Prelude to War: 4. The Rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party
The Making of a Populist Mass Movement (1918-1930)
Adolf Hitler was twenty-nine years old when he returned to Munich in November 1918. He had spent the previous four years as a soldier in the Bavarian Army, serving on the Western Front through some of the war’s bloodiest battles. Now Germany had surrendered, the Kaiser had fled to Holland, and revolutionaries controlled the streets of Munich.
Hitler had been born in Austria, in the small town of Braunau am Inn on the German border, on 20 April 1889. His father Alois was a customs official. His mother Klara died of breast cancer when he was eighteen, leaving him alone with a small inheritance and no clear direction.
Hitler had wanted to be an artist. He moved to Vienna in 1907 and applied twice to the Academy of Fine Arts. He was rejected both times. He remained in Vienna until 1913, living on his inheritance and a modest orphan’s pension, drifting between men’s hostels and cheap rooms, painting postcards and architectural scenes that he sold for small sums.
In May 1913, Hitler moved to Munich in Bavaria, Germany’s largest southern state. Munich was Bavaria’s capital, a prosperous city of nearly 600,000 people known for its universities, art galleries, beer halls, and conservative Catholic culture. He was still painting and selling postcards when the First World War began in August 1914.
The war electrified Hitler. Within days, he petitioned King Ludwig III of Bavaria for permission to enlist despite being Austrian. The petition was granted. On 16 August 1914, Hitler joined the 16th Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment.
Hitler served as a Meldegänger, a dispatch runner. This role involved carrying messages between regimental headquarters and the front-line units, often across open ground under artillery fire. It was dangerous work with high casualty rates. Unlike front-line soldiers who spent much of their time in trenches, runners moved constantly between relative safety and extreme danger.
The regiment saw heavy fighting from the beginning. In October 1914, during the First Battle of Ypres in Belgium, the regiment suffered catastrophic losses. Of roughly 3,600 men who went into battle, only about 600 remained combat-effective after ten days. Hitler survived. He was promoted to Gefreiter, lance corporal, and remained at that rank for the rest of the war, unusual for a soldier who served four years and won medals for bravery.
In October 1916, shrapnel wounded Hitler in the left thigh. He spent two months recovering before returning to his regiment. In August 1918, he received the Iron Cross First Class, a significant decoration rarely awarded to enlisted men. The recommendation came from his immediate superior, Leutnant Hugo Gutmann, a Jewish officer. The Iron Cross First Class was normally reserved for officers or for enlisted men who had performed extraordinary acts of bravery. Hitler wore it prominently for the rest of his life.
On 13 October 1918, near Ypres, British forces launched a mustard gas attack. Hitler was caught in the bombardment. Mustard gas caused horrific injuries, blistering skin, burning lungs, and often temporary or permanent blindness. Hitler was temporarily blinded and evacuated to a military hospital in Pasewalk. He was still there when the armistice took effect on 11 November.
Hitler later wrote that hearing of Germany’s surrender drove him to despair and sparked his decision to enter politics. Whether this theatrical moment actually occurred is impossible to verify. What is certain is that Hitler returned to Munich in late November 1918 and found a city transformed. On 7 November 1918, Kurt Eisner, a Jewish journalist and socialist politician, had led an uprising that declared Bavaria a republic. King Ludwig III fled Munich, ending the Wittelsbach monarchy that had ruled Bavaria since 1180.
Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Munich
Kurt Eisner’s Bavarian Republic represented moderate socialist reform. Eisner wanted democratic improvements, workers’ rights, and investigation of how Bavaria had been drawn into the war, but he did not seek Soviet-style revolution. He was an intellectual and idealist, not a hardened revolutionary.
Eisner’s government was fragile from the beginning. Elections held in January 1919 delivered a crushing defeat to his party, which won only 2.5 percent of the vote. Eisner planned to resign, but on 21 February 1919, as he walked to the parliament building, Count Anton von Arco auf Valley, a twenty-two-year-old former army officer and extreme nationalist, shot him dead.
