Hitler and the Nazi Party rose to power due to the social and political

circumstances that characterized the interwar period in Germany. Many

Germans could not concede their countrys defeat in World War I, arguing
that backstabbing and weakness in the rear had paralyzed and, eventually,
caused the front to collapse. The Jews, they claimed, had done much to
spread defeatism and thus destroy the German army. Democracy in the
Weimar Republic, they argued, was a form of governance that had been
imposed on Germany and was unsuited to the German nature and way of
life. They construed the terms of the Versailles peace treaty and the steep
compensation payments that it entailed as revenge by the victors and a
glaring injustice. This frustration, together with intransigent resistance and
warnings about the surging menace of Communism, created fertile soil for
the growth of radical right-wing groups in Germany, spawning entities such
as the Nazi Party.
In 1925, a transitory economic upturn and a promising political dialogue
brought relative calm into sight. However, the severe international economic
crisis that erupted in 1929 carried the instability to new heights.
In 1919, Adolf Hitler, a released soldier wounded in WWI, joined a small and
insignificant group called the National Socialist Party. He became the groups
leader and formulated the racial and antisemitic principles in its charter. In
1923 party activists led a revolt and tried to seize power in Munich, but
failed. Hitler was imprisoned, during which time he wrote his venomous book
Mein Kampf (My Struggle), in which he expressed his ideas about racial

theory and Nazi global dominion. Hitler realized that he must employ
legitimate democratic means in his struggle to seize power. However, he and
his associates left no doubt about their belief in democratic freedoms as
mere tools with which power might be attained. After his release Hitler
reorganized the party.
In the 1924 Reichstag elections, the Nazi Party received three percent of the
votes cast and was represented in the parliament by fourteen delegates. In
the 1928 elections, its support declined; the party was able to send only
twelve delegates to the legislature. The turnaround came in 1930, the first
elections after the economic crisis began. Surprisingly, the Nazis received
18.3 percent of the vote and sent 107 delegates to the Reichstag, the
German Parliament. In July 1932, with 230 mandates, they became the
largest faction in the House a political force that made an impact and
acceded to power legitimately. President Paul von Hindenburg gave Hitler the
mandate to form a government, and Hitler became Chancellor on January 30,
1933.
The Beginning of the Persecution of Jews in Germany
In the 1930s, Germanys Jews some 500,000 people made up less than
one percent (0.8%) of the German population. Most considered themselves
loyal patriots, linked to the German way of life by language and culture. They
excelled in science, literature, the arts, and economic enterprise. 24% of
Germanys Nobel Prize winners were Jewish. However, conversion,

intermarriage, and declining birth rates, led some to believe that Jewish life
was doomed to disappear from the German scene altogether.
The paradox was that Nazi ideology stemmed from Germany and the
German people, among whom Jews eagerly wanted to acculturate. Indeed,
there was a widespread belief amongst many Jews in the illusion that the role
they played within industry and trade and their contributions to the German
economy would prevent the Germans from completely excluding them.
Nazi anti-Jewish policy functioned on two primary levels: legal measures to
expel the Jews from society and strip them of their rights and property while
simultaneously engaging in campaigns of incitement, abuse, terror and
violence of varying proportions. There was one goal: to make the Jews leave
Germany.
On March 9, 1933, several weeks after Hitler assumed power, organized
attacks on Jews broke out across Germany. Two weeks later, the Dachau
concentration camp, situated near Munich, opened. Dachau became a place
of internment for Communists, Socialists, German liberals and anyone
considered an enemy of the Reich. It became the model for the network of
concentration camps that would be established later by the Nazis. Within a
few months, democracy was obliterated in Germany, and the country
became a centralized, single-party police state.
On April 1, 1933, a general boycott against German Jews was declared, in
which SA members stood outside Jewish-owned stores and businesses in
order to prevent customers from entering.

Approximately one week later, a law concerning the rehabilitation of the

professional civil service was passed. The purpose of the legislation was to
purge the civil service of officials of Jewish origin and those deemed disloyal
to the regime. It was the first racial law that attempted to isolate Jews and
oust them from German life. The first laws banished Jews from the civil
service, judicial system, public medicine, and the German army (then being
reorganized). Ceremonial public book burnings took place throughout
Germany. Many books were torched solely because their authors were Jews.
The exclusion of Jews from German cultural life was highly visible, ousting
their considerable contribution to the German press, literature, theater, and
music.
In September 1935 the Nuremberg Laws were passed, stripping the Jews of
their citizenship and forbidding intermarriage between Jews and non-Jews.
Jews were banned from universities; Jewish actors were dismissed from
theaters; Jewish authors works were rejected by publishers; and Jewish
journalists were hard-pressed to find newspapers that would publish their
writings. Famous artists and scientists played an important role in this
campaign of dispossession and party labeling of literature, art, and science.
Some scientists and physicians were involved in the theoretical
underpinnings of the racial doctrine.