The Collapse of Democracy and the Rise of Hitler

Abstract

The collapse of democracy effectively preceded, and was an essential precondition for, the rise of Hitler; and the appointment of Adolf Hitler to the chancellorship of Germany was by no means the only possible, or inevitable, outcome of the collapse of Weimar democracy. In the civilian arena, towards the end of the 1920s, increasing disaffection with democracy was reflected in the right-wards shift of a number of 'bourgeois' parties. The Nazi Party was, in the early 1920s, but one among many nationalist and volkisch radical political groups. Weimar democracy might have been rejected in principle; but it was quite another matter to consider Hitler's Nazism as embodying a preferable alternative. The Weimar Republic had suffered since its inception from major economic problems. The pursuit of deflationary economic policies by Bruning served to exacerbate the economic crisis and nourish the conditions in which the NSDAP was able to achieve mass support.