You think
you know Adolf Hitler? You’ve never seen
him like this before.

Hitler’s contemporaries,
from his birth in Braunau to his
death in the bunker, authentically flesh
out the picture.

Who was Hitler? Hitler neither finished school nor had any vocational training.

He occasionally lived
in homeless shelters or on the street.

He refused to pursue
a regular job.

To this day, it
seems inexplicable that he could come to power.

Out of nowhere, Hitler
became the fuhrer, leader of the German Reich.

One of the most powerful
men of the 20th century.

Starting an inferno
that engulfed the world and brought death to
millions of people.

The nation worshiped
him and followed him blindly into the abyss, but during his lifetime
he kept his origins and his life secret.

No one should know
how or who he was.

Fascinating and
oppressive accounts from companions, friends,
and enemies as well as the most extensive collection of archive material every shown.

Much of it, hitherto
unpublished, reveal who Hitler was and
how he could become what he was.

A notorious liar and an
unscrupulous murderer.

As soon as Hitler
gets out of prison, he re-establishes the NSDAP.

After his imprisonment,
he decides to take power by illegal means instead of attempting
a further coup.

As the unquestioned
leader of the NSDAP and the national camp, he develops the party
into a powerful movement.

The NSDAP attracts
mainly young people and offers an alternative to the established
bureaucratic parties.

As the economy recovers
in the late 1920s the NSDAP stagnates, but with the crisis at
the beginning of the 1930s Hitler’s party
regains popularity.

Hitler loses the
election for president, but in the next
parliamentary elections the NSDAP becomes
the strongest party.

Nevertheless,
Hindenburg still refuses to appoint him chancellor.

Hitler must rethink how
he can come to power.

At
the head of The Reich stood an imperial field
marshal, as far as I knew, with ultra conservative views
and a limited intellect.

The anti-republican
conservative party, now called the German National, had occasionally
participated in government.

Why shouldn’t this continue? Pursue further consolidation.

Where were the alternatives? The Communists would
never come to power, certainly not the
National Socialists.

Guller Mann, student.

Diary,
November the 28th, 1926.

Departure Monday morning.

Arrival in the
afternoon in Essen.

Straight to the boss.

He’s happy that I’ve
come to the auditorium, a huge hall filled to
bursting with people.

Hitler comes in, then
he speaks for two hours.

He was the Fuhrer again for whom it is a real
pleasure to fight.

Joseph Goebbels, NSDAP
leader of Berlin.

After
imprisonment in Landsberg, Hitler becomes the sole leader
of the Nationalist movement.

He feels chosen by
destiny to show Germany the way to national salvation.

Although the party remains
unsuccessful at the polls, and membership
increases only slowly, the personality cult
around Hitler is growing.

This Fuhrer Cult holds the National Socialist
Movement together across ideological divisions
and personal differences.

The salute, Heil Hitler also began to take
hold about this time.

It originally came from
the harmless greeting, Heil So-and-so.

Something you’d say
to people in sporting or cycling clubs without
using their names.

Ernst Hanfstaengl,
Hitler acquaintance.

Letter from
Marga to Heinrich Himmler, March the second, 1928.

Dear sweetheart, Earlier on I tried to imagine
how you looked as a boy.

Do you have any pictures? Why are you going
to a Hitler meeting? You know what he has to say.

Sweetheart, I kiss you.

Your little wife.

Lieblstrasse in Dresden, 1929.

The druggist, Gregor
Strasse, has been the Reich organization directory
of the NSDAP since 1928 and thus the party’s
second most important man.

In the North of
the German Reich, he ensures a rising
popularity for the NSDAP, but he is a Socialist
revolutionary and committed to cooperating
with the Soviet Union and thus comes more and more
into conflict with Hitler.

Since 1925, Strasse has
sponsored his secretary, the young Heinrich Himmler.

At Hitler’s behest, Himmler
will have Strasse murdered by the SS on June
the 30th, 1934.

The German Interior Ministry
states in March, 1927 that the NSDAP is
not moving forward.

It did
not succeed in bringing it’s supporters even
close to the strength that it reached in year 1923.

Hitler had failed to reach the middle class himself.

Now, when the middle
class fell with the Mark and were later exasperated
by the world crisis, he offered himself
as their savior.

