Why Ordinary Germans Chose Hitler

[00:00:00]In popular memory, the death of the Weimar Republic is sometimes reduced to a simplistic tale of how a madman hypnotized an otherwise rational populace through the dark arts of relentless propaganda and charisma.

[00:00:12]These explanations, while comforting to some, obviously fail to withstand historical scrutiny and ultimately infantilize the electorate of the era.

[00:00:21]As the historian Richard J. Evans has argued, viewing the rise of the Third Reich just as a triumph of hate, fanaticism, or mass delusion deliberately obscures the highly contingent reality of the interwar period. The historical truth is that the Nazi Party was not swept into power by a brainwashed or entirely irrational citizenry. Instead, National Socialism was actively supported, tolerated, or passively accepted by millions of ordinary, rational Germans who genuinely believed their nation was in the throes of an existential collapse. If we want to understand what happened in 1933, we must look beyond the dictator's personality and examine the structural, economic, and psychological preconditions of the Weimar era.

[00:01:05]Hitler's ascent was mostly dependent upon a multi-layered historical crisis.

[00:01:10]The traumatic defeat of the First World War, the humiliation of the Treaty of Versailles, devastating cycles of economic ruin, the normalization of paramilitary violence, and the paralysis of liberal democratic institutions. Most crucially, the middle-class voters, conservative elites, rural farmers, and military veterans who eventually formed the bedrock of Nazi support did not perceive their political choices as a simple, morally unambiguous binary between a functional democracy and authoritarianism. Rather, they felt trapped in a rapidly deteriorating society squeezed between two extremes.

[00:01:46]On the radical left stood the vanguard of a revolutionary, property-destroying Marxist-Leninist uprising actively directed by Moscow. On the radical right stood a militant nationalist movement that despite its crude thuggery, promised order and national salvation.

[00:02:02]For many ordinary Germans, the Weimar Republic had fundamentally failed to provide basic security, economic prosperity, or national dignity. Liberal democracy was widely viewed as a weak alien system imposed by conquering powers, a system fundamentally incapable of protecting the nation from the very real threat of a Bolshevik revolution.

[00:02:23]In this climate of intense polarization, the NSDAP was increasingly viewed as a necessary counter-revolutionary force.

[00:02:32]It was perceived as a ruthless but restorative movement capable of imposing order and defending traditional European civilization from communist dissolution.

[00:02:42]Thus, by examining the collapse of institutional legitimacy, the normalization of street violence, and the pervasive dread of a Marxist takeover, we can understand why a large segment of German society came to rationalize the Nazis as the lesser evil. The foundational trauma that haunted the Weimar Republic was born in the bitter autumn of 1918. When Imperial Germany surrendered, it did so not after foreign armies had fought their way to the gates of Berlin, but while German troops still occupied vast tracts of foreign soil in France, Belgium, and Eastern Europe. The suddenness of the capitulation, combined with the collapse of the Hohenzollern monarchy, and the abdication of Kaiser Wilhelm II produced a cognitive dissonance among the German public. The populace, having been fed relentless propaganda promising imminent victory, was entirely unprepared for defeat. This psychological dislocation immediately spawned the Dolchstoßlegende or the stab-in-the-back myth, a highly effective narrative promoted by the military high command, notably Generals Paul von Hindenburg and Erich Ludendorff. This myth posited that the heroic undefeated German army had been betrayed from within by a of socialists, communists, and Jews, the November criminals who had fomented revolution at home, undermined the war effort, and signed a cowardly armistice.

[00:04:00]This narrative fundamentally delegitimized the new democratic republic from its very inception, shifting the blame for the catastrophic defeat away from the aristocratic military leadership and onto the civilian politicians of the center left.

[00:04:13]This sense of domestic betrayal was infinitely deepened by the Treaty of Versailles in 1919.

[00:04:20]The treaty was perceived across the entire German political spectrum as a punitive, vindictive diktat designed to permanently the nation.

[00:04:28]Territorially, Germany was severely dismembered. It was stripped of 13% of its European territory, including the industrially vital Alsace-Lorraine and the Polish Corridor, a loss that completely severed East Prussia from the rest of the German state. Furthermore, the confiscation of all overseas colonies shattered the pre-war imperial mindscape, a deeply entrenched vision of global prowess and economic destiny that had been foundational to the German middle class identity since the late 19th century. Beyond territorial dismemberment, the treaty imposed severe restrictions on German sovereignty. The proud German army, which was once the most formidable land force in Europe, was limited to just 100,000 men, and the nation was denied an air force, heavy artillery, and submarines. Economically, the imposition of astronomical, theoretically limitless reparations tied the nation's future productivity entirely to the service of foreign debt.

