HITLER, ADOLF

Adolf Hitler (April 20, 1889–April 30, 1945) was a founding member and leader of the National Socialist Party of Germany (NSDAP, Nazi Party) from 1922. He became chancellor of Germany on January 30, 1933, a post he held until taking his own life as the victorious Allied powers marched on Berlin in April 1945.

BEGINNINGS

Hitler was born into lower-middle-class respectability in the small Austrian town Braunau am Inn near the border with Germany. Unsuccessful and unhappy at school, he left at the age of sixteen to pursue a career as a painter in the imperial capital but twice was rejected by the Academy of Graphic Arts in Vienna. The rejection was a serious blow to his pride, and he spent the years from 1907 to 1913 in Vienna, eking out an impoverished existence by selling his paintings and sleeping in flophouses. Life in Vienna played a crucial role in shaping Hitler's anti-Semitism, which was to become his guiding principle in NSDAP policies. Moreover, his decision to join a Bavarian infantry regiment in 1914 (he was rejected as unfit by the Austrian army) helped to cement his prejudices and his determination to right the wrongs that, he believed, had brought on Germany's World War I defeat and the Treaty of Versailles, the peace agreement signed at the palace of Versailles in June 1919. Hitler believed this treaty humiliated the German people.

Twice decorated with the Iron Cross by the German Imperial government, Hitler nonetheless failed to rise above the lowly rank of lance-corporal during the war because he was deemed to lack the right qualities to make him an effective leader. Injured in combat, he was employed by the German army to collect intelligence against extremist political groups operating in Munich. In September 1919 the work brought him into contact with the German Workers' Party, a small group consisting of no more than forty members. By July 1921 Hitler had become leader of the party, demonstrating his particular skills as an orator who was both appealing and charismatic while articulating bigoted views and woolly promises. He now exuded the self-confidence of a man who believed his destiny was to lead the German people. Hitler experienced a short period of notoriety as leader of an attempted putsch against the regional government in Bavaria and the national government in Weimar—the small town in the state of Thuringia that was home to Germany's first republican government—in November 1923, which landed him in jail for less than a year. It took the following five years for the NSDAP or Nazi Party to begin making political inroads in the Weimar Republic.

THE ROAD TO POWER

Hitler used the years from 1924 to 1928 to strengthen the party and his grip on it, while the early half-baked policies of the NSDAP developed into a cohesive ideology. The Nazi Party's first political victory came in May 1928 when the town of Coburg in Bavaria gave the NSDAP a majority in local elections. The timing of the Nazis first electoral success coincided with early signs that German economic performance was stalling: industrial output had dropped for the first time since 1924, levels of foreign investment had fallen, and the number of people employed had begun to slide downward. By the following year, Germany was in the midst of a full-blown economic crisis. Declining levels of foreign investment and rules governing monetary policy imposed on the German government and the central bank, the Reichsbank, meant that government at every level, local, regional, and national, found itself desperately short of funds to pay for even the most basic of services.

The rules governing membership in the gold standard meant that the successive German governments found it almost impossible to formulate an effective policy to combat the crisis. In order to regain the foreign investment they had lost, the Reichsbank raised interest rates, while the minority government of the "Hunger Chancellor" Heinrich Brüning, which took office in March 1930, adhered to the principles of economic orthodoxy by raising interest rates and acting to limit government spending. Germany had become very dependent on foreign investment, and Brüning believed he had to go along with what the bankers wanted—gold standard orthodoxy—if he were to regain foreign investment in Germany. However, this strategy lay in tatters in the wake of the banking crisis that gripped Germany in the summer of 1931.

Brüning's inability to offer the German electorate any real solutions to the second major economic crisis to grip the country in less than ten years reflected the widespread failure of all politicians in the center of German politics to offer either viable or appealing solutions to the economic collapse. Instead, it was the extremist political parties, the German Communist Party (KPD) and the Nazi Party, which were the political beneficiaries. The crisis provided Hitler with the opportunity to capture the support of more than one-third of the voting population. Hitler became chancellor on January 30, 1933, because of a potent combination of well-organized party activism (the NSDAP was successful in capturing the support of farmers by combining party political rallies with practical agricultural advice for example), winning slogans, and the collusion of leading political figures who, while not Nazis, supported Hitler's rise to power because they believed he would prevent Germany's slide into civil war. The Nazis also made enthusiastic use of political violence, particularly against the Communists. But the NSDAP made it clear that Jews, Poles, and other groups whom they considered socially undesirable were their enemies too. After January 1933 these groups were to become Nazism's first victims.

