The Nazi Party's Rise

Chapter 6 ended with the NSDAP's own real electoral surge peaking at 37.3% in July 1932 — the largest party in the Reichstag, but never a majority. This chapter covers the six months between that peak and 30 January 1933, and its own central, real finding is the one this course has been building toward since Chapter 1: Hitler did not seize power. He was appointed to it, through a completely legal act, by an elected President operating within powers Chapter 4's own Constitution had granted him from the start.

November 1932: The Surge That Stalled

The Nazi Party's own momentum did not simply escalate in a straight line to power. In the November 1932 election, NSDAP support genuinely declined — down to 33.09% and 196 seats, a real loss of 34 seats from July's peak, on turnout that fell for the first time since 1928. The real, contemporary assessment was blunt: "a great disappointment for the Nazis." Still the largest single party, the NSDAP had once again failed to translate its own real support into anything resembling a governing majority — Chapter 5's own negative-majority problem, still fully intact.

Schleicher's Real Gamble: Splitting the Nazi Party From Within

General Kurt von Schleicher became Chancellor on 3 December 1932 with a genuinely different strategy from his predecessors: rather than negotiating with Hitler directly, he tried to fracture the NSDAP itself. On 4 December 1932, Schleicher met with Gregor Strasser, a real senior Nazi figure, and offered him the post of Minister-President of Prussia in exchange for splitting his own faction away from Hitler's own leadership — the real "Querfront" ("cross-front") strategy, betting that the threat of a genuine Nazi split would force Hitler to cooperate with the existing government instead of demanding the chancellorship for himself.

Papen's Real Scheme: "We've Hired Him"

Franz von Papen — Schleicher's own predecessor and rival — had spent these same weeks cultivating Hindenburg privately. Papen secretly told Hitler he still held real influence with the President, and that he would help make Hitler Chancellor on one condition: Papen himself would serve as Vice-Chancellor. Papen's own real calculation was that a cabinet with Hitler as titular head but genuinely dominated by conservative, non-Nazi ministers could "tame" him — contain the Nazi movement's own energy inside a government conservatives still actually controlled.

30 January 1933: A Legal Appointment, Not a Coup

Hindenburg appointed Hitler Chancellor on 30 January 1933 — an entirely ordinary exercise of the same presidential appointment power Chapter 4 traced back to the Weimar Constitution's own real design, and, before that, the same appointment power Chapter 1 identified as belonging to the Kaiser alone under the old Imperial Constitution. There was no putsch, no seizure by force, no unconstitutional act comparable to Chapter 3's own extra-legal 9 November 1918 transfer of power to Ebert. Historians mark this distinction directly in the German language itself: Machtergreifung ("seizure of power") is the older, more dramatic term; Machtübernahme ("assumption/transfer of power") is the more precise one — the transfer took place entirely within the existing constitutional framework.

Hands-On Exercises