How Hitler Came to Power in 1933

How Hitler Came to Power in 1933

On the evening of 30 January 1933, columns of men in brown uniforms marched through the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, holding flaming torches above their heads. The parade went on for hours. From a window of the Reich Chancellery, Adolf Hitler watched them pass. That same morning, he had been sworn in as Chancellor of Germany.

To the cheering crowds, it looked like the triumph of a movement carried to power by the people. The truth was very different. Hitler had never won a majority in a free election. Only weeks earlier, his party had been losing votes, sinking into debt and splitting from within. Newspapers had even begun writing about his decline. What happened between that moment of weakness and the torchlight parade is one of the most important political stories of the twentieth century.

A Defeat Germany Refused to Accept

The road to 1933 starts at the end of the First World War. In November 1918, Germany asked for an armistice. Its armies were still standing on foreign soil, and many Germans had been told until the very end that victory was near. When defeat came, it felt sudden and impossible to explain.

A dangerous story spread to fill that gap: Germany had not been beaten on the battlefield but betrayed at home by politicians, socialists and Jews. This myth, known as the “stab in the back”, became one of the most powerful weapons in German politics.

The peace settlement made the anger worse. Under the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, Germany lost territory, saw its army limited to 100,000 men, and had to accept responsibility for the war and pay reparations. The new democratic government, the Weimar Republic, had signed the treaty. From its first day, millions of Germans linked democracy with defeat and humiliation.

An Unknown Soldier Finds His Voice

At this point, Hitler was nobody. Born in Austria in 1889, he had failed to build a career as an artist in Vienna, served as a soldier in the German army during the war, and returned with no job and no future. In 1919, the army sent him to observe a small group in Munich called the German Workers’ Party. Instead of reporting on it, he joined it.

He soon discovered a talent that would change history: he could hold a crowd. His speeches were full of rage against Versailles, against the Republic and against Jews, and audiences responded. The party was renamed the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, shortened to Nazi Party, and Hitler became its leader in 1921.

The Year Money Became Worthless

In 1923, Germany fell behind on reparation payments, and French and Belgian troops occupied the Ruhr, the country’s industrial heart. The government printed money to support striking workers, and the currency collapsed. By November 1923, one United States dollar was worth about 4.2 trillion German marks. Workers carried wages home in bags and spent them immediately before prices rose again. Lifetime savings vanished.

Hitler believed the moment for revolution had arrived. On 8 and 9 November 1923, he and his followers tried to seize power in Munich, starting in a beer hall and marching into the city the next day. Police opened fire, and the attempt, later called the Beer Hall Putsch, collapsed. Hitler was arrested and tried for treason.

The trial turned him into a national figure, and the court was remarkably lenient. He was sentenced to five years but served only about nine months in Landsberg prison, where he dictated Mein Kampf. In his cell, he drew a crucial lesson: armed revolt had failed. He would now take power through elections and propaganda, using democracy to destroy democracy.

The Quiet Years

When Hitler left prison, Germany was recovering. A new currency stopped inflation, American loans flowed in, and the mid-1920s became known as the Republic’s “golden years”. Extremism lost its appeal. In the May 1928 election, the Nazis won only 12 seats and 2.6 percent of the vote. To most observers, Hitler was a fading agitator from Bavaria.

He used these years to build an organisation across the whole country, with local branches, youth groups and the SA (Sturmabteilung, or Storm Detachment), the party’s brown-shirted street army. The structure was ready. It only needed a crisis.

The Crash That Crossed the Atlantic

The crisis came from New York. In October 1929, the American stock market crashed. United States banks called back their loans, and Germany, whose recovery rested on that money, collapsed faster than almost any other economy. Factories closed, farms failed and unemployment rose from about 1.4 million in 1928 to more than 5 million by 1932.

Fear spread through every class. Workers feared hunger, farmers feared losing their land, and the middle classes, who still remembered 1923, feared being ruined a second time. The democratic parties argued and seemed helpless. Hitler offered certainty: work, bread, national pride and a strong leader. He also offered enemies to blame, including communists, Jews and the politicians of Versailles.