Arco had applied to join the Thule Society, an antisemitic and nationalist organisation in Munich, but was rejected because his mother was Jewish. He assassinated Eisner to prove his nationalist credentials and absolve himself of Jewish ancestry.
Eisner’s assassination plunged Munich into chaos. In the confusion, radical elements seized the initiative. On 7 April 1919, left-wing revolutionaries declared Bavaria a Räterepublik, a council republic based on workers’ and soldiers’ councils rather than parliamentary democracy.
The Bavarian Soviet Republic was chaotic and short-lived. Its leaders included anarchist writers and communist activists who had little practical experience and disagreed fundamentally about their goals. The Soviet Republic held power for three weeks, implementing radical measures that terrified Munich’s middle class: requisitioning food supplies, nationalising banks, and attempting to arm workers.
The Reich government in Berlin and the Bavarian government in exile mobilised Freikorps units to crush the revolution. These irregular paramilitary forces, composed largely of demobilised soldiers and officers, had already suppressed communist uprisings in Berlin and other German cities. They were experienced in street fighting and hostile to anything resembling Bolshevism.
The reconquest of Munich began on 1 May 1919 and lasted a week. Freikorps units fought street by street against Red Guards defending the Soviet Republic. The Freikorps executed suspected revolutionaries after cursory trials or no trial at all. Between 600 and 1,200 people died during the suppression, the vast majority killed by Freikorps forces after organised resistance had collapsed.
Hitler observed these events from within the army. He appears to have served as an informant, reporting on leftist sympathies among soldiers. After the Soviet Republic’s fall, the army assigned him to political education, teaching returning soldiers against communist ideas. Hitler discovered he was an effective speaker. In June 1919, he lectured soldiers on the Treaty of Versailles and the internal enemies who had supposedly stabbed Germany in the back. His superiors noticed his oratorical ability, leading to his assignment in September 1919 to investigate political groups in Munich, including a tiny organisation called the German Workers’ Party.
The German Workers’ Party
The Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, the German Workers’ Party, began in January 1919 as a tiny political circle meeting in Munich beer halls. Its founder was Anton Drexler, a forty-year-old toolmaker and locksmith who worked in the railway workshops. Drexler wanted to create a political movement that combined nationalism with working-class concerns.
Drexler’s politics rejected Marxist socialism and internationalism. He wanted a specifically German socialism that excluded Jews and foreigners while uniting ethnic Germans across class lines. This combination of nationalist and socialist themes, mixed with antisemitism, characterised völkisch ideology, from Volk meaning people or nation in a racial sense.
Drexler co-founded the party with Karl Harrer, a sports journalist. They met in small groups in rented rooms in beer halls. In its first months, the German Workers’ Party rarely attracted more than twenty or thirty attendees. It was one of dozens of small nationalist groups operating in Munich in 1919.
On 12 September 1919, Adolf Hitler attended a German Workers’ Party meeting at the Sterneckerbräu, a tavern in central Munich. The army had sent him to observe the group. Fewer than twenty-five people attended. The discussion was unimpressive until a professor suggested Bavaria should secede from Germany and join Austria.
This enraged Hitler. He stood up and delivered an angry, impromptu speech attacking the proposal. His vehemence impressed Anton Drexler, who approached Hitler after the meeting and pressed a pamphlet into his hands.
Days later, Hitler received a postcard informing him he had been accepted as a member. He had not applied. Drexler had simply added him to the membership list. Hitler hesitated but recognised an opportunity. The party’s combination of nationalism and working-class appeal matched his emerging political views. More importantly, its tiny size meant he could rapidly become influential.
Hitler became the seventh member of the party’s executive committee. He was assigned membership number 555, though the party had nowhere near that many members. The numbering started at 500 to create an illusion of size.
Hitler’s contribution was transformative. He pushed the party to abandon small discussion groups and hold mass public meetings. On 16 October 1919, the party organised a meeting where Hitler spoke for thirty minutes. About 111 people attended, a significant increase. Hitler’s speaking style was passionate, aggressive, and emotional. He built speeches toward crescendos of anger and conviction. He repeated simple themes relentlessly. He identified enemies and blamed them for Germany’s suffering.
