Hitler got into power because of the great depression and the German populations attraction at the time to authoritarian nationalist political party's not because Germany's war reparations were so horrendous.

So I'll admit the situation is too complicated for me to really say this honestly, but the real issue the Germans faced was that they had lost WWI and a bunch of foreign powers were extracting large amounts of wealth from them. They eventually snapped and responded with violence. The fact that the focus when they snapped was Nazi ideology was unfortunate, but the problem wasn't the ideology - it was that foreigners were taking their wealth and the government failed to keep people fed, sheltered and employed.

(1) Authority. At one time, Germany was a battle ground with the children eating by thawing out frozen soldiers in the snow. One reaction was Prussia that became intensely 'militaristic'. Somehow that Prussian development spread over Germany and created an 'intensity' and a big respect for 'authority'. At best there are pros and cons with that direction, and somehow, on balance, Germany long went too far.

(2) WWI. That was a disaster. England, France, Belgium, Germany, Russia, and more suffered. Finally the US came in and broke the stalemate and ended it. Yes, the US lost, too. Among all the suffering, Germany was near the top of the list and, much of Germany had a hugely bitter reaction.

(3) Versailles. There were 'reparations'. So, Germany printed money to pay off the reparations more quickly. Then the inflation ruined the finances for much of Germany and created more bitterness.

(4) Democracy. The German efforts at democracy in the 1920s were clumsy -- more bitterness.

(5) The Great Depression. Sure, the stock market crash was in the US. So, people had borrowed from the banks to buy stocks and suddenly had no hope of paying back. So, the banks went bust. So, the economy slowed enormously. The 2008 housing crisis was similar; we did it to ourselves and didn't often enough see the disaster coming and haven't been very smart about fixing the problem, and the same song, first verse was in the 12 years after the 1929 crash. Then somehow the more developed economies were much more closely linked than one would expect. So, the US slowed down buying from Germany, and some Germans lost their jobs; they didn't buy, and more Germans lost their jobs; they didn't buy from the US, and more in the US lost their jobs; etc.

(6) Hitler. He was mad, and in particular he was mad about all the disasters that happened to Germany. And did I mention, he was mad? Determined. Ambitious. Ruthless. Can think of various 'reasons' from his relationship with his mother, with girls, his struggles in his career, his WWI experience, etc., but none of these factors has any 'predictive' power since many others with similar backgrounds didn't go nuts.

(7) Fertile Ground. Hitler found fertile ground for organizing and leading, especially leading out of work, angry, ex-WWI German soldiers. Hitler wanted to be able to speak and get his followers up on their hind legs, practiced a lot, and got good at it.

(8) German Army Politics. The German Army had some funds for political activities, liked what they saw in Hitler, and provided just enough 'seed' money to keep Hitler going in politics.

(9) Communists. In politics it usually can be helpful to have a visible enemy, and Hitler had the Communists. And they were also likely a genuine threat.

(10) Elections. By 1933 or so, Hitler had enough political followers to start to make some waves in elections. He didn't do really well, but he did stay in the game.

(11) Industry. As might be expected, German industry had some political power. Well, they thought that Hitler could help them, and Hitler no doubt was good at playing along. So, eventually Hindenburg asked Hitler to form a government.

(12) Double Down. Then Hitler and his Nazis were the government, but they still didn't have much power. Hitler called for new elections and used the power he did have to 'stuff the ballot boxes' and do better in the second election. So, he had more in the Reichstag, i.e., congress. Then there was some rough and tumble politics, i.e., before a vote in the Reichstag some of Hitler's tugs could 'arrange' that the majority they wanted was present and voting and the rest were still outside.

(13) Hindenburg Died. Then Hitler got Hindenburg's job, also, which made Hitler close to a dictator. E.g., his buddy Goering was head of the police force in Prussia. Generally his buddies were running things.

(14) Then, in the words in one of the Star Wars movies, Hitler pushed through some 'special powers' for, as I recall, 4 years, to get the economy going again. Amazingly, he actually did it. So it was roads, bridges, ships, planes, whatever. The US should have done as well over the last 4 years. Of course, it's easier to put people to work when also have thugs trash the unions and just dictate what people will get paid -- we don't do such drastic things in the US. Hitler ran what can be called a 'command economy'. Why most economies run from the center flop and his didn't, I don't know. But German industry had reason to be happy with Hitler.

(15) Progress. By 1936 and the Berlin Olympics, Hitler had Germany looking good, if didn't look too closely. There was a lot of 'authoritarianism', but Germany was 'susceptible' to that.

(16) Dictator. Then Hitler got his second term of special powers, was an absolute dictator, and the real monster started to come out. "Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.". Plenty of people in Germany with good sense saw the threat, but opposing Hitler was not possible.

