Trump and the Republicans rise to power
In order for anyone to fully understand what is going on in the USA they need to learn why the constitution was written with the rights given to the people and why there are 3 branches of the government on the federal level as well as state level and then the local municipalities therein.These allow for checks and balances.
Next one must research and study history to see what is similar now to the rise of Hitler and the NAZI party.
Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933 through the Nazi Party. His rise to power was influenced by a number of factors, including:
- World War IHitler's experiences as a wounded veteran in World War I contributed to his hatred of the Treaty of Versailles.
- The Great DepressionThe economic crisis created conditions that allowed Hitler to come to power.
- PropagandaThe Nazis used propaganda to exploit people's fears and build support.
- Political dealsRight-wing politicians made deals with Hitler to use his popularity to destroy the Weimar Republic.
- The weakness of democracyGermany's democratic institutions were weak, which made it easier for Hitler to manipulate the system.
How Did Adolf Hitler Happen?
Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor of Germany in 1933 following a series of electoral victories by the Nazi Party {National Socialist German Workers' Party (German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei or NSDAP) }. He ruled absolutely until his death by suicide in April 1945.
Upon achieving power, Hitler smashed the nation’s democratic institutions and transformed Germany into a war state intent on conquering Europe for the benefit of the so-called Aryan race. His invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, triggered the European phase of World War II. During the course of the war, Nazi military forces rounded up and executed 11 million victims they deemed inferior or undesirable—“life unworthy of life”—among them Jews, Slavs, homosexuals, and Jehovah’s Witnesses.
Hitler had supreme authority as führer (leader or guide), but could not have risen to power or committed such atrocities on his own. He had the active support of the powerful German officer class and of millions of everyday citizens who voted for the National Socialist German Workers’ (Nazi) Party and hailed him as a national savior in gigantic stadium rallies.
How were Hitler and the Nazis possible? How did such odious characters take and hold power in a country that was a world pacesetter in literature, art, architecture, and science, a nation that had a democratic government and a free press in the 1920s?
Adolf Hitler's Rise to Power
Hitler rose to power through the Nazi Party, an organization he forged after returning as a wounded veteran from the annihilating trench warfare of World War I. He and other patriotic Germans were outraged and humiliated by the harsh terms of the Treaty of Versailles, which the Allies compelled the new German government, the Weimar Republic, to accept along with an obligation to pay $33 billion in war reparations. Germany also had to give up its prized overseas colonies and surrender valued parcels of home territory to France and Poland. The German army was radically downsized and the nation forbidden to have submarines or an air force. “We shall squeeze the German lemon until the pips squeak!” explained one British official.
Paying the crushing reparations destabilized the economy, producing ruinous, runaway inflation. By September 1923, four billion German marks had the equal value of one American dollar. Consumers needed a wheelbarrow to carry enough paper money to buy a loaf of bread.
Hitler, a mesmerizing public speaker, addressed political meetings in Munich calling for a new German order to replace what he saw as an incompetent and inefficient democratic regime. This New Order was distinguished by an authoritarian political system based on a leadership structure in which authority flowed downward from a supreme national leader.
In the new Germany, all citizens would unselfishly serve the state, or Volk; democracy would be abolished; and individual rights sacrificed for the good of the führer state. The ultimate aim of the Nazi Party was to seize power through Germany’s parliamentary system, install Hitler as dictator, and create a community of racially pure Germans loyal to their führer, who would lead them in a campaign of racial cleansing and world conquest.
Hitler blamed the Weimar Republic’s weakness on the influence of Germany’s Jewish and communist minorities, who he claimed were trying to take over the country. “There are only two possibilities,” he told a Munich audience in 1922. “Either victory of the Aryan, or annihilation of the Aryan and the victory of the Jew.” The young Hitler saw history as a process of racial struggle, with the strongest race—the Aryan race—ultimately prevailing by force of arms. “Mankind has grown great in eternal war,” Hitler wrote. “It would decay in eternal peace.”
Jews represented everything the Nazis found repugnant: finance capitalism (controlled, the Nazis believed, by powerful Jewish financiers), international communism (Karl Marx was a German Jew, and the leadership of the German Communist Party was heavily Jewish), and modernist cultural movements like psychoanalysis and swing music.
Nazi Party foreign policy aimed to rid Europe of Jews and other “inferior” peoples, absorb pure-blooded Aryans into a greatly expanded Germany—a “Third Reich”—and wage unrelenting war on the Slavic “hordes” of Russia, considered by Hitler to be Untermenschen (subhuman).
Once conquered, the Soviet Union would be ruled by the German master race, which would exterminate or subdue millions of Slavs to create lebensraum (living space) for their own farms and communities. In a conquered and racially cleansed Russia, they would work on model farms and factories connected to the homeland by new highways, called autobahns.