The first big electoral breakthrough came on September 14, 1930, when the NSDAP became the second-largest party in the German parliament, the Reichstag. By July 1932 Hitler had run Germany's aging president and war hero Paul von Hindenburg a close race in presidential elections, and Hitler's position in the Reichstag was strengthened by elections in which the NSDAP gained 37.3 percent of the vote, making it the largest party in the Reichstag. Although the Nazi vote fell by some four percent in the November elections of 1932, the machinations of power-brokers in the German state, such as former Director of the Reichsbank Hjalmar Schacht and ex-Chancellor Franz von Papen, ensured that the chancellorship was delivered into Nazi hands. Although at first in a cabinet dominated by conservatives, by March 1933 the Nazis had succeeded in suspending civil rights in Germany, arrested their leading left-wing opponents, and with the passage of the Enabling Act on March 23, 1933, secured comprehensive law-making powers and unprecedented control of German society.

THE NAZI RECOVERY

Part of the Nazis' electoral appeal lay in their bold prescriptions for economic recovery. They promised to reorganize the economy to serve the interests of the nation and not the greedy demands of foreign bankers; they proposed new schemes to generate employment and to value the "ordinary German." But they skillfully avoided any talk of redistributing wealth, so as not to put off middle-class supporters, including big business groups. The Nazis intended to exploit capitalism, not destroy it.

The measures put in place to quell the German banking crisis of 1931 provided the foundation for Nazi economics. In September 1934, Schacht, now restored as director of the Reichsbank, issued the "New Plan," which turned the 1931 exchange controls into a complex system of monetary and trade restrictions. All imports had to be authorized by the German government, and German capital could not be moved abroad freely. (Of course, this action had implications for Jews and other groups who were trying to escape the country.) Germany became increasingly detached from the international economy, signing only bilateral trading agreements with countries that either sold essential commodities or whose governments were central to German diplomatic ambitions.

Under the Nazis, state policy came to control prices, wages, private investment banks, and all other aspects of investment. Despite all the hype, however, not all Nazi public works schemes were as effective as they claimed to be in soaking up unemployment or generating recovery more broadly. The most effective schemes centered on public building and construction programs that involved renovating houses and building new roads. From 1935, the state's management of the domestic economy took a sinister turn as public investment in rearmament replaced civilian job creation as the basis for continued economic expansion—a move cemented by the introduction of the Four-Year Plan under the control of Nazi Minister and Chief Commander of the Luftwaffe (airforce) Hermann Göring. Aircraft production, for example, now leaped from its 1935 level of around three thousand aircraft a year to an annual average well in excess of five thousand. But this emphasis on military output also meant that consumables like clothing and household goods became a poor second in Nazi priorities.

Nazi spending policies were also used as a lever to extend the party's control over German society. Trade unions were destroyed; the government controlled wage rates (between 1933 and 1938 they dropped by around seven percent) and introduced compulsory labor service for some 400,000 men between 1933 and 1935. The drop in German unemployment from a level of more than six million in 1932 to less than a million by 1937 was spectacular, but the cost to civil liberties in Germany was incalculable. In 1933 the Nazi publication the Völkischer Beobacher was proud to claim that Franklin Roosevelt had adopted the policies of Hitler and Mussolini. There were parallels, albeit superficial ones, between, for example, U.S. and German public-works schemes and the declared ambitions of the Reich Labor Service and the Civilian Conservation Corps. But the curtailment of individual and corporate freedoms in Germany was the clearest indication that U.S. and German recovery policies differed fundamentally from one another.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Barkai, A. Nazi Economics: Ideology, Theory and Policy. 1990.

Bessel, Richard, ed. Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany: Comparisons and Contrasts. 1996.

Borchard, Knut. Perspectives on Modern German Economic History and Policy. 1991.

Burleigh, Michael. The Third Reich: A New History. 2000.

Fischer, Conan. The Rise of the Nazis, rev. edition. 2001.

Garraty, John. "The New Deal, National Socialism and the Great Depression." American Historical Review 78 (1973): 907–944.

James, Harold. The German Slump: Politics and Economics, 1932–36. 1986.

Kershaw, Ian. Hitler: 1889–1936: Hubris. 1998.

Kershaw, Ian. Hitler: 1936–1945: Nemesis. 2000.

Kershaw, Ian. The Nazi Dictatorship: Problems and Perspectives of Interpretation, rev. edition. 1993.

Overy, Richard. The Nazi Economic Recovery, 1932–38, rev. edition. 1995.

Overy, Richard. War, Economy and the Third Reich. 1994.

PATRICIA CLAVIN

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