To fully answer this question one must look at the underlying philosophies behind Hitler’s leadership. What did he stand for and did his ideologies have any redeeming characteristics? Indisputably he had an ability to lead and motivate. He was revered with almost God – like fanaticisms by his people. This essay will set out to establish the basis of his leadership and within that framework, the nature of the man and his vision for the world.
Hitler was in many ways a great leader and his influence on the German people was immense; he used his motivational and powerful speaking abilities to gain support and popularity. Hitler knew how to appeal to people's baser instincts and made use of their fears and insecurities. He could do that, however, only because they were willing to be led, even though his programme was one of hatred and violence. Hitler was extremely Anti-Semetic and when Germany was in the state of social instability and crisis Hitler was able to easily deflect that frustration on to the Jews. After the economic and social hardship of the Great Depression Hitler began to rebuild Germany. He saw a nation of unemployed and hungry citizens and promised them economic prosperity in return for absolute power. Hitler was convinced Germany's past suffering was due to the Jewish population, and as a result initiated a campaign of hatred and isolation towards the nation's Jewish community. Hitler’s propaganda machine promoted the theory that the Aryan race was superior t...
After World War I, the state of Germany was in chaos. This helped Hitler’s campaign to be built on propaganda and fear. In this case, his exploitations of fear were directed towards the Jewish population and other minorities in Germany. Almost all who rallied behind Hitler centered the blame towards the Jewish; again, using them as a scapegoat for the poor condition that Germany was left in. However it wasn’t just the people he absolutely abhorred who lived in fear, people who fit Hitler’s specific criteria were described as, “ Also living in constant fear of doing or saying anything wrong...” (MacKenzie). Anyone who spoke against anything Hitler believed was instantly painted a target, also any connection with the groups he was opposed to was not taken lightly. So not only did Hitler evolve fear into total paranoia, but into a complete psychological control system over the whole nation. Consequently, this power lead to the demise of millions of innocent
During the end of the 1930’s, Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party rose into action. Hitler is commonly referenced and linked with World War II, and has become famous for his brutal dictatorship in Germany. Adolf Hitler began the persecution of Jews with the belief that they were insignificant to the human race. Along with Jews, he believed that handicapped, mentally ill, and elderly people did not deserve the right to live. This horrifying genocide killed over 2/3 of the Jewish population in Europe. 6,000,000 Jews were murdered in concentration camps and mistreated by the Nazis.
From the time Hitler and the Nazi’s took control of Germany in 1933 until the collapse of the Third Reich in 1945, the aim of the regime under the calculating guidance of Hitler himself sought no less than global conquest. This ambitious objective can be further dissected into short term and long term goals that provide insight into Hitler’s character, thoughts and actions.
Before World War II Hitler successfully implemented tactics through propaganda to secure his position as the next German Chancellor. Without using propaganda to increase his popularity Hitler would not have been able to gain the support he needed to gain control of Germany. He manipulated the German people by stating that Germany needs to become united to preserve their freedoms and to keep peace throughout the country. When Hitler was campaigning as a candidate for Chancellor he stated in one of his speeches, “Show tomorrow your firm national unity… Support with me and the Reich Chancellor the principle of equal rights and of peace with honor” (Larson, p. 175). By using a manipulative style of speaking to the public Hitler was able to present himself as one for the people, showing that he prioritized them above everything else. However, this was all a trick to increase Hitler’s popularity so he could eventually become dominant over all aspects of German life. The Nazi Regime achieved this through strategic implementations of propaganda. This desensitized the public into believing Hitler could help Germany in its time of economic and political struggle. A few people were surprised by the amount of propaganda used by the Nazis. One person was a Jewish philologist in Dresden, he noted that, “On every commercial vehicle, post office van, mailman’s bicycle, on every house and shop window, on broad banners, quotations form Hitler are everywhere and al...
After Germany lost World War I, it was in a national state of humiliation. Their economy was in the drain, and they had their hands full paying for the reparations from the war. Then a man named Adolf Hitler rose to the position of Chancellor and realized his potential to inspire people to follow. Hitler promised the people of Germany a new age; an age of prosperity with the country back as a superpower in Europe. Hitler had a vision, and this vision was that not only the country be dominant in a political sense, but that his ‘perfect race’, the ‘Aryans,’ would be dominant in a cultural sense. His steps to achieving his goal came in the form of the Holocaust. The most well known victims of the Holocaust were of course, the Jews. However, approximately 11 million people were killed in the holocaust, and of those, there were only 6 million Jews killed. The other 5 million people were the Gypsies, Pols, Political Dissidents, Handicapped, Jehovah’s witnesses, Homosexuals and even those of African-German descent. Those who were believed to be enemies of the state were sent to camps where they were worked or starved to death.