Depressed, they wanted dreams.

He offered them
dreams for the moment and security for the future.

He made them fight and
they made him a god.

The god of the petty bourgeois precisely because
he thought and spoke what was inarticulate
in their minds.

Stephen H.

Roberts,
Australian historian who lived in Germany
during the 1920s.

In 1928, Hitler rents a small house on
the Obersaltzberg know as Haus Wachenfeld.

He used to stay here
under the name Herr Wolf.

Hitler allows his closest
friends to call him Wolf.

The reason for this, Hitler went by the nickname Wolf at the beginning of
his political career.

Heinrich Hoffmann,
friend of Adolf Hitler.

Hitler
understands the name as the Germanic root of Adolf.

It corresponds to
his view of the world as a place of constant
struggle for survival.

To Hitler, the name
Wolf, implies the idea of strength, aggression,
and solitude.

Wieland,
Wolfgang, Verena, and I, we all loved Wolf because he enthralled us
with his adventure stories about his travels
through Germany.

For us, his life was exciting because it was so different.

Everything was
like a fairy tale.

Friedelind Wagner, grand-daughter
of Richard Wagner.

Soon,
Hitler has enough money to buy Haus Wachenfeld.

From 1924 onwards, the
German economy recovers.

This leads to the five golden
years of the Weimar Republic.

Looking back on it now, I see the mad whirl of
this Berlin of 1928 and ’29 as a kind of Pompeii and Revel on the eve of the
Vesuvian eruption.

Sefton Delmer, correspondent
of The Daily Express in Berlin.

Diary,
September the 19th, 1928.

Elsa wrote that she has
had her hair cut in a bob.

I am shocked.

Would never have
thought it possible, but one shouldn’t be surprised
at anything nowadays.

Diary, October the 3rd, 1928.

Yesterday, Elsa
visited cheery and gay.

Her bob suits her
extremely well.

Nevertheless, to me it looks
awful and will remain so.

Henrietta Schneider,
housekeeper, East Prussia.

The
Nazis hated culture itself because it is
essentially international and therefor subversive
of nationalism.

Christopher Ishwood,
British-American writer.

In
the 1920s, Berlin was ahead of everything that was
known as new in our field.

It had everything.

Reinhardt’s great theater,
great film studios, great films.

The most beautiful
bars and restaurants, including gay bars.

Berlin was productive
and rich with ideas, rich in ideals, and at
the same time practical.

A combination never
achieved before.

Marlene Dietrich, actress
and singer, Memoirs.

If Maestro Klemperer takes the tempi differently
than Furtwangler, if a painter adds
to a dusk, a hue which one can not even in bright daylight
perceive in Pomerania, if one is for birth control, if one builds a house
with a flat roof, this is all cultural Bolshevism.

As is showing a caesarian
section in a film.

Cultural Bolshevism is
practiced by the act of Chaplin, an if the physicist
Einstein asserts that the principle of the
constant speed of light can only be invoked where
there is no gravity, this must also be
cultural Bolshevism and a personal
favor to Mr.

Stalin.

Karl Frauzyetski, publisher
of the Weltbuener magazine .

Art was
no longer a mere ornament of life, but rather it’s
immediate expression.

Cubism, futurism, expressionism, whatever you want to call it, this is how we wear it.

This was our world,
so shaken and shocked that everything was upside down.

Surrealism? Of course! What else? Vicki Baum, writer
and journalist.

I
met Hitler personally for the first time in
early October, 1927.

He was accompanied
by Rudolph Hess.

In the hotel, Hitler
immediately went to his room.

Hess followed him
quickly after ordering 20 bottles of mineral
water for the lectern on the grounds that Hitler
sweated a great deal during the big speeches.

He was liable to lose
five pounds in weight.

Albert Krebs, provincial
NSDAP leader, Hamburg.

The old Social
Democratic People’s Party had almost no orators able
to mobilize the masses.

While the National Socialist
speakers, whip their followers into a frenzy, the Social
Democrats tormented their listeners with figures,
statistics, and evidence.

Julius Leber, editor-in-chief,
Social Democratic Lubecker Volksboten newspaper.

On
November the 16th, 1928, for the first time after the ban on public speaking in
Prussia has been lifted, Hitler speaks in the
Sportpalast in Berlin allegedly in front
of 18,000 supporters.

