Rise of Adolf Hitler

The era of the **Rise of Adolf Hitler** lasted from about 1932 AD until 1939 AD. It began when forty-three-year-old Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor of Germany. It then ended on the eve of World War II, the deadliest conflict in human history.

The years leading up to the declaration of war between the Axis and Allied powers in 1939 were tumultuous. The Great Depression left much of the world unemployed and desperate, but nowhere did it hit harder than in the newly recovered Germany, just six-years after the hyper-inflation of the early ‘20s. Chafing against the punitive measures of the Treaty of Versailles, nationalism swept the somewhat-delusional but charismatic demagogue Adolf Hitler to power. Germany and Italy, as well as Japan all tested the British and French policy of Appeasement and the newly founded League of Nations with invasions and occupations, and felt emboldened when they encountered no meaningful consequences. Meanwhile, the Spanish Civil War became a rehearsal of sorts for the upcoming World War; a fight between Communism and the liberal democracies against Fascism. When Fascism emerged victorious, Nazi Germany blazed the path to conflict, breaking the promises made in the Munich Agreement and annexing Czechoslovakia. When further German claims were made on Poland, the situation reached a general crisis.

## History

### Hitler’s Rise to Power

Adolf Hitler was born in 1889 in the small Austrian town of Braunau, close to the German border. A detached and introverted child, he dropped out of school without a qualification. Unable to settle into a regular job, he moved to Vienna to pursue a career in fine art but failed. Yet he was well placed to be influenced by the demagogy of Karl Lueger, Vienna’s deeply anti-Semitic mayor. At the outbreak of World War I, Hitler was living in Munich and volunteered for the German Army despite being an Austrian national. He served as a dispatch runner on the Western Front in France and Belgium, reaching the rank of corporal and winning the Iron Cross for bravery twice, First and Second Class. Like many German veterans, he took the armistice and Treaty of Versailles as a humiliating betrayal by the liberal government and the anti-war agitation of Socialists. After the war, he remained in the army, and was assigned to spy on a tiny political party, the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (Nazi); a party based on nationalism and race, not class socialism. Instead, Hitler joined Nazi Party as its 55th member. He quickly rose through the ranks thanks to his vitriolic oratory, and in 1921 took over the leadership of the party which now had about 3,000 members. It was Hitler who gave the party the Swastika as a symbol, the Nazi Salute, and organized a personal army of thugs to beat up Communists and other political opponents; the Brownshirts.

In the chaos of hyper-inflation in 1923, Hitler conceived a bold plan to seize power in Bavaria, by kidnapping the Bavarian first minister Gustav von Kahr at a political meeting in a beer cellar; the **Beer Hall Putsch** (November 1923). With Hitler in the audience, his colleague Hermann Goering burst into the hall with twenty-five armed Brownshirts, and detained Kahr. After taking him away, in the bold move of the confidence trickster, Hitler announced to the crowd that Kahr and the Nazi Party had supposedly agreed to form a new Bavarian government, with the full support of the local police and army. Alas, Kahr managed to escape, and then next day a Nazi march to the centre of Munich was met by a hail of bullets. Hitler and his conspirators were all arrested, and given five years in prison. The whole incident seems to show how naïve Hitler was in his early career. He served only nine months in jail, sharing a cell with Rudolf Hess, and using this time to write his autobiography and political manifesto, ***Mein Kampf*** (My Struggle). It contained a vivid forewarning of Hitler’s heady brew of obsessions: the superiority of Aryan race; the Jews were blamed for all Germany’s humiliations; the need for Germans to seek living space at the expense of the contemptible Slavs; and his hatred of Communism. Few bothered to read it when it was published in 1925.

