The Great Depression was also a major boost for the KPD, so it was more of a general spur for totalitarianism in Germany. The specific rise of Hitler had to do with his anti-Communist leanings and his greater willingness to gamble than most of his rivals. In fact the Nazi share of the vote was actually declining during the period where Hitler was offered the Vice-Chancellorship and refused, as he wanted the Chancellorship or bust. The people who made that NSDAP-DVNP coalition government did so under the impression that the Bohemian Corporal was a buffoonish clown with a stupid mustache that they could control. This of course was a major misreading of who Hitler was.
It's also worth pointing out that Germany was not succeeding under Hitler, not according to scholars like Adam Tooze and Richard Overy who took a hard look at what Nazi policies actually did. In practice Hitler's reckless rearmament was overheating the German economy to a point that circa 1940 or 1941 the bottom would have fallen out into a complete collapse even worse than that of the early 1920s. This in fact was one of the motivating factors for that German expansionism of the late 1930s: Germany expanded or it collapsed, Hitler had removed all other options from it, and compounded with a systematic creation of redundant, chaotic bureaucracies feuding where only he could arbitrate. As a system for a power-hungry thug, it's brilliant. As the basis for building a continental empire, well.........we saw how well *that* worked in 1945 when it was the springboard to the Soviet-US power games in Europe.
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Date: 11/2/13 02:31 (UTC)It's also worth pointing out that Germany was not succeeding under Hitler, not according to scholars like Adam Tooze and Richard Overy who took a hard look at what Nazi policies actually did. In practice Hitler's reckless rearmament was overheating the German economy to a point that circa 1940 or 1941 the bottom would have fallen out into a complete collapse even worse than that of the early 1920s. This in fact was one of the motivating factors for that German expansionism of the late 1930s: Germany expanded or it collapsed, Hitler had removed all other options from it, and compounded with a systematic creation of redundant, chaotic bureaucracies feuding where only he could arbitrate. As a system for a power-hungry thug, it's brilliant. As the basis for building a continental empire, well.........we saw how well *that* worked in 1945 when it was the springboard to the Soviet-US power games in Europe.