Adolf Hitler's rise to power

• 1. Introduction

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  Adolf Hitler's rise to power began in a beer hall in Munich in September 1919, when a 30-year-old army intelligence agent walked into a meeting of a tiny fringe group called the German Workers' Party. He had been sent to spy on them. He left as a member, holding provisional card number 7. Within fourteen years, he would be the absolute dictator of Germany. How did a stateless Austrian with no formal political experience, no money of his own, and a criminal record for attempted coup d'état become the chancellor of one of the most powerful nations on earth? The answers lie in the wreckage of World War I, the structural failures of a young democracy, the economic catastrophe of the Great Depression, and in the particular talents of the man himself: his oratory, his willingness to use violence, and his instinct for exploiting the fears of a nation.

• 2. The Soil Before the Seed

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  Otto von Bismarck, Germany's founding chancellor, left a legacy that historians argue helped make the Nazi movement possible. His strategy of "negative integration" sought to unite a fractured new Germany not by building consensus but by rallying the population against a common enemy. From 1873 into the late 1870s he waged the Kulturkampf, a campaign questioning whether German Catholics were loyal to Berlin or to foreign Catholic powers. Rather than uniting Germany, it alienated a significant religious minority. In 1878 he turned against the left, introducing anti-socialist laws that stayed in force until 1890. Historians have noted that because the German state was still very new and impressionable at the time, Bismarck's confrontational style planted a durable idea: that a citizen was either loyal to the government or an enemy of the state. That binary framing would be exploited by every extremist movement that followed.

  World War I shattered whatever stability Bismarck's nation had managed to build. Germany emerged from November 1918 with a humiliating defeat, enormous casualties, and a new republic that many Germans associated with surrender rather than liberation. Munich, where Hitler arrived after his discharge, was in a state of socialist upheaval. The socialist politician Kurt Eisner had been shot dead by a German nationalist on the 21st of February 1919. Hitler watched that chaos firsthand, and he drew conclusions from it.

• 3. The Spy Who Stayed

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  Captain Karl Mayr made a decision in early June 1919 that he could not have anticipated would change history. In his role as head of the intelligence and propaganda department of the German military command in Munich, he recruited Hitler as an undercover agent. Hitler's assignment included infiltrating and reporting on the German Workers' Party, the DAP, which had been founded on the 5th of January 1919 at a small gathering at the restaurant Fuerstenfelder Hof in Munich. The party had been organized by Anton Drexler, Karl Harrer, and others through the amalgamation of several minor groups.

  At the DAP meeting of the 12th of September 1919, an audience member rose to argue that Bavaria should secede from Germany and unite with Austria. Hitler, by his own account in Mein Kampf, jumped up and scolded the man so forcefully that the man left before the meeting ended. Drexler, impressed, urged Hitler to join the party. Within a week Hitler received a postcard confirming his membership. He later wrote that joining the fledgling group "was the most decisive resolve of my life. From here there was and could be no turning back." He received a provisional card with the number 7. By early 1920 the party had grown to over 101 members, and Hitler's card was reissued as number 555, because the numbering had restarted from 501.

• 4. Building the Machine

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  By early 1920 Hitler had become chief of propaganda for the newly renamed Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, the NSDAP, the party that the world would come to know as the Nazis. He organised their biggest meeting yet: 2,000 people gathered on the 24th of February 1920 at the Staatliches Hofbräuhaus in Munich, where he announced the party's 25-point program. He also designed the party's banner: a swastika in a white circle on a red background. He was discharged from the army in March 1920 and began working for the party full time, supported financially by wealthy patrons and sympathisers despite the party's public claim that he took no income from them.

  The party's muscle took shape around the same time. A small "hall protection" squad organized around Emil Maurice in 1920 evolved through several names before becoming the Sturmabteilung, the SA, formally known by that name by November 1921. By the autumn of 1921, the group being called the Sturmabteilung was already a recognizable paramilitary force.

  Hitler's grip on the party machinery was secured through a crisis he manufactured himself. In June 1921, while he and Dietrich Eckart were on a fundraising trip to Berlin, members of the party's executive committee attempted to merge with a rival organization. Hitler returned to Munich on the 11th of July, angrily tendered his resignation, and made clear that his departure would mean the end of the party. He rejoined on the 26th of July as member 3,680, this time with absolute powers as party chairman. At the membership meeting that ratified the arrangement, only one vote was cast against him. The party's end-of-year membership stood at 2,000.

• 5. The Putsch and the Prison

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  Benito Mussolini's March on Rome in 1922 convinced Hitler that a coup d'état was the right model for seizing power in Germany. By May 1923, elements loyal to Hitler within the German military had helped the SA illegally acquire a barracks and its weapons. But the order to march never came, in part because Army General Otto von Lossow reportedly warned Hitler that he "would be fired upon" by Reichswehr troops if a putsch was attempted.

  Hitler moved anyway. On the 8th and the 9th of November 1923, he launched the Beer Hall Putsch from the Bürgerbräukeller in Munich, announcing that Bavarian government officials would be deposed and that Munich would serve as a staging point for a march on Berlin. Nearly 2,000 Nazi Party members advanced toward the Marienplatz in Munich's city center. A police cordon met them. Sixteen Nazi Party members and four police officers were killed. Hitler briefly fled the city before being arrested on the 11th of November 1923 and charged with high treason.