In February 1920, the German Workers’ Party held a mass meeting at the Hofbräuhaus, one of Munich’s largest beer halls. Nearly 2,000 people attended. Hitler unveiled the party’s 25-point programme, a mixture of demands that revealed the ideological incoherence that would characterise Nazi policy throughout its existence.
The programme called for the union of all Germans in a Greater Germany, the abolition of the Treaty of Versailles, and land and colonies to feed Germany’s population. Point Four declared that only members of the nation could be citizens, that only those of German blood could be members of the nation, and therefore no Jew could be a member of the nation. The programme demanded revocation of citizenship for Jews who had immigrated since 1914, confiscation of war profits, nationalisation of major businesses, profit-sharing in large industries, land reform, and the death penalty for usurers and profiteers.
These demands were contradictory and often meaningless, but the incoherence was deliberate. The 25 points were designed to appeal to different constituencies simultaneously. Nationalists could support territorial revision. Workers could support profit-sharing. Small businessmen could support protection from large corporations. And everyone who was antisemitic could unite around blaming Jews for Germany’s problems.
In April 1920, Hitler left the army to devote himself entirely to politics. He was thirty-one years old. The party changed its name to Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, abbreviated NSDAP and commonly called the Nazi Party. The new name was carefully constructed. Nationalsozialistische combined nationalism with socialism. Deutsche emphasised ethnic identity. Arbeiterpartei suggested the party represented the common man.
Führer
By mid-1921, Hitler had become the Nazi Party’s most effective asset. His speaking ability drew crowds. His organisational energy built infrastructure. But he still officially shared leadership with others. This frustrated Hitler, who had no patience for collective decision-making.
In July 1921, Hitler threatened to resign unless he was granted dictatorial powers as chairman. He demanded the title Führer, leader, with absolute authority over party decisions. Drexler and the executive committee faced a choice: lose their most dynamic speaker or surrender their authority. They chose submission. On 29 July 1921, a party meeting voted 543 to 1 to grant Hitler dictatorial powers. He became party chairman with the title Führer. He was thirty-two years old.
Hitler immediately remade the party according to his vision. He developed the visual symbols that would become synonymous with Nazism. The swastika became the party emblem. Hitler personally designed the Nazi flag: a black swastika in a white circle on a red background. The colours were chosen deliberately. Red attracted working-class Germans familiar with socialist flags. White symbolised racial purity. Black evoked Prussia’s military tradition and provided stark visual contrast.
The party developed elaborate rituals borrowed from military and religious practice. Members greeted each other with raised right arms and the salute “Heil Hitler.” Mass rallies featured banners, torchlight processions, martial music, and choreographed displays of uniformed men marching in formation.
Hitler also created the Stosstrupp-Hitler, Hitler Shock Troop, a small bodyguard unit personally loyal to him. This was distinct from the larger Sturmabteilung, Storm Detachment, commonly known as the SA or Brownshirts, which had been founded in August 1921 as the party’s paramilitary wing.
The SA grew from security detachments into a mass paramilitary organisation that terrorised political enemies. Its members wore brown shirts, originally purchased cheaply as surplus colonial uniforms. They organised into military-style units with ranks and command structures. They marched through Munich in formation, singing martial songs and projecting disciplined force.
The SA attracted demobilised soldiers, unemployed young men, and those drawn to violent political action. It provided structure, camaraderie, regular meals at party events, and the opportunity to fight communists, socialists, and Jews. SA units disrupted left-wing meetings, attacked opposition newspaper sellers, and brawled with communist paramilitary groups. German cities became battlegrounds where rival political organisations fought for control of public space.
The Ideology of Hatred
Hitler’s worldview was crude and borrowed from existing currents in German nationalist and racist thinking. But he presented these ideas with fanatical conviction and ruthless clarity.
At the core of Hitler’s ideology was race. He divided humanity into a hierarchy, with the so-called Aryan race, which he identified with Germanic peoples, at the top. According to Hitler, Aryans were the creators of all significant civilisation and culture. They possessed inherent qualities of intelligence, creativity, courage, and leadership. Other races were inferior in varying degrees, capable at best of copying Aryan achievements but incapable of original creation.
