The Nazi Regime From Start to Finish (1933–1945) 🇩🇪⚫ | How the Dictatorship Rose and Fell | Boring History for Sleep

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Hey there, night owls. Tonight, the 12 years of Nazi Germany start to finish, from torchlight through the Brandenburg Gate in January 1933 to a Soviet flag over the ruined Reichstag in May 1945 And here's the part school skipped. The party that took the whole country had just lost 2 million votes, 33%, broken falling apart. 18 months later, it owned every institution in Germany, and it got there with paperwork, laws, decrees, stamps, signatures. Then there's the other myth, the Flawless War Machine. That machine ran on about 2 million horses. It sold the people a car so cheap everyone could own one.

336,000 of them paid in, and roughly 600 civilians ever got one. Best subscription plan in history, if you were the one collecting. Moscow in 6 months turned into 4 years, and never happened. So over 12 chapters we follow the whole arc. The legal takeover, the propaganda, the promises, the conquests, the collapse, and the courtroom at the end. Documents and dates only, no myths. Hit that like button and drop a comment. What city are you watching from, and what time is it there right now? Lights down, let's roll. Start with the number that should have ended the whole story. In the November 1932 election, the National Socialists took 33.1%, down from 37.3 in July. Two million voters gone in four months. In any normal political system that is the sound of a movement peaking and beginning its slide. The party was also broke. It had run two presidential campaigns, two parliamentary campaigns, and a permanent travelling circus of rallies. Banners, uniforms, trucks and bans, all on credit, and the bills were arriving faster than the donations. Regional offices were behind on rent. Printers wanted cash up front. Gregor Strasser, one of the most capable organizers in the party, was arguing that they should take whatever share of power was on offer before the whole operation collapsed, and in December he resigned from all his posts, which is the political equivalent of walking out of a burning building and leaving the door open behind you. Josef Goebbels, who was running the Berlin operation, and keeping a diary that has been extremely convenient for historians ever since, spent the end of 1932 writing about gloom, debt, and the feeling that everything was finished. He was briefly correct. To understand why it was not finished, you have to understand that German democracy had already been quietly switched off before anyone put a torch in the street. Since 1930, the country had been governed by presidential cabinets, meaning chancellors who could not command a majority in parliament, and simply governed by emergency decree under Article 48 of the Constitution, signed by the president. Heinrich Brüning did it for two years, cutting wages and benefits during the worst economic collapse in modern memory, which was an interesting choice. Franz von Papen did it. Kurt von Schleicher did it.

By 1932, the Reichstag met a grand total of 13 times in the entire year, and passed five laws while the president's office signed 66 decrees. So the machinery for ruling without parliament was already built, tested and warmed up. All it needed was someone with the nerve to use it properly, and unfortunately that person was available. The rest was a small circle of men doing favors for each other. Papen, a Catholic aristocrat with a talent for being underestimated that turned out to be entirely deserved, had been dumped as chancellor and wanted back in. Schleicher, the general who had spent years arranging chancellors the way other people arrange furniture, had taken the job himself and lasted 57 days. President Paul von Hindenburg was 85, an authentic living monument to a Germany that no longer existed, and he found the leader of the National Socialists personally distasteful, describing him in private as a corporal from Austria who might be suitable for the postal ministry.

On January 4th, 1933, Papen and Hitler met at the Cologne Villa of the banker Kurt von Schröder and worked out the deal. The elites who backed it were not fanatics. They were frightened men who looked at 6 million unemployed and a communist party holding 100 seats and decided that the loud nationalist with the street army was the manageable option. The plan was to give him the title and keep the power.

In the cabinet formed on January 30th, there were 11 ministers, and exactly 3 of them were national socialists. Papen, as vice-chancellor, would sit in on every meeting with the president. He told a friend that within 2 months, they would have pushed the man so far into a corner that he would squeak. That is the single most quoted miscalculation of the 20th century, and it took roughly 8 weeks to disprove. The new chancellor's first act was not to govern with his cabinet, but to get rid of the parliament that constrained it. On February 1st, the Reichstag was dissolved, and elections were called for March 5th, which sounds democratic until you notice what happened to the referee.