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Great Depression In Germany Essay

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Prior to the Great Depression, Germany was already in a poor economic and political state. More than 6 million Germans were out of work. Germany also had to pay massive reparations for supposedly being solely responsible for all the destruction that WWI caused, and the government was unstable, with several parties vying for power. The current government, the Weimar Republic, was losing support and there was no clear successor to be the new government of Germany. How did the Great Depression affect an already gloomy Germany? How did Hitler and the Nazis take advantage of the economic crisis? In 1920-1923, the inflation of the German mark led to the decrease of private capital in German merchant banks. These banks had no choice but to take the …show more content…

Unemployment was on the rise and personal income on the fall. The government’s budget was in the negatives and industrialists were insisting on lower taxes for employers and capital, while also insisting on higher taxes on the working class. It was this new tax that led to the dissolve of the coalition of the parties of the Weimar Republic. The Reichstag was dissolved soon after. The new head of the Weimar Republic enacted more taxes to push the working class further into poverty. The election in 1930 show the correlation between economic crisis and political radicalism. The right-wing parties, with their traditional voter base of Protestants and the middle class, no longer had sufficient support and their voters went to Hitler’s party, the National Socialists. This sudden rise of support for National socialism was the result of the radicalization of the middle class (Frey, Bruno S. Effect of the Great Depression, 410). The unemployed, and the employed who felt their jobs were not secure, in a last-ditch effort to save their social status, took to supporting radical parties. There was also a large number of first-time voters without party affiliations who were easy targets for the

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