This racial theory was pseudo-scientific nonsense, but it served powerful psychological and political functions. It offered Germans a vision of themselves as superior beings destined to rule. It provided a simple explanation for Germany’s defeat: racial betrayal rather than military failure. It justified aggression as natural expressions of racial superiority.
The Jewish people occupied a special position in Hitler’s racial worldview. He portrayed Jews not merely as inferior but as uniquely dangerous, a parasitic people who destroyed civilisations from within through financial manipulation, cultural subversion, and biological contamination through intermarriage. According to Hitler, Jews could not create their own culture. They lived as parasites within other peoples’ societies, exploiting their hosts while undermining them.
Hitler’s antisemitism was biologised and eliminationist from the beginning. This was not religious antisemitism that allowed conversion as escape. Hitler’s racial antisemitism was absolute and inescapable. A person was Jewish by blood, regardless of religious practice or cultural assimilation. Jewish converts to Christianity remained Jews. Their children and grandchildren remained Jews. There was no redemption, only racial destiny.
In speeches throughout the 1920s, Hitler used medical and biological metaphors to describe Jews. They were germs, parasites, bacteria infecting the German body politic. This language of disease pointed toward elimination as the logical solution. Hitler told a Munich audience in August 1920 that removing Jews was not a question of law but of “cleansing.”
Hitler also fixated on Lebensraum, living space. He argued that Germany’s population was growing while its territory remained constrained by the Treaty of Versailles. Without additional land for food production and settlement, Germans faced starvation and national decline. This expansion would come eastward, at the expense of Poland, Russia, and the Slavic peoples, whom Hitler regarded as racially inferior Untermenschen, subhumans, fit only for enslavement or extermination.
This drive for Lebensraum connected to Hitler’s obsession with Social Darwinism, the misapplication of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution to human societies. Hitler believed nations existed in perpetual struggle for survival, with the strong conquering the weak. Peace and international cooperation were illusions that weakened superior peoples. War was natural, necessary, and purifying. Germany must expand or die.
Anti-communism formed another pillar of Nazi ideology, though it was inseparable from antisemitism in Hitler’s mind. He portrayed communism as a Jewish conspiracy to destroy European civilisation. He claimed Jewish intellectuals like Karl Marx had created communist ideology as a weapon to overthrow governments. The Bolshevik Revolution in Russia was, in this view, Jewish domination of Slavic masses. The German communist movement represented the same Jewish plot against Germany.
This fusion of antisemitism and anti-communism had powerful appeal in post-war Germany. The revolutionary chaos of 1918-1919, the Spartacist Uprising in Berlin, and Bavaria’s Soviet Republic had been led by figures who included prominent Jews such as Rosa Luxemburg, Kurt Eisner, and Eugen Leviné. For Germans seeking simple explanations for national disaster, Hitler’s conspiracy theory offered clarity and an identifiable enemy.
Mein Kampf
Hitler’s ideology found its fullest expression in Mein Kampf, My Struggle, the autobiographical manifesto he dictated while imprisoned after his failed putsch attempt in November 1923. The first volume appeared in July 1925, the second in December 1926.
Mein Kampf is notoriously difficult to read. Hitler’s prose was repetitive, turgid, and poorly structured. The book reflected his speaking style, building through repetition and emotional crescendo rather than logical argumentation. Yet within its verbose pages, Hitler laid out his worldview with remarkable candour.
The book began with Hitler’s early life. He described his childhood in Austria, his years in Vienna from 1907 to 1913 where he claimed his antisemitism crystallised, his move to Munich, and his war service. Much of this was self-serving mythology. Hitler exaggerated his poverty in Vienna, omitted his failures, and portrayed himself as a man of destiny.
He devoted extensive passages to the supposed Jewish conspiracy. He described Jews as racial parasites who survived by exploiting other peoples. He claimed they controlled finance, the press, and cultural institutions to weaken and destroy the nations they inhabited. He blamed Jews for Marxism, capitalism, prostitution, cultural degeneracy, and Germany’s defeat in the war.
