Most Americans who hiss at the name Adolf Hitler have no idea or experience of the conditions that brought him to power – although that may shortly change. They simply assume that the Germans turned to a raving madman for no reason. Conditions in Germany following the Great War and the great inflation were catastrophic. Prostitution, homelessness and near starvation were everywhere. Unemployment was catastrophically high. Upon Hitler’s ascension to power there were 270,000 suicides a year in Germany. The country was in chaos and Communist revolution was impending.

Millions of Germans had been torn from the home country by the vindictive and punitive Treaty of Versailles. The Germans had been unfairly saddled with the sole guilt for the war. Impossible to pay reparations were assessed and huge tracts of Germany and the former Habsburg Austrian Empire and Hungary were torn off by the treaties of Saint Germain and Trianon and turned over to vengeful Poles and Slavs. The Czechs, in particular, had a centuries old animus toward Germany dating back at least to the Hussite rebellions of the fifteenth century and the battle of White Mountain triggering the Thirty Years War of 1618-1648. The Czech leaders, Masaryk and Benes, presented forged maps to the Paris Peace Conference. The Czechs achieved total political power in a state in which they formed only 50% of the population. German factories and schools were shut down and Germans were attacked in the streets. In Poland, huge numbers of Germans living in the east east since the partitions of the eighteenth century were similarly brutalized. Against the advice of even David Lloyd George, who correctly predicted that it would lead to a new war, Danzig and the Corridor were separated from Germany, as was Memel in Lithuania. The Rhineland was given to France to satisfy Clemenceau and Austria was denied its professed wish of reunification with Germany.

It was in this atmosphere of misery, degradation and national despair that Hitler came to power. His first task was to restore the economy and put huge numbers of unemployed Germans back to work. He succeeded spectacularly. Huge autobahns were built and public works projects kept the unemployed busy. Although the methods were undoubtedly socialist the results brought about a vast improvement. Paid vacations were introduced for the first time and all sorts of social improvements were brought about from cancellable loans to those starting families to the creation of the “people’s car”, the Volkswagen. In foreign policy, by guile or by force, the territories amputated from the Reich by the infamous treaty were reincorporated. First came the Rhineland, then Austria, then the Sudetenland and Czechoslovakia and finally the eruption of the war over Danzig.

This is the background around which the rise of Adolf Hitler must be judged. None of this touches that holy of holies, Hitler’s mistreatment of the Jews. It is not true that the Nazis were reflexively anti-Jewish, as they made numerous exceptions for Jews who had fought for Germany during the First World War, as well as for part-Jews in the Wehrmacht. Nevertheless, it is clear that the Nazis were anti-Jewish Communist. The Communist revolution in Germany, as everywhere else, had been heavily Jewish dominated. When ordinary middle class Germans had been wiped out by the great inflation, cash rich foreign Jews moved in and bought up German real estate for a fraction of its real value. The German nationalist reaction was severe. Hitler was, of course, seeking more than just restored German territory. He wanted empire, principally at the expense of the Soviet Union and the peoples of Eastern Europe. Whether it was wise to defeat him at all costs or whether it would have been wiser to use him as a foil against Joseph Stalin is still a much debated question.

And there is the real background to Adolf Hitler. Love him, hate him or judge him as the product of his times, as you will.

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http://therebel.org/braveheart/675350-weimar-conditions