Lesson video

Hello, year six, and welcome back to our history unit on 20th century conflict.

I'm Mr. Hutchinson, this is lesson four.

So if you haven't already caught up with the other lessons, you can just go back to the previous days and make sure that you've watched our first three lessons because we've had the First World War, that's over.

The Treaty of Versailles has been put in place, and today, we're going to be looking at how Hitler rose to power through the 1920s and 1930s.

If you haven't already, make sure you have done the quiz, so pause the video and go back and do the quiz now to consolidate those bits of knowledge.

If you've already done it, well done.

Remember, it doesn't matter if you don't get any right.

Even getting the wrong answers will help to fix the key bits of knowledge in your head.

You need to make sure that you're all set up, so I'd advise you to pause now and get a pen, some paper or a book, make sure you've got a quiet place, no distractions near you, and maybe a drink of water or something so that we can go through for the next hour, and learn a lot all about Hitler and how he rose to power.

So let's get started.

Our key question today is going to be, how did Hitler rise to power? That's our first, that's our big question that we're going to be asking, and you remember that in our, this is how the lesson is going to be structured.

So, first of all, we're going to look at something called the Weimar Republic.

Now in German, we say the W letter, we say that with a V sound, so it's if whenever you see a W, you make a V sound, so this isn't Weimar, it's Weimar.

Try and say it.

Weimar, try and say it.

Weimar, good, well done.

So, the Weimar Republic, we're going to look at the establishment of the Weimar Republic in 1919.

The First World War is over, Treaty of Versailles is in place, the Weimar Republic comes.

Then there's something called the Beer Hall Putsch, okay? So we'll look at what the Beer Hall Putsch is.

We'll then look at the Great Depression of 1929 and how that affected things, about how this character, Hitler, becomes Chancellor of Germany, and finally, there'll be the end of lesson quiz.

Here we go.

First of all, the Weimar Republic.

So, with, you remember in the last lesson, that Kaiser Wilhelm had abdicated, he'd resigned.

The German Empire was no longer an empire.

They'd already had some democratic institutions, so that didn't change completely because they did already have a constitutional monarchy with a.

It had some elements of democracy already, but it was going public.

A republic is a country without a king or a queen, so it's going to be fully democratic with a parliament and a president, and they made most of these decisions in a place called Weimar, and that's why it's called the Weimar Republic.

It's just named after the place that it was.

So what was agreed in Weimar? What was agreed in terms of what the new Germany was going to look like? Well, first of all, it would be a republic, so there would be no supreme leader in terms of a monarch, and then there are two different names that are used.

The Weimar Republic, sometimes, like I said, because it was made in, they'd made the decisions in Weimar, but it's usually also referred to as the German Reich, Reich.

You need to pay attention to that word so get this vocabulary sorted now, the German Reich, and reich means realm or sort of a country, so, the new German, the new country of Germany, no longer an empire.

Now it's the country of Germany, and to make the rules of the new country, to make the rules of any country, we use what's called a constitution, a list of rules, a list of what's going to happen, and so there was the Weimar Constitution, and the Weimar Constitution so that Germany was going to be a reich or a realm.

It was going to be one state with the same rules for everybody in that state.

It would have a president to rule over it.

It would rule for seven years.

Then there would be a chancellor, kind of like our prime minister, so somebody who's in charge of parliament, making all of the decisions in consultation with parliament, and that parliament, or the Reichstag, that parliament would have different politicians and party members in, to make those decisions together.

They wrote all of this down in their Weimar Constitution.

That's exactly what it looks like, with all of these decisions of let's have a president, let's have a chancellor, how long can they be in charge for, and they wrote it all down and signed it in the Weimar Constitution.

So that meant we started to get some new parties, some new political parties, who wanted to be in charge, so, in history, we often talk about what stayed the same and what became different.

This is a good example of where this change started to create new changes, including new political parties, and we're going to look at one in particular because one new political party that came out of this was led by a German soldier, led by somebody who had been a German soldier, and that German soldier, that is a young Adolf Hitler.

You might have heard of him before.

And Adolf Hitler had served in the German army.

He fought at the Battle of Somme, which we've already learned about, and he wanted to make a new party, a new party called the Social Democrat Party, or sometimes called the Nazi Party, and that was their sign, the Nazi Party.

And so, Hitler, in the late, in 1919 to the early 1920s, became a leader of this small sort of new political party.

So, we have a new country now, the new German Reich.

How did it do? Well, unfortunately, there was some trouble straightaway for the new German Reich.

Of course, they've just had the Treaty of Versailles has just happened, they've lost millions of men in the war, they've had lots of their land taken away, including Alsace-Lorraine, which had all of that coal and all of the stuff that they could use to create wealth, and so, something happens in Germany called hyperinflation, okay? Hyperinflation, and hyperinflation is when money starts to become worthless because Germany didn't have much money, and so what they would start to do is they would just print more money, but the problem is the more that you have of something, the less it's worth.