Hitler also laid out his vision for Germany’s future. He rejected restoration of pre-war borders as insufficient. Germany must expand eastward into Russia and Eastern Europe. The agricultural lands of Ukraine and western Russia would be conquered. The Slavic inhabitants would be killed, driven out, or reduced to slave labour. German settlers would colonise the conquered territories. This expansion would be achieved through war. Hitler was explicit about this.
Hitler discussed propaganda at length, revealing his cynical understanding of mass psychology. He argued that effective propaganda must be simple, repetitive, and emotional. It should appeal to feelings, not intellect. Complex arguments confused and bored ordinary people. Propaganda should reduce everything to stark contrasts: friend and enemy, good and evil.
He wrote: “The receptivity of the great masses is very limited, their intelligence is small, but their power of forgetting is enormous. In consequence of these facts, all effective propaganda must be limited to a very few points and must harp on these in slogans until the last member of the public understands what you want him to understand by your slogan.”
Mein Kampf sold poorly at first. The 1925 edition sold fewer than 10,000 copies in its first year. As the Nazi Party grew in the late 1920s, sales increased modestly. After Hitler became chancellor in January 1933, the book became a bestseller through genuine interest, social pressure, and coercion. By 1945, over 12 million copies had been distributed in Germany.
Foreign observers who read Mein Kampf found Hitler’s ambitions alarming but often dismissed them as fantasies or rhetorical exaggeration. This was catastrophic misjudgement. Hitler meant what he wrote. When he gained power, he pursued the goals he had outlined: rearmament, territorial expansion, elimination of Jews from German life, and ultimately war to establish German racial dominance over Europe.
The SA and Ernst Röhm
The Sturmabteilung became one of the Nazi Party’s most important instruments. Founded in August 1921 initially as security for party meetings, the SA evolved into a massive paramilitary organisation that terrorised opponents and dominated German streets.
The SA’s early recruits came largely from the Freikorps, the irregular military units that had fought communists after Germany’s defeat. These men, often unable to adjust to civilian life, found in the SA a continuation of violent camaraderie. The SA attracted unemployed workers, young men seeking adventure, disillusioned veterans, and those drawn to political violence.
Membership provided tangible benefits beyond ideology. Members received free beer and food at party gatherings. They received uniforms, creating visual solidarity. They experienced camaraderie and belonging in an organisation with military-style hierarchy. For unemployed men with no prospects, the SA offered structure, purpose, and identity.
Ernst Röhm emerged as the SA’s most important leader. Born in Munich in 1887, Röhm had served as a professional army officer during the First World War. He was badly wounded, taking a bullet through the face that left permanent scarring. After the war, he remained in the Reichswehr, working in positions that maintained contact with paramilitary organisations.
Röhm was a skilled organiser with extensive contacts among right-wing military circles. He secured weapons for the SA from sympathetic army officers. He helped organise the SA’s military structure and training. He believed the SA should become the nucleus of a new German army, sweeping away the traditional officer corps.
Röhm was also openly homosexual, a fact widely known within Nazi circles. Hitler tolerated Röhm’s homosexuality despite the party’s ideology condemning homosexuality as degeneracy. He valued Röhm’s organisational abilities and absolute personal loyalty. This tolerance would not last. In 1934, after Hitler had consolidated power, Röhm’s homosexuality became one of the pretexts for his murder. But through the 1920s and early 1930s, Hitler protected Röhm and benefited from his work building the SA.
The SA’s primary function was political violence. SA units disrupted communist and socialist meetings, bursting into halls and starting brawls. They attacked left-wing newspaper sellers. They fought pitched battles with the Rotfrontkämpferbund, the Red Front Fighters League, the communist paramilitary organisation.
This violence served multiple purposes. It demonstrated Nazi strength and willingness to fight. It created an atmosphere of crisis that the Nazis could then promise to end once they gained power. It attracted young men who wanted physical confrontation. It also brutalised participants, normalising violence as a political tool.
The SA also targeted Jews directly. Stormtroopers vandalised Jewish-owned shops, smashing windows and painting antisemitic slogans. They attacked Jews in the streets. They disrupted Jewish businesses, standing outside shops to intimidate customers. These attacks increased in frequency and severity as the Nazi Party grew stronger.
