Hitler’s Rise to Power in Germany

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.”