HookHitler never won a free election — so how did he get the country?
On 30 January 1933 Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany. He was not swept in by a landslide. In the last free election, in November 1932, the Nazi vote had actually fallen — from 37.3% in July to 33% — and the party held just 196 of the Reichstag's seats. Hitler had lost the presidential election to the 84-year-old Paul von Hindenburg the year before. He came to power in a back room, appointed by an ageing president who had been persuaded by the schemer Franz von Papen that the Nazis could be tamed. 'We have hired him,' Papen boasted. Within eighteen months Papen was lucky to be alive, and Germany was a one-party state.
That gap — between a party that never won a majority and a dictatorship that controlled everything — is the whole story of this period. To explain it you have to run the film back to 1890, when a young, autocratic Kaiser dismissed the statesman who had built modern Germany, and forward through defeat, revolution, hyperinflation, a golden decade and a slump that put six million out of work. The examiner's real question is never 'was Hitler evil?' It is how did a modern, educated, industrial democracy vote and stumble its way into a regime that would murder millions — and could it have been stopped?
ContextThe Kaiser's Germany: strong economy, weak politics
In 1890 Kaiser Wilhelm II, aged 31, sacked Otto von Bismarck, the chancellor who had unified Germany in 1871, and took personal charge. On paper Germany had a parliament, the Reichstag, elected by all adult men — but real power stayed with the Kaiser, who appointed the chancellor and commanded the army. Wilhelm was clever, impatient and erratic; the 1908 Daily Telegraph interview, in which he insulted Britain and boasted about German policy, embarrassed his own government and showed how one man's temper could destabilise a state.
Beneath the politics, Germany was booming. By 1914 it was out-producing Britain in steel and leading Europe in chemicals and electrics; firms like Krupp and Siemens were giants. Rapid industrialisation created a huge urban working class, and with it the Social Democratic Party (SPD) — Marxist in theory, and by 1912 the largest single party in the Reichstag with 110 seats. The old elite feared socialism at home and craved status abroad. That craving fuelled Weltpolitik and Admiral Tirpitz's Navy Laws of 1898 and 1900, a programme to build a battle fleet that could rival the Royal Navy. The naval race poisoned relations with Britain and helped lock Europe into the alliance system that exploded in 1914.
CrisisWar, revolution and the birth of the republic
The First World War broke Imperial Germany from the inside. The British naval blockade slowly starved the country: the 'turnip winter' of 1916–17 saw Germans surviving on turnip bread, and by 1918 hundreds of thousands had died of malnutrition. As the army's last offensive failed in the summer of 1918, morale collapsed. In late October sailors at Kiel mutinied rather than sail on a suicidal final mission, and revolution spread across Germany within days.
On 9 November 1918 Wilhelm II abdicated and fled to the Netherlands; the SPD politician Philipp Scheidemann declared a republic from a Reichstag window. Two days later, on 11 November, the new government signed the armistice. This was the origin of a poisonous myth. The soldiers who signed — and the democratic politicians behind them — were branded the 'November Criminals', and the nationalist right pushed the Dolchstoss or 'stab-in-the-back' legend: the claim that Germany's undefeated army had been betrayed by Jews and socialists at home. It was false — the generals had already admitted the war was lost — but it stuck to the new republic like tar. The 1919 Weimar Constitution was strikingly democratic, with votes for women and proportional representation, but two features would later prove fatal: PR splintered the Reichstag into small parties, and Article 48 let the President rule by emergency decree.
Crisis1919–1923: revolt, reparations and the great inflation
The young republic was shot at from both sides. In January 1919 the communist Spartacists, led by Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, tried to seize Berlin; the government used the Freikorps — right-wing ex-soldiers — to crush them, and both leaders were murdered. In March 1920 those same Freikorps turned on the republic in the Kapp Putsch, briefly seizing Berlin until a general strike by Berlin's workers shut the city down and defeated it. In November 1923 a little-known agitator named Adolf Hitler attempted the Munich (Beer Hall) Putsch with the war hero General Ludendorff; it collapsed in a shoot-out that left sixteen Nazis and four police dead. Hitler was jailed, but he used his trial as a platform and served only nine months, writing Mein Kampf and concluding that power had to be taken legally.
Money was the other battlefield. The 1921 London Schedule fixed reparations at 132 billion gold marks (about £6.6 billion). When Germany defaulted in January 1923, France and Belgium occupied the industrial Ruhr to seize goods directly. The government told workers to down tools in passive resistance — then printed money to pay them, triggering catastrophic hyperinflation.
A source or interpretation question on 1923 rewards you for knowing who suffered — because the popular image is wrong. Follow the numbers. In January 1923 a US dollar bought about 18,000 marks; by November 1923 it bought roughly 4.2 trillion. A loaf of bread that cost around 250 marks in January cost some 200 billion by the autumn; workers were paid twice a day and rushed to spend before prices doubled again. But hyperinflation did not ruin everyone. Anyone with fixed debts — big businesses and farmers with mortgages — effectively watched their debts vanish and could pay them off with worthless notes. The people wiped out were savers, pensioners and the middle class, whose life savings and fixed incomes became worthless. In an exam that lets you write 'the middle class lost most while big debtors gained', you show you understand the event rather than just repeating 'everyone was poor'.