By 1930, the SA had grown to several hundred thousand members, far larger than the Nazi Party’s formal membership. Many Germans joined the SA without formally joining the party, attracted by its martial culture and material benefits during the Depression when unemployment reached catastrophic levels. The SA provided soup kitchens for unemployed members, organised sports activities, and created community.
The Propaganda Genius
Joseph Goebbels joined the Nazi Party in 1924, attracted by Hitler’s oratory and racial ideology. He was twenty-seven years old, a failed novelist and playwright with a PhD in literature from the University of Heidelberg. Small in stature at 165 centimetres tall, with a deformed right foot and pronounced limp from childhood osteomyelitis, Goebbels compensated with intellectual aggression and rhetorical skill.
Goebbels had been born in 1897 in Rheydt, an industrial town in western Germany. His father was a factory clerk, his family working-class Catholic. Young Goebbels was academically gifted, attending university on a Catholic scholarship. He studied German literature, history, and philosophy, graduating in 1921 with a doctorate.
But a doctorate in literature provided no clear career path in post-war Germany. Goebbels tried to establish himself as a writer. Publishers rejected his work. He worked briefly as a bank clerk and tutor while living in his parents’ house, a humiliating position for an ambitious man in his mid-twenties with a doctorate.
Goebbels drifted into right-wing nationalist politics. He attended Nazi meetings in 1924 and was mesmerised by Hitler’s speaking style. He joined the party and quickly made himself useful through his writing skills and rhetorical ability.
Initially, Goebbels aligned with the party’s left-leaning faction led by Gregor Strasser, which emphasised socialist economics and alliance with the Soviet Union. Hitler opposed this faction. In February 1926, Hitler confronted Strasser at a meeting in Bamberg. Goebbels, recognising which side held power, abandoned Strasser and pledged absolute loyalty to Hitler.
In November 1926, Hitler appointed Goebbels as Gauleiter of Berlin, Germany’s capital, a city of 4 million people and the centre of German political life. It was also a left-wing stronghold where the Nazi Party had barely gained traction. Goebbels was tasked with building Nazi support in hostile territory.
Goebbels transformed the Berlin party organisation through aggressive propaganda. He founded Der Angriff, The Attack, a weekly newspaper that combined antisemitic propaganda with sensationalist attacks on political opponents. The paper was crude and vulgar. Headlines screamed accusations of corruption and treason against named politicians, particularly Jewish politicians. Goebbels understood that sensationalism sold papers and scandal attracted attention.
Der Angriff pioneered techniques that would become standard Nazi propaganda. It personalised attacks, targeting individuals by name. It reduced complex political disputes to simple conflicts between good Germans and evil traitors. It repeated the same themes endlessly: Jews controlling finance and media, communists threatening German workers, the Weimar Republic betraying the nation, Hitler offering salvation.
Goebbels also organised mass rallies that combined political speeches with entertainment. Nazi meetings featured music, theatrical lighting, choreographed marches of uniformed SA men, and Hitler’s speeches as the climactic event. These spectacles drew thousands, creating emotional experiences that bonded participants to the movement more effectively than rational discourse.
Goebbels recognised the propaganda value of violence. He deliberately provoked communists into street battles, knowing the resulting chaos would generate publicity and allow the Nazis to portray themselves as defenders of order. He courted police crackdowns, turning arrested SA men into martyrs.
One of Goebbels’s most effective propaganda creations was the cult around Horst Wessel. Wessel was a 22-year-old SA man shot during a confrontation in January 1930. He died on 23 February from his wounds. The circumstances were sordid: Wessel had been living with a former prostitute, his landlady wanted him evicted over unpaid rent, and her communist associates confronted him.
Goebbels transformed this seedy dispute into Nazi mythology. He organised a massive funeral procession through Berlin with thousands of SA men marching. He wrote articles portraying Wessel as a hero. He published a marching song Wessel had written. The “Horst Wessel Song” became the Nazi Party’s anthem, sung at every party gathering.
