Whch branch of oceania do you prefer airship one uk canada or australia

Biden’s godawful and his puppeteers may well exceed Putin, but Putin has the clear lead. Jan 6th is bad but it isn’t serial executions and “accidents.”

And if you think the Squad is bad and that Omar’s dominance in the Twin Cities is awful, and it is, take a look at Kadyrov. A man who has been steadily turning Chechnya into a Narco-Islamist gangster state run on torture, murder, and smuggling with Putin’s at least passive acceptance.

Disagree. The Nazi Party was inconsequential prior to 1930.

Maybe if we are just looking in the Reichstag, but it was certainly not inconsequential, on the streets, and particularly not in places like Bavaria and Saxony. This is what a lot of people do not realize, and that indeed many of the “respectable” politicians failed to realize this. The work they did forming their paramilitary, political, and financial machinery and organization is what helped give them the seemingly seismic shift in 1930.

And they began consolidating very effectively, such as imposing purges on Jews in civil government throughout Saxony in 1930, in a very real sense bringing the Third Reich or at least a Lite, Localized version of it into being two/three years before Hitler seized power on a national scale. Which helped lead them to further gains in 1932 and then retaining most of them later in that crucial year, at a time when the SA was far larger than the military or its unofficial paramilitaries or that of most other paramilitaries.

So clearly it wasn’t simply that the other sides were doing wrong things (which they WERE). He was clearly doing some things right. Very, Very Right.

Their visibility was a function of an association with Gen. Ludendorff which proved transient

Doesn’t work.

Hitler and Ludendorff broke as a result of the failed Munich Putsch and the shockwaves from it, and in any case Ludendorff as a whole was marginalized due to the conflict he had with Hindenburg starting in 1926-7.

In other words, Ludendorff both became more hostile to the Nazis and Hitler AND less powerful around the exact time that the NSDAP’s grass roots saw seismic growth, first breaking into the Reichstag and then seizing control of regional political machines like in Saxony and Bavaria.

and the curios generated by the use of national-list PR as an electoral system.

Which doesn’t explain their remarkable resilience, their ability to fundraise on an unprecedented level in terms of grassroots, or their endurance.

You had a succession of own goals by the German establishment during the period running from 1918 to 1933

Eh, broadly agreed.

which included the impetuous disestablishment of the monarchy,

Not so sure I’d go that far. The monarchy had thoroughly tainted itself by its conduct in the war and connivance with military leadership, and had the Imperials not fled for the border at least Wilhelm would probably have faced a trial.

It’s also worth noting that Ebert – a monarchist at heart, even if a Social Democrat – felt pushed to declare a Republic because he feared more radical republicans would beat him to the punch.

defects incorporated into the constitution,

Agreed, though many of those predated it.

the absurd monetary policy followed during 1922 and 1923,

Agreed, though I’d go to from 1914 to 1933.

Hindenburg’s presidential candidacy in 1925 and 1932,

Agreed.

the takeover of the National People’s Party by volkisch elements,

Those had always been rather powerful and represented in the party, and had other mediums.

and the destructive monetary policy followed by the Bruening ministry during 1930-32.

Agreed with caveats; Bruning’s policy was right in theory but it was hard.

Removing just this last one might have sufficed to prevent the Nazi Party from gaining much of a following.

Disagree. Brunning’s fiscal handling was bad but his cooperation with the Cabinet of Barons and Hindenburg was worse, and to be fair all of the above were dealing with the aftershocks of the Great Depression, which was largely US caused.

(As late as 1928, the Nazi Party scored all of 2.6% of the vote in a German federal election).

This is true, but it was no mean feat on a national stage. Most political parties never got that far. And for a party that had JUST been re-legalized after being banned for an attempted coup?

That I think shows how the NSDAP triumph goes far beyond the sum of their opponents’ failures, and in particular ignores how successful Hitler etc. al. were at capitalizing on their successes during the late 1920s and early 1930s, so that once they took ground they would not be expelled from it.

There’s where I think you’re wrong. The failure of the German establishment discredited the parties who’d made up the various ministries since 1918. The parties not implicated were the Communists, the Nazis, and the National People’s Party. The National People’s Party under Hugenberg abandoned much of is distinctiveness in favor of imitation.

This I think seriously sidesteps the core issue.

A: Why were these parties not implicated? Generally because they had been political outsiders.

B: Frankly I think you are overestimating the degree to which these failures had discredited the parties involved, especially in comparison to others. The Cabinet of Barons under Papen in particular had basically ended the Republic and helped trigger some surges back to the republican parties, but too late.

