90th Anniversary Of Hitler’s Rise To Power Raises Questions About Future (Worthy News Analysis)
By Stefan J. Bos, Chief International Correspondent Worthy News
BERLIN (Worthy News) – Germany realized Monday that precisely 90 years ago, Adolf Hitler rose to become Reich chancellor and eventually changed world history with the war and its Holocaust killing millions.
His power grab on January 30, 1933, came after it initially looked unlikely that his Nazi Party would be unlikely ever to take power.
By the autumn of 1932, the Nazis lost support as the Depression-hit economy improved.
In the November 1932 federal election — the last free and fair vote held before the Nazis seized power — Hitler’s National Socialist German Workers’ Party won the most votes.
But it failed to obtain a majority, which meant Hitler had to form a coalition amid ongoing political deadlock.
Few would have then predicted that Hitler would rise to the chancellorship on January 30, 1933, said Dan Diner, a German-Israeli historian, author, and emeritus professor of modern history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Hitler ensured that his election as chancellor in 1933 would be Germany’s last until his suicide in late April 1945 and the crushing military defeat of Nazi Germany in World War II.
By the time of his death, Hitler’s devastating wars led to the death of 60 million people worldwide, according to historians.
Six million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust, along with several million Sinti and Roma, people with disabilities, and homosexuals.
Fast forward, concerns remain about Europe’s future, with the continent’s most significant armed conflict since World War Two raging in Ukraine and reports of rising antisemitism.
With war raging in Ukraine, the government of Germany, Europe’s largest economy, was trying to balance its military support for Kyiv with security threats even closer to home.
Berlin expressed concern about the rise in the number of neo-Nazis and other extremists in the German military.
Far-right extremists have been involved in several terror attacks, including in 2019 on a synagogue in Halle, the fifth most populous city in former East Germany.
Federal data showed a significant increase in antisemitic crimes nationwide from 2020 to 2021.
And a report from the RIAS watchdog group recorded 450 antisemitic incidents in Berlin in the first half of last year though that was a drop from 574 in the same period the previous year.
Yet as Germans recall Hitler, concerns remain whether new generations will remember the “Never Again” cries from Holocaust survivors and others who saw the horrors of his era.
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