Goebbels understood that propaganda worked through repetition and emotional appeal, not rational argument. Nazi posters, speeches, and newspapers targeted fear, resentment, and hope rather than proposing detailed policies. The message was simple and repeated endlessly: Germany has been betrayed, enemies surround the nation, only the Nazis can restore greatness.
Goebbels also promoted the Hitler cult with fanatical devotion. He portrayed Hitler as Germany’s saviour, a man of destiny sent to rescue the nation. Hitler was depicted as infallible, selfless, and devoted entirely to Germany’s revival. This personalisation simplified political choice. Supporting the Nazi Party became supporting Hitler personally. Opposing the Nazis became betraying Germany’s redeemer.
The Appeal Across Classes
The Nazi Party’s growth cannot be explained by propaganda and violence alone. The movement offered something to diverse groups across German society.
To unemployed workers and young men without prospects, the Nazis promised jobs, dignity, and belonging. The party’s name emphasised socialism. The SA provided immediate community. Nazi rhetoric attacked financial manipulation, themes that resonated with workers who felt betrayed by both capitalism and the socialist parties that had failed to prevent their misery.
Yet the Nazis also attracted substantial middle-class support, particularly from small business owners, shopkeepers, and white-collar workers. These groups feared proletarianisation, the slide into working-class poverty. They resented large corporations that crushed small enterprises and organised labour whose demands threatened profit margins. The Nazis promised to protect the Mittelstand, the middle class, from both monopoly capitalism and Marxist revolution.
Farmers and rural communities provided crucial Nazi support. German agriculture had struggled throughout the 1920s, facing chronic debt, low prices, and competition from foreign imports. Rural areas remained deeply traditional and religious, hostile to urban modernity. The Nazis appealed through Blut und Boden, blood and soil ideology, celebrating rural life as the source of German racial purity. They promised to protect farmers from foreclosure, cancel agricultural debts, and restrict food imports.
Students and young intellectuals formed another important Nazi constituency. German universities were hotbeds of right-wing nationalism. Students faced uncertain employment prospects despite their education. They found in Nazism a revolutionary movement that promised to overthrow the existing order and create opportunities for a new elite based on ideological commitment rather than birth or wealth.
Women supported the Nazi Party despite its ideology relegating them to domestic roles. The party promised to restore traditional family structures, protect women from having to work outside the home, and create economic conditions where single-income families could thrive. For women exhausted by the double burden of wage work and domestic labour, or those who found Weimar’s liberated culture threatening, this message had appeal.
Veterans constituted a particularly receptive audience. Men who had fought in the trenches felt betrayed by Germany’s surrender and humiliated by Versailles. The Weimar Republic offered them little beyond meagre pensions. The Nazis honoured their service, blamed their defeat on traitors rather than military failure, and promised to restore Germany’s military strength. Hitler’s own war service and Iron Cross gave him credibility among former soldiers.
The party’s antisemitism attracted those seeking simple explanations for complex problems. Why had Germany lost the war? Jewish betrayal. Why was the economy in crisis? Jewish financial manipulation. This conspiracy theory offered clarity and an identifiable enemy. It also provided psychological relief. If Jews were responsible for Germany’s problems, then ordinary Germans bore no responsibility.
Each group that supported the Nazis focused on different aspects of the ideology while overlooking elements that might have troubled them. Industrialists who donated money ignored anti-capitalist rhetoric. Workers who joined the SA dismissed the party’s alliance with conservative elites. Christians who voted Nazi convinced themselves the movement’s neo-pagan elements would fade. This selective perception was encouraged by the party’s deliberate ambiguity and focus on emotional appeal rather than detailed policy.
The Nazis also benefited from the political centre’s weakness. The Weimar Republic’s democratic parties were fragmented and unable to form stable governing coalitions. They were compromised by their association with Versailles and their inability to solve the economic crisis. The Social Democrats were divided from the Communists by bitter enmity that prevented united action. The centre-right parties had no answer to the Depression’s mass unemployment.
The Nazis appeared decisive, energetic, and confident while the democratic parties seemed exhausted. Hitler promised action while other politicians offered only explanations for why action was impossible.