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As for what happened after 30 January 1933, see the case study by Wm. Sheridan Allen and the account by William L. Shirer of what was up in Berlin. The opposition parties suffered a collapse of morale and put up no resistance.

I have, but I find their studies to be rather out of date and in many details inaccurate. In particular they do not understand the strong political machinery the Nazis had in place, the weakening of their morale in the face of the invisible dictatorship under Papen and the Barons’ Cabinet trying to bring back an Empire (which was already rather unpopular to anybody but the monarchist right, who by this point were a distinct minority), and in particular the NSDAP’s powerful independent financing and paramilitary arms that allowed it to operate “in the wilderness” without sizable establishment backers and to pose a threat much like the communists but with greater appeal to non-Nazis if they were denied a say in power.

I’d highly suggest Noakes’s The Nazi Party in Lower Saxony 1921-1933 for a regional level of how the Nazis first took power and then locked it down, Henry Ashby Turner’s “German Big Business and the Rise of Hitler” for Nazi financing during this early period (and how LITTLE it had to do with German Big Business), and Rainer Zitelmann’s “Hitler’s National Socialism” for a more general overview of the entire regime and movement and how it actually won loyalty.

Suffice it to say, I find Shirer and Allen to have been operating with both limited sources and in some cases (especially in the case of Shirer) ideological blinders that prevented them from assessing the nature and strategies of the NSDAP.

Finally: A collapse of morale among the establishment parties never meant that the NSDAP would be the ones to take advantage of it. It could at least theoretically have led to a restored Imperial Dictatorship (which was what Papen and Hindenburg had been planning), a Communist coup (the KPD’s plan), or some kind of Faux-Parliamentary dictatorship like what we saw in Austria under the “Christian Social/ist Party” and Metaxes in Greece. And even if the Nazis had taken power there was no guarantee Hitler could have kept control of it from both entryism from the right and the more leftist and “revolutionary” elements around the Strassers.

Not all of what led to his victory was his result (in particular the KPD engaging in futile and bloody uprisings that drained its strength and tainted its reputation), but many others did. He skillfully led his movement and manipulated other political and military actors – sometimes even abroad – to achieve absolute power. For that he deserves at least some credit, even if we disagree on the exact amount.

It is not enough to explain why the Republican parties and the invisible dictatorship of Papen and Hindenburg that followed them failed. We must explain why the Nazis succeeded, and particularly did so at the expense of both the establishment and the other alternatives.

I don’t think Turtler meant that the opposition to Hitler didn’t make a lot of errors. I think the point is that Hitler took full advantage of those errors. In addition, of course, he maneuvered his way into being Chancellor without ever up to that point won more than a bit more than a third of the German vote. He did it very cleverly, by taking advantage of the weaknesses of those opposed to him and playing them against each other, as well as making false promises. Then he cemented absolute power by doing the same, plus the threat of violence (as well as the reality of violence) against those who would oppose him, and the exploitation of loopholes in the German constitution.

I’m not following you. He never married, had no children, and had no employment history between 1903 and 1933 apart from his military service and dipping into the Nazi Party treasury.

All true, but he was legitimately distinguished as a soldier (no Audie Murphy but quite skilled and brave and apparently good at calculating odds), and was a skilled politician and street tactician. He formed one of the largest mass movements in history after staging a bloodless bureaucratic coup of the German Workers’ Party( and did so in the face of opposition from almost all the established powers in Germany except maybe the military.

He had a crazy period of accomplishment between 1930 and 1940.

More like to 1941. And while his plans for Barbarossa were stupidly optimistic they were shared by most of his staff and he was not responsible for its single greatest failure (well, within the framework of racist overconfidence), since he advocated striking South to secure the Farmlands and Oil sources that the Reich needed to sustain its efforts, while Halder (one of the supposedly more skilled military professionals and a guy we trusted to write the US Army history of the Eastern Front) committed one of the largest acts of insubordination in history to Yolo after Moscow, getting Army Group Center stuck outside the Soviet Capital on a rocky countryside that couldn’t feed occupied Europe even if they took it. His greatest flaw and crime (though it is a huge one of both) was insisting that the war in the East be conducted as an utterly cruel war of annihilation, thus driving the Soviet peoples into Stalin’s camp and depriving him of one of Ludendorff’s most potent tactics.

And I could go on.

The last five years were a catastrophe and the first 40-odd an embarrassment.

I’d argue the first 25 years were an embarrassment, Bu5 the 27 years after that were a nightmare before going into the catastrophe. He was an evil, evil man and NOWHERE near as competent as he thought he was, but he often gets less credit than he deserves.

He was also a madcap hypochondriac and physically repulsive).

He was really only physically repulsive for the last two or three years of his life and was noted to be quite handsome and dashing before then.