imagine yourself as a political opponent of Nazi Regime make a report on Hitler's rise to power and his ideology
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The 80th anniversary of the beginning of the Second World War is on September 1. It’s important to understand how the conflict and the Holocaust could have happened—and how we can prevent such atrocities from happening again.
As someone who specializes in international business, I know how rapidly ideas and ideologies can be transported globally. International business scholars are increasingly concerned with the possibility that economic nationalism will lead to deglobalization, reversing decades of economic growth.
This has spurred new debates on the potential consequences of economic nationalism and also examinations of the political processes that cause shifts from liberal democracies to more authoritarian governments. To better understand why countries may abandon liberal democracy, it’s instructive to turn to history.
And so it’s important to look back at how Adolf Hitler rose to power. Understanding 1930 to 1933 helps us better understand 1939 to 1945. And in an era of rising political extremism around the world, this period of history holds lessons important for the present.
Hitler’s ascent involves conservative politicians sharing power with an extremist party and being outmanoeuvred. It features a university courageously resisting ministerial interference, but quickly falling in line when the new regime had cemented its power.
When the SPD lost its majority in the election while the Nazis rose to third place, the alliance parties formed a coalition with Hitler’s party. This coalition government gave the Nazi party the position of speaker of Parliament and minister of the interior.
The Nazis used these positions to effectively promote their interests, and despite various crises, the coalition held on until 1933. Dietrich Klagges, the minister of the interior from 1931, used his position to harass political opposition, undermine democratic processes, intervene in internal matters of the university, and—critically—to give Hitler his German citizenship.
The Technical University of Braunschweig found itself at the center of political conflicts of the time, while struggling to assert its autonomy from the state government. The conflict started in 1931 with an incident in which Nazi students accused a Bulgarian student of insulting a female German student and demanded his expulsion.
When the university did not comply with their racially charged demands, university leaders themselves became the focus of Nazi attacks.
Adolf Hitler addressing the German Reichstag in Berlin on Jan. 30, 1934
AP PHOTO
The conflict escalated in March 1932 when Klagges, the minister of the interior, prepared to appoint Hitler as a professor at the university. The school strongly opposed the idea, not only because Klagges was interfering in university autonomy, but also because Hitler lacked the academic qualifications.
University president Otto Schmitz went over Klagges’s head to communicate directly with Prime Minister Werner Küchenthal. Küchenthal refused to sign the appointment document.
Klagges found another route, namely to appoint Hitler to a governmental position with the Braunschweig representation in Berlin, which would automatically entail German citizenship. Coalition partners reluctantly agreed on the assurance that Hitler would actually work in that role (which he never did).
But at the university, the relationship with the minister continued to deteriorate. In May, Schmitz was suspended and investigated for an unrelated supposed scandal. But the new president, Gustav Gassner, also squared off against the Nazi student group, objecting to their use of Memorial Day to celebrate one of their leaders killed in a street fight and that they carried party banners with the swastika symbol at university events. Klagges overruled him.
After the national power grab of the Nazi party in January 1933, Braunschweig, sooner than elsewhere, experienced dismissals, arrests of political opponents, street violence, and book burning. Among many social democrats and communists, former prime minister Jasper and city major Ernst Böhme were arrested; Böhme was tortured until he signed his resignation. Gassner first hid and then fled the state, resigned while in Bonn, and was arrested upon his return to Braunschweig.
On May 1, 1933, Klagges announced on the steps of the university that Nazi party member Paul Horrmann was its new president. By then, democracy and university autonomy were dead.