My son likes documentaries. We have been watching some on the rise of the Third Reich. What made the German people fall for him and make him Chancellor? The Depression of the 1930s made them poor and desperate, so his radical ideas seemed more appealing.
The people were angry, bitter and put upon by the ill-conceived, vindictive war reparations put upon them by England and France after WWI.
The German people were never allowed to form a nation in the 1840s, so they did not have several generations to go through their revolutions and mass movements before settling down to be a republic. They went from Prussian militarism (and resentful for being treated like the pariahs of Europe by the rest of Europe) and imperialism, to a weak democracy, and then into mass movement Hitlerian Nazism with world conquest as his goal for his master race. Because they could not evolve slowly and steadily, they jumped into the arms of an evil nut job like Hitler.
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