Quotes Weimar Republic and Hitler's RTP

Jacket

“The principal predicament of the Weimar Republic was not defeat nor the difficulties which its government faced in the post-war years, but the social and political structure of German society…(with) their origins in the 19th century.”

Geary

“The economic crisis acted as a trigger, occasioning the abandonment of a political system that had already lost its legitimacy”

Kolb

“The first German republic was encumbered by a basic weakness due to the circumstances of its foundation. In the form it took in 1929, parliamentary democracy was truly accepted and zealously defended by only a minority of the population.”

Armagh

“Gloom was such that already by the mid 1920s may Germanys were losing faith in the very principle of parliamentary democracy: this was above all the cancer that killed Weimar… A growing number of politicians… came to feel that democracy was unworkable.. Probably by 1930 a period of authoritarian rule had become inevitable.”

Salmon

“If Weimar had some chances of survival before (the Depression), it had very little chance afterwards.”

Laffan

“There was nothing predestined about Hitler’s triumph in 1933. Like the democrats in 1918, the National Socialists came to power more because of their enemies’ weakness and failures than because of their own strength.”

Nicholls

“Hitler’s appointment was quite unnecessary… the Nazis could not have threatened the state if they had been denied power. Their movement was waning, a further period of frustration might have finished them off.”

Feuchtwanger

“The personality of the Führer became a significant historical factor. He had a combination of demagogic gifts and political instinct… Luck was also with him, mainly because all other players in the field turned out to be so inadequate and mistaken in their judgements.”

Klaus Fischer

“The rise of Nazism was due to special conditions within a 60 year span — anti-Semitism, nationalism, imperialism, defeat in war, the Versailles Treaty, the vindictive attitude of Western powers, catastrophic economic circumstances, Germany’s unstable political institutions and parties, the myopia of Hindenburg and his conservative clique, and the charismatic genius of Adolf Hitler”

Holtfrerich

“The Nazi rise to power was essentially linked to the Great Depression which was a world-wide phenomenon and had little to do with the domestic conflict.”