On his release from jail, Hitler reorganised his party, but with the improvement in the German economy thanks to the diplomatic skills of foreign minister Gustav Stresemann, politics in Germany had become less combative. It was not until the Great Depression hit Germany in 1929 that the Nazis were able to attract a significant following. With millions thrown out of work and several major banks collapsing, Germans, ambivalent to the parliamentary republic, were increasingly open to extremist options. In 1930, the Nazi Party dramatically jumped from 12 seats to 107 in the Reichstag out of a total of 577. While Hitler jockeyed for position with the government of Paul von Hindenburg, the Nazis clashed often violently with the equally successful Communists. In May 1932, Hitler stood directly against the veteran statesman Hindenburg for the presidency. Although he lost, the vote was close enough to establish him in the public mind as a potential leader in waiting. Political rivalries within the government prompted Hindenburg to call a second Reichstag election in July 1932, and this time the Nazis achieved another breakthrough, becoming the largest party. Yet the Nazis could not find partners to form a government, resulting in yet another election in November 1932. For the first time the Nazi vote slightly slipped, and this both persuaded Hitler to be more willing to compromise in his negotiations with the weary political establishment, and persuaded Hindenburg to give Hitler a little power to smother his ambitions.

In January 1933, forty-three-year-old Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany, but with only three other Nazis in the cabinet, out of eleven portfolios. From that position he could surely do little harm, yet he moved ruthlessly to consolidate his own hold on power. At his first cabinet meeting, Hitler argued for fresh elections. The campaign for the election of March 1933 saw unprecedented violence, with gangs of Brownshirts unleashed on the streets across the country to break up opposition meetings. During the campaign on the night of 27 February, the **Reichstag building burned down**. Historians still debate who caused the blaze. Many at the time assumed the Nazis were responsible and still do, but it seems probable that it was an unrelated act of arson. Yet, Hitler perfectly exploited the opportunity to establish himself as an elected dictator. The German Communist Party was blamed for the fire, and Communist activities all over the country were violently suppressed by the Brownshirts, with some four-thousand arrested. Although the Nazi Party gained an increased majority in the election, they failed to win the two-thirds majority needed to grant Hitler’s government emergency powers. Steps were quickly taken to remedy this. When the newly elected Reichstag met in March 1933, the building was surrounded by gangs of threatening Brownshirts. In the event only the few remaining Social Democrats had the courage to oppose the Enabling Act which passed by the comfortable margin of 441 to 94. The Reichstag Fire Decree of February 1933 had already rescinded most German civil liberties, including rights of assembly, freedom of the press, and detention without charge. Now Hitler’s government was granted the power to pass legislation by decree, independent of the Reichstag and without any restriction by the President. Legislation would be accompanied by a propaganda blitz to win public support for the measures.

Having achieved full legislative powers, Hitler embarked on a systematic suppression of the remaining political opposition: by May trades unions were brought under Nazi control, and by July the Nazi Party was declared the only legal political party in Germany. Yet Hitler’s rise to power was not complete, since the army was still directly controlled by President Hindenburg. As the health of the aged Hindenburg deteriorated in 1934, Hitler acted ruthlessly to ensure he would succeed to his position. On the brink of achieving power, the Brownshirts were at risk of being a political liability; the army, determined to keep out of politics, would not recruit them, and there were now more than 2 million uneducated and violent members. Needing the army’s endorsement to succeed Hindenburg, on the **Night of the Long Knives** (30 June-2 July 1934) some 150 of the leaders of the Brownshirts were purged by Hitler’s personal bodyguard, the Schutzstaffel (SS). At the same time, some personal grudges were also settled; Gustav von Kahr, long retired from political life, was hacked to death for making a fool of Hitler eleven years earlier in the failed Beer Hall Putsch of 1923. The remaining Brownshirts were disbanded or merged into the SS, a much more sophisticated means of suppressing dissent, encompassing the secret police (the Gestapo), and guards for the planned concentration camps (the Totenkopfverbände). The senior army commanders welcomed the taming of the Brownshirts, and were indifferent to the naked criminality of Hitler’s government. Thus on Hindenburg’s death in August, they agreed to support Hitler now assuming the combined roles of Chancellor, President, and supreme commander of the German armed forces. In fact, each man in the army would swear a personal oath of loyalty to Hitler. In August 1934, a plebiscite of the German people granted Adolf Hitler both the powers of Chancellor and President as the **Führer** (Leader) of Germany; more than 4 million voters had the courage to say no, but 38 million said yes. Thus began the heady concept of the Third Reich, the Thousand-Year Reich, after the First Reich of the Holy Roman Empire, and the Second achieved by Bismarck. In the event, it would be the shortest of the three.

