Helped into Power Nazis: A Warning from History

Hidden in a forest, in what is now the eastern part of Poland, near the border with Russia,

lie the remains of a concrete town.

For three crucial years during WWII

this was home to one of the most infamous figures in world history.

A man who said he and the nation he led would create an empire which would outlast any other.

RECORDING OF HITLER SPEAKING

Here at the Wolf's Lair,

his headquarters in the forest of Rastenburg, in what was then German East Prussia,

Adolf Hitler took decisions which shaped the course of WWII.

The result was a level of destruction and suffering unprecedented in the history of war.

55 million people died in WWII.

The Germans took five million Russian prisoners of war alone.

Only two million survived.

During the war, Hitler authorised a policy unique in all history,

the mechanised extermination of an entire people.

All this was possible because the Nazis ruled Germany.

How could it be that a cultured nation at the heart of Europe

ever allowed such a man, and the Nazi party he led, to come to power?

Leading Nazis explained their success easily.

It was inevitable given what they called the superhuman qualities of their leader.

But the true reasons for the Nazis' rise to power are not that simple and are much more alarming.

Nazism, which was to create the Second World War,

was born out of the first.

On November 11th 1918, to the surprise of German troops, the war stopped.

IN GERMAN:

The myth grew among many of the surrendered German soldiers that they had been stabbed in the back,

that the front-line troops and the two million German war dead

were betrayed by Marxists and Jews who had fermented dissent at home.

As the surviving troops returned to the newly democratic Germany, they took their bitterness with them.

It would grow into Nazism in the south of Germany, in Bavaria.

Bavaria is a picture-book land, famous for its lederhosen and its beer halls,

but at the end of WWI, conditions existed here which would create a revolution.

After the war, the Allies continued to blockade Germany

and the returning troops were shocked to discover how much their families were still suffering.

Millions of Germans were hungry

and thousands more were dying of tuberculosis and influenza.

Politics were polarised.

Conservatives and Socialists became radical in the face of crisis.

With the whole of Germany in turmoil in the spring of 1919,

the unrest in Munich resulted in a left-wing takeover of the city, the Raterepublik.

This culminated, in April 1919, in the Munich Soviet Republic,

an attempt to create a soviet-style government of the city,

only 18 months after the victory of the Bolsheviks in the Soviet Union.

Government troops were sent to quash the rebellion and there was fighting on the streets of Munich.

GUNFIRE AND EXPLOSIONS

More than 500 people were killed.

The soldiers were supported by the Freikorps,

right-wing mercenaries paid for by the government.

In Munich, there were cases where the Freikorps simply shot members of the Raterepublik out of hand.

Other Freikorps members heartily approved of the brutal measures

used to suppress Communist revolutionaries throughout Germany.

Eugene Levine's father was the leader of the Raterepublik.

He was executed in June 1919.

I understand, from my mother,

that he had been very brave, the way he met his death.

And in fact, he called out, er,

"Long live the world revolution."

And I realised that an honourable person would die sooner or later,

either on the barricades or put up against a wall and shot.

Eugene Levine's father was Jewish,

and the anti-Semitic prejudice of those on the right

was further fuelled by the fact that of the leadership of the Raterepublik, most were Jewish.

To the Freikorps, who celebrated in Munich after the suppression of the Raterepublik,

the Jews were convenient scapegoats,

held to blame for all the country's ills.

And the Freikorps had the support of right-wing officers in the army,

like Captain Ernst Rohm, a man with a simple philosophy.

"Since I am an immature and wicked man,

"war and unrest appeal to me more than order."

Rohm was involved in the violent politics of the extreme right,

and in 1919, he joined the small German Workers' Party.

Here he met a 30-year-old veteran of WWI, Corporal Adolf Hitler,

a man who shared with Rohm a deep hatred of Communists and Jews.

Hitler had also joined the German Workers' Party in 1919.

His membership card said he was member 555,

but in reality, he was member 55.

They numbered from 500 to make it look as if they had more members.

Hitler was like thousands of other ex-soldiers, drifting without a job.

He discovered a natural talent.

He could channel his anger at the way the war ended into powerful speeches.

Hitler spoke about what he called the iniquity of the Versailles Treaty, signed at the end of WWI.

Under the treaty, Germany lost large amounts of her own territory

and was forced to pay reparations to the victors.

In the early 1920s, inflation spiralled out of control.

In Bavaria, by 1921, Hitler had become leader of the small German Workers' Party,

renamed the National Socialist German Workers' Party,

or the Nazis for short.

It was still one of many different right-wing parties in Munich,

and they still all said the same -

Versailles was a crime and the Jews were behind it.

But Hitler's dynamism, together with his uncompromising tone,

began to attract other prominent Bavarians to the Nazi party.

In 1922, a WWI flying ace joined the Nazis.

Holder of awards for gallantry and Richthofen squadron commander during WWI, Hermann Goering.

"I joined the party because it was revolutionary, not because of any ideological nonsense."

The Nazi party spread its appeal into the Bavarian countryside.

One agricultural student, who was to become a chicken farmer, found in the Nazis

an expression of his obsession with the relationship between German blood and German soil.