Hitler’s rise to power before World War II was due to his anger at Germany’s defeat in World War I and the punishment Germany received from Britain and France. He also directed his anger at Jews and communists he believed contributed to that defeat. He blamed them for the loss of World War I, which he thought was a Jewish conspiracy (Jews in Nazi Germany pg. 1). He also believed that the Treaty of Versailles was a Jewish conspiracy designed to take down the country of Germany (Jews in Nazi Germany pg. 1) as well as the hyperinflation of 1923, which he believed to be an international conspiracy by the Jewish people (Jews in Nazi Germany pg. 2). On January 30, 1933, Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany (The History Place: Holocaust Timeline pg. 1). This was the rise to power that he needed to carry out his campaign of evil against the Jewish people. After his rise to power, Hitler branded the Jews as
The debate as to whether Hitler was a ‘weak dictator’ or ‘Master of the Third Reich’ is one that has been contested by historians of Nazi Germany for many years and lies at the centre of the Intentionalist – Structuralist debate. On the one hand, historians such as Bullock, Bracher, Jackel and Hildebrand regard Hitler’s personality, ideology and will as the central locomotive in the Third Reich. Others, such as Broszat, Mason and Mommsen argue that the regime evolved out from pressures and circumstances rather than from Hitler’s intentions. They emphasise the institutional anarchy of the regime as being the result of Hitler’s ‘weak’ leadership. The most convincing standpoint is the synthesis of the two schools, which acknowledges both Hitler’s centrality in explaining the essence of Nazi rule but also external forces that influenced Hitler’s decision making. In this sense, Hitler was not a weak dictator as he possessed supreme authority but as Kershaw maintains, neither was he ‘Master of the Third Reich’ because he did not exercise unrestricted power.
Adolf Hitler’s rise to power as the chancellor of Germany is one of history’s great political success stories. He was known to be an uneducated common soldier in World War I, who had been a failure in all in his undertakings. He eventually rose to power in 1933, in a country that was devastated both socially and politically. Within five years, he had given his nation stability and hope. They started to hail him as the leader and savior because he eradicated unemployment, stabilized the currency, provided social legislation, and reformed the military. He also built magnificent freeways and promised automobiles to every laboring man. If Hitler had died before World War II, he may well have been remembered as the greatest and one of the most outstanding leaders in German history. However, later on his political career, he ordered and also committed atrocities like the order for the extermination Jews and the elimination of every potential enemy in the occupied Eastern territories. He was fully aware of mass executions of Jewish civilians in these territories that make him one of the most monstrous leaders in world history. A look at his benevolent work at the beginning of his political career and his malevolence at the peak and towards the end of his life lead us to view him in two perspectives; thus he seemed to be once a mentally ill person and a brilliant political leader. I refuse to see him from just one perspective since he was human and he had evil in him. In the book, Psychopathic God by Robert Waite, a leading German Biographer, A. J. P. Taylor has come to the conclusion that Hitler was “a neurotic character who was imprisoned by an overpowering neurotic psychosis” (Waite xvi).
The 1940’s was a time of great conflict between the United States and Europe. This led to World War II, which began on June 14th, 1940 when German troops were sent to France to occupy Paris (Nash 500). Before the United States entered World War II many conflicts erupted throughout Europe such as the advancement of German troops into various countries (Nash 501-502). The main source of these conflicts was a man by the name of Adolf Hitler. Hitler was a power hungry man who had the drive to become a political leader (Nash 492). But, the ways by which he obtained leadership were repulsive. He struck fear into the eyes of those in which opposed his teaching and killed whoever stood in his way (Nash 493). Germany faced troubling times after World War I. Hitler looked at this as the perfect opportunity to rise to power. He turned a party that consisted of a small amount of workers into the National Socialist German Workers’ party, which later became known as the Nazi party. During the 1920s, Hitler performed many speeches in order to make the Nazi party better known. In his speeches he talked about eliminating the differences between the rich and poor in order to prevent divided social classes. This made his party strong, attractive, and it quickly gained many supporters (Nash 494). By August 1934, Hitler became the Dictator of Germany and began mass takeover of Europe and World War II began (Nash 495). It was at this point when he began mass takeover of Europe and World War II began (Nash 500). He sent Nazi troops to take over nearby land, which made neighboring countries nervous. One of these countries, Russia, made a non-aggression pact with Hitler as a way to try to protect their country. Even though H...