[00:05:23]However, it could be argued that the most enduring damage was psychological.

[00:05:27]The treaty codified this degradation in Article 231, the infamous war guilt clause, which forced Germany to accept total moral and legal responsibility for the outbreak of the war. For the German populace, the Weimar Republic was inextricably linked to this national degradation. The democratic government having been forced to sign the treaty under the explicit threat of an Allied invasion and the continuation of a devastating naval blockade was branded with the permanent stigma of surrender and subjugation. As the historian Robert Gerwarth outlines, the end of the war did not bring peace to Central Europe. Rather, it initiated a vicious cycle of paramilitary violence, irredentism, and counterrevolution among the vanquished nations. And as such, Germany was not just a defeated state. It was a dishonored, betrayed, and degraded society where millions of demobilized veterans returned to a fractured homeland harboring unresolvable resentments. The democratic republic was born in the suffocating shadow of this defeat, ensuring that it struggled to command the patriotic loyalty of conservative elites, civil servants, and the broader middle class who fundamentally associated democracy with national weakness and international humiliation. To accurately reconstruct the political calculations of ordinary Germans in the 1920s and 1930s, one must deeply grapple with the existential terror inspired by the Russian Revolution of 1917.

[00:06:55]The Bolshevik seizure of power to the German bourgeoisie, independent farmers, the clergy, and the conservative establishment represented an apocalyptic ideology explicitly bent on the total annihilation of the existing social, moral, and economic order. The horrors of the Russian Civil War and the ensuing Red Terror were widely reported in the German press and vividly recounted by waves of traumatized Eastern European refugees and White Russian emigres fleeing westward to cities like Berlin and Munich. Germans read with horror of the extermination of the Romanov family, the Cheka's summary executions of class enemies, and the complete unapologetic expropriation of private property, agricultural land, and businesses.

[00:07:38]Furthermore, the militant anti-clericalism of the Soviet regime, which resulted in the widespread destruction of churches and the murder of priests, deeply terrified Germany's devout Christian populations, both Catholic and Protestant. As Richard Evans notes, it would be difficult to exaggerate the fear and terror that these events spread amongst many parts of the population in Western and Central Europe. The middle and upper classes were alarmed by the radical rhetoric of the Communists and saw their counterparts in Russia lose their property and disappear into the torture chambers and prison camps of the Cheka.

[00:08:13]The German historian Ernst Nolte controversially, but effectively conceptualized this era as a European Civil War, arguing that the ideological polarization of the interwar period was largely driven by the original aggressive threat of Bolshevik totalitarianism.

[00:08:30]While Nolte's later attempts to draw direct causal and moral equivalencies between the Soviet Gulag and the Nazi Holocaust sparked the fierce academic controversy known as the Historikerstreit, Historians' Dispute, his earlier premise successfully captures the subjective psychological reality of the era. National Socialism and other European fascist movements derived massive reactionary momentum from the genuine dread of a Marxist-Leninist revolution. Fascism successfully positioned itself as the necessary, militant, and uncompromising antithesis to Communism. Crucially, Bolshevism was fundamentally and militantly internationalist. Lenin and Trotsky explicitly viewed the backward Russian state as the initial staging ground for a global workers' uprising, with the highly industrialized, politically unstable German state serving as the necessary prize for the survival of the global revolution. The creation of the Communist International Comintern in 1919 clearly signaled Moscow's intent to actively fund and export revolution to the West. For the German Mittelstand, middle class, civil servants, shopkeepers, and independent farmers, a communist victory did not signify the introduction of higher progressive taxes or increased trade union influence within a democratic framework. It meant de-kulakization, forced collectivization, the loss of all personal and familial assets, and potential physical liquidation as defined class enemies. This fear created an environment where any political force that promised to ruthlessly crush the Marxist threat was viewed by conservative and bourgeois demographics as a potential savior of traditional European civilization, regardless of its other extreme attributes. The collapse of the German Empire in November 1918 immediately spawned a highly active radical left-wing movement aiming to replicate the successful Russian model.

[00:10:21]The widespread establishment of workers and soldiers councils across major German cities mirrored the Soviet system, directly challenging the establishment of a liberal parliamentary democracy, and threatening to bypass traditional state authority entirely.