### Hitler in Power

There were three main planks to Hitler’s economic and domestic policy: the reduction of unemployment, military build-up to make Germany strong again, and the dominance of Aryan race to the exclusion of all others. By a policy of massive investment in public works, especially the building of autobahns, Hitler achieved rapid success with unemployment; the world’s first motorways were widely admired internationally. Meanwhile, the rich mining district of the Saar was the last remaining region of the Rhineland still under the control of the League of Nations. In January 1935, as stipulated in the Treaty of Versailles, a plebiscite agreed to merge the region with Germany; powerful Nazi propaganda in the district ensured a 90% majority but strong anti-French feeling would no doubt have provided the same result. Thus, Hitler had acquired a valuable industrial region. Two months later, he took the first of three calculated international gambles. In blatant violation of the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, he reintroduced conscription to the German army and navy. The great European powers duly registered their protests but took no action. A year later, Hitler again violated the treaty, moving troops into the supposedly permanently demilitarised Rhineland. Again he heard only mild objections. In the final violation of the treaty, Hitler launched a massive re-armament programme for his enlarged army and navy; German expenditure on arms rose eight-fold from 1933 to 1938. Foreign governments seemed strangely willing to believe Hitler’s protestations that his military would be for defensive purposes only; Britain even signed a naval pact with Germany in 1935. Meanwhile, the re-armament program and the banning of trade unions helped stimulate the German economy like gang-busters at least in the short-term; the **Nazi economic miracle** was ludicrously over-extended, and if unchecked the economy would have almost certainly collapsed even without World War II.

Meanwhile, the world was given a clear warning that the **anti-Semitism** of Mein Kampf was not merely idol raving, when the German government declared an open-ended boycott of all Jewish shops in March 1933. The widespread economic and political dislocations caused by World War I notably intensified anti-Semitism throughout Europe and the United States after the war, but in Nazi Germany it reached a terrifying intensity. The German announcement received widespread international condemnation, with the United States threatening to ban all German goods. Hitler now showed his sure touch with international diplomacy, rescinding the Jewish boycott. Nonetheless, the SS who appeared outside every Jewish establishment in Germany had the same effect. In April, a law was passed ordering the immediate “retirement” of all non-Aryan teachers and civil servants; a non-Aryan was anyone with at least one Jewish grandparents. In 1935, even harsher measures were announced at the Nazi rally in Nuremberg: Jews were to be deprived of German citizenship, excluded them from all aspects of public life, and sexual relations with a Jewish man was now punishable by death. As yet there had been no systematic violence against Jews, but that changed drastically in November 1938. A nation-wide pogrom was unleashed on the Jews of Germany and annexed Austria. On **Kristallnacht** (the night of broken glass), organised bands of Nazis rampage through the towns and cities, burning synagogues, smashing the windows of some 7,500 Jewish shops and looting their contents. To pile on the misery, it was decreed that all insurance money due for the damage caused was to be paid to the state. It seems an anomaly that so many Jewish firms were still trading in 1938, yet it was entirely consistent with Hitler’s caution not to damage Germany’s commerce and industry. Meanwhile, the Nazis had been establishing concentration camps around the country organised by Heinrich Himmler; Dachau near Munich opened in 1933. Until the war, they were predominantly used for Communists and other political prisoners rather than large numbers of Jews.

