By Dr. Rachel Bitecofer
When Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany in January 1933, it wasn’t because he seized power. It was because Germany’s conservatives gave it to him.
He didn’t storm the Reichstag. He walked through the front door — ushered in by aristocrats, generals, and businessmen who thought they could use him to save themselves from democracy.
They weren’t Nazis. They were the respectable men in suits, the “adults in the room.” President Paul von Hindenburg, the aging field marshal who still dreamed of empire. Franz von Papen, the slick conservative politician who fancied himself a kingmaker. Alfred Hugenberg, the media tycoon who used his newspapers to rehabilitate the far right. They were Germany’s establishment — men of property, pedigree, and power.
And they were terrified.
The Fear of Modernity
To understand why they made their devil’s bargain, you have to understand what they feared.
The 1920s had shattered the old Germany. The Kaiser was gone. The aristocracy stripped of its automatic privilege. Women had the vote. Jazz, cabarets, open sexuality, and a flood of new ideas made Berlin feel like Sodom on the Spree.
To conservatives, the Weimar Republic wasn’t just unstable — it was unholy.
They saw the Depression as proof that democracy had failed. They watched Communists battle police in the streets. They saw the Social Democrats — the moderate left — as traitors who had stabbed the army in the back in 1918. They blamed Jews for everything from modern art to inflation.
And in the middle of this storm stood Hitler: the vulgar populist who promised to restore Germany’s greatness.
The Deal with the Devil
By late 1932, Hitler’s Nazi Party was the largest in the Reichstag, but he still lacked a governing majority. The presidency — held by Hindenburg — was the real prize, because only Hindenburg could appoint the chancellor.
Hitler demanded the job. The conservatives refused. Hindenburg called him “that Bohemian corporal” and said he’d never entrust Germany to “such a rabble.”
They all knew what Hitler was. They’d heard the speeches. Read Mein Kampf. They knew about the SA — his street thugs who beat and murdered political opponents. They understood his contempt for law, for parliament, for Jews, for democracy itself.
And yet, after months of political deadlock, the elites began to crack. They wanted stability. They wanted order. And most of all, they wanted to destroy the left.
Von Papen, desperate to regain relevance, pitched the unthinkable: make Hitler chancellor, but surround him with “responsible men.” He convinced Hindenburg that the cabinet would have only three Nazis out of eleven ministers — that the conservatives would hold the real power.
“We’ve hired him,” Papen assured his allies. “In two months, we’ll have pushed him so far into a corner that he’ll squeal.”
Within two months, they were the ones squealing.
The First Month
Hitler was sworn in on January 30, 1933. Within weeks, the Reichstag was in flames.
The Nazis blamed the Communists. The conservatives went along. They signed the emergency decrees suspending civil liberties. They voted for the Enabling Act, giving Hitler the power to rule by decree. They cheered as the SA rounded up their political enemies — and pretended not to notice when the arrests didn’t stop there.
By summer, every other party had been outlawed. The unions were smashed. The press muzzled. The courts “coordinated.” The conservatives who thought they could “guide” Hitler now found themselves either unemployed, imprisoned, or collaborating.
The cabinet that was supposed to contain him had been absorbed — just as he had promised.
The Dream of Order
Why did they do it? Because in their minds, chaos was worse than tyranny.
They believed democracy had empowered the wrong people — workers, women, socialists, Jews. They thought fascism could restore “discipline.” They believed they could channel Hitler’s energy without being consumed by it.
They wanted a strong hand, and they got one — around their own throats.
For a while, it looked like they’d succeeded. The economy recovered. The streets were quiet. The crowds were obedient. The regime restored national pride. At less than 1% of the country’s population, the Nazi’s war on the Jews was all but invisible to anyone who wanted to pretend it was no big deal.
But by 1939, that order had metastasized into self destruction. Hitler, who ran as a No Wars candidate and got away with it, dreamed of a revived German empire and it ended in World War II — in cities reduced to ash, in tens of millions of dead, in the final realization that their “savior” had brought about their annihilation.
The Lesson They Never Learn
Every generation of conservatives tells itself the same lie: that they can harness the chaos of populism, that the demagogue is a weapon to wield, not a bomb that will detonate in their hands.
America’s elites made the same calculation. They saw Trump as a clown they could control — a populist battering ram against liberals and progressives, a way to realign the courts and cut their taxes. They called themselves “adults in the room.” They told themselves he’d grow into the office.
They told themselves what von Papen told Hindenburg: don’t worry, we’ve got this.
They didn’t.
Trump understood power in the same way Hitler did — not as something to share, but to consume. He recognized fear and used it as currency. He turned their party into his cult. He humiliated every one of them, one by one, and made them bow to him on live television.
The same people who whispered that he was dangerous now defend him as indispensable. They tell themselves that they can manage the chaos — that they can get what they want before he burns it all down.
They can’t.
The End of the Bargain
The German conservatives got their monarchy back, all right — just not the kind they imagined. Instead of a Kaiser, they got a Führer. Instead of honor, they got ruin. Some of them paid for that mistake with their lives.
When the smoke cleared in 1945, there were few aristocrats left to restore. No empire. No fatherland. Only rubble and famine, for nearly a decade.
The men who thought they could control him ended up begging for the mercy of the victors. The ones who lived long enough to see the end of their bargain saw the truth written in the ashes of their cities:
They didn’t save Germany.
They destroyed it.
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