For the first time he
uses an electro-acoustic sound system, speaking
into a microphone, and for the first time his
words are clearly understood in every corner
of a large space.

Between 1925 and 1929, Hitler’s
small political movement is marked by activism,
dynamism, enthusiasm, youthfulness, and strength.

Nearly 60% of new party
members are under 30 years old.

The Reichsbanner
Black-Red-Gold, a league of German war veterans
and Republicans was founded 1924 in Magdeburg.

In 1932, the Banner has
more than 3 million members.

At first
people laughed at the parades, the meetings full of
incidents and brawls, but it soon became clear
that neither the underlying ideology nor the wild
determination of his representatives had been
correctly estimated.

The Worker’s Movement
mobilized it’s forces, increased it’s
supporters activity, and created defenses in the form of the Reichsbanner
Black-Red-Gold, The Iron Front, and special
protective formations called Schufuls.

I was one of the younger
driving forces and very committed to all of this.

William Mattour, Social
Democrat, Konigsburg.

There
was only one way for us to save the republic.

To unite with the left-wing
parts of the democratic party and the center party and
find a common approach.

Due to the authoritarianism
of the state, it would have been impossible for the Social Democratic
Party to establish a purely party political
military organization for the protection of the
republic and the working class against fascism.

Carl Hurstmann, vice-president,
Reichsbanner Black-Red-Gold.

By the
way, you could buy a pistol, a 7.

65 caliber, factory
new, for a giveaway price.

A push was more or
less expected any day.

The air was full of such rumors.

Horst Wessel, law
student in Berlin.

And
of course we gave ourselves military training, but not in
order to overthrow the state, but to defend ourselves.

Police and fascist thugs
kept attacking demonstrations and disrupting meetings.

We had the Red Front
Fighter League and the Red Youth Front.

In the evening, we
practiced judo on the banks of the river Elbe and
learned how to move around in groups safely and
unobtrusively at night.

We never sought or
provoked brawls, we just defended
ourselves against raids and often got beaten up.

Horst Zindermann, Communist
Youth Official, Dresden, Before Daylight.

Street
processions, press promotions, propaganda tours
into the provinces created an atmosphere
of activism and tension.

There were countless
clashes and wounded people, even dead people
left in the square.

Horst Wessel, Autobiography.

In February, 1930, one of the casualties will be the Berlin student Horst Wessel.

In parliamentary elections
on May the 20th, 1928, the Social Democrat SPD
and the Communist KPD win 40% of the votes
at the expense of the Nationalist parties.

The NSDAP earns only 2.

6%
of the votes and 12 seats.

In 1930, the NSDAP
bought new premises, the brown house
near Konigsplatz.

The money for the purchase
is donated to the NSDAP by industrialist Fritz Thyssen.

Hitler will have Thyssen
arrested and jailed at the end of 1940.

For his study, Hitler had a large corner room
on the first floor which I can barely remember
because I seldom saw him there.

Not even the large Frederica
Strelitz painting on the wall could persuade him to
keep regular working hours or treat appointments
as binding.

Ernst Hanfstaengl.

Despite
the lack of political success, the party stages
spectacular rallies.

First in Munich and Weimar,
then from 1927 onwards, exclusively in Nuremberg.

Diary,
Nuremberg, August the 4th, 1929.

A stampede of people that
exceeds our wildest hopes.

Outside the drums
are already booming.

Torch light processions,
endlessly long.

Joseph Goebbels, NSDAP
leader of Berlin.

The
party conventions are without question,
Hitler’s personal work.

Just as he was involved
in building the SA, from the smallest details
of the uniforms to the color of the collar patches, he concerned himself
with the planning of the party
conventions, right down to the decorations
in the Congress Hall.

Albert Krebs, NSDAP
leader, Hamburg.

Through the city, a triumphant procession, everyone cheering and throwing
flowers, marched past, almost four hours.

A sea of joy and flowers.

Joseph Goebbels.

The
continuing fragmentation of the party landscape
is advantageous for the rise of the NSDAP.

In elections, they win
more and more support from the splinter
and protest parties.

October 1929.

Angry autumn after
a beautiful summer.

Rain and calm weather and
something suffocating in the air and it wasn’t the weather.

For the first time on the
street, manure brown uniforms.

