A work visit has brought me to Vienna, and I have been staying a few blocks away from one of the apartments where Hitler once briefly lived with Kubizek. It is interesting to see all these historic places, and my mind has strayed to the dead orator.
Hitler alone does not explain Nazi Germany, of that I am certain. He was a man of probably above-average intelligence, a fairly well-read man, a decent writer, a great speaker, with a tremendous determination and charisma. Probably all totalitarian systems can be usefully thought of as cults, and totalitarian leaders as cult leaders. Hitler had a cult leader's magnetic appeal.
But this is not tremendously rare. Every big city probably has a few such people.
Hitler's gifts should not be overestimated. He was not brilliant. His intelligence, his willpower, his charisma - all had limits. He was a mediocre military leader and a positively bad geopolitician. He had one of history's greatest rise-to-power stories, but once he had power he fucked everything up. He was not a great statesman. Even if you do not care about the human rights abuses of the Nazi regime, it is impossible to argue that the Germans who supported Hitler bet on the right horse.
On the whole Nazi phenomenon
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The Nazi phenomenon must be thought of as a whole. When too much attention is given to Hitler, perhaps too little is given to the rest - from Goebbels, Goering, Himmler, and so on... all the way down to the party functionaries and the man in the street.
The question remains of how what happened happened, and it must be asked - how did it happen that the German system in the 20s and early 30s was arranged in such a way that the Nazis managed to become a serious political force. To what an extent did they lie, and to what extent did the average German understand what they desired to do? How did it happen that in 1933, the Nazis were in a position not only to rule within the liberal framework, as the largest parliamentary party, but also to do away with the entire liberal framework in a matter of months?
Is one man unintentionally responsible for 100m deaths, like 5% of the worlds population at the time, a lot of them being white males, and 2 nuclear bombs dropped on civilian targets?
What am I suppose to this of a man like this? Does fuck up cut it?
Bump.
you would find your answers in actually studying hitler, it seems like your knowledge of him is just scratching the surface, for a start, hitler wasn't that crazy psychopath everyone thinks he is and he wasn't a bad statesman, if you want to read more look at "Hitler's war" by david irving and "Hitler's table talks" to get a better understanding of him and no he didn't start ww2 and the holocaust isn't true either
nice redpill
>Weimar economy recovering, everything going quite well again
>Abysmal performance by NSDAP at the polls
>Suddenly Great Depression
>Start gaining traction
>Form uneasy ad-hoc coalition with DVNP and other nationalist parties
>Von Papen decides to appoint Hitler chancellor to "control him"
>SDP and KDP too busy blaming eachother for whose fault this shit was to mount any effective opposition
>Dutch communist fortuitously burns down the Reichstag allowing the Enabling Act to ban basically anyone Hitler wanted to from participating in the government
>Hindenburg dies and Hitler uses the executive power to merge Chancellor and President
It was the perfect storm of bullshit, fucking ridiculous really how everything went so right for them
I didn't say he was a crazy psychopath. I would say that he was an emotionally disturbed cult leader type, though, with an above-average but not tremendous intelligence and a limited skillset (that is, he was very good at several particular things, such as public speaking, but fairly incompetent at other things).
this has to be bait or you're just completely uninformed and purely base your beliefs off of ironic jokey pol infographics
What jokes? The truth dosen't fear investigation!
Why were the Nazis' opponents unable to mount an effective resistance when the Nazis began to do away with liberal institutions in 1933?
>Weimar economy recovering
It wasn't recovering, Germany wasn't devastated by war like France or Russia. The growth of the 20's came not from closing a recessionary gap, but from a boom in debt-fueled consumption, which inevitably led to a bust since there was no foundation for growth. It would be more accurate to say the Weimar economy was booming.
the communists didn't have nearly the same rapport with government institutions due to the civil uprisings after ww1 and the moderates were too pussy to step up to them to risk being sent to the same place that communists were being sent.
Because they were fucking retarded basically, Zentrum and SDP were too autistic to form a voting bloc, the National Liberals didn't exist anymore and the DVNP and DVP basically agreed with Nazi policy on everything except the monarchy
To the average German who believed it was because muh reperations that it was shit in the first place it was absolutely recovering
That's oversimplification. The economy was definitely recovering little by little. Nazi debt in 1938 was much bigger than Weimar debt in 1928.
OP, do you have anything of substance to contribute?
>Hitler alone does not explain Nazi Germany
did it really take you going to Vienna to figure this out, dingus?
>probably all totalitarian systems can be usefully thought of as cults
No, because cult is a vague squirrely term for any organized group with a charismatic leader where membership is seen as the product of irrationality or coercion, contrasted with systems that in a normative mindset are built on rationality, which is not a useful model for understanding a political system at all (and really isn't useful for understanding "cults," but that's a separate issue).
>a bunch of standard questions about whence Nazis
You are such a deep philosopher, asking the real unasked questions about Nazi Germany. Seriously, what was the point of this post?
Last part of your post sounds like something I'd read in an Internet Comment Etiquette video.
Who do you think he's satirizing?
Not big money.
No I mean Eric
Veronica?
I suppose that by the time the Nazis became the biggest party and Hitler was appointed Chancellor, it was already too late for voting to make much difference. After all, voting had made the Nazis the biggest party. The key was to somehow preserve liberal institutions and force the Nazis to respect them. Given the nature of the Nazis, it seems that this would have taken the existence on an opposing block capable of using violent force if necessary to protect liberal institutions. I'm wondering... what fraction of the armed forces and police forces would have supported an pro-liberal block?
They weren't the biggest party, they were the second biggest, what made it all possible was the nationalists supporting them
>what fraction of the armed forces and police forces would have supported an pro-liberal block?
If Von-Lettow Vorbeck ran for office they'd be lining up to suck his dick
They were the biggest even in 1932.
They weren't the biggest? Then I must be misunderstanding something. I'm going off en.wikipedia.org
Am I thinking through something wrong?
By coalition, the opposing parties could have killed their bills if they weren't too busy denouncing eachother over superfluous shit
State and federal differences basically
The problem is your underlying idea that what Hitler said was unappealing or wrong. Admittedly, he didn’t win, but he was right about almost everything, and this was obvious. There’s no big mystery. Germans weren’t huffing paint. He was the best option.
They were still the biggest party, just not with absolut majority. You can't expect a coalition of literal everyone between communists, liberals and reactionaries to work out.
>Lose millions of men in a war
>Get literally nothing out of it but a divided country and a totally fucked infrastructure
>he was the best option
Ah, I see what you're saying. They didn't have a majority, just a plurality. The other parties could have stopped them by uniting.
Even if you think the Nazis were right about everything, the fact that they got Germany into an almost unwinnable war that they could have avoided by being better geopoliticians means that they were not the best option.
Well actually you could, the KPD and SDP alone could have squandered his bills and with the left Zentrum supporting them it would have been a gridlock, but they were too busy accusing eachother of being anti-working class to do anything else
Zentrum was a conserevative party. KPD and SPD did not have a majority even if they didn't hate each others guts.
>Zentrum was a conservative party
No, not really, like most democratic parties it had factional splits, do you think the Catholic unions supported the SPD?