From the start it had been part of Hitler's dream, expressed in Mein Kampf, that he would unite all the German-speaking peoples of Europe in a recreation of the Holy Roman Empire, disbanded in 1806. His first foyer into foreign policy was thus in the country of his birth, **Austria**. Both were German-speaking, but Austria had been excluded from Bismarck’s united Germany due to the long rivalry between Prussia and Habsburg Austria. How fitting then to rectify Bismarck’s failure of vision and bring Austria into the German fold. By the time Hitler won power, there was already a sizable sister Nazi Party in Austria. Yet in July 1934, the Austrian Nazis overreached themselves in a failed coup, and Hitler found himself compelled to disown them. He began a slow game of cat and mouse with the Austrian Chancellor. In the Austro-German Agreement (1936), Germany formally recognised Austria’s sovereign independence and non-interfere in each other’s internal affairs, but Austria promised to cooperate with Germany on foreign policy. Yet two years later, leading a much stronger Germany, Hitler was in a very different mood, effectively summoning the Austrian Chancellor to a meeting in Germany, and browbeating him into lifting the ban on the Austrian Nazi Party. Back in Vienna, the Austrian Chancellor gambled. A central plank of Hitler’s argument had been that a majority of Austrians wanted a union with Germany, so he decided to put it to the test. He announced that on 13 March 1938, a plebiscite would decide whether Austria should be free and independent. Fearing the result of a plebiscite performed on Austrian terms, Hitler ordered German tanks to the border with Austria. There followed a day of frantic last-minute diplomacy and ultimatums. In the end, the Austrian Chancellor resigned in favour of a Nazi sympathiser, who invited German troops to cross the border at dawn on 12 March. That evening in Linz, the town where Hitler went to school, he was greeted by an ecstatic gathering of Austrian Nazis. The plebiscite finally took place on 10 April, with 99.75% of Austrians agreeing to be annexed into Germany. On the day that the union came into effect, Himmler was in Vienna, and the first arrests were made: politicians, trade unionists, more than two thirds of the officers in the Austrian army, and some 30,000 Jews.

Despite Hitler’s assurances that the annexation of Austria would not affect Germany’s relations with Czechoslovakia, within months the Nazis proceeded with their plans on the dismemberment of the country. It was easy to argue that the notion of self-determination, so important at Versailles, gave the predominantly German-speaking western part of Czechoslovakia, Sudetenland, the right to merge with Germany. During the summer of 1938 Hitler threatens the Czech government at the diplomatic level, while massing troops on the border. Unlike his *fait accompli* in Austria, this did prompt international concern; France had a defensive treaty with Czechoslovakia and Britain would support France, so the result could be war. In September, Hitler met in Munich with Neville Chamberlain of Britain, Édouard Daladier of France as well as Mussolini; though the dismantling of their country was under discussion, Hitler refused to allow any Czech representative to take part. The **Munich Agreement** (September 1938) was appeasement of all that Hitler would wish; the Sudeten region was ceded to Germany, and a plebiscite would agree the new border. Chamberlain returned to Britain declaring “*peace for our time*”. Less than six months later, Hitler ordered the German invasion of the rest of Czechoslovakia. Such a brutal betrayal of the Munich Agreement transformed the appeasers, and as it became evident that Poland was next, Britain and France prepared for war.

Benito Mussolini had first met and Hitler in Venice in June 1934, allowing the longer-established Italian dictator to present himself on home soil as the more powerful of the two. However, on a return visit to Munich and Berlin in September 1937 the reality was made all too evident. Hitler laid on spectacular military parades and factory visits which easily convinced the impressionable Mussolini of Germany’s invincible might. By this stage, Italy and Germany were already formally aligned by the Axis Agreement (1936) in European diplomacy.

### Britain and France

While a Europe was increasingly characterised by the extremist politics of Fascism and expansionist policies of Adolf Hitler, the British were fascinated by their own dramatic internal crisis; a royal love affair. **Edward VIII** had succeeded to the throne in January 1936. Handsome and charming, with a playboy image, Edward was popular with the public, but for those in the know there had been signs of impending trouble in his passionate involvement with Wallis Simpson, an American woman already in her second marriage. In October 1936, Wallis divorced her husband and the king announced to the prime minister Stanley Baldwin his intention to marry her. Baldwin, almost certainly in tune with the majority of public opinion, felt that a marriage between the king and a divorced woman was out of the question. In December, Edward abdicated the throne in favour of his younger brother George VI; the only British monarch to voluntarily do so. Edward and Wallis Simpson married in France in June 1937, and henceforth lived a somewhat embittered existence in France and the West Indies.

