Hitler’s Road To Power

Strange that after the passage of half a century and the publication of over a hundred books, there still should be something factually new to say about Adolf Hitler’s road to power. Richard Hamilton, professor of sociology at McGill University, is attempting to do just that in raising the question, “Who voted for Hitler?”

In order to find an answer, he painstakingly analyzed and compared the election results of the Weimar period, particularly those of the three key elections to the Reichstag (Germany’s parliament) after the onset of the Great Depression—those of September 1930, July 1932, and November 1932. The Nazi movement initially had peaked in 1923, the chaotic year of astronomic inflation, with the failed Bierkeller putsch in Munich. But in the years between the currency stabilization of November 1923 and the Reichstag election of 1928, Hitler’s party (the NSDAP—National Socialist German Workers’ Party) had dwindled to an insigni...