Depression in 1929, however, led to a new period of political instability. In 1930 Hitler made an alliance with the Nationalist Alfred Hugenberg in a campaign against the Young Plan, a second renegotiation of Germany’s war reparation payments. With the help of Hugenberg’s newspapers, Hitler was able for the first time to reach a nationwide audience. The alliance also enabled him to seek support from many of the magnates of business and industry who controlled political funds and were anxious to use them to establish a strong right-wing, antisocialist government. The subsidies Hitler received from the industrialists placed his party on a secure financial footing and enabled him to make effective his emotional appeal to the lower middle class and the unemployed, based on the proclamation of his faith that Germany would awaken from its sufferings to reassert its natural greatness. Hitler’s dealings with Hugenberg and the industrialists exemplify his skill in using those who sought to use him. But his most important achievement was the establishment of a truly national party (with its voters and followers drawn from different classes and religious groups), unique in Germany at the time.

Who brought Hitler to power

This appointment became fatal in stories Germany and the world. A year later, after the death of President Hindenburg, Hitler received the authority of the head of state and the Supreme Commander of the armed forces. From this moment on, his power over Germany becomes complete and the country’s preparation for revenge for the lost World War I begins. Just a few years, the policy of «appeasing the aggressor» led to the fact that the world was on the verge of a new global battle.

Unfortunately, in the official history course telling about the preparation for the unleashing of a world war, practically nothing is reported about the financing of Hitler, the NSDAP. About how Hitler actually «led» to the highest office in Germany. Although to understand the true causes of the outbreak of World War II and aggression against the Soviet Union, you need to know who was behind the German Nazis and was the true customer and the culprit of the global massacre that claimed and crippled tens of millions of lives. Otherwise, the lack of information leads to the fact that people begin to believe the fables that the «bloody villain» Stalin and the totalitarian USSR were the instigators of the Second World War. The most arrogant «researchers» agreed to the fact that the USSR and Stalin personally helped Hitler come to power so that he would crush the countries of «Western democracy.»

There was a very original and cunning system, the so-called. «Absurd Weimar circle». Gold, which the Germans gave to the victorious countries, went primarily to cover the amount of US debt. Then the money was already in the form of «help» returned to Germany, and Berlin gave them to secure the reparation amounts of Great Britain and France. The British and French paid them their military debts to the United States. The Americans again sent these amounts to Germany, already in the form of loans at significant interest rates. As a result, Germany «hooked» on the hook loans. This time in the Weimar Republic called the «golden twenties.» The country and its industry lived in debt and without Washington would have suffered a complete bankruptcy.

It should also be noted that these loans were used to restore the military-industrial potential of Germany. As a result, already in 1929, German industry ranked second in the world. However, the Germans paid for the loans with shares of industrial enterprises, so the Anglo-American capital began to actively penetrate into Germany and occupied a significant sector in the German economy. In particular, the well-known German chemical concern IG Farbenindustry was controlled by the American Standard Oil (i.e., the Rockefeller houses); depending on General Electric (Morgan) were Siemens and AEG; American ITT Corporation owned up to 40% of German telephone networks. German metallurgy largely depended on Rockefeller, Opel was under the control of General Motors. The Anglo-Saxons and the banking sector, and railways, in general, all more or less valuable German assets, did not forget.

After the fall of 1929, when the American bankers behind the Fed provoked the collapse of the American stock exchange, the “financial international” began a new phase in German politics. In the world and in Germany, a crisis was provoked, which led to an increase in social tension and radicalization of the political field. The Federal Reserve and the house of Morgan decide to stop lending to the Weimar Republic, inspiring a banking crisis and economic depression in the country. In September 1931, the Bank of England abandoned the gold standard, which was the deliberate destruction of the international payment system. “Financial oxygen” was completely blocked by the Weimar Republic. Naturally, the financial and economic problems led to an increase in social tension in Germany and an automatic increase in the popularity of radical political forces, the Nazi Party. The Nazis received good funding, and joining the ranks of attack aircraft ensured the stability of their members and families. The press, as if on cue, begins praising Hitler, his party and program.

In 1934, Standard Oil will build gasoline plants in the Reich, and Pratt-Whitney and Douglas will hand over a number of patents to German aircraft manufacturers. In general, the level of annual US investment in Germany increases to 500 million dollars a year. It is the generous Western investment that will become the basis of the “German miracle”, turning Germany into the economic leader of Europe.

It is clear that this assistance was provided not for the beautiful eyes of the Fuhrer. The owners of London and Washington were well able to count every dollar. Hitler and the NSDAP were considered as a long-term project that was supposed to crush Soviet Russia, which was not controlled by “financial international”. Moscow dared to present to the world an alternative project of a world order, which could not but bother the masters of the Western democracies. The Soviet Union had to be instructive to punish, and take control of Russian resources. The project of the Third Reich showed the future of all mankind: a global slave-owning, essentially parasitic pyramid, where at the very top is a handful of financial and industrial magnates, and the rest are slaves. For this, it was not a pity to destroy even hundreds of thousands of Jews who had already assimilated into the countries of Europe and the USSR. By the hands of Hitler and others like him, the «financial international» was ready to destroy entire nations. The West has been preparing Hitler for a long time and purposefully (including his ideological, mental preparation, “pumping”), for “expanding living space” in the East.

It is clear that at a certain stage, Adolf Hitler, feeling the power of the system he led, decided to change the rules and participate in the Big Game as a full partner, which was not part of the plans of its creators. However, this does not change the fact that it was originally a “project” of the masters of Western civilization.

Movie from the series «History Of Russia «. The Genesis of World War II. Who brought Hitler to power.

Authors: Mikhail Shiryaev, Nikolay Smirnov.