By the summer of 1937, Britain had a new prime minister as well as a new king; Neville Chamberlain. Chamberlain would be most associated with the policy that became known as **appeasement**, which was somewhat reluctantly supported by France; the belief that compromise with Europe's Fascist dictators would provide the best chance for peace, or at very least buy time to re-arm in preparation for war. In fact the policy preceded Chamberlain: in 1935 Mussolini’s conquest of Ethiopia was allowed by an increasingly enfeebled League of Nations, and the Anglo-German Naval Agreement (1935) tacitly accepted the naval aspect of German re-armament. Beginning in July 1936, the Spanish Civil War absorbed much of Europe's attention, but from 1938 the Adolf Hitler’s provocative moves came at an ever increasing pace, each of them taking to the brink the good faith of the appeasers. After the annexation of Czechoslovakia, the main theme of British and French foreign policy now became the forging of diplomatic and military alliances to prepare for the inevitable conflict.

### Russia and the United States

Joseph Stalin’s first reaction to the rise of Hitler was to enter more fully into the international community. The USSR joined the League of Nations in 1934, and made defensive military alliances with France and Czechoslovakia in 1935. Yet the appeasement of Hitler by France and Britain in the Munich Agreement (1938) greatly concerned Moscow, raising the alarming possibility that Hitler could be left free to concentrate all his energies on Germany’s eastern front, where *Mein Kampf* had always stated that he intentioned to seek the Lebensraum (living-space) required for the German people.

Meanwhile in the United States, the American public was deeply isolationist, and Congress reflected this when it passed the Neutrality Act (1937), forbidding military aid of any kind to nations at war. Nevertheless, privately Franklin D. Roosevelt was well aware of the danger, even to the US, if Hitler succeeded in controlling the whole of Europe.

### Spanish Civil War

After the abdication of King Alfonso XIII, the Second Spanish Republic was declared under the centre-left government of Niceto Alcalá-Zamora. Niceto promised change and a step into the 20th century: trade unions, land reform, secularisation, and women’s rights. So many leftist ideas at once alienated the right-wing, while the actual introduction was so painfully slow that the far-left too became disillusioned. In 1933, Niceto was swept from power by the right-wing Catholic-conservative CEDA, which began reversing the reforms that actually did get done, and purging the military and government of leftists. Spanish political ideologies were becoming intensely polarised, as both right and left saw vast evil conspiracies on the other side that had to be stopped. In 1934, there were general strikes in Valencia and Zaragoza, street-fights in Madrid and Barcelona, and an armed rising by workers in Asturias, that were put down by the CEDA government and young general **Francisco Franco** with a brutality that foreshadowed the civil war to come. The 1936 election was narrowly won by a coalition of left-wing groups called the Popular Front. Fearing that the left-wing government would give way to a Communist revolution, in July a well-planned right-wing military coup was launched in garrison towns throughout Spain, under the eventual leadership of Franco. Yet peasants and workers fought against the uprising, and city across Spain would either fall or not, drawing the initial front-lines to a new bloody civil-war; the right-wing rebel Nationalists took Seville, Castile and Leon, but the left-wing Republican government held onto Valencia, Barcelona and Madrid.

