The rise to power of the Nazi Party
The early Nazi Party was largely composed of social misfits, nationalist cranks, psychopaths, and unemployed former soldiers who were happy to provide strong-arm services to intimidate political opponents. The Nazi Party would probably have disappeared but for the economic chaos and soaring inflation that gripped Germany in the 1920s, and financially ruined the great mass of the German people. This economic chaos, partly due to the heavy burden of reparations demanded by France, played into Hitler's hands. Secretly backed by elements of the army and powerful business leaders, Hitler rapidly turned his small political party into a major player in German politics. Hitler employed his uniformed party thugs, called storm troopers (Sturmabteilung), to terrorise political opponents. Although lacking a Nazi Party majority in the German parliament (Reichstag), Hitler persuaded the elderly President of Germany to appoint him Chancellor of Germany on 30 January 1933. The death of democracy in Germany would follow swiftly.
Hitler salutes the Nazi flag at a party rally in 1934 after winning power. These massive rallies were a typical Nazi propaganda exercise.
The Nazis staged a fire at the Reichstag on 27 February 1933, and suggested that it was evidence of a communist revolution about to take place. Political turmoil followed, and Hitler convened the Reichstag on 23 March 1933 and demanded that the parliament turn over its powers to him so that he could protect Germany from communist disorder. The aisles of the German parliament were lined with menacing Nazi storm trooper thugs, and many opposition deputies had been arrested by the Nazis on trumped-up charges or denied entry to the parliament. The remaining intimidated deputies meekly surrendered the powers of parliament to the Chancellor, Adolf Hitler, and the dictatorship of the Nazi Party gangsters and their Fuehrer was established. Germany would be ruled until its defeat in World War II by these Nazi gangsters.
To ensure that the vast majority of Germans would be isolated from information and views not approved by their Nazi masters, strict censorship of the media was imposed and a propaganda ministry was established. Loyalty to the Fuehrer and the Nazi Party was ensured by the setting up of the infamous Schutzstaffel, or SS, a quasi-military secret police organisation. The uniforms of its members were black and their badge was the Death's Head. The SS rounded up political opponents and other victims of Nazi policy and imprisoned them in concentration camps.
The student of history may well question at this point how Nazi gangsters could take over a democracy in this way. Hitler's skilful exploitation of economic chaos in Germany was an important factor in the rise to power of the Nazi Party, together with the secret support of elements of the German army and powerful business leaders, most of whom shared with Hitler a contempt for genuine democracy. Political opponents were intimidated by Nazi storm troopers. However, to understand why so many Germans were attracted to Adolf Hitler and accepted his despotic rule and military aggression, it is necessary to turn briefly to German history.
Historical Foundations of German Militarism
The German habit of obedience to authority can be traced to the aftermath of the Thirty Years' War which devastated Germany before it ended in 1648. After the war, Germany was split up into hundreds of small principalities ruled by despot princes, who crushed individual liberties, imposed a dark age on German culture, and repressed any striving for democracy. This fragmented Germany continued until the late nineteenth century, when the Germanic state of Prussia took over Germany's destiny.
Prussia at this time was an aggressive military state possessing a powerful and disciplined army. The king of Prussia was a despot who demanded absolute obedience from his people and dedication of their lives to work, duty and sacrifice. The great Prussian landowners, known as Junker, were generally ruthless, arrogant, and domineering men who ruled their own lands as petty despots. It was one of these ruthless Junker, Otto von Bismark, Prime Minister of Prussia, who between 1866 and 1871 used his powerful army to weld all of the German states into the nation we know today as Germany.
Bismark believed that war was an appropriate instrument for achieving political goals. To secure unification of the German states under Prussian leadership, he deliberately provoked the Franco-Prussian War (1870-71), which resulted in the defeat of France and the unification of the German states as an empire. In 1871, King Wilhelm I of Prussia was proclaimed emperor of a Germany ruled by Prussian militarists who viewed democracy and culture with contempt, and military power as being the proper way to settle disputes with neighbouring countries. Bismark was rewarded for his services by being made a prince, and he was appointed chancellor of the new German empire. His ruthless militarism earned him the description "Iron Chancellor".
When Japan's Iwakura mission came to Germany in 1871 to learn how Western nations were managed, its members were impressed by Germany's Prussian-influenced authoritarian form of government and Prussian-trained military machine. They brought these German models back to Japan, where they were subsequently adapted to Japan's needs for authoritarian government behind a façade of democracy and a powerful military machine. The Japanese even borrowed the German term "Diet", meaning an assembly of representatives, for their inaugural parliament in 1890. The Japanese mission chose unfortunate models, and it is arguable that Japan would ultimately pay a high price for adopting political and military models from Bismark's Germany.
When Kaiser Wilhelm II abdicated in 1918, he left behind for Adolf Hitler a frightening legacy of a nation conditioned over three centuries to acceptance of despotic rule, obedience to authority, censorship of information, and the culture of militarism imposed on Germany during sixty years of Prussian domination.
Although the comparison is not an exact one, it will be seen, when Japan's path to war with Australia is examined, that there are disturbing parallels between the development of Germany and Japan as modern nations prior to World War II. Japan shared with Germany a similar pattern of militarism, authoritarian rule, and obedience to authority which, in the case of the Japanese, had been ingrained in the minds of its people by centuries of domination of Japanese culture by samurai warriors.