So here is my theme on the Great Depression in Germany and Hitler's seizure of power (with my Works Cited page). YAY! I just turned it in this morning and I spent a couple of long nights on this (still don't think it's my best :P) but despite my current state of exhaustion, I had a lot of fun researching this stuff.
Hitler is the ultimate “bad guy” of history. He persecuted millions, manipulated situations for his own good, censored art and the press and did it all in a way that made people want, and choose, to follow him. Not to mention he had the mustache that all “evil villains” require. What people tend to avoid, however, are the conditions in Germany when Hitler became Chancellor. In 1933, most of the world was in the middle of The Great Depression and Germany was the country that was hit the hardest (Wright). Hitler was able to turn Germany around, back to her former glory and strength, but at what cost? Though Adolf Hitler did restore the German economy and bring back her former power and strength, ultimately Hitler pulled Germany farther down than it was before he seized power.
Going into the Great Depression, Germany was already starting on the wrong foot. After the Great War “Germany,. . . faced the additional burden of paying reparations to the victors” (The Great Depression (Overview)). This resulted in the massive inflation of the mark, an increase in unemployment and the overall devastation of the German economy (Evans, 103). In September of 1922, Ernest Hemingway recounts his experience in Germany and the inflation of the mark; “There were no marks to be had in Strasburg, the mounting exchange had cleaned the bankers out days ago, so we changed some French money in the railway station at Kehl. For 10 francs I received 670 marks. Ten francs amounted to about 90 cents in Canadian money. That 90 cents lasted Mrs. Hemingway and me for a day of heavy spending and at the end of the day we had 120 marks left!” (Hemingway). As the roaring twenties carried on, normally marked as a time of prosperity in most countries, the value of the mark began to hyper-inflate and the German economy sunk lower and lower. “The most dramatic and serious effects were on the price of food. A woman sitting down in a café might order a cup of coffee for 5,000 marks and be asked to give the waiter 8,000 for it when she got up to pay an hour later” (Evans, 106). The value of the mark was literally dropping by the minute at the height of the great inflation. This hourly drop of the mark caused riots and violence in grocery stores and people resorted to selling their possessions in order to buy food. “Malnutrition caused an immediate rise in deaths from tuberculosis” (Evans, 106). The inflation of the mark was not the only thing devastating the German economy. “Industrial production was only 42 per cent in 1919 of what it had been in 1913, and the country was producing less than half the grain it had produced before the war” (Evans, 104). The entire country of Germany was “grinding to a halt” (Evans, 108). Their economy was failing. Businesses could not afford to keep workers on, and workers could not afford enough food even with a job since their salary would become practically useless in mere hours. The first signs of relief were in 1924 in The Dawes Plan. It essentially “provided for U.S. loans to Germany so that Germany could pay reparations to France and others. Those nations, in turn, could repay U.S. loans they owed” (The Great Depression (Overview)). The new Weimar Republic also introduced a new currency that eventually adopted the name Reichsmark whose value was dependent on the price of gold (Evans, 109). This ended the hyperinflation of the mark, but at a high cost, setting up for Hitler’s rise. By changing the currency, people that invested in war bonds lost all of their money and anyone who borrowed money instantly gained money (Evans, 109-10). “Victor Klemperer was a typical figure in this process.When the stabilization came, the ‘fear of sudden monetary devaluation, the mad rush of having to shop’ were over, but ‘destitution’ came in their place, for in the new currency Klemperer had virtually nothing of any value and hardly any money at all” (Evans, 110). With the Dawes Plan, Germany was now dependent on the stability of the American economy. Though the Weimar Republic was enjoying a period of restoration, there was tension under the surface. The people were not completely satisfied with the Weimar Republic and out of the chaos of 1929, Adolf Hitler would rise up to rescue Germany.
