The number of people unemployed rose by five million from the start of the great depression1929 to when Hitler became chancellor in 1933. Some people were still in works but they were paid low wages and worked short time works. The number of unemployment left many people hungry as they had no work so they couldn’t get the money to buy food. Also many people became homeless. The great depression gave huge boost to the extremist parties as the German people started to blame the government to the depression and therefore lost confidence in them.
What Evans means by this is that the desperation of the people led them to polarising their votes and seeing radical leaders like Hitler as a solution to the mess that Germany had become. Hitler took advantage of this, and from there was able to play a huge role in the collapse of the Weimar Republic. The economic strain that Germany was placed under was also a major impact of the Depression on the collapse of the Republic. Firstly, the Depression had the obvious impact of the debt rising and the banking crises however, there were a number other impacts. Germany relied heavily on international trade for resources; almost one third of their resources came from overseas.
Hitler also thought that since the government was just developing it would have been a good time to seize power and take over the government. Finally, Hitler attempted the Munich Putsch also to gain support from the streets but this had failed him. I agree with the statement ‘the Reichstag Fire more important than the Enabling Act in allowing Hitler to consolidate power’ because of several reasons. Firstly, without the Reichstag Fire there wouldn’t have been an Enabling Act. The Reichstag Fire led to the Enabling Act because Hitler had managed to convince Hindenburg that it was a ‘communists uprising’.
The limited nature of the revolution was one of the main factors which weakened prospects for democracy, when Ebert was trying to form a government he still had a problem that the radical communists were still looking to turn Germany into a communist state similar to the Soviet Union and thus to put down this rebellion and get support of the army he made an agreement with Groener. The agreement was that the army would support the government if the army and civil service were left unchanged. This was the main reason that democracy was irreversibly weakened, because the civil service and army generals were all right-wing conservatives providing a powerbase for the radical right. This limited democracy because the radical right thought that democracy was weak and indecisive, the radical right though was weakened because the radical left was way more powerful initially in post war Germany, but the radical right would help democracy until the radical left was no longer a threat and would act as ticking time bomb of support. This could have acted as a powerbase for the Kapp Putsch and the eventual rise of the Nazis.
Another thing was there was the weakness of the Weimar government, which played its part. The Weimar government was failing miserably, what with a failed economy, no power, a great depression, unemployment, a weak president, and the rise of terrorism and extremism. The Social Democrats were losing their touch. During the Stresemann years of the 1920s the Nazis couldn’t even get into double figures when it came to seats in the Reichstag. Germany, it looked, was on the rise while Stresemann was Chancellor but the Nazis and their appealing polices were al too good for the people of Germany to refuse and so while the votes for the Social Democrats only increased ever so slightly the Nazi votes were plumiting and with every election they grew and grew.
The failure of the Weimar Republic to fix the increasingly pressing problems of Germany consequently contributed massively to their downfall, as it demonstrated their weakness. By the early 1930s the German people were resentful of their government because of the economic issues caused by the Great Depression and Wall Street Crash. For example industrial production in 1930 had dropped by 13% of what it was in 1928, and by 1932 it had dropped by 42%. This combined with the fact many Germans still had the effects of the economic problems of the early 1920s fresh in their minds caused declining support for moderate parties and therefore the Republic. This can evidently be seen from the election results as in 1928 the SPD had 29.8% of the vote and by 1932 this had dropped to 20.4%.
The Great Depression was mainly in America but it also had effects on the German economy too. Between the years 1929 and 1932 the amount of world trade fell by around 70 per cent. The unemployment levels rose and wage cuts were made and many people were made homeless due to this, they were unable to pay their rent or their mortgages so many were reduced to instant poverty. Welfare was a problem with the depression, the right wing didn’t like the idea of welfare but some of the left wing parties did. This meant they were arguing over welfare, the fall of Muller government and what they would do with the benefit system.
John majors government came into office after the downfall of Margret Thatcher, which ultimately created divisions within the party. Not only did the party suffer from the internal conflict but also faced the problems of the recession after the ‘Lawson boom’. In order to stabilise the economy he joined the ERM getting a good deal but ultimately resulting in ‘black Wednesday’ causing Major to raise interest rates to 15%. This was political suicide and he soon lost the support of the press we had once relied so much on to get re-elected in 1992. The housing market also plummeted leading to negative equity, which the majority of the working class could not afford resulting in the repossession of their houses combined with the drastic increase in unemployment Britain was in a mess.
6) Hoovervilles were named after Herbert Hoover because he was the president at the time of the great depression. The American people felt like he was to blame for the terrible economy because he raised taxes when he promised that he wouldn't as well as creating the Smoot Hawley tariff which eventually cut America off from foreign trade, tightening the grasp that the depression already had on the U.S. The negative view that the American people had of Hoover was not fair because he put forth more effort than any other president before him to pull America out of a
American businesses lost vast amounts of money and to repay the debt they asked German banks to repay the money they had borrowed. Peoples vote turned to leaders who blamed reasons for the Depression. The Nazi's The Weimar Republic was not to blame for the huge economics problems Germany were in at the time. Though to stop hyperinflation reoccurring the Chancellors raised taxes, cut wages and reduced unemployment