"The yeoman of his own acre is the backbone of the German people's character.

"Cowards are born in towns, heroes in the country."

The words of another Bavarian, Heinrich Himmler,

chicken farmer and, later, commander of the SS.

In January 1923, the Nazis exploited the discontent caused by the French occupation of the Ruhr.

French troops came to enforce reparation payments.

They succeeded in alienating the Germans.

In Munich, in 1923, in the atmosphere of crisis caused by the occupation of the Ruhr,

Hitler and the Nazis acted.

Hitler stood on the stage of the Burgerbraukeller on November 8th, interrupting a right-wing meeting.

He called for a revolution to overthrow the left-wing government in Berlin.

The next day, the Nazis and other right-wing parties marched through Munich to gain support.

They were stopped by the police at the war memorial.

The Nazis hoped the army and police, many of whom were right-wingers,

would join them in a march on Berlin.

GUNFIRE

The police didn't support them.

Shots were fired and the marchers were routed. Hitler fled the scene.

Four policemen and 16 Nazis lost their lives.

Hitler was tried with other leaders of the putsch in early 1924.

The trial was a media sensation with entrance by ticket only.

The Nazis hadn't just killed four policemen,

they had also organised a bank robbery.

A defiant Hitler told the court,

"You may pronounce us guilty,

"but the goddess who presides over the eternal court of history

"will, with a smile, tear in pieces the charge of the public prosecutor

"for she acquits us."

Hitler gained fame for his apparently brave stand.

But it was a con trick,

for he knew as he spoke that the judge would be lenient.

Hidden from the public was the truth about a previous appearance Hitler had made in a Bavarian court.

More than two years before,

Nazi thugs, egged on by Hitler, had disrupted a left-wing meeting,

dragged the speaker off the stage and beaten him up.

Almost all the documents relating to the trial were seized by the Nazis when they came to power.

But one or two from this trial survived, hidden in the archive,

and they tell truths the Nazis wanted to hide.

Hitler got the minimum sentence possible - three months in prison.

The sympathy of the judge didn't stop there.

He wrote to the appeal court and asked them to reduce his sentence.

As a result, Hitler served only one month in prison

and a period on probation.

The judge in Hitler's first trial was called Georg Neithardt,

the same judge whom the authorities let preside over the putsch trial.

It must have been obvious to Hitler that the court would be lenient.

Hitler had attempted revolution, incited murder and his followers had robbed a bank.

He served nine months in Landsberg prison.

But even so, by 1924, it seemed that Hitler and the Nazis had become an irrelevance.

In the mid-1920s, the German economy recovered, as inflation was reduced to single figures.

The Weimar government had solved the reparations problem by borrowing money from the Americans

which it used to pay the French and British their own reparations.

The good times were financed by short-term credit.

There were Germans who disapproved of the "Weimar decadence".

They joined non-political groups like the Wandervogel,

who called for a return to an older, simpler way of life.

One small political party sought to capitalize on this longing for old-fashioned values.

In the mid-1920s, the Nazi party was small but radical.

Their party programme promised that if the Nazi party came into power

German Jews would be stripped of citizenship and could be expelled from the country.

INTERVIEWER ASKS IN GERMAN:

The fantasy of a world Jewish conspiracy was openly preached by the Nazis...and believed.

Along with their anti-Semitism went a belief that violence was a part of the political process.

The party had a paramilitary wing, the brown-shirted storm troopers,

who protected Nazi meetings, intimidated the followers of other parties and drummed up support.

Towering over the small party

was the personality of the man now called the Fuhrer, Adolf Hitler.

The way the party was evolving was essentially the way it would be structured when they ruled Europe,

and the structure was a strange one.

Though these images of Nazi offices in the 1920s seem ordered enough,

the administration of the party was chaotic.

Hitler hated committee meetings and disliked arbitrating between rivals.

The Fuhrer was often late.

One prominent Nazi, Gottfried Feder, complained to Hitler,

"I regard your time management as very damaging for the entire movement."

Yet the party still functioned.

Hitler was a passionate believer in the law of natural selection.

"Men dispossess one another

"and one perceives that, at the end of it all,

"it is always the stronger who triumphs.

"The stronger asserts his will.

"It's the law of nature."

Hitler's obsession with this idea of the survival of the fittest

meant that when a party member wrote to him and asked to be made leader of his local branch,

he was answered thus by Max Amann, one of Hitler's confidants -

"Herr Hitler takes the view that it is not the job of the leadership to appoint party leaders.

"You state that almost all the local members have confidence in you,

"so why don't you take over leadership of the branch?"

But now, seven years after Hitler had become leader,

the Nazi party was failing dismally in the great struggle.

Despite the enthusiasm of the party faithful,

the Nazis could not get themselves elected to power.

In the 1928 election, the Nazis got just 2.6% of the vote.

The vast majority of the German electorate, over 97%,

rejected them and their leader.

This secret government report, compiled before the 1928 election,

says that the Nazi party has "no noticeable influence" on the great masses of the population.

The Nazis were a tiny fringe party, almost a joke.

