The conservative parties did not manage to win enough votes. They pressured president Paul von Hindenburg to appoint Hitler chancellor. The fact that they expected to use Hitler for their own agenda would turn out to be a fatal underestimation. The National Socialists celebrated their victory with a torchlight procession through Berlin. From the balcony of the chancellery, Hitler looked on approvingly.
In spite of the glory, he was still far from being all-powerful at that point. The new cabinet counted only two NSDAP members, but Hitler succeeded in getting them appointed to important positions.
He was a minister without portfolio who got to control the police force of Prussia, the larger part of Germany. For the Nazis, this was reason to celebrate their 'national revolution', but many Germans were indifferent to the news.
They had seen many governments come and go and did not expect the new government to last any time at all. Before long, Hitler claimed more power. The fire in the Reichstag, the parliament building, was a key moment in this development. On 27 February , guards noticed the flames blazing through the roof. They overpowered the suspected arsonist, a Dutch communist named Marinus van der Lubbe. He was executed after a show trial in Evidence of any accomplices was never found.
The Nazi leadership was quick to arrive at the scene. Not a moment must be lost! Anyone who stands in our way will be cut down. It formed the basis for the dictatorship.
The civil rights of the German people were curtailed. Freedom of expression was no longer a matter of course and the police could arbitrarily search houses and arrest people. The political opponents of the Nazis were essentially outlawed. In this atmosphere of intimidation, new elections were held on 5 March The streets were full of Nazi posters and flags.
Nevertheless, the great victory hoped for by the Nazis did not materialise. With Meanwhile, the arrests and intimidation were on the increase. The government banned the Communist Party.
By 15 March, 10, communists had been arrested. In order to house all these political prisoners, the first concentration camps were opened. The circumstances in the camps were atrocious. People were ill-treated, tortured, and sometimes killed.
Jews and well-known Germans in particular had a rough time of it. SS guards at the Dachau camp, near Munich, for instance, took four Jewish prisoners outside the gates, where they shot them dead.
The guards then claimed that the victims had tried to escape. In , Hitler and his followers staged the Beer Hall Putsch in Munich, a failed takeover of the government in Bavaria, a state in southern Germany. In the aftermath of the Beer Hall Putsch, Hitler was convicted of treason and sentenced to five years in prison but spent less than a year behind bars during which time he dictated the first volume of Mein Kampf , or My Struggle, his political autobiography.
After his release from prison, he set about rebuilding the Nazi Party and attempting to gain power through the election process. In , Germany entered a period of severe economic depression and widespread unemployment. The Nazis capitalized on the situation by criticizing the ruling government and began to win elections. In January , Hitler was appointed German chancellor and his Nazi government soon came to control every aspect of German life.
Under Nazi rule, all other political parties were banned. In , the Nazis opened their first concentration camp in Dachau , Germany, to house political prisoners. Dachau evolved into a death camp where countless thousands of Jews died from malnutrition, disease and overwork or were executed.
Although the Treaty of Versailles was explicitly based on the principle of the self-determination of peoples, he pointed out that it had separated Germans from Germans by creating such new postwar states as Austria and Czechoslovakia, where many Germans lived. From the mid- to late s, Hitler undermined the postwar international order step by step.
He withdrew Germany from the League of Nations in , rebuilt German armed forces beyond what was permitted by the Treaty of Versailles, reoccupied the German Rhineland in , annexed Austria in and invaded Czechoslovakia in After conquering Poland , Hitler focused on defeating Britain and France.
At the beginning of the war, Hitler and his Nazi Party were fighting to dominate Europe; five years later they were fighting to exist. By late , Jews were banned from most public places in Germany.
In the invasion and occupation of Poland, German troops shot thousands of Polish Jews, confined many to ghettoes where they starved to death and began sending others to death camps in various parts of Poland, where they were either killed immediately or forced into slave labor. In , when Germany invaded the Soviet Union, Nazi death squads machine-gunned tens of thousands of Jews in the western regions of Soviet Russia.
In and , Jews in the western occupied countries including France and Belgium were deported by the thousands to the death camps mushrooming across Europe. In Poland, huge death camps such as Auschwitz began operating with ruthless efficiency. The murder of Jews in German-occupied lands stopped only in last months of the war, as the German armies were retreating toward Berlin. In , Hitler began his long-promised expansion of national boundaries to incorporate ethnic Germans.
The Czechs looked to Great Britain and France for help, but hoping to avoid war—they had been bled white in World War I—these nations chose a policy of appeasement. The following year, the German army swallowed up the remainder of Czechoslovakia. I believe it is peace for our time. After being released from prison, Hitler vowed to work within the parliamentary system to avoid a repeat of the Beer Hall Putsch setback. In the s, however, the Nazi Party was still a fringe group of ultraextremists with little political power.
It received only 2. But the worldwide economic depression and the rising power of labor unions and communists convinced increasing numbers of Germans to turn to the Nazi Party. The Nazis fed on bank failures and unemployment—proof, Hitler said, of the ineffectiveness of democratic government. Hitler pledged to restore prosperity, create civil order by crushing industrial strikes and street demonstrations by communists and socialists , eliminate the influence of Jewish financiers, and make the fatherland once again a world power.
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