[00:10:37]The most prominent early confrontation was the Spartacist uprising in Berlin in January 1919, led by the charismatic Marxist intellectuals Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg. The newly formed Communist Party of Germany, KPD, attempted an armed insurrection to violently overthrow the provisional Social Democratic, SPD, government.

[00:10:58]Bereft of a reliable national army following the demobilization, the SPD government made the decision to ally with the Freikorps, who were heavily armed right-wing paramilitary units composed of embittered anti-republican war veterans. The Freikorps crushed the uprising in the streets of Berlin, summarily executing Luxemburg and Liebknecht without trial, an event that permanently poisoned relations between the moderate SPD and the radical KPD, fatally fracturing the German left. The political violence was even more extreme and traumatic in the south. In April 1919, radical socialists and communists declared the Bavarian Soviet Republic in Munich. Under the leadership of figures like the Russian-born Jewish communist Eugen Levine, the Munich Soviet initiated its own localized red terror. The revolutionary government seized private property, established a red army, and ultimately took right-wing figures, nobles, and members of the Thule Society as hostages. When government forces approached the city, Levine's radical forces executed several prominent hostages, an act of brutal escalation that shocked and outraged the Bavarian public. In response, the SPD government in Berlin again unleashed the Freikorps, resulting in the white terror. The Freikorps conquered Munich in May 1919 with artillery and flamethrowers massacring between 600 and 1,200 communists, anarchists, and suspected left-wing sympathizers in the streets and courtyards of the city. This intense bloodletting had long-term consequences for the political trajectory of the Weimar Republic. Bavaria, which was a traditionally conservative/Catholic stronghold, shifted sharply to the hard radical right, viewing the brief Soviet Republic as a terrifying reign of terror, food shortages, and alien occupation. Munich subsequently became a highly fertile breeding ground for reactionary völkisch movements, serving as the incubator for Hitler's nascent Nazi Party. Notably, Adolf Hitler was present in Munich during these events, and the trauma of the Soviet Republic heavily influenced his later anti-Marxist views and rhetoric.

[00:13:04]Furthermore, these events established an enduring paradigm for the Weimar Republic. Political disputes were increasingly settled in the streets through the deployment of armed paramilitaries. Throughout the 1920s and early 1930s, intense bloody street battles between the KPD's Rotfrontkämpferbund, Red Front Fighters League, the Nazi Sturmabteilung, SA, and the conservative Stahlhelm became a routine feature of urban life. For ordinary citizens navigating this chaos, the normalization of political violence underscored the impotence of the democratic state, validating the growing belief that only a strong militarized authoritarian power could restore public order and prevent a descent into total civil war. Even without the immense external pressures of economic ruin and paramilitary street violence, the Weimar Republic was vulnerable from its inception. Its constitution, while celebrated by liberals as one of the most progressive and democratic in the world, contained mechanisms that practically ensured political instability. The system of absolute proportional representation meant that even minor radical fringe parties could gain seats in the Reichstag. While this accurately reflected the deep diversity of German political thought, it made securing a stable, ideologically cohesive governing majority nearly impossible.

[00:14:24]Consequently, the entire Weimar period was characterized by weak and short-lived coalition governments.

[00:14:30]Between the founding of the Republic in 1919 and Hitler's appointment in 1933, Germany saw 20 separate cabinets, with most lasting less than a single year.

[00:14:41]This continuous parliamentary fragmentation bred a pervasive public cynicism regarding the efficacy of democracy, which was increasingly viewed by the electorate as a forum for endless self-serving partisan bickering rather than effective decisive governance. To many Germans, democracy quickly became synonymous with paralysis and national weakness. Furthermore, the Republic suffered from a critical lack of a broad foundation of genuine ideological support. It was frequently described as a republic without republicans. The traditional conservative elites, the powerful military officer corps, the judiciary, the higher civil service, and major industrialists remained fundamentally hostile to the democratic project. They often viewed themselves as loyal servants of the abstract German state rather than the specific democratic republic, openly harboring monarchist or authoritarian sympathies, and frequently treating left-wing insurgents with extreme prejudice while handing lenient sentences to right-wing terrorists. Simultaneously, the KPD on the radical left actively sought the complete overthrow of the democratic order, adhering strictly to the revolutionary dictates of Moscow. The historian Detlev Peukert interpreted the failure of Weimar as the inevitable crisis of classical modernity. Weimar Germany was undergoing a period of incredibly rapid social, cultural, and technological modernization. Rapid urbanization, the visible emancipation of women, the proliferation of avant-garde art, and the loosening of traditional patriarchal hierarchies provoked severe cultural anxieties among conservative, religious, and rural populations. The democratic system was inextricably linked in the public mind to this turbulent, unsettling modernity.