Sebastian Haffner,
journalist, Memoirs.

The SPD had won the parliamentary elections
in 1928 and since then, led a coalition government
with the middle class parties.

This falls apart over
domestic policies one year after the death of the liberal foreign
minister, Stresemann.

The fall of the SPD
chancellor Hermann Muller and the appointment of the
Central Party’s Heinrich Bruning are the first steps
towards the abandonment of the Weimar Republic
by the founding parties.

National Socialists are now sitting in parliament.

The rise of the party could
no longer be overlooked.

Ernst Niekisch, National
Bolshevist, Hitler opponent.

In foreign policy, Hitler promised to
free the country from the injustices of
the Versailles Treaty.

Domestically, he promised
to eliminate unemployment and political squabbling.

Heinz Guderian, colonel
of the German army.

In
1930, chancellor Bruning convinces President von Hindenburg
to dissolve parliament and call for new
elections 24 months early.

Bruning is determined to
govern with the help of the president, if necessary
without a majority by presidential decree.

Following the example of
Italy, at the end of the 1920s movements which
are called fascist are gaining strength
all over Europe.

In some Eastern European
states, dictatorial governments rely on the
support of such factions.

A Union of Fascists is
also established in the UK.

A party demonstration
in Manchester in 1934.

Let’s create programs to help the unemployed.

In 1930,
unemployment had increased to 3,076,000 and the National
Socialists then increased their MPs to 108
with a vote of 18%.

Less than three years later,
the National Socialist Party came to power.

Unemployment had
risen to 6,014,000.

Sir Oswald Mosley, born
1896, founder British Union Of Fascists.

Diary,
September the 15th, 1930.

The first election results.

Fantastic! The bourgeois
parties are smashed.

Up to now we have 103
seats, a 10-fold increase.

Joseph Goebbels The
day after the election the composition and climate
of politics in Germany have changed fundamentally.

The NSDAP has risen from
the Bavarian political sect to become the second
biggest party, fundamentally opposed
to the democracy of the Weimar Republic.

The Social Democrats
suffer only minor losses, mostly to the Communists.

Catholic voters
link up effectively with the Catholic Centre Party.

They lose only a few votes, After
the last election, you sensed for the first time, strong displeasure with
the party leadership from within the Social
Democratic ranks.

A deep seated disillusionment
with the big wigs came over the Social
Democratic organization.

Julius Leber, SPD
member of the Reichstag.

The
electoral gains of the NSDAP are greatest in the
predominantly Protestant regions of rural Northern
and Eastern Germany.

Some three quarters of
the voters are Protestant.

The middle class is over
represented with 40% yet the NSDAP is not a
purely middle class party.

The Hitler Movement,
as the party is called by friend and foe, finds favor
among all sectors of society, including industrial workers.

I
went to a Nazi rally.

It was held in a beer hall.

Some drank beer, the others
sat in front of empty tables.

There were a lot of workers
there that hurt terribly.

Ilya Ehrenburg,
Russian-Jewish author.

Nothing
succeeds like success, as they say in English.

Stefan Weims, student in Berlin.

Diary,
November the 12th, 1930.

Wilhelm Arrives from Bolivia where he was active in the army.

He’s very nice to me
and I like him a lot.

An open, straight, soldier type.

Joseph Goebbels.

The
years from 1931 to 1935, apart from my anxiety
on public affairs, were personally
very pleasant to me.

I earned my livelihood.

I meditated constantly
on the European situation and the rearming of Germany.

Winston Churchill,
The Second World War.

New Year’s
Order, December the 31st, 1931.

The army of brown shirts has
multiplied numerous times.

The movement has suffered a
great deal of blood sacrifice.

Comrades, by the
beginning of this year, I thank you for everything
that you accomplished over the past year
through dedicated work and self sacrificing battles.

You can enter the new year
with joyful confidence, proud of what you
achieved in the year 1931.

Adolf Hitler.

Hitler sent a really good New Year’s message to the Nazis.

The world will sit
up and take notice.

The Communists will
have to watch out.

Henrietta Schneider, diary.

Speech to the Industrial Club of Dusseldorf,
January the 26th, 1932.

Summary, I see two principles radically opposed to each other.

