ABSTRACT
In retrospect there can be no minimising the importance of one historical date – 30 January 1933, when Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor of Germany by President von Hindenburg. Within eight years of his coming to power, Germany had conquered continental Europe from the Channel coast to the gates of Moscow. It was not a conquest and occupation such as had occurred in the Great War. In German-occupied Europe some 10 million people, including 2 million children, were deliberately murdered. Hitler’s Reich was a reversion into barbarism. Racism as such was nothing new, nor was it confined to Germany. These doctrines attracted groups of supporters in most of Europe, including France and Britain, in South America and in the US. But it was in Germany that the resources of a modern industrial state enabled criminal leaders to murder and enslave millions. Until the concentration camps revealed their victims the world was inclined to believe that a country once in the forefront of Western culture, the Germany of Goethe, could not so regress. This faith in civilisation was misplaced. How was it possible? For just one of the more easily discernible parts of the explanation we must turn to the politics of Weimar Germany, which failed to provide stable governments until political democracy ceased to function altogether after the onset of the economic crisis of 1929.
