The current continually repeated message is,

Adolf Hitler is not only our candidate, he is the future president.

The entire party's confidence in victory must be elevated into blind faith.

Yosef Gubel's

in an internal campaign memorandum.

Welcome to the history

of the 20th century.

Music Episode 268, A Private from Bohemia.

As you already know, the year 1931 was a restless one for Adolf Hitler and his National Socialist German Workers Party, or NSDAP. In the 1930 Reichstag election,

the NSDAP had leapt into second place among the parties represented in the chamber,

wedged between the number one Social Democratic Party, or SPD, and the number three Communist Party of

Germany, or KPD.

Strangely enough, all three of these parties were in opposition, albeit for different reasons.

You don't often see a parliamentary democracy in which none of the top three parties are in government,

but the times were indeed strange.

The German chancellor, Heinrich Bruning, led a minority government that held on to power

thanks to the support of the president, Paul von Hindenburg, and to the toleration of the SPD,

the number one party. The Bruning government introduced harsh austerity measures to deal with the Great Depression,

which was hitting Germany harder than any other country, with the possible exception of the United States.

Bruning's austerity measures were deeply unpopular, so much so that the Reichstag would not enact them. They had to be

introduced by emergency presidential decree, which was allowed under the German Constitution.

The Reichstag did have the power to nullify these presidential decrees or to bring down the

...