The response was explosive. In September 1930, the Nazis rose from 12 seats to 107 seats with 18.3 percent of the vote. Party membership grew from 293,000 in September 1930 to almost 1.5 million by the end of 1932. At the same time, the Communists were also growing, and street battles between the two sides became part of daily life.

A Republic Ruled by Decree

With extremists gaining ground on both sides, the Reichstag (German parliament) could no longer agree on laws. Chancellor Heinrich Brüning, appointed in March 1930, began governing through Article 48 of the constitution, which allowed the President to issue emergency decrees.

This shifted real power to one man: President Paul von Hindenburg, a celebrated First World War field marshal who was now in his eighties. Around him stood a small circle of advisers, including his son Oskar, his state secretary Otto Meissner and the political general Kurt von Schleicher. Germany’s fate increasingly depended on the conversations of a few men in the presidential palace, long before Hitler entered government.

1932: The Year of Endless Elections

In 1932, Germans voted again and again.

Hitler wanted to challenge Hindenburg for the presidency, but there was one problem: he was not a German citizen. He had given up his Austrian citizenship years earlier and had been stateless since. In February 1932, Nazi allies in the state of Brunswick appointed him to a minor government post, which automatically made him a German citizen just in time to stand.

He lost, but impressively. In the second round, Hindenburg won 53 percent and Hitler 36.8 percent. Millions now saw him as a serious national leader.

Brüning was soon dismissed and replaced by Franz von Papen, an aristocrat with little public support, backed by Schleicher. In the July 1932 election, the Nazis won 230 seats and 37.3 percent of the vote, making them the largest party in Germany. Together, the Nazis and Communists now held more than half the seats, and no democratic majority was possible.

Hitler demanded to be made Chancellor. Hindenburg refused. He distrusted Hitler’s violent movement and offered him only the post of Vice-Chancellor, which Hitler rejected. It was all or nothing.

The Moment the Nazis Began to Fall

Then the tide turned. In the November 1932 election, the Nazi vote dropped to 33.1 percent, and the party lost 34 seats and about two million votes. Its funds were running dry after so many campaigns. The Social Democratic newspaper Vorwärts published an article announcing Hitler’s rise and fall.

Schleicher, now Chancellor himself from 3 December, tried to finish the job by splitting the Nazi Party. He offered the post of Vice-Chancellor to Gregor Strasser, the party’s powerful organisation chief. Hitler forbade any deal. On 8 December 1932, Strasser resigned from all his party posts. In his diary, Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels summed up Strasser’s fate in two words: “Dead man!” For a few weeks, the Nazi movement looked close to breaking apart.

The Secret Meetings

What rescued Hitler was not the voters. It was the rivalry and ambition of the men around Hindenburg.

Franz von Papen had never forgiven Schleicher for helping to bring down his government. On 4 January 1933, he met Hitler secretly at the Cologne home of banker Kurt von Schröder. Papen realised he could not return to power without Hitler’s mass support, and Hitler realised he could not reach the chancellorship without someone close to Hindenburg.

Days later, the Nazis poured their entire leadership into a regional election in the tiny state of Lippe on 15 January. They won the largest share of the vote there, and their propaganda presented it as proof that the movement was rising again.

Further secret talks followed at the Berlin villa of Joachim von Ribbentrop, a businessman close to the Nazis. Hindenburg’s son Oskar and state secretary Meissner were drawn into the negotiations, and both were persuaded to support Hitler. On 24 January, Papen and senior Nazis agreed on a plan to overcome the President’s resistance: Hitler would lead a nationalist cabinet surrounded by conservatives.

The arrangement looked safe on paper. Only three Nazis would sit in the cabinet: Hitler, Wilhelm Frick and Hermann Göring. Papen would become Vice-Chancellor. Papen reportedly reassured worried allies that they had simply hired Hitler and would soon box him in.

Meanwhile, Schleicher had failed. Unable to split the Nazis or win a majority, he asked Hindenburg for emergency powers. The President refused, and Schleicher resigned on 28 January 1933. Two days later, Hindenburg appointed Hitler Chancellor.