[00:16:25]When the system eventually failed to deliver economic security, large swaths of the population rejected not only the political government, but the entire liberal modernist urban-centric project it represented. As the structural deadlock worsened in the early 1930s, the republic increasingly relied on Article 48 of the constitution, which allowed the president to rule by emergency decree, effectively bypassing the deadlocked Reichstag entirely. As the eminent political scientist Karl Dietrich Bracher noted in his seminal work The Auflösung der Weimarer Republik, the ultimate dissolution of the republic began long before Hitler's appointment. It started precisely when the government shifted from a parliamentary basis to a quasi dictatorship under the aged President Paul von Hindenburg and his consecutive chancellors Brüning, Papen, and Schleicher.

[00:17:16]By the time the political crisis reached its peak in 1932, the ideal of liberal democracy had already been gouged out from within, leaving a massive power vacuum waiting to be filled by a more decisive, ruthless, authoritarian force.

[00:17:31]The fragile political architecture of the Weimar Republic might have survived its inherent constitutional flaws had it not been subjected to two devastating economic cataclysms that fundamentally obliterated the German public's trust in institutional stability. Economic devastation acts as the ultimate radicalizing agent in any society. When the mechanisms of daily survival break down, the appeal of centrist politics quickly starts to evaporate and is replaced by a desperate search for radical salvation. The first shock was the hyperinflation crisis of 1923.

[00:18:06]Triggered by the French and Belgian military occupation of the industrial Ruhr Valley due to defaulted reparations and the German government's subsequent policy of passively resisting by printing unbacked currency to pay striking workers, the value of the mark collapsed to an unimaginable, absurd degree. By November 1923, a single US dollar was worth an incomprehensible 4.2 trillion marks. While industrial tycoons with hard assets in foreign currency survived or even profited by buying up bankrupt competitors, the traditional German middle class was practically wiped out. Lifelong savings, war bonds purchased out of patriotism, fixed pensions, and salaried incomes became mathematically worthless overnight. As the journalist Sebastian Haffner chronicled in his posthumous memoir Defying Hitler, the hyperinflation permanently scarred a generation. It destroyed the foundational bourgeois virtues of thrift, hard work, and trust in the state. "Not only money, but all standards lost their value," Haffner observed, noting the lingering cynicism that the crisis had permanently etched into the German psyche. Even though the currency was eventually stabilized, the damage was irreversible. The middle class never forgave the Republic for wiping out its security. Following a brief period of debt-fueled stabilization, funded heavily by short-term American loans, the Dawes Plan, the second fatal blow arrived with the Wall Street crash of 1929 and the ensuing global Great Depression.

[00:19:36]The immediate withdrawal of American capital collapsed the highly leveraged German economy. Industrial production plummeted by over 40% and by 1932, nearly 6 million Germans, roughly 1/3 of the entire workforce, were officially unemployed with millions more suffering on drastically reduced hours and wages.

[00:19:56]Rather than stimulating the economy through public spending, Chancellor Heinrich Brüning enacted pro-cyclical austerity measures, repeatedly utilizing Article 48 to force through brutal public spending cuts, wage reductions, and steep tax increases. The quantitative impact of these policies was devastating. State-level real expenditure was slashed by 8% while Reich-level expenditure fell by 14% between 1930 and 1932.

