Adolf Hitler And The Rise Of Nazi Power

In this essay, I will review three articles relating to power within a sociological context, I will endeavour to examine, Adolf Hitler and the role of charismatic power and the rise of the Nazi power movement. There have been many opinions as to how and why Nazi power occurred in January of 1933. All of the articles concur in principal that the Nazis were accepted for four main reasons; war, racism, violence, and the need for order (Kershaw 2004). The papers all examined the history of German society between 1918 and 1933, and each framed the significant, unseen and devastating transition into the immortal year of 1933; The journal articles The Nazi Capture of Power (Bessel 2004) and Hitler and the Uniqueness of Nazism (Kershaw 2004), suggests

Because of the war Hitler was able to offer himself as a soldier an ordinary man, and represent the generation of the beaten soldiers of the trenches from within, during and after the war. The people of Germany saw him as a person who came from nowhere to a life of a radical activist on the right of German politics. Hitler's principal lieutenants; Hermann Göring, Rudolf Heß, Ernst Röhm all had served in the military and their experiences appealed to the eight million voters who were war veterans following the war and while all were focused on the rise to power of Adolf Hitler and the capture of state power and the Nazi movement in 1933 the world failed to see the marking one of the most famous, and appalling, turning points in modern history from within a power framework.

All three articles examined and are in agreement that Hitler did not come to power by virtue of some deterministic set of impersonal forces, nor by a sequence of planned actions on the part of anyone, contrary to widespread belief, Hitler’s power was handed to him by the actions and negligence of the leading politicians at the time, specifically

Germany had been an empire until the First World War, the loss of which shook the German people to their very foundations. The psychological impact of going from an empire to a defeated nation was utterly traumatic. At the same time, Marxism was raging throughout Europe, toppling numerous governments and seen as a threat everywhere by the establishments. Hitler made people feel they were great again and played to their nationalistic and patriotic sentiments. It was easier for people to believe they were great and stab them in the back than to believe they had been failures and deserved what was happening to them. His message resonated with the masses and therefore I am reminded of Marx and Religion and the Opium of the people Hitler became just that, so as the German economy crashed, his popularity rose, the business community wanted Hitler to succeed, they financed his party and supported his movement. The business community wanted a strong man to fix the anarchy so that they could continue in an orderly fashion with the business of making money. Another reason was that they saw Hitler as a very simple, even a stupid man who could be directed and dangled like a puppet from above with an only limited understanding of politics