HOW THE NAZIS TOOK POWER
It’s a common misconception that the Nazis and Adolf Hitler took power in Germany by force alone. It makes some logical and emotional sense to think this must be the case. How could anyone have elected such people to rule? Surely the populace wasn’t complicit in the making of the Third Reich? The truth is more complex than that, but it’s fair to say that the death of democracy in Germany was a gradual process that at many turns was given the (at least superficial) endorsement of the public at large.
While the Nazi party’s takeover of German institutions was methodical, its rise to a position of influence, from the late 1920’s into the early 1930’s, was almost meteoric. In the 1928 Reichstag elections, the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (the Nazi Party’s full title) got 2.6 percent of the vote, a drop from its 3 percent four years earlier. However, the Grand Coalition that resulted from the 1928 election proved ineffective against the economic onslaught of the Great Depression from 1929.
It was in this environment that Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party found fertile new ground.
“The Nazis had suddenly rocketed from being nowhere into being very important,” says Dr Benjamin Hett, author of “To be precise, in the Reichstag election of 1930 the Nazi vote jumped from a previous (1928) figure of 2.6% to 18.1%,