[00:20:24]The overt scale of the misery, mass bankruptcies, bank failures, widespread malnutrition, and the collapse of the welfare system created an undeniable sense that liberal capitalism and parliamentary democracy had totally failed. Desperate voters, viewing the moderate establishment parties as the deliberate architects of their ruin, flocked in their millions to the political extremes. It is a historical error to view the sudden electoral surge of the Nazi Party solely as a triumph of anti-Semitism or blind fanaticism. While an obsessive biological racialism was undeniably central to Hitler's personal worldview and the core ideology of the party, the mass appeal of the NSDAP during the Great Depression was fundamentally rooted in its unique ability to present an alternative to the despair and paralysis of Weimar. The Nazis operated as a highly effective catch-all party of protest, tailoring their messaging to resonate with a wide contradictory array of disaffected demographics. To the millions of desperate unemployed workers, the Nazis promised immediate jobs, massive public works programs, and relief from destitution. To the heavily debt-ridden rural farmers in Protestant regions like Schleswig-Holstein and Franconia, they promised agricultural tariffs and debt relief. To the traditional middle classes, civil servants, and small business owners squeezed by major corporate monopolies on one side and terrified of communist expropriation on the other, the Nazis offered physical protection and a guarantee to restore bourgeois stability. Above all, to a nation still nursing the wounds of the 1918 defeat, Hitler promised an unapologetic national revival, the tearing up of the hated Treaty of Versailles, the aggressive rearmament of the military, and the restoration of Germany to its rightful dominant status as a global power. The effectiveness of this messaging was very much reflected in the electoral data of the era. Prior to the Great Depression, the Nazis were largely dismissed as a marginal extremist fringe group. However, as the economic and political crisis deepened, their electoral fortunes skyrocketed, running parallel to the steady growth of the Communist Party, effectively gutting the moderate center. The Nazis offered a compelling utopian vision of the Volksgemeinschaft, national community, a promise to permanently transcend the exhausting class warfare and sectarian confessional divides that had completely paralyzed the Weimar Republic. They combined this utopian social vision with an aesthetic of extreme militarized order. The highly disciplined marching columns of the SA, despite their propensity for street violence, successfully projected an image of youth, vigor, and paramilitarized strength, appealing deeply to voters who craved a return to law and order amidst the perceived chaos of the Republic.

[00:23:14]Through relentless campaigning, Hitler successfully positioned himself as a messianic figure, the only man possessing the ruthless willpower required to smash the dual existential threats of Marxism and democratic decadence. As the Weimar Republic disintegrated under its contradictions, the electorate quickly abandoned the political center. However, the critical historical question remains: When faced with the collapse of the liberal order, why did the vast majority of the middle and upper classes, the rural peasantry, and the conservative elites gravitate toward the extreme right rather than the extreme left? Why did the NSDAP achieve 37.3% of the vote at its peak, while the KPD never surpassed 16.9%?

[00:24:00]I believe the answer lies in the fundamental differences in how the two extremes proposed to reshape German society. For all its revolutionary rhetoric and violent radicalism, National Socialism successfully presented itself to the electorate as a restorative counterrevolution. The Nazis explicitly promised to protect and defend the foundational pillars of traditional German life, private property, the traditional family hierarchy, religion, carefully framed through the ambiguous lens of positive Christianity, and national pride. While they promised to ruthlessly destroy the independent trade unions and liquidate the political left, they did not threaten to liquidate the industrialist class, the independent farmer, the civil servant, or the shopkeeper. In contrast, the Communist Party of Germany represented an absolute existential threat to the inherited forms of German life. Communism explicitly promised brutal class warfare, the total expropriation of private property and land, the secularization of society, and complete ideological subservience to a foreign internationalist movement directed by Joseph Stalin in Moscow. To a German farmer, a conservative teacher, or a small business owner, the Nazi SA stormtrooper might have seemed thuggish, but the Communist Red Front represented complete social, economic, and physical annihilation. Furthermore, the German left was divided at the exact historical moment it most needed unity. Following the rigid directives of Stalin and the Comintern, the KPD under the leadership of Ernst Thälmann adopted the disastrous ultra-left doctrine of social fascism.

[00:25:37]This theory posited that the moderate Social Democrats (SPD) were not potential allies in the fight against fascism, but rather social fascists who represented the primary, most dangerous obstacle to a true proletarian revolution. Consequently, the KPD spent the crucial, deciding years of the early 1930s fiercely attacking the SPD, even going so far as to actively cooperate with the Nazis in events like the 1932 Berlin transport strike to undermine the moderate left rather than forming a united front against Hitler. This fratricidal warfare on the left achieved two disastrous outcomes. First, it alienated millions of moderate workers and entirely destroyed any chance of a unified resistance capable of stopping the Nazis. Second, the highly aggressive revolutionary rhetoric and street violence of the KPD deeply terrified the middle and upper classes, pushing them definitively and irrevocably into the arms of the right. As the political landscape fractured, many Germans did not experience the politics of 1932 as a choice between a reasonable moderation and an irrational extremism.