In 1928, signs of a recession were becoming increasingly obvious, but they were still just foreshadowing of a depression to come. “All leading industrial countries began to impose monetary restrictions in the face of a looming recession. . . . Such measures were necessary to preserve gold reserves, the basis of financial stability in the era of the Gold Standard, when currency values everywhere were tied to the value of gold” (Evans, 234). Since Germany had changed to the Reichsmark, which was dependent on the value of gold, they were now affected by these “monetary restrictions” (Evans, 234). This then caused major industries to suffer and “there was virtually no growth in industrial production in Germany in 1928-9” and because of this, many people who had worked in these factories now had already lost or were threatened with losing their job, making the number of the unemployed skyrocket (Evans, 236). On the 24th of October, rumblings of a stock market failure resulted in too many people selling their shares on the New York Stock Exchange, which consequently led to the dramatic drop in value of the stock shares (Evans, 234). But the worst was yet to come. Just a few days later, on October 29, 1929, dubbed ‘Black Tuesday’, the stock market crashed, along with the “giddy confidence that the expansion would continue forever” (The Great Depression (Overview)). Millions of people desperately scrambled to sell their stock before its value dropped even further (Evans, 234). “Company after company went bust. American demand for imports collapsed” (Evans, 235). This then led to American banks backing out of their short-term loans; “American banks began withdrawing their funds from Germany at the worst possible moment, precisely when the already flagging German economy needed a sharp stimulus to revive it” (Evans, 235). The Dawes Plan from the Weimar Republic that had pulled Germany up and out of the Great Inflation was the very thing that pulled them back down into the Great Depression. The Weimar Republic’s Chancellor Brüning did try and pull Germany from the depression, but all of his methods were now out of date and not enough to combat the Great Depression (Mitchell, 175). “All of this was conventional economic wisdom, but it did not work in stemming the Depression. . . . Brüning and his advisors continued to react as they had to the inflation of 1923” (Mitchell, 175). Meanwhile, this depression was spreading rapidly into Europe. 1930 plunged Germany even deeper into the depression with the Smoot-Hawley tariff, “which effectively closed U.S. market to European imports” (The Great Depression (Overview)). With the demand for products rapidly decreasing, the production all but stopped. There was no money to pay for produce anymore, and no money to keep on paying employees to make produce that no one was buying, causing unemployment. “By 1932, roughly one worker in three in Germany was registered as unemployed, with rates even higher in some heavy industrial areas such as Silesia or the Rhur” (Evans, 236).
The National Socialists, also known as Nazis, came up with an effective solution to keep the unemployed off the streets, fed and busy. “The National Socialists established their “storm centers” all over the country. These were the back rooms of beer halls, unused warehouses, or similar buildings, which now sat unused because of the Depression” (Mitchell, 178). This kept them fed and gave them a place to stay off of the streets and clothes on their back. But the clothes they wore were the Nazi uniforms, and with all of the unemployed together, wearing the Nazi uniform essentially labeled and made them into National Socialist party members (Mitchell, 178).“The high unemployment of the Depression era--estimated at a rate approaching 50% in Germany--increased misery and made the Nazi claims more believable to Germans” (Neel). The people were so devastated, they were willing to believe anything, as long as they had someone to blame. “The Nazis provided a very real alternative to the people subjected to the effect of government failures” (Mitchell, 177). The German people knew that the Weimar Republic was not working and the Depression was not getting any better. They needed a new leader, a new government even, and they saw that in the Nazi Party, led by Adolf Hitler. “As a leader of the Nazi Party, Hitler promised the German people relief. To the unemployed workers, he promised jobs and to the farmers, a market for their goods” (The Rise of Fascism in Europe). Charismatic and appealing, Hitler was in the right place at the right time and knew what to say to each group of people to gain their support (The Rise of Fascism in Europe). In his speech from July of 1932, he says; “Our opponents. . . say that we don’t want to work with other parties. . . . I have given myself one goal- to sweep these thirty political parties out of Germany” (Hitler, 1932). Hitler did not deny it; he wanted to eliminate the competition and reduce Germany to one ruling political party. He took advantage of the broken economic state of Germany and the growing hatred of the current government and set the foundation of his regime upon it. Hitler focused on fueling the hatred of the Jews, communists and corrupt politicians, using the distaste for them that was already there (The Rise of Fascism in Europe). Hitler’s Nazism placed a strong emphasis on the nation and took “nationalism” to a new extreme. He also placed importance upon “Idealism, patriotism and national unity” and said that it “would create the basis for economic revival” (Evans, 245). But first, the old government had to be done away with. The Weimar democracy slowly started to fall apart. The Grand Coalition was eliminated in 1930 and the reformed government was now headed by a Reich Chancellor, a position that Hitler would shortly hold (Evans, 247).