(17) Dreams. Hitler had 'dreams'. One of his dreams was to take over the land to the east, essentially from Germany to the Arctic, the Urals, and the Black Sea. He wanted to turn this land into 'farms' owned by Germans and with Slavs as slave labor on deliberate starvation diets. Everyone else in that land he wanted just to kill off right away.

So Hitler started making war. E.g., he took half of Poland and half of France. For war production, he would turn captured people into slaves.

(18) England. Hitler thought that he could quickly take England. But before a landing, he had to defeat the Royal Air Force -- thus started the Battle of Britain. But Hitler's air force was really just not up to the job: Both his fighter planes and his bombers had range too short. Hitler got angry and tried to bomb London, but his fighters could not provide protection as far as London, and, net, in The Battle of Britain Hitler's air force took unacceptable losses, and Hitler gave up.

(19) Russia. Hitler came close actually to capturing and holding the lands to the east he had in mind. But, he got delayed: (A) Stalin was also running a 'command economy'. So, as Hitler moved east, Stalin packed up nearly everything of value and moved it much farther east. (B) As Hitler moved east, his front grew to be too wide and his supply lines, too long. (C) Hitler planned badly for the Russian winter. (D) The Russians regrouped and pushed back against Hitler and gained time. (E) Due to events elsewhere, Hitler ran out of time, got over extended and, basically, was not able actually to win in Russia. His losses were huge.

Hitler's buddies in Japan declared war on the US, so so did Hitler, and now he was in a two front war, with the US, and on a long walk on a short pier.

Hitler was going to take North Africa, move east and take the Suez Canal and, thus, cut off oil, etc. to England, and continue to move east and take the Mideast oil for Germany, but he blew it. First, the US provided massive supplies to Monty a little west of Suez. Rommel got pushed back to the west. England broke the German code, and, thus, much of Rommel's supplies went to the bottom of the Med. Ike invaded North Africa, and Rommel went back to Germany. Hitler's efforts in North Africa were a bust.

So, Hitler had lost in England, North Africa, and Russia.

England. The US turned England into an unsinkable aircraft carrier, and the US Eighth Air Force along with the Royal Air Force started bombing anything and everything in Germany. Meanwhile the Russians were moving west. By D-Day, June 6, 1944, Hitler was unable to put much of anything into the air. The Normandy invasion was a great success, in spite of some cases of hard times, and then it was a fast charge all the way across France and into Germany. Germany was getting it from the air, from Russia from the east, and from the US, England, etc. from the west.

For the German submarines in the Atlantic, too soon for Germany the US and England looked at the maps, blimps, airplanes, radar, sonar, small aircraft carriers, etc. and from bases in Canada, Greenland, Iceland, England, etc. had fairly safe passage across the North Atlantic.

Hitler also had bought heavily into the whole 'eugenics' stuff, Darwin, the image of human breeding much like dog breeding, etc. and for that reason, his general resentment and madness, and some long 'tensions' in Europe, long a very bloody place, wanted to kill off everyone he regarded as undesirable. He did a lot, especially in Poland.

It appears that since WWII the main lessons were not lost on Germany: No more dictators, Nazis, hate speech, mass unemployment, big inflation, or militarism. A big social safety net. Work hard and smart and just do not mess up again.

Could it happen in the US? I'm too afraid it could. We have to be careful.

The Nazis actually did a good job getting Germany functional again. That doesn't excuse in any way all the horrible stuff that they later did. But it does explain how they took over.

Watch "Triumph of the Will" sometime, from the perspective of people who had spent over a decade after WWI starving.

It's all just cycle of hate. Just how the abused grow up to be abusers. But on a hugely larger scale.

That's what the Germans wanted everyone to believe.

Now, if you compare Versailles (1918) with Brest-Litovsk, Sèvres, or even Versailles (1871) (or even the Septemberprogramm), it's far from awful for the time. Germany had to pay reparations that were in the norm for the period, and lost territories that were basically ethnically either Polish or Danish. It was still the first powerhouse of Europe, and had an intact land- and industrial base, especially in comparison to France or Belgium, where – on top of battle-caused destruction – they carefully destroyed economical infrastructure (e.g. https://www.jstor.org/stable/44575822?seq=3#metadata_info_ta...).

> And the real poverty and unseemliness of the Weimar Republic?