Hitler was the ideologue as well as the chief organizer of the Nazi Party. By 1921, the party had a newspaper, an official flag, and a private army—the Sturmabteilung SA (storm troopers)—made up largely of unemployed and disenchanted WWI veterans. By 1923, the SA had grown to 15,000 men and had access to hidden stores of weapons. That year, Hitler and WWI hero General Erich Ludendorff attempted to overthrow the elected regional government of Bavaria in a coup known as the Beer Hall Putsch.
The regular army crushed the rebellion and Hitler spent a year in prison—in loose confinement. In Landsberg Prison, Hitler dictated most of the first volume of his political autobiography, Mein Kampf (My Struggle). The book brought together, in inflamed language, the racialist and expansionist ideas he had been propagating in his popular beer-hall harangues.
After being released from prison, Hitler vowed to work within the parliamentary system to avoid a repeat of the Beer Hall Putsch setback. In the 1920s, however, the Nazi Party was still a fringe group of ultraextremists with little political power. It received only 2.6 percent of the vote in the Reichstag elections of 1928.
But the worldwide economic depression and the rising power of labor unions and communists convinced increasing numbers of Germans to turn to the Nazi Party. The Nazis fed on bank failures and unemployment—proof, Hitler said, of the ineffectiveness of democratic government. Hitler pledged to restore prosperity, create civil order (by crushing industrial strikes and street demonstrations by communists and socialists), eliminate the influence of Jewish financiers, and make the fatherland once again a world power.
By 1932, the Nazis were the largest political party in the Reichstag. In January of the following year, with no other leader able to command sufficient support to govern, President Paul von Hindenburg appointed Hitler chancellor of Germany. Shortly thereafter, a fire broke out in the Reichstag building in Berlin, and authorities arrested a young Dutch communist who confessed to starting it.
Hitler used this episode to convince President Hindenburg to declare an emergency decree suspending many civil liberties throughout Germany, including freedom of the press, freedom of expression, and the right to hold public assemblies. The police were authorized to detain citizens without cause, and the authority usually exercised by regional governments became subject to control by Hitler’s national regime.
Almost immediately, Hitler began dismantling Germany’s democratic institutions and imprisoning or murdering his chief opponents. When Hindenburg died the following year, Hitler took the titles of führer, chancellor, and commander in chief of the army. He expanded the army tremendously, reintroduced conscription, and began developing a new air force—all violations of the Treaty of Versailles.
Hitler’s military spending and ambitious public-works programs, including building a German autobahn, helped restore prosperity. His regime also suppressed the Communist Party and purged his own paramilitary storm troopers, whose violent street demonstrations alienated the German middle class.
This bloodletting—called the “Night of the Long Knives”—was hugely popular and welcomed by the middle class as a blow struck for law and order. In fact, many Germans went along with the full range of Hitler’s policies, convinced that they would ultimately be advantageous for the country.
In 1938, Hitler began his long-promised expansion of national boundaries to incorporate ethnic Germans. He colluded with Austrian Nazis to orchestrate the Anschluss, the annexation of Austria to Germany. And in Hitler’s most brazenly aggressive act yet, Czechoslovakia was forced to surrender the Sudetenland, a mountainous border region populated predominantly by ethnic Germans.
The Czechs looked to Great Britain and France for help, but hoping to avoid war—they had been bled white in World War I—these nations chose a policy of appeasement. At a conclave held at Munich in September 1938, representatives of Great Britain and France compelled Czech leaders to cede the Sudetenland in return for Hitler’s pledge not to seek additional territory. The following year, the German army swallowed up the remainder of Czechoslovakia.
British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, one of the signers of the Munich pact, had taken Hitler at his word. Returning to Britain with this agreement in hand, he proudly announced that he had achieved “peace with honor. I believe it is peace for our time.”
A year later, German troops stormed into Poland.
Nazi Party, political party of the mass movement known as National Socialism. Under the leadership of Adolf Hitler, the party came to power in Germany in 1933 and governed by totalitarian methods until 1945. Anti-Semitism was fundamental to the party’s ideology and led to the Holocaust, the systematic, state-sponsored killing of six million Jews and millions of others.
Founding of the Nazi Party and the Beer Hall Putsch
The Nazi Party was founded as the German Workers’ Party by Anton Drexler, a Munich locksmith, in 1919. Hitler attended one of its meetings that year, and before long his energy and oratorical skills would enable him to take over the party, which was renamed National Socialist German Workers’ Party in 1920. That year Hitler also formulated a 25-point program that became the permanent basis for the party. The program called for German abandonment of the Treaty of Versailles and for the expansion of German territory. These appeals for national aggrandizement were accompanied by a strident anti-Semitic rhetoric. The party’s socialist orientation was basically a demagogic gambit designed to attract support from the working class. By 1921 Hitler had ousted the party’s other leaders and taken over.
