Here's a question for you. How did Adolf Hitler successfully destroy German democracy?

In his writings and in his speeches, Adolf Hitler comes across as deranged, paranoid, ignorant, buffoonish.

And yet he successfully came to power through mostly democratic means, using his position to unleash the most

systematic mass murder campaign in world history, ultimately bringing ruin on his country, and

much of the rest of the European continent. So how could such a calamity actually happen?

How did he convince people to support him?

And how can we ensure that no such scenario ever plays out again?

Well, Hitler didn't come to power by promising to commit the Holocaust.

That's important. As Ian Kershaw notes in his

definitive biography of Hitler, in the crucial 1930 elections that multiplied the Nazi's

parliamentary representation by tenfold, Hitler actually campaigned not on promises to destroy

the Jews, but on the idea that the other parties had failed the

country. He promised a sweeping program of national redemption. Kershaw writes,

in the election campaign of 1930, Hitler seldom spoke explicitly of the Jews. The crude

tirades of the early 1920s were missing altogether.

The key theme was now the collapse of Germany under parliamentary democracy and party government

into a divided people with separate and conflicting interests, which only the Nazi party

could overcome by creating a new unity of the nation, transcending class, estate, and profession.

Now, when he was running this campaign, Hitler was of course no less of an anti-Semite than he'd

been before. He still identified the Jews as the chief culprit for everything wrong with

Germany, and that theory led him almost inexorably to the conclusion that exterminating them

was justified and necessary.

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