The principle of
democracy, which is the principle of destruction
where ever it is practiced, and the principle of the
authority of the personality that I would describe as the
principle of achievement.

Adolf Hitler.

The upper class is getting closer to Hitler.

My grandfather had
the right saying for these turncoats.

‘You spit in their eyes and
they ask you if it’s raining.

‘ Bella Fromm, German-Jewish
journalist, diary.

Diary, Tuesday, February the 23rd, 1932.

After coffee, Frau Knusple
appeared with the news that Hitler is standing for the German
presidential elections.

Henrietta Schneider.

After
an internal party discussion in Munich on February the 2nd, Adolf Hitler decides to run
in the first round of voting in the German presidential
elections of March 1932.

One problem with his candidacy is that Hitler is not a
citizen of the German Reich which doesn’t award citizenships
of it’s own until 1934.

Who ever has or gains
citizenship of one of the 24 German states is a
citizen of the Reich.

Thus Thomas Mann, for
instance, has citizenship of the free Hanseatic
City of Luebeck and a corresponding passport.

By
law, Hitler was stateless because bureaucratic
chicanery on the one hand and personal
negligence on the other had repeatedly delayed
his proper naturalization.

Now however, settling
this question was merely a formality once it had
become possible for the Brunswick Provincial
Government made up of Nazis and German nationals,
to arrange automatic German citizenship
for him at any time by means of a pro
forma appointment to some position in
the civil service.

Ernst Hamshtinger, head of the
NSDAP foreign press bureau.

In the
states of the German Reich a civil servant automatically
becomes a citizen and thus a German national.

This also happened to
the Swiss Albert Einstein against his will, who had become a Prussian official in 1917.

Hitler was entrusted with doing the job of a
clerk for economic affairs of the state of Brunswick
at the Brunswick Embassy in Berlin, an office
he never held.

It is thus all the more
surprising that Adolf Hitler nevertheless
re-registered his official place of abode as Brunswick.

After all, for one and a half
years, Adolf Hitler appeared in the official list of
inhabitants of Brunswick and de-registered on
September the 16th, 1933 as Reich chancellor,
Berlin, Wilhelmstrasse.

Hartmann Lauterbacher,
provincial leader of the Hitler Youth, South
Hanover, Brunswick.

Berlin, this
26th day of February 1932, at the Brunswick Embassy.

Today Adolf Hitler
appeared before me, who according to the
decree of the chairman of the Brunswick
State Ministry and the Brunswick Minister of Finance
of February the 25th, 1932, is now present as a
senior civil servant employed by the
state of Brunswick.

After being informed
of the requirements, he took the mandatory
oath of service.

“I swear loyalty to the
constitution of the Reich “and the state,
obedience to the laws, “and conscientious
fulfillment of my duties.

“Adolf Hitler.

” Read aloud and signed, Adolf
Hitler, senior civil servant.

Letter
to the Embassy of Braunschweig in Berlin,
February the 28th, 1932.

Reference, leave.

I hereby request you
to grant me leave until the end of the presidential
election campaign.

Respectfully yours, Adolf Hitler.

When I landed
in Munich on a day in March I was told ‘Herr Hitler has
run from the brown house’.

He’s planning to fly to
various cities in The Reich and he wants to rent a plane.

You have been
recommended to him.

During the election campaign
he wanted to travel by plane.

He’d visit up to five
cities in one evening.

Hitler told me that frankly he had little
confidence in flying.

He saw flight as
a necessary evil and so it was that in 1932, three major election
flights were made.

Hans Baur, Lufthansa pilot, I Flew the Powerful
of the World.

Diary, Berlin, February the 16th, 1932.

What a strange country
in which the presidency must be decided between
Thalmann, Hitler, or Hindenburg.

Terscht Eidenheim, art
collector and author.

Hindenburg
was meant to serve as a shield against
Hitler’s rise.

That was also the reason
why the Social Democrats supported his
re-election in 1932.

Paul Lobe, Social Democrat,
president of the Reichstag.

Again
it was the politics of toleration when the
SPD asked it’s voters to vote for Hindenburg and
how faithfully they followed.

Golo Mann, Memoirs and Thoughts.

Diary, Monday, February the 29th, 1932.

Who will win? Henrietta Schneider.

Election
campaign flight, April 1932.

Soon Hitler had sunk
into morose apathy.