Under Hitler the Nazi Party grew steadily in its home base of Bavaria. It organized strong-arm groups to protect its rallies and meetings. These groups drew their members from war veterans groups and paramilitary organizations and were organized under the name Sturmabteilung (SA). In 1923 Hitler and his followers felt strong enough to stage the Beer Hall Putsch, an unsuccessful attempt to take control of the Bavarian state government in the hope that it would trigger a nationwide insurrection against the Weimar Republic. The coup failed, the Nazi Party was temporarily banned, and Hitler was sent to prison for most of 1924.
The Nazi Party and Hitler’s rise to power
Upon his release Hitler quickly set about rebuilding his moribund party, vowing to achieve power only through legal political means thereafter. The Nazi Party’s membership grew from 25,000 in 1925 to about 180,000 in 1929. Its organizational system of gauleiters (“district leaders”) spread through Germany at this time, and the party began contesting municipal, state, and federal elections with increasing frequency.
However, it was the effects of the Great Depression in Germany that brought the Nazi Party to its first real nationwide importance. The rapid rise in unemployment in 1929–30 provided millions of jobless and dissatisfied voters whom the Nazi Party exploited to its advantage. From 1929 to 1932 the party vastly increased its membership and voting strength; its vote in elections to the Reichstag (the German Parliament) increased from 800,000 votes in 1928 to about 14,000,000 votes in July 1932, and it thus emerged as the largest voting bloc in the Reichstag, with 230 members (38 percent of the total vote). By then big-business circles had begun to finance the Nazi electoral campaigns, and swelling bands of SA toughs increasingly dominated the street fighting with the communists that accompanied such campaigns.
When unemployment began to drop in Germany in late 1932, the Nazi Party’s vote also dropped, to about 12,000,000 (33 percent of the vote) in the November 1932 elections. Nevertheless, Hitler’s shrewd maneuvering behind the scenes prompted the president of the German republic, Paul von Hindenburg, to name him chancellor on January 30, 1933. Hitler used the powers of his office to solidify the Nazis’ position in the government during the following months. The elections of March 5, 1933—precipitated by the burning of the Reichstag building only days earlier—gave the Nazi Party 44 percent of the votes, and further unscrupulous tactics on Hitler’s part turned the voting balance in the Reichstag in the Nazis’ favour. On March 23, 1933, the Reichstag passed the Enabling Act, which “enabled” Hitler’s government to issue decrees independently of the Reichstag and the presidency; Hitler in effect assumed dictatorial powers.
The Nazi Party in the Third Reich
On July 14, 1933, Hitler’s government declared the Nazi Party to be the only political party in Germany. On the death of Hindenburg in 1934 Hitler took the titles of Führer (“Leader”), chancellor, and commander in chief of the army, and he remained leader of the Nazi Party as well. Nazi Party membership became mandatory for all higher civil servants and bureaucrats, and the gauleiters became powerful figures in the state governments. Hitler crushed the Nazi Party’s left, or socialist-oriented, wing in 1934, executing Ernst Röhm and other rebellious SA leaders on what would become known as the “Night of the Long Knives.” Thereafter, Hitler’s word was the supreme and undisputed command in the party. Its vast and complex hierarchy was structured like a pyramid, with party-controlled mass organizations for youth, women, workers, and other groups at the bottom, party members and officials in the middle, and Hitler and his closest associates at the top wielding undisputed authority.
Ernst Röhm Ernst Röhm, 1933.
The history of the Nazi Party after 1934 can be divided into two main phases. The years between 1934 and 1938 were used by the party to establish virtual total control of all political, social, and cultural activities in Germany. This phase began in earnest with the death of Hindenburg on August 2, 1934. The functions of the military and government were subsumed into the party, and all troops and officials were forced to take the oath of fidelity to Hitler personally. Subordination of the broader German populace was achieved primarily through the unification of all the police, security, and Schutzstaffel (SS) organizations under the direction of Heinrich Himmler and his chief lieutenant, Reinhard Heydrich.
Heinrich Himmler and Adolf HitlerHeinrich Himmler (left) and Adolf Hitler reviewing an assembly of Hitler's personal guard.
NazismView of the opening ceremonies at the Deutsche Kampfspiele (“German Combat Games”) in Nürnberg, Germany, June 1934.
A core element of the Nazi Party ideology was anti-Semitism, and Hitler used this period of consolidation to mobilize the power of the Nazi police state against Germany’s Jewish citizens. Jews were deprived of virtually all legal rights under the Nürnberg Laws of September 15, 1935, and prewar state-sponsored persecution of Jews reached its climax on Kristallnacht (November 9–10, 1938). Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels ordered these pogroms, in which SS-directed rioters damaged or destroyed more than 1,000 synagogues and ransacked some 7,500 Jewish-owned homes and businesses. Scores of Jews were killed in the violence, and tens of thousands of Jewish men and boys were arrested and imprisoned in concentration camps. After Kristallnacht, the bulk of all Jewish property was confiscated, and Germany’s Jews were effectively erased from public life.