If that's what you learned in your history books, think about changing them. The only thing that led to the infamous economical failure of the Weimar republic is its aversion to pay reparation (~B150$ today) in a normal manner. Instead, they printed stupid amount of money to buy foreign currency to pay reparation with. Of course, this led to a monetary crash – out of wich Germany promptly got out by simply switching to a better handled new mark[1,2,3,4]. It was a pure product of the hopeless German economic policies, that they went back to being the economic powerhouse of Europe as soon as they got their duck in a row, and the difficulties they met thereafter were the baseline for all the nations after the war[5,6].

https://www.minneapolisfed.org/economic-research/conferences...

https://www.jstor.org/stable/41377814

[1] https://www.jstor.org/stable/41377814 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperinflation_in_the_Weimar_R... [3] Wages of Destruction, Tooze [4] Confessions of the old wizard, Schacht [5] https://www.jstor.org/stable/41377814 [6] https://slidetodoc.com/europe-between-the-wars-the-economics...

We should not forget that world war 2 happens, but it also doesn't make much sense for Germans to continue self-flagellation forever. If anything, the lessons learned by the period between world war 1 and world war 2 is that lasting peace is not about trying to fix every past injustice by never ending reparations. It is not feasible to create a world as if world war 2 did not occur, and at some point people has to accept the past and work as a single group, like say a European union rather than Europe vs Germans.

"(3) Versailles. There were 'reparations'. So, Germany printed money to pay off the reparations more quickly. Then the inflation ruined the finances for much of Germany and created more bitterness."

Some of the Allies were going to make the same mistake in WW2 with repartitions once again. The French wanted to take the Ruhr, the industrial heartland in Western Germany and annex it into France. Other ideas were to make Germany an agrarian society. The primary reason the US created the Marshall Plan was to ensure the reparations and the initial dismantling of the German Industry (later repealed) that were forced on Germany (mostly the taking of IP, such as patents) would not cripple it and make it fall into the hands of the Soviets[1].

"(8) German Army Politics. The German Army had some funds for political activities, liked what they saw in Hitler, and provided just enough 'seed' money to keep Hitler going in politics."

The army did sort of a bittersweet deal with Hitler. Most of the army was not fond of Hitler, but they did see him as a way to restore their faded glory. They made their "deal with the devil" though when they agreed to take an oath to Hitler in return for Hitler dismantling the SA, which the Army saw as thugs and did not want integrated into the army (who thought of themselves as principled and aristocratic). Much of the army took that oath quite serious as well due to the Prussian tradition of loyalty to their country and leader--believing that betraying the oath was to betray their country. However, elements of the military still thought Hitler was mad all the way back to 1938 and had plotted to kill Hitler[2]. However, the capitulation of the UK and France in Czechoslovakia[3] and the later invasion of Poland quieted most of the planning to assassinate Hitler for the time being.

Also anyone who has not seen them, I reccomend the BBC's Fall of Eagles[4], BBC's The Great War[5] and the BBC's World at War[6]. Watching them back to back explains quite a bit about how the 19th Century Monarchies led to WWI and how WWI led to WWII.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_reparations_for_World_Wa...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1944_Adolf_Hitler_assassination...

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Munich_Agreement

[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fall_of_Eagles

[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_War_(documentary)

[6] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_at_War

Firstly, the Nazis may have been bad – but the treatment of post-WW1 Germany was bad and a causing factor of WW2.

The Treaty of Versailles ensured in effect that there will be another war in Europe. I think that Germany was uniquely the only country in the 20th century to receive such a hard “punishment” (both economically and culturally) when they lost the First World War.

I guess better forgiveness for German aggression are due to good behaviour from post-war Germany, okay education in north and western Europe, and also that Germany behaved _relatively_ good on the western front. Of course it will take longer for eastern Europe mostly due to the extreme ugliness of the eastern front, and the huge economic differences.

...Keynes began work on The Economic Consequences of the Peace. It was published in December 1919 and was widely read. In the book, Keynes made a grim prophecy that would have particular relevance to the next generation of Europeans: "If we aim at the impoverishment of Central Europe, vengeance, I dare say, will not limp. Nothing can then delay for very long the forces of Reaction and the despairing convulsions of Revolution, before which the horrors of the later German war will fade into nothing, and which will destroy, whoever is victor, the civilisation and the progress of our generation."

Germany soon fell hopelessly behind in its reparations payments, and in 1923 France and Belgium occupied the industrial Ruhr region as a means of forcing payment. In protest, workers and employers closed down the factories in the region. Catastrophic inflation ensued, and Germany's fragile economy began quickly to collapse. By the time the crash came in November 1923, a lifetime of savings could not buy a loaf of bread. That month, the Nazi Party led by Adolf Hitler launched an abortive coup against Germany's government. The Nazis were crushed and Hitler was imprisoned, but many resentful Germans sympathized with the Nazis and their hatred of the Treaty of Versailles.

A decade later, Hitler would exploit this continuing bitterness among Germans to seize control of the German state. In the 1930s, the Treaty of Versailles was significantly revised and altered in Germany's favor, but this belated amendment could not stop the rise of German militarism and the subsequent outbreak of World War II.

https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/keynes-predicts-...