Anatomy of a democratic coup

In December 1932, Adolf Hitler had hit rock bottom.

- KANIKA DATTA

In Reichstag elections the previous month, the party had seen a 25 per cent drop in votes despite an expensive and intensive campaign. Gregor Strasser, "chief operating officer" of the National Socialist movement, had exited the party over ideological differences and Hitler's refusal to compromise chancellorship claims, threatening a split in the party.

Though the Nazi Party was the largest party in the Reichstag with 196 seats, business donors, such as steel magnate Thyssen, the Krupp engineering empire and piano maker Bechstein, had tightened the purse strings, repelled by the unhinged violence of the Nazi's storm troopers, the Sturmabteilung (SA). With the party deep in the red, this paramilitary organisation was forced to sell potatoes to covertheir costs; in Berlin 10,000 of them mutinied over shortage of funds.

Yet by January 30, 1933, Adolf Hitler took oath as Chancellor of Germany.Less than two months later he pushed through the infamous Enabling Act, allowing him to issue laws without Parliament's consent, setting Germany on the road to World War II and the Holocaust.

How did the Weimar Republic, united Germany's first genuine democracy, succumb to the Nazis? The standard explanations point to the humiliating terms of the Versailles Treaty imposed by the victorious Allies at the end of World War Ithat irreparably weakened the German economy, causing spiralling inflation and mass unemployment, inevitably enhancing the popularity of right-wing totalitarianism. But Hitler's rise to power was by no means inevitable. Historians tell amore granular story of cynical power broking by the traditional political elite, rooted in Bismarckian privilege with tenuous loyalty to democracy.