Excerpts From “The Weimar Republic 1919-1933”
“Yet despite such signals, the surge in support for the Nazi Party in the elections of September, 1930, came as an enormous shock to large numbers of Germans.”
“As Feuchtwanger has noted, ‘the Nazi breakthrough was not only sensational, it finally destroyed a party system’ which had survived ‘the traumatic events of defeat and revolution’. The Nazis increased their vote from 2.6 per cent in 1928 to 18.3 per cent, representing an eight-fold rise in the numbers of voters from 812,000 to 6.4 million. While some Germans contemptuously attributed their startling success to an ‘uprising of stupidity’, hundreds of thousands of Protestant farmers in northern Germany, craftsmen and small businessmen and their families and unskilled workers in smaller communities, civil servants, women and above all young people responded to the Nazi appeal to turn their backs on the weak parliamentary system, the Treaty of Versailles and the Young plan, and to support a dynamic nationalist party dedicated to the regeneration of Germany.”
“they {the other parties} now recognised the immense threat posed by the Nazi Party If they were not able to keep Brüning in office, they feared that his replacement might well be the loud-mouthed, tub-thumping, crude but undeniably charismatic Adolf Hitler.”
“He (Brüning ) drew a sharp distinction between the interests of the state, which he saw as being well-served by disciplined and selfless government servants, and ‘party political interests’ which had made Germany ungovernable in the selfish pursuit of narrow party gain. After the election of 1930, Brüning increasingly relied on the support of the government’s administrative machinery and on non-political ‘experts’ to help him in framing and carrying through his policies. Ministerial positions became administrative appointments above the party political system, and power became concentrated in a small circle of powerful state secretaries.”
― from “The Weimar Republic 1919-1933 (Lancaster Pamphlets)”
Tags: After Trump, Nazi. neofascism, neofascism
Posted 25 Feb 2017 by theaveeditor
in Misc.