The Road to War in Europe

Abstract

In Germany, with economic stability after 1923, the extreme right and left declined in popularity: but democracy had shallow roots, associated as it was with defeat and Versailles, and it could not survive the upheaval of the Depression. From 1930, the government ruled by emergency decree. The Communists, claiming the USSR had avoided depression, grew in popularity among industrial workers. In response, the National Socialists (Nazis), led by the charismatic Adolf Hitler, appealed to the middle classes, claiming to represent the values of the great German past. They aimed to reverse the humiliations of Versailles and unite all Germans (the ‘volksdeutsche’) in one Reich, and claimed to have an explanation for Germany’s problems in what they saw as a Jewish—Bolshevik world conspiracy. Conservatives saw the Nazis as a useful weapon against the Communists, and they helped Hitler become Chancellor in January 1933. He soon dispensed with their assistance and established a one-party totalitarian state, maintained by the terror of the Gestapo and the concentration camp. In July 1934, he secured the loyalty of the Army, by purging the Nazis’ paramilitary force, the SA, in the ‘Night of the Long Knives’.