HITLER: HOW DID HE COME TO POWER?
...ed on loans from other countries, most notably American. When the depression hit, hyper-inflation took place, unemployment rose, etc. In their desperatation, many German people began to look to political extremes for solutions. One member of the Nazi party had been quoted as saying "I had lost all I possesed through adverse economic conditions. And so, early in 1930, I joined the National Socialist [Nazi] Party." This is not to say that the depression only caused the membership of the Nazi Party to increase. Ian Kershaw, leading historian on Hitler and the Nazis, points out that economic crises often cause the fall of governments, but rarely do they destroy the system of government. The Great Depression successfully destroyed the already crippled Weimar Republic that was in place in Germany. So the depression had resulted in a mass movement towards extremist parties, including the Nazis, and destroyed the democratic system in place. Yet it was not only the depression that proved fatal to the Weimar Republic. In Lehman's terms, the Republic was severely flawed. It included the infamous Article 48, which allowed the independantly elected President to effectively rule by decree. There was also the Chancellor, colleague to the President, who had a major influence in the Reichstag (the German Parliament, or Congress). Other major faults in the Republic's setup was that the Reichstag could initiate a vote of no confidence to dismiss the Chancellor, even if no replacement had been lined up, and also in the event of a President resigning or dieing, the Chancellor would assume the President's powers pending an election. When President Paul von Hindenburg died in 1934, the then Chancellor Adolf Hitler took his chance to unite the offices of Chancellor and President and proceeded to establish his dictatorship. There was also a large degree of social problems in Germany around this period. At a time of excessive discrimination against women (who had simply been sacked from there jobs when the men had returned from the First World War, and also laws had been passed enabling the dismissal of women, who were second wage earners, from the civil service), and when there we...