To What Extent Was the Rise to Power of the Nazis Due to the Wall Street Crash?
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To what extent was the rise to power of the Nazis due to the Wall Street Crash?
Historian Carr writes “It is inconceivable that Hitler could have come into power had not the Weimar Republic being subject to the unprecedented strain of a world crisis”, thus he thinks that the Wall Street Crash was the cause of problems in Weimar leading to the rise of the Nazis. In 1933 the Nazi party took control of Germany, installing Hitler as chancellor. Evidence would suggest that the Wall Street Crash was a major factor in the Nazis rise to power, however there were other factors such as the fall of the Weimar Republic and the attraction of the Nazi ideal. Historian Conan Fischer says that “The worsening economic situation triggered the slide towards some form of authoritarian government”. Thus he sees the economic problems in Germany as the cause for the Nazis rise to power. In the 1920s a confidential government report in said of the National socialists, “Today it is a numerically insignificant, radical, revolutionary splinter group that is incapable of exerting any noticeable influence on the great mass of the population or on the course of political developments”. This shows that the party had little precedence in its early years and later events lead to its rise in popularity.
The Wall Street Crash brought mass unemployment to Germany. The phrase “When the Americans sneeze, Europe catches a cold” accurately describes the cause of the mass depression after the Wall Street crash. Germanys reparation payments from the First World War had been restructured so that they could afford to pay them. Restructuring of the Treaty of Versailles under the Dawes Plan of 1924 and The Young Plan of 1929 enabled Germany to pay reparations propped up by large loans from America. Stresseman, chancellor of Germany till his death in 1929 described Germanys situation as “Germany is in fact dancing on a volcano. If the short-term credits are called in, a large section of our economy would collapse”. The crash of the American stock markets meant that they