Hitler’s authority was derived from his personal qualities as opposed to being vested in the office which he held. “All authority within the Party was ultimately concentrated in the hands of the leader, Hitler.” The party was organised around the idea of the Fuhrerprinzip. This laid down that power was concentrated in the hands of one leader and that his authority was absolute. This gives the impression of a very ordered power structure, but in reality it was more complex. Even before 1933, the Nazi Party leadership, Hitler aside, was undermined by its inability to exert control over the regional Gauleiters, who saw themselves as Hitler’s personal representatives responsible only to him.
They let Hitler rebuild and conquer again. One way that Hitler was able to rebuild Germany was by a society called S.A. The leader was Ernst Roehm and he was a very powerful leader during this time. The S.A was gaining too much power and was becoming a threat to Hitler’s power. Therefore Hitler had no other choice but to purge the Sturmabteilung or S.A. After World War 1 the Treaty of Versailles stated that Germany could have a standing army.
Explain why Hitler tried to introduce the policy of volksgemeinschaft in Germany in the period of 1933-1939 This was Hitler’s and the Nazis idea of a people’s community. This was put into three categories ideological, biological, and social. Hitler and the Nazis what to remove any ideological threats of which they felt were going to threaten them getting into power. The main group of which Hitler was concerned about in this section was the communists. The Nazis felt like this political group was trying to undermine their “people’s community”.
However structuralists have argued that mass political movements in Germany were on the rise and did in fact influence politics. The power the Kaiser has was overwhelming because he didnt have to answer to neither the reichstag or the bundesrat, he ultimately has complete utter control over domestic and foreign policy. This would suggest that Wilhelmine Germany was an authoritarian state under the kaisers rule, but many historians such as Wehler suggested his own version of the argument which states that Wilhelmine Germany was in fact shaped by the elites (junkers) and the army which simply controlled the Kaiser from the shadows. In this essay i will discuss these interpretations offering the view that Wilhelmine Germany was an 'authoritarian' state under the rule of elites and ultimately the kaiser. Kaiser Wilhem II was an unpredictable, intelligent man with a poor judgement, hardly the kind of person you would give almost unchallenged political powers.
(Document 6) As written in The Origins of the Second World War, by A.J.P. Taylor, if more countries kept getting involved with the issue of the Munich Agreement, Czechoslovakia would have been safe. Taylor also thought that German people were the only ones in the world who can “turn Hitler out” This was to be thought because the Germans were the ones who put him into power in the first place. “The appeasers” feared that the loss of Germany would result in the domination of Europe” (Doc
Intentionalists believe that the eradication of the Jews and ultimately the holocaust was all part of Adolf Hitler’s grand design, and that he would stop at nothing until his design was completed. The extremities of intentionalist beliefs tend to vary, with a large number of Historians taking a more intense view on Hitler
As well, the only way that the Wilson plan would have survived the political intrigue of the Europeans was either through a league that had real teeth, or a super power willing to intervene as a worldwide police officer. Neither of which existed in 1918. Clemenceau’s views represented the average sentiment of the European Allies after the war. In the closing days of the war, a war weary European population must have tried to make sense of the carnage, of the loss. Clemenceau casts a pale light on the German population, blaming the war on the aims of “the intolerable German Aristocracy.” (Clemenceau, p. 73) The entire argument for the French and nay, European view, was the perceived threat that Europeans felt of German arrogance.
Moderate reform played a small part in keeping power in the hands of the Kaiser but its limited scope together with the lack of any real success show that it may have been other factors that kept power in the hands of the Kaiser. This is clearly shown in the lack of substance inherent in Bulow’s and Hollweg’s reforms to placate the socialists together with the failure of Hollweg’s reforms to reform the constitution. On the surface it would appear that Bulow’s reforms to solve the socialist threat show that it was actually reform that maintained power in the hands of the Kaiser, these include the laws to extend accident insurance, to give longer and more generous hours to workers in poor health and those to reduce the amount of factory work. In actual fact, the introduction of a tariff law in
This trigger is held highly among determinist historians as one of the reasons the republic was doomed to fail from the start. Article 48 was a major flaw in the constitution as it compeletely ignored the point of democracy, effectively turning the country into an autocratic rule. This left the country at the mercy of the President, and effectively bypassed the whole point of having a democracy entirely. This is one of the direct causes of the downfall of the democracy as it was this very article that granted President Hindenburg power to hire Adolf Hitler as chancellor against the concensus of the reichstag. It was this that was to be the final nail in the coffin of the Weimar Republic and therefore is one of the reasons for the downfall of the Republic.
These included the industrialists and the army. Although Nazi Germany has totalitarian features, it may no longer be completely appropriate to see Hitler’s Germany as totalitarian. According to an Historian Nazism is best understood when it is seen as the German example of fascism. Fascism was a movement that rejected the idea of democracy and parliamentary government. It emerged in countries such as Italy and Germany where