Should the Weimar Republic have banned Adolf Hitler from becoming Chancellor in 1933?

[katelyn not caitlin]

Thaelmann and his KPD were just as bad --  if  not, worse, given Thaelmann's metaphorical orgasming over Stalin -- and bear a big part of the blame for Hitler coming to power.

Terrifying the German middle class with threats of confiscating their property will do that.

Anyone who spends eleven years in solitary confinement interspersed with torture deserves some respect, but it does not remove him or his party from blame or their share of the responsibility.

[katelyn not caitlin]

The Nazis didn’t actually have an election majority though. And in the last Reichstag election before Hitler was appointed Chancellor the Nazis had actually lost seats, though they remained the largest party (ie., they had a plurality of seats)

The NSDAP and KPD combined had the most seats in the Reichstag. A stable majority government committed to democracy was impossible.

[katelyn not caitlin]

Franz von Papen had essentially ended democracy in Prussia in 1932 because he didn't like that a coalition was impossible without the support of at least one of the Nazis or Communists. This ended helping the Nazis quite a bit in the long run and Papen deserves a lot of the blame for Hitler becoming dictator.

At the federal level, an argument could be made for Brüning being the man who had ended Weimar democracy, who was the last Chancellor before Papen, Schleicher, and Hitler.

The idiots in the SPD bringing down Mueller in 1930, IMO.

[katelyn not caitlin]

Franz von Papen had essentially ended democracy in Prussia in 1932 because he didn't like that a coalition was impossible without the support of at least one of the Nazis or Communists. This ended helping the Nazis quite a bit in the long run and Papen deserves a lot of the blame for Hitler becoming dictator.

At the federal level, an argument could be made for Brüning being the man who had ended Weimar democracy, who was the last Chancellor before Papen, Schleicher, and Hitler.

The idiots in the SPD bringing down Mueller in 1930, IMO.

A bad move, yes. And they couldn't prevent the KPD's increased popularity in any case.

The KPD's Thaelmann deserves one such big black mark as well though he found out being a supplicant to Joe Stalin just means you get left to the horror of 11 years of solitary confinement interspersed with whatever the Nazis did to him that he didn't manage to smuggle out to the world about.

[katelyn not caitlin]

From what I've read, ALL the Weimar parties wanted to take land back from Poland and to be honest, Poles thinking that British and French will still rush to save them is, like their statements about FDR and Winnie stopping Stalin from doing what he wanted to, now that he was in control of the territory the Red Army occupied, pure fantasy.

It's not how the interwar French, especially the French military leaders, worked or thought. And, without the French, the British will not act.

[katelyn not caitlin]

Ouch! Although after doing some reading about the interwar and world wars, i think ethnic greeks should be truthful and tell us all that the Megali Idea is way too similar to Lebensraum for comfort.