Soldier or civilian, man or woman, all would be drawn into the **Spanish Civil War** (1936-39), whether fighting for freedom against tyranny, or righteous Christianity against godless Communists. The Spanish Civil War quickly caught the eye of politicians, the media, and creatives around the world, and what began as a Spanish war was co-opted by Fascists and Communists in a proto cold-war to show the merit of their respective ideology. Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany sent aid, troops and weapons to the Nationalists, while the Republicans received aid from the Soviet Union, as well as some 60,000 volunteers from liberal Europe and the United States. The Nationalists and Republicans proceeded to organise their respective territories and to repress opposition or suspected opposition; at least 50,000 people were executed or assassinated on each side. While the two sides were at this stage evenly matched, Franco’s strong leadership unified the many elements of the Nationalist faction, while the Republicans lacked this unity; the leftist government wanted merely to survive, while the Communists and Anarchists wished to instate their differing ideas of a utopia in the disorder. By November 1936, the Nationalists had advanced to the outskirts of Madrid. The government retreated to Valencia, but Madrid stood unyielding for years thanks to the passionate men and women of the capital. Nevertheless, the Nationalists extended the territory they controlled in the south, and took the northern Basque provinces in the summer of 1937 after it was subjected to the bombers of the German Luftwaffe. With infighting among the Republicans, the Nationalists drove eastward capturing large parts of Catalonia in April 1938, and cutting the Republican territory in two. With the British and French policy of appeasement to Hitler and non-intervention in Spain confirmed by the Munich Agreement, the morale of the Republicans shattered and the civil war was all-but-over. Franco's troops conquered Barcelona and northern Catalonia in a whirlwind campaign during the first two months of 1939. In March 1939, the Republican government flew into exile in France, and the capital Madrid and the rest of Spain surrendered to their Fascist future. The Spanish Civil War cost the lives of at least 500,000 people, and marked the first great military step for Fascism. Spain was put under forty years of the brutal dictatorship by Francisco Franco (1936-75).

### China and Japan

During the Warlord Era (1916 – 1928), Japan was able to extend her influence into the northern Chinese province of Manchuria. However, in 1928 the Chinese KMT government assassinated the Manchurian warlord and his successor declared his allegiance to the nominally unified China. Thus, the Chinese Civil War provided excellent opportunities for Japan to reassert control over Manchuria, a limitless source of raw materials and a market for her manufactured goods, as well as a protective buffer state against her rival for dominance in Asia, the Soviet Union. As a pretext to launch a full invasion of Manchuria, the Japanese government orchestrated an explosion on a section of a Japanese owned railway line in Mukden, Manchuria; the Mukden Incident (September 1931). Blaming it on the Chinese, **Japan invaded Manchuria**, and after five months of fighting, established it as a puppet state. The League of Nations condemned Japan for her incursion, causing Japan to withdraw from the League, but took no further action.

In the following years, Japan continued to extend her influence over northern China. Then in July 1937, Japanese soldiers, who had conducted military exercises in the vicinity of Beijing for years, exchanged fire with Chinese troops at the crucial access-route of Marco Polo Bridge. The Japanese responded with a full-scale invasion; the **Second Sino-Japanese War** (1937-45). Despite a shaky alliance between the KMT government and Communists, the technologically superior Japanese quickly captured the province of Nanjing and the former Chinese imperial capital of Beijing. The Chinese responded by attacking the Japanese enclave in Shanghai, but with the arrival of reinforcements, Shanghai fell to the Japanese. The Japanese continued to push back the Chinese forces, capturing the capital Nanking in December, while Japanese aircraft bombarded inaccessible regions and effectively wiped-out the Chinese air force. In order to stall the Japanese advance, the KMT government opened the dikes on the Yellow River, causing devastating flooding to the region and population; some 500,000 civilians were killed, millions rendered homeless, and resulted in famine and suffering. This controversial tactic only contributed to growing support for the Communists, and didn’t even stop the Japanese from taking the city of Wuhan. Yet Japanese military victories did not bring about the collapse of Chinese resistance that they had hoped, due to their brutal treatment of civilians and military prisoners. The most infamous example was the **Rape of Nanking** (January 1938) where Japanese forces murdered some 300,000 Chinese civilians and surrendered soldiers, and forced thousands of women to become "*Comfort Women*", essentially sex slaves. By the end of 1939, the Japanese controlled the entire north-eastern coast and areas up to 400 miles inland. Yet the fighting had reached a stalemate, with the Japanese advance stalled by a successful guerilla campaign, but the Chinese lacking the experience in modern warfare to go on the counter-offensive. Meanwhile many atrocities continued to take place, such as the notorious Japanese Unit 731 which conducted lethal human experimentation on prisoners for biological and chemical warfare development. During 1939 the conflict was eclipsed by World War II, and became part of the wider war in 1941, with China and Japan respectively joining the Allies and Axis; Japan had joined the German–Japanese–Italian Axis alliance in November 1936, on the basis of their shared animosity and fear of the Soviet Union.