[Author’s Name]
[Institution’s Name]
Essay on Hitler's Social Revolution
The fortunes of Hitler's dictatorship are traced in similar fashion among the workers, shopkeepers, civil servants, and teachers. Small businessmen were "betrayed" by the Nazi regime after the seizure of power, before which they had had good reason to believe that the fleshpots promised them during the end of the Weimar Republic would finally be at hand. For various reasons, explained in detail, civil servants and teachers also felt let down. Here, too, material motivations seem to have taken precedence over purely ideological ones.
We have the power. Now our gigantic work begins." Those were Hitler's words on the night of January 30, 1933, as cheering crowds surged past him, for five long hours, beneath the windows of the Chancellery in Berlin. His political struggle had lasted 14 years. He himself was 43, that is, physically and intellectually at the peak of his powers. He had won over millions of Germans and organized them into Germany's largest and most dynamic political party, a party girded by a human rampart of hundreds of thousands of storm troopers, three fourths of them members of the working class. He had been extremely shrewd. All but toying with his adversaries, Hitler had, one after another, vanquished them all.
Standing there at the window, his arm raised to the delirious throng, he must have known a feeling of triumph. But he seemed almost torpid, absorbed, as if lost in another world. It was a world far removed from the delirium in the street, a world of 65 million citizens who loved him or hated him, but all of whom, from that night on, had become his responsibility. And as he knew -- as almost all Germans knew at the end of January 1933 -- this was a crushing, an almost desperate responsibility.Half a century later, few people understand the crisis Germany faced at that time......