  The trial began in February 1924. Hitler turned it into a platform, putting the Weimar Republic itself on trial as a betrayal of Germany. He was convicted and sentenced on the 1st of April to five years of Festungshaft at Landsberg Prison, but the judge Georg Neithardt was sympathetic and cited Hitler's war service and his self-identification as German rather than Austrian in explaining the sentence. Hitler was released on the 20th of December 1924, after serving just nine months, over the objections of the state prosecutor. The most lasting product of his imprisonment was Mein Kampf, dictated principally to his deputy Rudolf Hess. It would become the foundational text of Nazi ideology.

• 6. The Legal Path to Power

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  After the failed putsch, the Nazi Party was banned in Bavaria, but it participated in the elections of 1924 under a proxy name, the National Socialist Freedom Movement. In the May 1924 federal election the movement won 6.6% of the vote, or roughly 1.9 million ballots. By December of that year, support had collapsed, with the movement holding only 14 Reichstag seats on 3% of the vote. Hitler drew a lesson: revolution by force had failed. He committed to what he called "the path of legality," using democratic elections to dismantle democracy from within.

  For years this strategy produced modest results. In the May 1928 federal election, the Nazi Party won just 12 Reichstag seats with 2.6% of the vote, or roughly 810,000 ballots. Party membership by the end of 1928 stood at 130,000. The Wall Street crash of 1929 changed everything. The Great Depression savaged the German economy, radicalized politics, and handed the Nazis the crisis they needed. In the September 1930 federal election, the party surged to 107 Reichstag seats with 18.3% of the vote, more than 6.4 million ballots. By the July 1932 election, the Nazis had become the largest party in the Reichstag with 230 out of 608 seats and 37.3% of the popular vote.

  The street violence ran in parallel. The SA marched into Communist strongholds, fought pitched battles with the Rotfront, and by the end of 1931 the two sides had killed dozens of each other. On the evening of the 14th of January 1930, Horst Wessel, a Nazi activist who had written a song that would become the movement's anthem, was fatally shot in Friedrichshain by a Communist gunman named Albert Hochter. Goebbels transformed the weeks Wessel spent on his deathbed into a propaganda event, and the funeral was staged as an anti-Communist spectacle. The song Wessel had written, the Horst-Wessel-Lied, became the Nazi anthem.

• 7. The Appointment

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  President Paul von Hindenburg was 84 years old and deeply reluctant to hand power to Hitler. His hesitance was shared by much of the conservative German establishment, which believed Hitler could be contained, used, and eventually discarded. Franz von Papen, who became chancellor in June 1932 after Hindenburg appointed him with the backing of General Kurt von Schleicher, privately told allies he intended to outmaneuver Hitler. That calculation proved wrong. When Schleicher maneuvered to have Papen removed and took the chancellorship himself, Papen reversed course and opened negotiations with Hitler, proposing a Nazi coalition with the German National People's Party.

  A letter signed by 22 prominent representatives of industry, finance, and agriculture, known as the Industrielleneingabe, urged Hindenburg to appoint Hitler chancellor. After two inconclusive elections in July and November 1932 had failed to produce a working parliamentary majority, Hindenburg acquiesced. On the 30th of January 1933, in a brief ceremony in Hindenburg's office, the new cabinet was sworn in. Hitler became chancellor; Wilhelm Frick became Minister of the Interior; Hermann Göring became Minister Without Portfolio. The SA and SS led torchlit parades through Berlin that night.

  Few observers at the time believed Hitler could establish a dictatorship. Conservatives were certain they could control him. Some foreign ambassadors described him as a mediocre imitation of Mussolini. Even a Social Democratic politician called him a Dekorationsstück, a piece of scenery in someone else's government. Sir Horace Rumbold, the British Ambassador in Berlin, was one of the few who saw clearly. On the 22nd of February 1933, he wrote that Hitler was "an uncommonly clever and audacious demagogue," and he informed London's Foreign Office that the Nazis had "come to stay."

• 8. Absolute Power

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  The Reichstag fire in February 1933 gave Hitler the emergency he needed. Accusing Communists of the arson, with Dutch Communist Marinus van der Lubbe found at the scene, Hitler persuaded Hindenburg to sign the Reichstag Fire Decree, which stripped citizens of fundamental liberties and allowed Hitler to begin removing political opponents systematically.

  On the 23rd of March 1933, Hitler called on the Reichstag to pass the Enabling Act, which would give him the power to pass and enforce laws without parliamentary oversight or constitutional limits. With Nazi paramilitaries surrounding the building, he told the assembled members: "It is for you, gentlemen of the Reichstag to decide between war and peace." The Centre Party, having extracted promises of non-interference in religion, joined with conservatives to pass the Act. Only the Social Democrats voted against. The law came into force in March; by April, Hitler held de facto dictatorial power and ordered the construction of Germany's first concentration camp at Dachau, initially for Communists and other political opponents. All other political parties were formally outlawed on the 14th of July 1933.

  Hindenburg remained president until his death in August 1934. On the day Hindenburg died, every soldier in the German military swore the Hitler Oath, pledging unconditional personal obedience to Hitler, not to the office or to the nation. Hitler then merged the chancellery and the presidency into the single title of Führer under the "Law Concerning the Head of State of the German Reich." A referendum held that year ratified the arrangement by a large majority. The man who had joined a fringe political party as an army spy in 1919 now held every instrument of German state power in his own hands.