what was going on in Germany in the 1930s that allowed the people to turn to a person like Hitler to lead them ?
Answers
Hitler's Rise: How a Homeless Artist Became a Murderous Tyrant
This April 20 marks the 127th anniversary of the birth of Adolf Hitler, the unremarkable artist who would rise to become the dictator of Germany and the instigator of the Holocaust.Given the devastation left in Hitler's wake, a major question for historians of the 20th century has been how Hitler captured the German imagination and came to power. He was not, as a person, a charismatic character; biographer Ian Kershaw described him as an "empty vessel outside his political life." He had few genuine friends, an overinflated view of his own intellect and no inborn connections to propel him to the top.
"He comes, obviously, from nowhere, sort of a lower-middle-class family in Austria," said Karl Schleunes, author of "The Twisted Road to Auschwitz: Nazi Policy Toward German Jews, 1933-39" (University of Illinois Press, 1970), who is working on a new book on 1930s Germany. Nor did Hitler have especially original ideas; the German Workers' Party he joined in 1919, which would become the Nazi Party under his leadership, was just one of approximately 70 right-wing groups in Germany after World War I, Kershaw wrote in the biography "Hitler: 1889-1936 Hubris" (W.W. Norton & Company, 1998).
But in the chaos of post-World War I Germany, it was Hitler's group that would gain dominance — and that was not a matter of luck, Schleunes told Live Science.
"What makes the German Workers' Party different from the other 69 groups is that they don't have a Hitler, whose speaker talent and tactics are really quite effective," Schleunes said. [Understanding the 10 Most Destructive Human Behaviors]
And once he achieved fame, Hitler was able to cover up his rather off-putting personality with media images of a cultured gentleman beloved by children and animals.
The early years
Hitler's early life does not hint at his future. The son of a low-level civil servant in Austria, Hitler was groomed by his harsh, authoritarian father to become a bureaucrat as well. Other than the beatings from his father, the future dictator's early childhood was relatively normal, but he became sullen and friendless in adolescence, according to Kershaw's biography. He never finished high school and, from 1905 to 1907, sponged off of his mother.
In 1907, Hitler famously failed to win admission to art school, kicking off a period in which he lived in Vienna, making grand pronouncements about art, architecture and culture, but rarely making any serious effort to secure a future in art himself. In 1909, he ended up living for a time in a flophouse for the homeless. He soon turned to supporting himself by selling cheap paintings of city scenes.
In 1913, Hitler went to Munich, fleeing Austrian authorities who'd noticed that he'd dodged mandatory military service there. It was in the German military, however, that Hitler would find direction — and a springboard into politics.