He just sat there staring
gloomily out of the window, wads of cotton in his ears.

A complete contrast
to the glad hand, extrovert man at Tempelhof.

Sefton Delmer, British
correspondent of The Daily Express in Berlin.

We must have visited each of the major cities once
if not several times and afterwards it was
always claimed that Hitler was the first German
politician to come to power who knew the country
inside and out.

Ernst Hamfschtinger.

As
the door of the aircraft was flung open,
Hitler ducked out and immediately threw
himself into his Fuhrer pose.

There he stood, bare-headed,
upright and unsmiling, his hand raised in greeting.

Sefton Delmer.

It
was always the same routine.

He gave his presentation,
had his bags packed, and on to the next city.

Ernst Hampfschtinger.

He gave
four or five speeches a day and flew from one
rally to another.

It was one of the
few times that I heard him speak in public.

We were led up to the podium.

We tried hard to
stay awake until The Fuhrer’s plane arrived late.

Minutes later he
began his speech.

He was hoarse and
his jarring voice was emotionally charged and
swept over the audience like a storm that
takes ones breath away and leaves people excited.

Friedelind Wagner.

Diary, Weimar April the 10th, 1932, Sunday.

Second round of voting in
German presidential election.

Hindenburg finally
elected over Hitler.

Harry Graf Kessler,
publicist and diplomat.

When the
victory of us tired, senile, not overly bright,
old soldier like Hindenburg over an obnoxious,
hysterical, social climber is the best that we can
get, it’s goodnight Germany.

Vicki Baum, writer.

Letter,
April the 20th, 1932.

My dear Mr.

Hitler,
for your birthday we are sending you
our best wishes from our warm,
children’s hearts.

When we told our parents that it was a pity we
couldn’t do anything for you because we’re only 10
and five years old, our parents said ‘You can pray for
Adolf Hitler every day’ and we’ll be doing
that every evening.

Our
prayer will be as follows: Oh
God may your blessing accompany Adolf Hitler
where ever he goes.

Give him the strength to free the fatherland.

Seen with a strong, good hand.

Your
faithful little Nazi’s, Leonora and Ehrhardt L.

Hamburg.

I myself
have no instinct for the character
expressed in faces.

For a long time I have
had a not very pleasant, yet not strongly
unpleasant impression of Hitler in photographs.

Ludwig Wieder, German Nobel
Peace Prize Laureate, 1927.

Berlin,
November the 8th, 1931.

Nothing smells more
penetratingly than the nationally scented
petite bourgeois.

Everything is falling apart.

Where are we heading? Tierscht Anheim.

More than
the Nazis, the Communists hate the Social Democrats
whom they defame as Social Fascists.

With what they call
a Leninist strategy, they want to make the
Weimar Republic ungovernable and create conditions
for a revolution through the collapse of the
Capitalist system.

Diary, May the 31st, 1932.

Lotta is coming on Sunday.

She’s planning a trip
with Kyle to Westerland.

Yesterday day Bruning resigned.

Now what? Henrietta Schneider.

Open
letter to Tierdo Leiphardt, German Trade Union Confederation Ernst Thalmann, Communist Party of Germany.

Otto Wells, Social Democratic
Party of Germany We the undersigned observe the development
of political events with the impression
that we are approaching a dreadful threat
of facistation.

In our view, this danger can be
eliminated by the merger of the two major worker’s parties
in the election campaign.

The responsibility lies
with their leaders.

Only the obvious desire of
the workers to stand together should be decisive.

Albert Einstein, Heinrich
Mann, Kathe Kollwitz The
hero of Tannenburg.

The hero of the German Republic had a dull spirit.

A grumpy field marshal
with his robust conscience.

With truly Germanic,
blind loyalty, he betrayed the pious chancellor
to whom he owed his power.

Bruning was fired.

His successor, the
comparatively liberal general von Schleicher was soon the
target of wild intrigue.

Klaus Mann, son of
Katia and Thomas Mann.

In June
1932, Franz von Patten, on behalf of Reich
president von Hindenburg, forms a right wing,
conservative cabinet which is without a
majority in parliament.

The new chancellor hopes
for the support of Hitler and according to
Hitler’s demand, asks the Reich president
to call new parliamentary elections on July the 31st.

