No Great Depression, no Hitler?

Adolf Hitler was born on April 20, 1889. It was 120 years ago. But his political birth is connected with the Great Depression which began 80 years ago. Do experts agree?

Questions:

1. Was the Great Depression the crucial point for Adolf Hitler on the path
to power and why?

2. If the Great Depression was one of the crucial points in his life what
would happen with Hitler without the Great Depression? Would he become a leader of Germany or the course of the history would be different in your opinion?

Answers:

Robert Gellately, Professor of History at Florida State University, Author of the book – Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler: The Age of Social Catastrophe

1. The Nazi Party was a marginal factor in German politics until the Great Depression. Hitler’s major breakthrough came in the September 1930 elections, which were the first after the stock-market crash hit in New York and then travelled around the globe. The Nazi vote jumped to 107 seats. The Party was then the second largest in the country after the Social Democrats (SPD). In the next elections in July 1932 the Nazis won 230 seats and nearly 38 percent of the vote. Hitler was now leader of the largest party and Germany’s strongest political figure.

The vote for the Nazi Party rose as unemployment did. It was not that the unemployed as a group voted Nazi. Unemployed workers, to mention one example, who had a history of voting for the SPD, often turned further to the left and voted for the Communist Party (KPD) when they lost their jobs. The rise of the KPD on top of the economic crisis frightened the solid middle classes who deserted the liberal parties and switched to voting for the Nazis whom they thought would better represent and protect their interests. Hitler’s paramilitary organizations were prepared to fight it out in the streets against the Communists.

Germany was a nation of property owners, and once they felt threatened with economic chaos as well as Communist extremist politics, they instinctively turned to the political right. I explore this theme in my book on “Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler.”

Thus the Great Depression had a “secondary effect” on the rise of Hitler and his Party. Keeping this effect in mind, it is nevertheless true that as the stock market went down, the vote for the Nazis went up. We could put it more dramatically and say: No Depression, No Hitler.

Voters bet on Hitler to get the country out of the depression. Hitler proved acceptable also because he stood firm against Communism and posed as the protector of private property. His Party was not tainted by association with the hated Republic. Beyond his nationalism and anti-Semitism, for which he was known, Hitler proudly said he would not “make cheap promises” of what he would do once in power. Many were prepared to give him a chance.

2. This question rightly implies that Hitler was not inevitable. That was true at least if we take out the Great Depression. If we go back to the pre-depression days but after the great inflation of 1923, when the German Mark was stable, real wages went up, and some “normality” existed, then Hitler and his movement were marginal. The Nazis made much noise, we see that Hitler spoke everywhere he could, but the movement got nowhere.

The multi-party political structure of the Weimar Republic was such that it was easy for a small party to get some votes, but difficult to break through the established political landscape taken up by many already existing parties. If there had been no major crisis and the Nazi Party had therefore been unable to grow, Hitler’s movement likely would have disintegrated or have been marginalized as a group on the lunatic fringe.

Hitler knew nothing but politics, but would have found it impossible to be under anyone else’s leadership. Thus he would have stuck with the Nazi Party and it would have remained of little interest or importance.

Hitler likely would have continued to be a curious and extremist figure, but in a Germany without a crisis he would have remained an eccentric. He would have had no success.

What made Hitler possible, what gave him new and seemingly over-night appeal and real political strength was the Great Depression, the mass unemployment and the threat of Communism.

Richard Overy, Professor of History at University of Exeter

1. The Great Depression was indeed crucial for Hitler’s success. It is important to see the psychological shock for the German people after 3 or 4 years in which the economy seemed to recover and Germany was admitted to the League, only to suffer more than the other major economies and to be cut off from any international efforts to revive the world economy. Germans looked for a radical solution and Hitler suddenly seemed a possibility.

2. Hitler needed the economic collapse to push the German people to a crisis solution. Otherwise he would have remained a noisy right-wing outsider. There was nothing inevitable about his eventual triumph and it is necessary to see it that way. The Third Reich was in no sense pre-ordained.

Sir Ian Kershaw, Professor at University of Sheffield, Author of the two volume biography of Adolf Hitler – Hitler: 1889–1936 Hubris, Hitler: 1936–1945 Nemesis

1. It is extremely unlikely that Hitler would have become Reich Chancellor without the impact of the Great Depression. Before 1929, the Nazi Party was a relatively small fringe movement in German politics. The Depression not only caused an economic crisis in Germany, but unleashed a comprehensive crisis of the state, society and culture. Since, unlike in this country or in the USA, the democratic forces were not powerful enough to stabilise the crisis, and the traditional power elites could find no authoritarian solution on the conservative Right, the crisis of the state produced a vacuum – the ‘political space’ – into which Hitler could march.

2. Deprived of a chance to come to power, Hitler would probably in the end have forced a split in his own party. He himself would, perhaps, have faded from the scene, a spent firebrand. Parts of the Nazi movement would have become attached to the national -conservative Right, and a nationalist authoritarian (though not Nazi) government would have sought some of the things that Hitler sought – revision of Versailles, reestablishment of Germany’s international standing, rebuilding the armed forces, hegemony in central Europe. Without Hitler, however, the tempo and character of policy would have been different. It is unlikely that the risks would have been taken that culminated in general European war in 1939 (or that anti-Jewish discrimination would have led to the Final Solution’). So history would have been very different.

Roger Eatwell, Professor of Comparative European Politics, Dean of Faculty, Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Bath

1. Although a major economic depression was the prelude to the rise of the Nazis after 1929, Italy prior to Mussolini’s rise was not experiencing a major depression (more a major threat from the left, which was also true in Germany where the Communists won over 16 per cent of the vote in 1932). Today there is no major threat from the left…

2. Both Nazism and Fascism in Italy could not have succeeded without some form of elite support/help from within the state by those who did not support liberal democracy and/or feared the left (e.g. Hitler served a year in goal for armed insurrection after the 1923 Munich putsch and at the local level a blind eye was sometimes taken to Nazi violence). In most of Europe today we do not see this type of dual-state, or ‘Janus’-state.