Word: hitlers
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...second important consequence was convincing Stalin that the Western powers would never resist Hitler's increasingly aggressive expansion eastward. Stalin had several times proposed a treaty with the Western powers to check Hitler's ambitions, but he had been ignored. With the treachery characteristic of him -- he had purged dozens of his top army officers on false charges of conspiring with the Germans to overthrow him -- he began exploring the possibility of signing an alliance with those same Germans. To Hitler, who had been ranting about "the struggle against Bolshevism" for nearly 20 years, it seemed like an offer...
...German conflicts with France ran back for centuries, so did those with the Poles, conflicts tinged with contempt. Long before Hitler, General Hans von Seeckt, the haughty army commander during the Weimar Republic, had said of the frontiers established by Versailles, "Poland's existence is intolerable, incompatible with the essential conditions of Germany's life. Poland must go and will go." That was the mission that Hitler now vowed to carry...
...called itself the German Workers Party. He began making speeches, denouncing Bolsheviks, capitalists, the Jews, the French. Germany had lost the war only because it had been betrayed at home by a "stab in the back." By 1923, as the new Weimar Republic was sinking into deep economic troubles, Hitler staged an absurd "beer-hall putsch" and led a march through Munich. He was arrested and sentenced to five years in prison (he served nine months). "You may pronounce us guilty a thousand times over," he declared at his trial, "but the goddess of the eternal court of history acquits...
Larger forces were aggravating the conflicts that Hitler would eventually exploit. In 1923 the Germans stalled on their reparations payments and the French seized the industrial Ruhr to compel payment. The German mark, declining ever since the war, began plunging: 7,000 to the dollar in January, 160,000 in July, 1 million in August. A kind of madness swept the country. People carried suitcases of money to a store to buy a sausage. And the mark kept falling, to an all-time low of 4.2 trillion that November. Everything was for sale, all savings were destroyed, and nothing seemed...
Recovery did come eventually, with lots of American and British loans, but the Wall Street Crash of 1929 started a worldwide depression to which the shaky German economy was especially vulnerable. Unemployment soared. The feeble Social Democratic coalition government collapsed. And Adolf Hitler, whose Nazi Party held an insignificant twelve seats in the Reichstag, suddenly became a voice that attracted attention. He was one of the first 20th century figures to master radio as an important political medium. His message: Down with the system. Vote for a leader who will bring us back to greatness...