For
far too long, we had been content with laughing and
joking about the house painter, Hitler.

Carl Zuckmeyer,
German-Austrian dramatist.

Diary,
Sunday July the 31st, 1932.

The hatred of the
parties is awful.

At 10 o’clock the
elections begin, without Wilhelm.

He is plagued with neuralgia.

Henrietta Schneider.

The triumph
of the National Socialists in the July elections of
1932, is a Pyrrhic victory.

Although all forms of
propaganda have been exhausted, leaving the party
deeply in debt, they have barely increased
their vote over the elections of the spring.

In a large portion of
the remote villages, Hitler had the absolute
majority in the parliamentary elections in July, often even two
thirds of the vote.

How does one account
for their success? The Nazis came into the
villages, ranted, and raved, and promised them the moon.

Maria Leichner, German
speaking Hungarian journalist and Communist.

Diary,
August the first, 1932.

Election results.

We have gained a little ground.

Marxism has gained a great deal.

Now we have to cease power
and wipe out Marxism.

Either way, Hitler is
also of this opinion, we won’t get an absolute
majority this way.

Joseph Goebbels Hitler
rejects Chancellor von Papen’s offer to serve as vice
chancellor in his government and demands the office
of chancellor itself.

President von Hindenburg
refuses to grant Hitler governmental power and warns
that all acts of terror will be dealt with severely.

As almost all the major
parties in the Reichstag want to bring down von
Papen’s government, Reich president von
Hindenburg dissolves the newly elected
parliament in September and calls new elections on
November the 6th, 1932.

Diary,
Wednesday the 21st, 1932.

I’m following political
developments in the state of pleasant titillation
and yet numbness.

I literally have no
sympathy for any of those now resting with each other.

Victor Klemperer, professor
of romance studies, Dresden.

Diary, Friday October the 21st, 1932.

Lotta announced that
she had seen Adolf and that she really liked him.

Laurie also heard him,
but didn’t see him well.

She couldn’t afford an
expensive five Mark seat.

Henrietta Schneider As my
wife and I had voted for the German National
Party in July 1932, after some hesitation we voted
for Hitler in the elections of November the
6th the same year.

So we too succumbed to the
fallacy that a government takeover by the NSDAP
would stabilize political and economic conditions.

Alexander, Count of
Dohna Schlobitten, East Prussian landowner.

Diary,
November the 6th, 1932.

Complied with compulsory voting, but still Social Democrat.

Election results on the
radio, the Nazis have lost.

The KPD have gained.

Klaus Mann, writer.

In the German elections of November, 1932, the NSDAP
won 11.

75 million votes, the SPD 7.

25 million, and the KPD some six million.

So together, both
worker’s parties were a lot stronger than the Nazis.

Malles Schperber,
Austrian writer and KPD member at the time.

In the
state elections in Thuringia, in December, the NSDAP even
loses 40% of it’s votes.

Many unemployed people turn
their backs on the Nazis.

They now put their
hopes in the Communists and the German Nationals.

Many leftists believed that Hitler would never recover
from this set back and had ceased to be a menace.

Christopher Isherwood,
British-American writer.

Despite knowing better, left-wing intellectuals
continued to enjoy their feeling of
steady advancement.

Their poems and songs, their
satirical and political plays and cabaret pieces, their
articles, their books and polemics, all of this resonated
so strongly that for them, it was as if they were
standing at the loom of time.

Malles Schperber.

Hitler
doesn’t win the election after achieving a majority, but
despite losing votes in the parliamentary
elections of November, he needs the support of
reactionary allies in high places.

They believe that, with Hitler’s
help, they can eliminate the Communists and
Social Democrats.

These forces succeed in a
few short weeks, in bringing the German president around
who, thanks to the constitution, is very powerful.

Snow
was already falling heavily and the shop windows
were festively decorated.

It was hard to get through
the crowds, thronging the sumptuously bedecked
department stores.

The new general chancellor
did not dissolve the Reichstag at all so, thank God, there
were no new elections.

The people were allowed
to celebrate Christmas and New Year’s Eve in peace.

There was knee-high snow
in the streets and the rush of the hungry unemployed
to do the work of removing the snow was so
strong that there weren’t enough shovels to go around.

Oskar Maria Graf,
writer, From My Life.