Hitler and Nazism

by Enzo Collotti

Published 1 November 1998
On 30 January 1933, the president of Germany appointed Adolf Hitler as Chancellor of the Weimar Republic. Hitler's National Socialist Party had won a majority in the general elections the year before, and Hitler's accession to power began under the guise of legitimacy. This text examines how the rise of Nazism was rooted in the crisis in German society following the economic collapse of the late-1920s. The following years saw the establishment of Germany's totalitarian state, the consolidation of full dictatorship between 1934 and 1938, and World War II.