[00:26:45]They experienced it entirely as a choice between two competing forms of extremes, one that promised to completely abolish their world and one that promised, however violently, to defend it. Faced with this perceived binary, they opted for the extreme right as the ultimate lesser evil. Despite their massive electoral success in July 1932, the Nazis never achieved an absolute majority in a free parliamentary election. In fact, by the elections of November 1932, the NSDAP's vote share actually dropped to 33.1% losing over 2 million votes. The party was practically bankrupt, its momentum appeared to have stalled, and internal divisions between the political leadership and the SA were mounting rapidly. Hitler's appointment to the chancellorship was not the result of an irresistible overwhelming democratic mandate, nor was it historically inevitable. It was the direct product of a gross miscalculation by an isolated cabal of conservative elites negotiated in the backrooms of Berlin. The aged president, Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg, personally despised Hitler, viewing him with aristocratic disdain as a vulgar upstart bohemian corporal unfit for high office. However, Hindenburg and his immediate circle of advisers, which was composed of aristocratic landowners, major industrialists, and high-ranking military officers, were desperate to definitively solve the political deadlock, bypass the uncooperative Reichstag entirely, and permanently crush the power of the trade unions and the Marxist left. The conservative establishment strongly desired to install an authoritarian nationalist government that would restore pre-1914 stability, but they fundamentally lacked the mass popular support required to legitimize such a regime. Franz von Papen, who was a deeply conservative nobleman and former chancellor, orchestrated the compromise. Operating under the delusion that the Nazi movement had peaked and that Hitler's sudden desperation for power made him malleable and easily controlled, Papen convinced a reluctant Hindenburg to appoint Hitler as Chancellor on January 30th, 1933.

[00:28:53]Papen's logic was grounded in supreme aristocratic arrogance and an underestimation of Hitler's political genius. He arranged a coalition cabinet where Hitler was heavily surrounded by traditional respectable conservatives with only two other Nazis, Wilhelm Frick and Hermann Göring, holding ministerial posts. Papen famously boasted to his conservative associates, "I have the confidence of Hindenburg. In two months we'll have pushed Hitler so far into the corner that he'll squeal."

[00:29:23]The conservative illusion that Hitler could be safely contained or managed by his aristocratic coalition partners evaporated almost immediately. Once legally granted the levers of state power, Hitler and his inner circle, figures such as Göring, Goebbels, and Himmler, moved with breathtaking speed to dismantle the Weimar Republic and consolidate a totalitarian state. The defining catalyst for this consolidation occurred on February 27th, 1933, when the Reichstag building was set ablaze.

[00:29:53]Immediately blaming the KPD for the arson and hysterically claiming it was the pre-planned signal for a violent communist uprising, Hitler manipulated Hindenburg into signing the Reichstag fire decree. This emergency decree completely suspended all fundamental civil liberties guaranteed by the Weimar Constitution, including freedom of speech, assembly, and the press, and allowed the regime to arrest political opponents without trial or due process.

[00:30:19]Overnight, the SA and the regular police rounded up thousands of communists, socialists, and union leaders, throwing them into hastily constructed concentration camps such as the facility at Dachau. The communist threat, which had so genuinely terrified the German public for over a decade, was now ruthlessly weaponized by the state to justify the complete destruction of the constitutional order. In March 1933, Hitler pushed the Enabling Act through a heavily intimidated Reichstag. The act formally granted the cabinet the power to enact laws without parliamentary consent or constitutional limitations.

[00:30:56]With the KPD entirely banned and the SPD suppressed and intimidated, the act passed with the support of the Catholic Center Party, providing a vital veneer of legality to the new dictatorship.

[00:31:09]What followed was the rapid process of Gleichschaltung, the of all aspects of German society. State governments were stripped of their autonomy, independent trade unions were dismantled and replaced by the Nazi Labor Front. All opposition political parties were outlawed and the civil service was purged of Jews and political dissidents. The history of the Weimar Republic's demise and the subsequent rise of the Third Reich fundamentally resists simplistic moralizing or comforting narratives.

[00:31:40]To conclude merely that extremism is bad or that Hitler was a masterful hypnotic manipulator is to dangerously ignore the forces of communism that drove one of the world's most highly educated, scientifically advanced, and culturally sophisticated societies to embrace totalitarianism.

[00:31:58]Thank you so much for watching this video. This video script came from one of my Substack articles. So, if you'd like to see more, please subscribe on Substack. And if you would like to support me further, please see the links in the bio, such as buy me a coffee.

[00:32:12]Thank you.