Was Hitler Inevitable?

According to German historian Marcel Bois in a 2015 article in Jacobin Magazine, No. So how did it happen?

Beyond the official proceedings, significant historical questions remain unresolved, raising important discussions on human nature, the role of the Left, and whether progressive movements can overcome racism and other oppressions to fight together. The dominant question, of course, is how something so awful could happen in the first place. How was it possible that the most horrific crime in human history could occur in Germany, the “land of poets and thinkers?”

Several factors contributed.  Among the economic factors, the 1929 Stock Market crash had global implications, but its effects were suffered particularly acutely in Germany .  The Weimar Republic under Hindenberg, head of the center right party that came to ascendency following Germany's defeat in World War I, began taking autocratic measures to stem the chaos.  Germany's recovery was heavily financed by American banks, and their failure spelled disaster for the German middle class which sank like a stone due to rampant bankruptcy.  The Weimar response was austerity which was felt unevenly by a middle class falling into poverty and a peasantry reeling from cratering food prices.  Unemployment grew from 1.3 million in 1929 to 6.3 million in 1933.  Rising in response to the turmoil, the Nazi party portion of the popular vote grew from 2.8% in 1928 to approach nearly 40 percent of the vote in 1930.   As Bois put it, "National Socialist demagoguery, directed against both finance capital and the labor movement, proved particularly appealing to members of the middle class."

Meanwhile, on the left, mutual antipathy festered between the extremes.  The ruling Social Democratic party (SPD) answered increasing challenges to its status from 1928 to 1930 from a steadily growing Communist party (KPD) and a mushrooming Nazi Party (NSDAP) with a bold stance of timidity, placing their support in 1932 (along with what was left of Germany's trade unions) behind the authoritarian Hindenburg as the evil lesser than Hitler, a strategy that as Bois points out "ran counter to the party’s political program, not to mention the material interests of its supporters."  But the move proved decisive:  it was Hindenberg after all who ultimately slighted his more mainstream supporters by appointing Hitler as Chancellor in 1932--  with only 2 elected Nazis in the Reichstag at the time.

The Social Democrats, possessed of an "anti-Communist fervor" equated Bolshevism and Fascism as 2 sides of the same brutish coin.  For their part Communists (KPD) were suspicious of Social Democrats as "social fascists" for their collaboration with Hindenburg.

The Central Committee overused the phrase “fascism” to the point of meaninglessness. As far as they were concerned, the German state had become fascist in 1930 when Hindenburg’s presidential cabinet took over. Indeed, the KPD leadership considered all other parliamentary parties to be variants of fascism, telling its members that “fighting fascism means fighting the SPD just as much as it means fighting Hitler and the parties of Brüning.”

The German Communist Party preferred to rival with leftists to the right of them by throwing strategic support behind certain Nazi initiatives (specifically against the Social Democratic platform in that party's stronghold, Prussia).  For their tolerance in times of crisis, the Communists were rewarded when the Nazis ultimately seized power by being outlawed, and by seeing the suspension of collective bargaining and unions.

Bois summarizes the situation prior to 1932, quoting Trotsky (observing from his exile from the Soviet Union on the Turkish island of Büyükada) in 1931:

If you place a ball on top of a pyramid the slightest impact can cause it to roll down either to the left or to the right. That is the situation approaching with every hour in Germany today. There are forces who would like the ball to roll down towards the Right and break the back of the working class. There are forces who would like the ball to remain at the top. That is a utopia. The ball cannot remain at the top of the pyramid. The Communists want the ball to roll down toward the Left and to break the back of capitalism.

Trotsky was exiled in the upheaval following Lenin's death in 1924 both from the Soviet Union and from the predominant thinking of the Communist leadership in Weimar Germany, who were more aligned with Stalinist views in 1932.

The KPD took its position from Moscow, basing itself on the theory of “social fascism” that fascism and Social Democracy were not opposed but in fact functioned like “twin brothers,” as Stalin had once argued. In the context of deep capitalist crisis, it was Social Democracy —  holding back the workers from fighting capitalism — that constituted the “main enemy.”

Only later heeding the call of Trotsky and others to "March separately, but strike unitedly!", the Social Democrats and Communists eventually began working together in a United Front against the Nazis.  It was too late to prevent Hitler's assumption of power and the many years of terror, horror and destruction that ensued, but not to keep the flame of opposition alive.

America is hardly a "land of poets and thinkers".  With an unduly powerful elite where few see the irony of a citizenry obediently goose-stepping to the corporate beat of the collective different drummer, if anything it is and has always been a bit of a fascist catastrophe waiting to happen.  Nevertheless, the Social Democratic caution to a fault should sound familiar to anyone who has hoped to place their eggs in the Democratic basket in US elections.  Similarly there is a leftist strain that would do well to learn from Germany's history and try to learn to keep from repeating the mistake.

Hitler’s rise to power was by no means inevitable, but rather the outcome of both specific historical conditions as well as the actions (and inactions) of various social forces. While many conventional histories paint Nazism as a kind of collective German project, what Hitler’s rise to power really illustrates are the very real consequences that socialist strategy can have in a society wracked by economic depression and political polarization.