RecoveryThe Stresemann years: a golden age on borrowed money
From late 1923 Gustav Stresemann pulled Germany back from the brink. As chancellor and then foreign minister, he scrapped the ruined currency and issued the Rentenmark, restoring confidence. The Dawes Plan of 1924 rescheduled reparations and opened the tap for huge American loans; the Young Plan of 1929 cut the reparations total to around £1.8 billion and stretched repayment to 1988. Abroad, Stresemann rebuilt Germany's standing: the Locarno treaties of 1925 saw Germany voluntarily accept its western borders, and in 1926 Germany joined the League of Nations as a great power again.
The recovery had a brilliant cultural side and a hidden fragility. 1920s Germany, especially Berlin, became a world capital of experiment: the Bauhaus design school under Walter Gropius, expressionist cinema like Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927), daring cabaret, and a new visibility for women, who now voted and worked in offices and cafés. Conservatives and Nazis loathed all of it as decadent 'un-German' filth. And the prosperity rested on short-term American loans that could be recalled at any time. When Stresemann died in October 1929 — just weeks before the Wall Street Crash — Germany lost its steadiest hand at the worst possible moment.
RiseSlump and breakthrough: how the Nazis went from fringe to first
The Wall Street Crash of October 1929 detonated the Weimar economy. American loans were recalled, world trade collapsed, and German unemployment climbed towards six million by early 1932. Chancellor Heinrich Brüning cut wages and benefits to balance the budget — earning the nickname 'the Hunger Chancellor' — and, unable to command a majority, governed by Article 48 emergency decree. Democracy was already being suspended before Hitler touched it.
Into this misery the Nazis surged. Their message — smash the Treaty of Versailles, destroy communism, blame the Jews and the November Criminals, restore German pride — was simple, and Hitler was a mesmerising public speaker backed by the disciplined violence of the SA and Goebbels's slick propaganda. When the economy was fine, Germans ignored them; when it broke, they flocked. The final act was a squalid intrigue among conservatives. Papen and General Kurt von Schleicher schemed to use Hitler's mass support for their own ends, and convinced President Hindenburg to appoint Hitler chancellor on 30 January 1933, boxed in by a cabinet with only three Nazis. It was the most catastrophic miscalculation of the century.
This leaf almost always appears as data you must interpret, so learn the trajectory as a story of cause. In May 1928 the Nazis won just 2.6% of the vote and 12 Reichstag seats — a joke party. In September 1930, a year into the slump, they leapt to 18.3% and 107 seats. In July 1932, at the depth of the Depression, they took 37.3% and 230 seats to become the largest party in the Reichstag. Line the two graphs up — unemployment and the Nazi vote — and they rise together almost exactly. That correlation is your analytical gold: it lets you argue the Depression was the necessary condition (no slump, no Nazi surge) while Hitler's oratory and Nazi organisation were what converted desperation into votes. Then deliver the killer nuance for the top level: the vote peaked in July and fell in November 1932, so Hitler did not simply ride a wave into office — he was put there by Papen's backroom deal just as his electoral momentum was stalling.
PowerThe legal revolution: from Chancellor to Führer in nineteen months
Hitler dismantled democracy using democracy's own tools. On the night of 27 February 1933 the Reichstag building burned; a Dutch communist, Marinus van der Lubbe, was caught at the scene. Whether the Nazis helped or simply exploited it, Hitler seized the moment: he persuaded Hindenburg to sign the Decree for the Protection of People and State, suspending civil liberties and letting the regime arrest thousands of communists overnight. In the election days later the Nazis still fell short of a majority, so Hitler forced through the Enabling Act on 23 March 1933. With communists barred and the SA intimidating the chamber, the Reichstag voted 444 to 94 to let Hitler make laws for four years without it. This is the hinge of the whole period — the dictatorship was born by a legal parliamentary vote.
What followed was Gleichschaltung, the 'coordination' of society: trade unions abolished in May 1933, all other political parties banned by July, Germany a one-party state. One threat remained inside the movement — Ernst Röhm's two-million-strong SA, which frightened the regular army. On the Night of the Long Knives, 30 June 1934, the SS murdered Röhm and scores of others, including old enemies like Schleicher. When President Hindenburg died on 2 August 1934, Hitler merged the offices of chancellor and president into a single new title, Führer, and made every soldier swear a personal oath of loyalty to him by name. Power was now total.