On 30 January 1933, the German president, Paul von Hindenburg, selected Adolf Hitler to be the head of the government. This was very unexpected. Hitler was the leader of an extreme right-wing political party, the National Socialist German Workers (Nazi) Party. Hitler sought to expand Germany with new territories and boundaries. Hitler also focused on rebuilding Germany’s military strength. In many speeches Hitler made, he spoke often about the value of “racial purity” and the dominance of the Aryan master race. The Nazi’s spread their racist beliefs in schools through textbooks, radios, new...
Adolf Hitler came to power on February 28, 1933 (Rossel). He rose to power using inflammatory speeches and inspiring hope for the defeated Germans. He constructed a system to empower the German people and allow them to thrive in the period after the Great Depression (Noakes). Using keen acumen and decisive moves, he was able to turn Germany into a war machine bent on the creation of an Aryan utopian society, at the cost of all inferior races, especially the Jews ("The Period between 1933 and 1939"). At this time Germany was a defeated country. They had recently had numerous humiliating defeats in WWI, and the Germans no longer had the pride they once had celebrated (Laurita). Augmented by the fact that the Great Depression had ravaged the country and left many in a state of penury and impoverished, the Germans were desperate. As well, Germany was currently a country without any source of stability without a generally supported constitution. When Hitler promised a utopian society filled with hope and where the Germans would be exalted as the superior race, the Germans listened and obeyed his every word (Noakes). Hitler fed on the desperation and hopelessness of these German people to make a society driven by fear; this state of pity allowed Hitler to convince the Germans that he could provide a better future.
During the late 1920s and early 1930s, Germany was experiencing great economic and social hardship. Germany was defeated in World War I and the Treaty of Versailles forced giant reparations upon the country. As a result of these reparations, Germany suffered terrible inflation and mass unemployment. Adolf Hitler was the leader of the Nazi party who blamed Jews for Germany’s problems. His incredible public speaking skills, widespread propaganda, and the need to blame someone for Germany’s loss led to Hitler’s great popularity among the German people and the spread of anti-Semitism like wildfire. Hitler initially had a plan to force the Jews out of Germany, but this attempt quickly turned into the biggest genocide in history. The first concentration camps in Germany were established soon after Hitler's appointment as chancellor in January 1933.“...the personification of the devil as the symbol of all evil assumes the living shape of the Jew.” –Adolf Hitler
In the Summer of 1941, Adolf Hitler started exterminating Jews and other non-Aryans, as a part of his plan to create a perfect Germany and to carry out his ‘Final Solution’ to the ‘Jewish Question’. Before exterminating 6,000,000 Jewish people, Adolf Hitler had already performed several actions which singled out the Jew as an evil person and one who should be killed. In 1923, Hitler was caught while trying to overturn the Bavarian government and was imprisoned for 5 years. In prison, he wrote the famed autobiography, Mein Kampf, in which he stated his first publicly known anti-Semitic beliefs and his ‘Final Solution’ to the ‘Jewish Question’. While imprisoned, there was a worldwide depression as economic markets crashed worldwide. This would help Hitler because once out of prison he would use this to help gain power both for the Nazi’s and for himself politically by promising better things to come in the future. In 1933, while preaching in front of a large Nazi crowd, Hitler used the Jews as scapegoats for Germany’s loss in World War One. “If at the beginning of the War and during the War twelve or fifteen thousand of these Hebrew corrupters of the people had been held under poison gas, as happened to hundreds of thousands of our very best German workers in the field, the sacrifice of millions at the front would not have been in vain.'; Many people were upset at the loss, and blaming the Jews made many people anti-Semites. Once he was named chancellor in 1933, Hitler preached about creating a Germany for true German people and a more centralized Germany. This included eliminating those who were non-Aryans and/or non-German. He would later detail about what a true German was in the Nuremberg Laws. He stated that Jews were not really Germans but instead, they were non-Aryan, and they were malignant tumors.
Hitler saw that most of Germany didn’t fit this picture at all, so he decided to solve it in one of the most awful ways possible. The mass murder, or Holocaust of over six million Jews, and long with the innocent Blacks, Gays, Gypsies, and both physically and mentally Handicapped. He mostly targeted the Jewish because in World War II, the Jewish was the main reason why Germany lost in World War II. This mass murder lasted over years and years of murder, forced lab...
In the year of 1933 Adolf Hitler seized the position of chancellor of Germany and this power that he received in January 30th is what shaped one of the most bloodlust dictatorships that this world has ever known. Hitler’s desire for power and victory made him one of the greatest leaders the world has ever seen but it also made him one of the most cruel and heartless people known to mankind. But how did he do this, how did he become one of the greatest and cruellest dictators? Throughout this essay we will explore the long, short and immediate causes for Hitler’s sudden success.