Long desired Fuhrer

It made sense that Hitler and NSDAP took advantage of the anger and bitterness that stirred up among the people due to WWI and Great Depression. But it is interesting how it was only Germany that ended up with a brutal dictator. In fact, the battlefield was in France. So even though France won the War, the exhausted and scarred French people could have been as distressed towards their government as the Germans who had to experience the embarrassing defeat were. However, French did not seek for a dictator. Also, Great Depression hit U.S. really bad. However, U.S. also did not seek for a dictator. Then, why did Germany look for one?

Kershaw explains this in his book “The Hitler Myth”. He says that “The roots of ‘heroic’ leadership ideas in Germany extend deep into the nineteenth century,” (14). Also, "Volkisch-nationalist leadership expectations in the Weimar era broke with traditions of a monarch-subject relationship, replacing it with partly neo-feudal, but partly psuedo-democratic notions of a relationship between leader and 'following' in which the leader represented in an authoritative way the will of the people without standing above and outside it in the fashion of a monarch or dictator" (19). The necessity of a single leader who can unite the nation and lead it to its advantage was long desired.

Hitler became the perfect fit. NSDAP first satisfied people’s need by calling Hitler the fuhrer of their party and by creating the “Hitler Myth”. Hitler then accelerated this process by convincing himself that he will “be the Fuhrer himself” (25). Certain political figures such as Goebbles put him on a pedestal and I was really impressed by some crazy fans who considered Hitler equivalent to Jesus Christ (39). Propaganda and Hitler's charisma helped him to be a complete dictator. People were so enchanted by him that a small-businessman "continued to swear by Hitler as a leader of super dimensional qualities 'even if he is a mass murderer'" (93). Because he was the type of leader that Germans have been desiring for a long time, people went crazy over him.