Hitler’s timing and tactful rhetoric eventually paid off with him becoming the Chancellor of Germany on January 30, 1933 (Mitchell, 194). From there, the Nazi Party gained political power and status with no one daring to challenge them. “All over Germany, the old political foes of Nazism were beaten and murdered” effectively “eliminating all political parties but his own” (Mitchell, 211, 221). Then, in August of 1934, Hitler and the Nazi Party seized Germany with the death of Germany’s president, Paul von Hindenburg and Hitler taking over as a right-wing dictator (The Rise of Fascism in Europe (Overview)). Once he seized power, Hitler immediately began to focus on the military and its expansion, going directly against the Treaty of Versailles. Even though it did go against the treaty, it was what ultimately revived the German economy and brought them out of the Great Depression (The Rise of Fascism in Europe (Overview)). At the root of the Nazis’s emphasis on the military was their twisted violence. In one of their songs, they explicitly talk about using violence to take over. “That such an open celebration of brutal physical force could become the battle hymn of the Nazi Party speaks volumes for the central role that violence played in its quest for power” (Evans, 268). Hitler also wove his obsession with violence into the revival of German nationalism. Hitler revived the almost-forgotten sense of national unity by convincing the people that “problems come about when there are people within the political unit who are not a part of the ‘nation’” (Neel). The Jews and any other political opponents that threatened the Nazi party became people who were “not a part of the ‘nation’” (Neel). Hitler began to purge Germany from the unwanted, eliminating any musicians, artists or any cultural aspect, as well as political, that did not represent a perfect Germany (Evans, 392). “All this marked the culmination of a widespread action ‘against the un-German spirit’. . .” (Evans, 430). Adolf Hitler also gave the newly united perfect German people a strong leader to rally behind, but his “strength” came from violence and the elimination of all competition. By having his followers go to a church service or go out into the street trying to collect money for a charity Hitler attempted to “right the wrongs” and cover up the violence (Mitchell, 211-12). “They sponsored sporting events like track meets or soccer games, group sings for the whole family, hiking or camping trips into the countryside, and other similar activities” (Mitchell, 181). He appealed to the common man, both rich and poor. And even if he did not appeal to them in the beginning, many ended up won over by Hitler’s charismatic command of rhetoric. However “the greatest tragedy of the European depression was that it struck hardest in Germany, the great power where democracy was weakest. Once democracy had been destroyed in Germany, democracy in the rest of Europe stood at risk” (Wright).
After the failure of the democratic Weimar Republic, Hitler seized his opportunity and became Chancellor, biding his time until he was able to become dictator. Hitler threw out the old Germany, politically and culturally, under the illusion of reviving the old Germany and with the idea of eliminating the “un-German spirit” (Evans, 430). Hitler did in fact bring about a stronger military which rebuilt the German economy and pulled them out of the Depression, but at too high a price. Any competition or slight threat against Hitler was treated as “un-German”; “not to have gone along with the Nazis would have meant risking one’s livelihood and prospects, to have resisted could mean risking one’s life” (Evans, 390). The violence brought about by Nazi Germany was not worth the economic stability. Even that economic stability was temporary, soon to be destroyed by World War II.
Works Cited
1. Adolf Hitler 1932 Election Speech. Perf. Adolf Hitler. Adolf Hitler 1932 Election Speech. YouTube, 18 Oct. 2007. Web. 9 Apr. 2013.
2. Carey, John. "Ernest Hemingway September 19, 1922." Eyewitnesses to History. N.p.: n.p., n.d. N. pag. Print.
3. Mitchell, Otis C. Hitler over Germany: The Establishment of the Nazi Dictatorship (1918-1934). Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1983. Print.
4. Neel, Carolyn. "Nazism." World History: The Modern Era. ABC-CLIO, 2013. Web. 9 Apr. 2013.
5. "The Great Depression (Overview)." World History: The Modern Era. ABC-CLIO, 2013. Web. 9 Apr. 2013.
6. "The Rise of Fascism in Europe (Overview)." World History: The Modern Era. ABC-CLIO, 2013. Web. 9 Apr. 2013.
7. Wright, Esmond, and Christopher M. Andrew. "The Great Depression." An Illustrated History of the Modern World. London: Chancellor, 1992. N. pag. Print.