Yet, just four years and eight months later,

Hitler was chancellor of Germany,

for the Nazis were helped by circumstance.

Germany suffered.

A drop in world agricultural prices brought poverty to the countryside

and then the Wall Street Crash heralded a world economic slump.

The Americans called in their loans.

German unemployment rose to five and a half million in 1931.

Unemployed lived rough in the cities

as Germany became economically the worst-hit nation in the world.

Then, just when it seemed things couldn't get any worse...

Then, just when it seemed things couldn't get any worse...they did.

The five major banks crashed in 1931.

More than 20,000 German businesses folded.

Now the middle class was suffering.

In the economic crisis, the Nazis' vote increased.

They still said the same -

Versailles was a crime, Jews should lose citizenship, Marxism must be destroyed, Germany must be reborn.

The message hadn't changed but more Germans were ready to hear it,

and in this economic crisis, people who had never seen or heard Hitler still voted Nazi.

RECORDING OF HITLER SPEAKING

In a remote town in German East Prussia, like Neidenburg,

in 1928, the Nazis got 2.3% of the vote.

In 1930, their vote leapt up to 25.8%,

yet Hitler didn't visit here and there was no Nazi party in the town.

But the Communists started to pick up votes too.

Something sinister was happening to this new democracy.

It seemed to be splitting apart as voters rushed to the extremes.

Alois Pfaller had joined the Communist party in the late 1920s

and now took on the Nazis in the streets.

SONG TRANSLATED FROM GERMAN:

NEW SONG:

FIRST SONG AGAIN:

Hitler said that he was the man who could solve the economic crisis,

at the head of a dynamic party that promised to destroy Germany's internal enemies.

And Hitler campaigned in a fresh and original way.

In his 1932 election campaign,

he travelled by aeroplane to 20 cities in seven days.

Though he was to lose the election to President Hindenburg,

Hitler had established himself as a credible alternative leader.

The Nazi party proposed little in the way of detailed policies,

but it offered order, discipline and the personality of Adolf Hitler.

Fridolin von Spaun met him in the early 1930s.

By 1932, the majority of Germans, in voting for Communists and Nazis,

were voting for parties openly committed to overthrowing democracy.

Democracy had arrived in Germany at the end of WWI.

Now the majority of Germans wanted rid of it.

Hitler made it quite clear that a vote for the Nazis was a vote for dictatorship.

As a result of the elections of July 1932,

the Nazis became the biggest party in Germany, with 37% of the vote.

One man stood between Hitler and the chancellorship,

the man Hitler had challenged for the presidency.

Hindenburg met Hitler on August 13th 1932.

Hitler demanded to be chancellor.

Hindenburg refused, and his state secretary recorded the reasons why.

"He could not bring himself to give government power to a single party

"which did not represent the majority of the electorate

"and which was intolerant, lacking in discipline and frequently appeared violent."

But then, different pressure groups began to lobby President Hindenburg.

A group of businessmen, including the former president of the Reichsbank, Hjalmar Schacht,

wrote to Hindenburg, arguing that Hitler must get the chancellorship for the good of Germany.

New pressures came as the results of an army war game arrived.

It said that in the event of civil unrest, the army couldn't control both the Nazis and the Communists.

"It's been shown that the forces of law and order of the Reich and of the German states

"could not protect the country against National Socialists and Communists and protect the borders."

But if there were pressures on Hindenburg as 1932 came to a close,

there were also pressures on the Nazis.

The crowds outside Nazi headquarters in Munich

weren't aware of the nature of the problem.

They were going bankrupt due to the cost of fighting so many elections.

A key figure in the party, Gregor Strasser, had just resigned

and the Nazi vote had dropped to 33% in the November 1932 election.

It looked like their support had peaked.

But the traditional right felt they had to negotiate with Hitler.

They too wanted to eliminate democracy

and without the Nazis they had no access to mass support.

A former chancellor, the aristocratic von Papen, came up with a deal.

Hitler could be chancellor if von Papen was vice chancellor

and there were only two other Nazis in the cabinet.

The theory was Hitler would be tamed.

As a result, Hindenburg offered Adolf Hitler the chancellorship on January 30th 1933.

Von Papen crowed, "We've hired him,"

and the new cabinet posed for the cameras.

The Nazis would later try and rewrite history

to say that he became chancellor simply because it was his destiny,

but, in reality, he had been helped into power by economic circumstance

and the support and miscalculation of others.

It all happened so fast in those days,

after one had seen it come gradually.

The Communist party line, to which I still belonged,

was that it doesn't matter if Hitler gets to power.

He'll soon prove himself incompetent and then it's our turn.

For some extraordinary reason,

they didn't realise that he was going to change the law once he came to power,

which he did very smartly.

On January 30th 1933, the same day Hitler was appointed chancellor,

the Nazis held a torchlight celebration parade in Berlin.

The revolution had begun.

There were a few storm troopers who had Jewish girlfriends

and therefore, a lot of German Jews thought, "Oh, well, it's not going to be so bad.

"They have Jewish girlfriends, they can't hate us all."

Oh, it's heartbreaking.