RegimeBread, work and the shaping of a people
The Nazi economy was built to end unemployment and prepare for war. Hjalmar Schacht managed the early recovery; the National Labour Service (RAD) put young men into uniform to build roads and drain marshes; the new autobahn network began in 1935; and from 1935 open rearmament and conscription created millions of jobs in factories and the forces. By 1939 unemployment had all but vanished — though the figures were flattered by removing women and Jews from the count and by conscription. Göring's Four Year Plan of 1936 pushed autarky, or self-sufficiency, developing ersatz substitutes like synthetic rubber so Germany could survive a blockade. Workers gained security and cheap 'Strength Through Joy' holidays, but lost their unions, and wages stayed low for long hours.
Social policy aimed to remould Germans from the cradle. Women were pushed back to Kinder, Küche, Kirche — children, kitchen, church — discouraged from work and university, with marriage loans and the bronze, silver and gold Mother's Cross rewarding large families. The young were captured young: membership of the Hitler Youth for boys and the League of German Maidens (BDM) for girls became effectively compulsory, drilling loyalty and, for boys, military fitness. Schools rewrote the curriculum around race 'science', history and physical training, and made Mein Kampf and biological racism part of everyday lessons.
TerrorFaith, race, fear — and the few who resisted
The regime demanded total control of belief. It tried to absorb Protestants into a Nazi Reich Church and signed a Concordat with the Catholic Church in July 1933 to keep it out of politics, but faith bred resistance: Martin Niemöller's Confessing Church defied the regime, and he was imprisoned in 1937, while Bishop Galen publicly denounced the murder of the disabled in 1941. Racial policy hardened relentlessly. The Nuremberg Laws of September 1935 stripped Jews of citizenship and banned marriage with non-Jews; on Kristallnacht, 9–10 November 1938, mobs burned synagogues, smashed Jewish shops and sent some 30,000 Jewish men to concentration camps. After war began this escalated to genocide: the Wannsee Conference of January 1942 coordinated the 'Final Solution', the systematic murder of around six million Jews, alongside Roma, disabled people and others, in death camps such as Auschwitz and Treblinka.
Holding it all together was propaganda and terror. Joseph Goebbels controlled press, radio and film, staged the vast Nuremberg rallies and the 1936 Berlin Olympics, put a cheap 'People's Receiver' radio in millions of homes, and burned 'un-German' books in May 1933. Beneath the spectacle sat Himmler's SS and the Gestapo secret police, a web of informers and block wardens, and concentration camps from Dachau (1933) onwards. Resistance was therefore dangerous and fragmented, but real: working-class Edelweiss Pirates and jazz-loving Swing Youth defied the Hitler Youth; the student White Rose group, led by Hans and Sophie Scholl, distributed anti-Nazi leaflets in Munich until they were caught and executed in February 1943; and army officers under Claus von Stauffenberg came within a briefcase-bomb of killing Hitler in the July Bomb Plot of 20 July 1944.
Interpretation questions on the Nazi years often set two historians against each other on 'how total was Nazi control?' — and the exam wants you to weigh, not pick a team. One interpretation stresses a terrorised, obedient nation: the Gestapo everywhere, resistance crushed, consent manufactured by propaganda. Another stresses limits: the Gestapo was actually thin on the ground and relied on ordinary Germans denouncing neighbours, the churches never fully submitted, and grumbling and small defiance persisted. The high-level move is to explain why the two views differ and then judge using your own knowledge: both are partly right, because control was tightest over public political life and loosest over private belief, which is exactly why opposition survived in youth gangs, pulpits and the officer corps but never in the Reichstag. Naming a precise case for each side — Niemöller's imprisonment for the 'control' claim, the persistence of the Edelweiss Pirates for the 'limits' claim — is what lifts the answer from assertion to argument.
VocabularyKey terms the mark scheme pays for
TrapsMisconceptions that cost marks
ExamWhat examiners want
This is a Paper 1 period study, and its signature question type is the interpretations set, testing AO4 (analyse and evaluate interpretations). Learn the three moves in order. First, the 4-mark 'how does Interpretation B differ from Interpretation A?' — answer only from the interpretations, quoting a phrase from each to show the contrast, with no outside knowledge yet. Second, the 4-mark 'why might the authors have a different interpretation?' — here you use provenance and your own knowledge: who wrote it, when, why, and what different evidence or purpose could explain the disagreement. Third, the 8-mark 'which interpretation do you find more convincing?' — this is where your contextual knowledge decides it: test each interpretation against precise facts you know (a date, a figure, a named event) and reach a supported judgement, rather than just preferring one.
The other two questions are AO1/AO2. The 8-mark 'write an account' is an analytical narrative, not a story: sequence events to show how one thing led to another (cause and consequence), using connectives like 'this in turn' and 'as a result', and finish at the outcome the question asks about. The 16-mark 'how far do you agree?' essay is marked for a substantiated judgement: decide your line in the opening sentence, argue for the stated factor and against it with specific evidence on both sides, and end with a genuine verdict on how far. Across every question the rule is the same as the whole period — precision beats generalisation, so always reach for the exact date, name or number (30 January 1933, the Enabling Act's 444–94 vote, six million unemployed) rather than a vague phrase.