The Party Ascendant
By 1929, the Nazi Party had established itself as a permanent feature of German politics but remained marginal. In the May 1928 Reichstag elections, the party received only 2.6 percent of the vote and won 12 seats in the 491-seat parliament. Hitler’s strategy of pursuing power through elections appeared to be failing.
The Beer Hall Putsch of November 1923 had taught Hitler that armed uprising would not succeed. The army and police had crushed his attempted coup easily. He served less than nine months before being released, but the experience convinced him that power must be achieved through legal means. The Nazi Party would win elections and use democratic institutions to destroy democracy from within.
This strategy required building party infrastructure throughout Germany. Through the mid to late 1920s, the Nazis established regional organisations in every German state. They created functional departments for propaganda, finance, and recruitment. They founded newspapers and published pamphlets. This organisational work was unglamorous but created the infrastructure that allowed rapid expansion when conditions changed.
Then came the Wall Street Crash of October 1929 and the subsequent global economic collapse. The German economy had recovered from hyperinflation through massive American loans. When the American economy collapsed, these loans were called in. German banks faced insolvency. German companies that depended on credit could not operate. The entire economic structure collapsed.
Unemployment soared. In September 1929, 1.3 million Germans were unemployed. By September 1930, unemployment reached 3 million. By early 1932, over 6 million Germans were officially unemployed, nearly one-third of the workforce. Industrial production collapsed by more than 40 percent. Banks failed, wiping out savings. The middle class saw its security evaporate.
The Weimar government’s response deepened the crisis. Chancellor Heinrich Brüning believed Germany must maintain the gold standard and currency value at all costs. This meant raising taxes and cutting government spending to balance the budget. These austerity policies reduced demand further, causing more businesses to fail and unemployment to rise. Government unemployment benefits were cut repeatedly. These policies were economically destructive and politically catastrophic.
This economic catastrophe transformed the Nazi Party’s prospects. Hitler’s apocalyptic rhetoric suddenly seemed prophetic. The democratic parties had no solutions and offered only more suffering. The Communists promised revolution but terrified the middle class. The Nazis promised action, jobs, national revival, and revenge against those supposedly responsible for Germany’s misery.
The party’s infrastructure allowed it to capitalise on the crisis. The Nazis had organisations in every region, propaganda machinery that could blanket Germany with posters and newspapers, and the SA to dominate the streets. They had Hitler, whose oratorical power reached new heights as he barnstormed the country promising salvation.
In the September 1930 Reichstag elections, the Nazi vote surged to 18.3 percent, making them the second-largest party with 107 seats. Only the SPD with 143 seats remained larger. The Nazis had gone from the fringe to the centre of German politics in a single election.
Hitler had achieved this without moderating his ideology or tactics. The party remained as violent, as antisemitic, and as hostile to democracy as ever. SA units continued brawling in the streets. Nazi newspapers continued their crude attacks on Jews and democratic politicians. But millions of Germans, desperate for solutions and susceptible to scapegoating, had decided these were not disqualifying factors but signs of the strength Germany needed.
The Nazi Party had become a mass movement. Hitler had spent a decade building the instrument of Germany’s destruction. He had created an organisation that combined traditional party structure with paramilitary violence, modern propaganda with ancient hatreds, and personal charisma with ruthless political calculation. He had published his intentions in Mein Kampf for anyone willing to read them. He had never hidden his antisemitism, his contempt for democracy, or his determination to launch wars of conquest.
Germany’s democratic forces, divided and weakened, failed to recognise the threat until it was too late. They saw the Nazis as a temporary phenomenon that would collapse under its own extremism once economic conditions improved. They convinced themselves Hitler would be moderated by the responsibilities of power.
They were catastrophically wrong. Hitler meant exactly what he said. The movement he had built would destroy German democracy, plunge Europe into war, and carry out genocide on an industrial scale. All the seeds of that catastrophe were visible in the Nazi Party’s rise during the 1920s. Understanding how Hitler built his movement is essential to understanding how civilisation can collapse and how democratic societies can fail to defend themselves against those who openly declare their intention to destroy them.