Erin ’s Reviews > Fateful Hours: The Collapse of the Weimar Republic > Status Update

Chancellor Bruning failed to turn the tide and instead exacerbated the economic crisis and contributed to the radicalization of large segments of the population.

Nationalist students in Hanover embarked on a vicious smear campaign against the Jewish scholar Theodor Lessing. His teaching license was revoked and in February 1933 he would be assassinated by the Nazis.

During the few hours Hitler's storm troopers believed they had in fact seized power, they immediately began to terrorize and arrest members of the political Left and German Jews.

The Nazi battle cry "Germany Awaken" was intended to install nationalism in schoolchildren.

In the September 14, 1930 elections the Nazi's increased their share of the vote from 2.6 to 18.3 percent and their seats from 12 to 107. Many of those who cast their ballots for the Nazi Party were first time voters and non -voters.

Political murder was the order of the day in the early Weimar Republic and time after time the trail led to radical right wing nationalist groups and paramilitary Freikorps associations.

The German business sector wasn't the only segment of society moving rightward. The bourgeois centrist parties were growing more conservative as well. Along with the general spirit of the day.

The bottomless pit that was hyperinflation defied rational explanation, leaving Germany veritably stunned.

In 1917 Wolfgang Kapp had founded the German Fatherland Party. It coalesced from a protofascist mass movement that insisted on "peace through victory" with massive territorial annexations.

Germany had lost faith in the status quo.