Twenty-Seven Days

Hitler acted immediately. He dissolved the Reichstag and called new elections for 5 March 1933, this time with the power of the state behind him. Göring, now in charge of the police in Prussia, Germany’s largest state, enrolled SA men as auxiliary police. The street army was now the law.

On the night of 27 February 1933, the Reichstag building went up in flames. Police arrested a young Dutch communist, Marinus van der Lubbe, inside. Whether he acted alone is still debated by historians, but the Nazis instantly declared it the start of a communist uprising.

The next day, Hindenburg signed the Reichstag Fire Decree. With a single signature, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly and protection from arrest without trial were suspended. Thousands of Communists and other opponents were arrested.

Even with the opposition silenced and the streets full of storm troopers, the March election gave the Nazis about 44 percent. Once again, they failed to win a majority on their own and needed their nationalist allies to control parliament.

The Vote at the Opera House

Hitler now wanted a law that would allow his cabinet to pass legislation without parliament or the President. Since this changed the constitution, he needed a two-thirds majority.

The obstacles were removed one by one. The 81 Communist deputies could not take their seats, as their mandates had been cancelled under the fire decree. Many Social Democrats were under arrest or in hiding. In March 1933, the first concentration camp opened at Dachau. The Catholic Centre Party, after receiving promises from Hitler about the rights of the Church, decided to support the bill.

On 23 March 1933, deputies gathered in the Kroll Opera House, since the parliament building lay in ruins. Armed SA and SS (Schutzstaffel, the Nazi elite guard) men lined the hall and crowded the entrances. Only one man rose to speak against the law: Otto Wels, leader of the Social Democratic Party. Facing the men who could arrest him at any moment, he declared: “You can take our lives and our freedom, but you cannot take our honour.”

The Enabling Act passed by 444 votes to 94. Every vote against came from the Social Democrats. Parliament had voted away its own power.

From Chancellor to Dictator

What followed was rapid. Trade unions were shut down in May 1933. By July, all political parties except the Nazis had been banned or had dissolved themselves. The conservatives who believed they had tamed Hitler found themselves pushed aside.

On 30 June 1934, in what became known as the Night of the Long Knives, Hitler ordered the murder of rivals inside and outside his party, including SA leader Ernst Röhm, Gregor Strasser and Kurt von Schleicher, who was shot at his home along with his wife. Papen’s own close aides were killed, and Papen was placed under house arrest.

When Hindenburg died on 2 August 1934, Hitler merged the offices of President and Chancellor and took the title of Führer. Soldiers were required to swear a personal oath of loyalty to him, not to the constitution or the nation. A referendum later that month approved the change with nearly 90 percent of the vote. In just eighteen months, a party that had been losing support in late 1932 had full control of Germany.

Separating Myth from Fact

• Myth: Germans elected Hitler by majority vote.
  His best result in a free election was 37.3 percent. He was appointed, not elected, to the chancellorship.

• Myth: His rise was unstoppable.
  By December 1932 his party was losing votes, short of money and divided. A handful of politicians brought him back from the edge.

• Myth: He seized power in a violent coup.
  His only coup attempt, in 1923, failed. In 1933, nearly every step used legal tools, from presidential decrees to a parliamentary vote, combined with fear and intimidation.

• Myth: The conservatives were his victims.
  Many of them opened the door for him, believing they could control him. Several later paid with their lives.

The Price of a Miscalculation

Weimar democracy did not collapse in a single night. It was worn down over fourteen years by a lost war, a resented peace, two economic disasters, constant street violence and leaders who grew comfortable ruling through emergency decrees. Each step seemed temporary or survivable on its own.

The final blow came from inside the system. Ambitious men who disliked democracy believed they could borrow Hitler’s popularity and then discard him. Instead, they handed him the keys to the state. Within months, the rights that protected every German had disappeared, and the path toward war and genocide had begun.

That is why the events of 1933 continue to be studied around the world. They show that democracies can be lost not only through tanks and coups, but through deals made behind closed doors by people convinced they remain in control.