Plain History: How Adolf Hitler Destroyed German Democracy in Six Months

Hosts

Derek ThompsonDerek Thompson

About the episode

Summary

• In the following excerpt, Derek and Richard J. Evans dive into the conditions in Germany that led people to vote for the Nazi Party and what Adolf Hitler’s real aims were as he rose to power. 

  Derek Thompson: Richard, in the open, I tried to give listeners a sense of what it was like to live in Germany at the end of 1932, beginning of 1933: the layers of economic desperation, national humiliation, the militarization of the culture, the frailty of its democratic legacy.

  What do you think we need to know to understand the psychology of the German people in late 1932 as they’re going to the polls to vote for the Nazi Party and other German political parties?

  Richard J. Evans: Well, you have to remember, the first thing is that you should never generalize about “the German people.” This is a country that’s more divided than almost any other in Europe at that time.

  It’s unique among large European countries in being divided by religion. So there’s about, not quite 60 percent are Protestant, and the rest are Catholic. And what that means is that you can’t really have a single conservative party, a mainstream conservative party. There’s a Catholic one, and there’s the Protestant one.

  And then secondly, it’s divided by class. It’s really quite hard to think ourselves back into that time, but social class is absolutely crucial. The different working class and the middle classes, they dress differently, they speak differently, they vote differently.

  And then region. You look at—Germany is a bigger country, much bigger than it is now, and it extends into East-Central Europe. So it’s very divided. And in fact, Hitler’s pitch in elections in the early ’30s was that he was going to unite the country.

  So Germany, as you said correctly, is in deep economic trouble. It was shocked, shattered by World War I. There was a hyperinflation, but that was over by 1924, and what came then was a brief stabilization of the economy. And then in 1929 with the Wall Street crash, American banks, which had funded this economic recovery, withdrew their short-term loans, and they plunged the German economy into a massive crisis: 35 percent unemployment, if you can imagine that, where more than one in three people lost their jobs, had no jobs.

  It was completely traumatic. This is no good. This is the first democracy we’ve had, the so-called Weimar Republic. Now you have full democracy with the ousting of the Kaiser at the end of World War I, which Germany had lost, and that’s not working. It can’t deliver prosperity. So they begin to vote for the Nazi Party. So that’s a kind of massive political and economic crisis in 1932.

  Thompson: So we’ve talked about the context of Nazi Germany. Let’s talk about the context of Adolf Hitler before we get to 1933.

  I think one of the more popular stories that’s been told about Hitler on the right in the last few years is this idea that Hitler was a reluctant participant in full-scale European war and the Holocaust. He was a constrained realist. His aims were limited. He just wanted to reestablish Germany’s power and its sense of pride after the Treaty of Versailles. He wanted to protect ethnic Germans to the east. He didn’t set out to be a new Napoleon. It was Winston Churchill’s fault that drew him into a continental war. And maybe he even didn’t mean for the Holocaust to turn out to be what it ended up being.

  Obviously, this is a huge claim, and I don’t want to spend all of our time on it. But having spent decades reviewing thousands, tens of thousands, of documents in the history of Adolf Hitler’s psychology and political philosophy and his work, how do you respond to this sort of new, trendy revisionism that says he was a constrained realist who didn’t want what ultimately happened in World War II?

  Evans: Well, the opening chapter, it’s 100 pages of my new book, Hitler’s People, that’s devoted to Hitler. God help me, I had to read all his speeches all over again and all his writings, including his autobiographical political tract, Mein Kampf (My Struggle), and so on. And it’s interesting; there’s a big divide.

  When he comes to power in 1933, he starts speaking, giving his speeches, which conceal his real aims because he knows that other countries are listening. Before that, he had no such qualms. And I had found a speech from 1930 to his own followers, a secret speech if you like, one that was not public, and in that he says—he looks back to the 1880s, which is the era he was born. He was born in 1889, and that’s the time of what we call the Scramble for Africa, when the European powers annex and take over huge swaths of Africa and the Pacific and the world.

  And he says in that speech, well, Germany came off really badly in that struggle for supremacy in the 1880s. We only got a few kind of leftovers after Britain and France had taken the lion’s share. But next time, he says—and there will be a new war, he says that quite openly to his followers, a new European war, and, indeed, all the evidence is that he intended there to be a war from the very beginning—that will be different. Germany will achieve world rule, rule over the world. The word he used in German is weltherrschaft, world rule. And it’ll be different. We will rule the world.

  And that’s a kind of astonishing claim to make. But that was what he wanted. When he knew that Britain, France, America were all listening to what he said, he portrayed himself as having much more limited aims. And that was plausible because Woodrow Wilson, U.S. president, had established at the end of World War I, which Germany, as you said, lost, that the principle of rebuilding Europe would be national self-determination. Every nation should have its own state.

  And the problem with that is that it’s a kind of jumble of different national, ethnic, and linguistic groups. There’s no point where you can say Germans end here, and then the Poles begin. They’re all mixed up.

  But the one nation that was not given its own state, as it were, was Germany. All of the states, of course, had substantial national minorities because you couldn’t draw this clear line. But the Austrians—German speakers, 6 million of them—were refused permission after the collapse of their empire over Eastern Europe, the Habsburg Empire, they were refused permission to unite with Germany. There were big German-speaking minorities in the Czech lands and in Poland and other parts of East-Central Europe. And Hitler pretended that he was only interested in, as it were, uniting those with the majority of Germans in Germany itself.

  But that was a pack of lies, to put it bluntly. And, of course, Hitler, if you look at all the treaties that he signed, he broke every single one of them. He broke the German-Polish Treaty [of] 1934, the Anglo German Naval Agreement of 1935, he broke the Nazi-Soviet Pact in 1939, he broke the Munich Agreement [of] 1938, all of them. He regarded them as just pieces of paper.

  And I’m afraid that the people who say that’s what he really wanted have fallen into the trap of believing him. But he was lying, and it was quite clear that he did not mean what he was saying because he broke all these treaties.

  There’s a lot of evidence from behind the scenes that he intended there to be a European and, probably, after that, even a World War. From the beginning, he tells all the generals in Germany as he is about to come to power, he’s going to give them a new European war. He’s going to overturn the results of World War I and go on to achieve this rule over the world.

  This excerpt has been edited and condensed.

  Host: Derek Thompson
  Guest: Richard J. Evans
  Producer: Devon Baroldi