The years between 1938 and 1945 witnessed the effort to impose Nazism on territories outside the Third Reich. This phase was initiated in 1938 with the suppression of the last conservative influences in the two remaining bulwarks of an older, authoritarian but civilized Germany—the army and the foreign office. In that year Hitler began German territorial expansion, carried out through threats and diplomatic pressure, by “peaceful” means. In such a way he incorporated into the Third Reich first the republic of Austria and then the Sudetenland (the German-speaking parts of the republic of Czechoslovakia).
Joseph Goebbels addressing a Nazi rallyJoseph Goebbels addressing a Nazi rally in Reichenberg, Sudetenland (now Liberec, Czech Republic), November 19, 1938.
German invasion of Poland in World War II German soldiers breaking down a barricade at the Polish border at the outbreak of World War II, 1939.
The Nazi Party in World War II
When Germany started World War II, it came as the logical outcome of Hitler’s plans—known to Germans since the publication of Mein Kampf (1926)—and of his systematic preparations since 1933. From the beginning, the Nazis did not intend to establish a new order of authoritarianism and inequality for Germany alone. Therein Nazism imitated communism. Its dynamism was bound to expand and to spread. By its own nature it could not recognize any limits to its own volition, only limits set by opposed superior forces. To a certain extent World War II repeated the pattern of World War I: great initial German military successes, the forging of a large-scale coalition against Germany, the loss of the war because of German overreaching and conduct.
German-American Bund; Nazi Party rally by the German-American Bund held in Madison Square Garden, New York City, 1939
Prior to Germany’s invasion of Poland, local Nazi affiliates had been present in areas outside the Reich, typically where there existed a sizable population of German descent. One notable group was the German-American Bund, a pro-Nazi paramilitary organization in the United States that was secretly funded and organized by the German government. These Nazi client organizations typically existed on the fringes of political life, but Germany’s early military successes brought them to the fore, especially in occupied territories. On April 9, 1940, German troops invaded Norway, and Vidkun Quisling, the leader of the small Norwegian National Socialist (Nasjonal Samling, or National Union) party immediately proclaimed a “national government.” Quisling’s party had virtually no domestic support, and his government collapsed within a week. Nevertheless, Quisling continued to serve the Nazi occupation forces, and he was named “minister president” in February 1942. German troops also occupied Denmark; although the Danish Nazi Party never managed to achieve a position of political prominence, it was able to orchestrate the creation of a Danish “Free Corps” of volunteers who fought on the Eastern Front as members of the Waffen-SS.
The outbreak of war also saw the full implementation of the Nazi Party’s “final solution to the Jewish question” in all areas controlled by the Third Reich. The ultimate goal of the Nazis’ anti-Semitic ideology was nothing less than Vernichtung (“annihilation”) of Europe’s Jewish population. Jews in occupied territories were forced into ghettoes or systematically killed. Mass shootings by Einsatzgruppen units gave way to the industrialized murder of millions in concentration and extermination camps. The Nazis killed victims from other groups—homosexuals, Roma, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Poles, and political opponents were chief among them—but the destruction of European Jewry remained paramount in the eyes of the Third Reich. In German-occupied Europe, out of a prewar population of about 8.3 million Jews, some 6 million were killed or died in extermination camps of starvation or disease.
Postwar neo-Nazi parties
Hitler’s dream of a “Thousand-Year Reich” came to an end with Germany’s defeat in 1945, after almost six years of war. Out of the ruins there arose a divided and occupied Germany. The Nazi Party was banned, and its top leaders were convicted of crimes against peace and against humanity. Remnants of Nazi ideology remained in Germany, however, and former Hitler Youth leader Artur Axmann was arrested by Allied forces in December 1945 while attempting to reorganize the Nazi Party. A small number of Nazi-oriented political parties and other groups were formed in West Germany from the late 1940s, though some were later banned.
The American Nazi Party was active in protests against the civil rights movement in the 1960s, and in 1978 the National Socialist Party of America won court approval to hold a demonstration in Skokie, Illinois, a city that was home to a large Jewish population, including individuals who had survived the Holocaust. In the 1990s gangs of neo-Nazi youths in eastern Germany staged attacks against immigrants, desecrated Jewish cemeteries, and engaged in violent confrontations with leftists and police. In the 21st century, small neo-Nazi parties were to be found in many European countries as well as in the United States, Canada, and several Central and South American countries. They were rare, but not unheard of, in the rest of the world. After 1945, however, Nazism as a mass movement was virtually nonexistent.
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