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Contents
  • A Century of History in Foreign Affairs
  • 01 The First Crisis in Ukraine
  • 02 A New Era for the United States and China
  • 03 India’s Fight for Independence
  • 04 Hitler’s Rise to Power in Germany
  • 05 9/11 Transforms U.S. Foreign Policy
  • 06 Africa Throws Off Colonial Rule
  • 07 The World After the Cold War

Hitler’s Rise to Power in Germany

How the Nazis Consolidated Control—and How the World Perceived the Threat

July 24, 2022
Adolf Hitler at a rally in Nuremberg, Germany, September 1935
Courtesy Wikimedia Commons
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The Nazi Party and its leader, Adolf Hitler, rose to power in a Germany wracked by economic and political crisis. Most Foreign Affairs contributors at the time recognized the dangers of the far-right movement, but they could not foresee how total and how devastating Nazi rule would become. In 1931, Erich Koch-Weser, a prominent German liberal politician, identified the Nazis as the chief threat among the groups exploiting the “political radicalism” of the era—but wrote off a power grab as “extremely doubtful.” In 1932, the journalist Paul Scheffer explored Hitler’s “reckless skill” in playing on Germans’ anxieties, hatreds, and hopes—but remained skeptical that the Nazi movement could “be carried over into practical politics.”

After the party’s success in parliamentary elections, Hitler was appointed chancellor of Germany in 1933. From there, the country’s social and political transformation was swift. “One by one continue to fall the last possible citadels of defense against uncontradicted Nazi dictatorship,” Foreign Affairs Editor Hamilton Fish Armstrong wrote later that year. Questions remained about how the Nazis would govern at home and how far they would push their “brash” and “impatient” policies abroad. But in those early months, Armstrong noted, “we cannot pretend that as yet there is any real evidence to cause our fears to diminish.”

Even years later, after World War II had begun, the grip of the Nazi regime on German society—which the journalist Dorothy Thompson described in 1940 as a revolution based on “the psychopathy of Hitler”—was difficult to comprehend. Easier to grasp was the magnitude of the threat Nazi Germany posed. As Thompson put it, “the West confronts the greatest danger in her whole history.”

Book cover not available

Radical Forces in Germany

By Erich Koch-Weser

Book cover not available

Hitler: Phenomenon and Portent

By Paul Scheffer

Book cover not available

Hitler’s Reich

The First Phase

By Hamilton Fish Armstrong

Book cover not available

The Problem Child of Europe

By Dorothy Thompson

More:
Germany Adolf Hitler History Nazism World War II

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