A Fooled Nation: Hitler’s Rise to Power

16 Pages 4087 Words

With a lock of hair falling over his forehead and a square little mustache on his often, somber face, Adolf Hitler seemed a comical figure when he first entered into politics. He was a public speaker who ranted and raved until his voice was hoarse and sweat dripped from his brow. Hitler was an evil genius. With the help of fanatic disciples and gullible masses, he profoundly changed Germany and the political face of Europe; unleashing the most terrible war in history and unprecedented genocide in which more than six million Jews died.

Hitler is called mad; but were the men around him also mad? They were cultivated, educated, learned men. Germany wasn’t a backward country, preyed on by ignorance, but one of the most advanced nations in the world; renown for great scientific and cultural achievements. His program was one for evil and destruction and yet the majority of the people in Germany accepted it. How did Hitler come to power? His ideas have lived on, unfortunately. Many around the world still find inspiration in his words. Also have lived on, the memories. Time has not dimmed the terms storm troops, gas chambers, death camps, and holocaust. A new generation asks, why?

On the morning of September 15 1930, early editions of newspapers across Germany brought the first reports that Adolf Hitler’s National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP) had scored a stunning electoral triumph. Only two years earlier, the party had languished in obscurity. The appeal of the Nationalist Socialists was so small that most commentators, those who recognized them at all, saw them as

a minor and declining party. Yet, when the polls closed on the evening of September 14, 1930 the NSDAP had become the second largest party in the Weimar Republic.

The NSDAP was founded as “Deutschearbei Partei”, the German Workers Party (DAP) in Munich, during January 1919. It was one of a number of German political parties clustered along the outsk...