Tenth Grade · History · week 22

Nazi Germany: Hitler's rise to power

Trace Hitler's rise from a failed 1923 coup to absolute power in 1933-1934, and explain how the Great Depression made the Nazi Party's appeal possible.

Adolf Hitler, a World War I veteran, joined and soon led the small National Socialist German Workers' (Nazi) Party in postwar Munich. His attempted Beer Hall Putsch of 1923, a failed coup, landed him a brief prison sentence, during which he wrote Mein Kampf ("My Struggle"), laying out an ideology built on extreme antisemitism, a false myth of Aryan racial supremacy, a demand for Lebensraum ("living space") through conquest of Eastern Europe, and bitter blame directed at Jews and the Weimar politicians he called "November Criminals" for Germany's defeat and humiliation. For most of the 1920s, the Nazi Party remained a marginal fringe movement.

Everything changed with the Great Depression (week 20): as unemployment climbed, effective propaganda from Joseph Goebbels and promises to restore German greatness and dignity turned the Nazis into the Reichstag's largest party by 1932. Conservative elites, believing they could control him, helped maneuver Hitler into being appointed Chancellor on January 30, 1933. Weeks later, the Reichstag Fire of February 1933 gave Hitler a pretext to suspend civil liberties, and the Enabling Act of March 1933 -- passed through a legal, if coerced, parliamentary vote -- granted him the power to rule by decree, ending Weimar democracy in practice. In 1934's Night of the Long Knives, Hitler purged internal rivals, and when President Hindenburg died that August, Hitler combined the presidency and chancellorship into a single position holding absolute power over Germany.

📋 For the teacher
Teach it (10–15 min):
  • Explicitly connect back to week 20's unemployment figures -- have them explain the link between the two weeks in their own words before moving on.
  • Discuss the Reichstag Fire as an example of a real or exploited crisis being used to justify seizing additional emergency power -- a pattern worth recognizing.
  • Note carefully that the Enabling Act passed through a legal-looking vote, not simply through force -- a genuinely chilling detail worth sitting with rather than rushing past.
  • Emphasize that this was a series of steps over roughly a decade (1923 to 1934), not one dramatic overnight coup -- history rarely collapses all at once.
Talk about it:
  • Why might voters turn to an extremist party specifically during an economic crisis, rather than during more stable times?
  • What does it mean that the Enabling Act was passed through a legal parliamentary vote rather than seized by force? Does that make it more or less alarming?
  • Do you think Germany's conservative elites, who believed they could "control" Hitler after appointing him Chancellor, made an avoidable mistake? Why or why not?

Mastery looks like: They can trace at least four specific steps from Hitler's 1923 failed coup to his 1934 absolute power, and explain the direct causal link between the Great Depression and Nazi electoral success.

Common stumbles: Treating Hitler's rise as a single sudden event rather than a multi-year sequence of specific, traceable steps, or missing the direct economic link between the Depression and Nazi electoral gains.

Homework for this lessonType it, write it with a stylus, or print it for pencil & paper.open →
Records attendance + 15 min of History for this learner.
← Back to todayAll coursesYear planner