So, for example, I could go out and get some grass from a field now, well, I couldn't because we're in lockdown, but normally, I could go out and get some grass, and I might try and sell that to somebody.

Would they give me any money for it? Well, no, because there's loads of grass already.

It's not worth anything because you can easily just go and get it.

The rarer something is, the more it's worth, and the problem was, as Germany printed more and more money, it became less rare, and so it became more worthless, and this is known as hyperinflation, and you will see that in 1923, the value of a gold mark is so if you wanted one gold mark, so here, sorry, it says, here, it's about sort of a.

Course, so if you want 5,000, if you had 5,000, if you wanted to buy a gold mark, it would cost you about 5,000 paper marks, okay? As we go through the months in 1923, you can see that if you wanted to buy the same gold mark, so this is the value of one gold mark, in January, it would cost you 5,000.

As we go up into, let's say, September, it wouldn't cost you one, it wouldn't cost you 5,000.

Now, it would cost you a one billion paper marks, and the hyperinflation means that money gets into this runaway cycle where it becomes worth less and less and less, and so you can see it in this picture here.

These children are playing with stacks of notes, stacks of money, so all of those are notes.

Imagine you've got a 20-pound note out now.

Imagine you've got a 20-pound note and you put that in a pile of other 20-pound notes, and you have stacks and stacks of 20-pound notes, and they're so worthless that you just use them like toys to build pyramids out of.

'cause they're basically just paper, and Germany had to start printing new notes, so they would print, for example, this was a billion-mark, a billion-mark note, German money was, we have pounds, they have marks.

In fact, it's more like a trillion marks because it's a thousand million, and we would normally call that a billion in a different, there's a difference between billions and trillions in US and other systems. And so you had to have 50 billion or 50 trillion marks.

Starting to have bigger and bigger and bigger notes that are necessary because money was becoming worthless.

So what does this mean? It means that in the years following the war, Germany was, economically, so economics has to do with money, economically, it was in a terrible place, and that meant that it was economically instable.

Okay, there was instability.

Now, in history, we look at different kinds of courses and we often group courses together for particular events or things happening.

Economic factors are usually very important.

We might have political factors, we'll have social factors, we have economics, to do with money, and so, your first question as a historian is, thinking about Germany now in 1923, following the war, I would like you to consider this economic instability, this sort of hyperinflation, the fact that nobody really had any money and the money that they had was worthless, it was difficult to get a job and Germany didn't have any sort of materials or resources they could use to be wealthy.

How does that economic instability, how might it affect how people in the country will feel, how Germans will feel? So you might like to imagine that, all of a sudden, money became worthless in the UK.

All of a sudden, your parents couldn't get a job anymore.

How might people start to feel? So I'll give you a little starter here.

You might write, with economic instability, money being worthless, jobs being unavailable, people may feel um, and give a reason for that, justify it.

So pause the video and complete that task now.

Okay, great.

You might have said that people would feel worried.

Well, then if you said they would feel worried, you might say that people would feel angry because unfairly punished by the Allies following the Treaty of Versailles, they're worried because they don't know if they will be able to eat anymore.

They might start to feel jealous of other European countries that have more than them.

Well done if you got any of those sorts of ideas.

And so, going back to Adolf Hitler, people in Germany started to feel unhappy and discontented.

They weren't content, they weren't happy, there was real discontent, people being very unhappy.

And that led to what's sometimes called the Beer Hall Putsch.

So putsch just means, it's German, it means kind of like a revolution or a violent revolution, trying to take over a country violently, and Hitler, you can actually see Hitler in this photo here, which was taken about the time of the Beer House Putsch in about 1923 with some of his old army friends, they were drinking in the beer hall, that's why it's called the Beer Hall Putsch, and they said, we should take over and we should be in charge of Germany.

The political leaders are doing a terrible job.

They're doing an awful job.

Look at what the bad state our country is in.

We deserve to be great.

We will take over.

And so they marched to the government building and they tried to take over.

The only problem was, this Beer Hall Putsch was not very successful.

The government already knew about this.

The army was there, and when they marched towards them, the army shot the person next to Hitler, in fact, he was killed.

They used their weapons and it was quickly put down and they were all arrested.

And so, this, in this picture, you can see all of these men were arrested, and Hitler was arrested and put in prison.

While he was in prison, he wrote one of the most influential books of all time, and that book was called Mein Kampf or My Struggle.

Here's a picture of it here.

He wrote it while he was in prison, and it put down all of his ideas and all of his beliefs.

So what are some of those ideas and beliefs that Hitler had? Let's take a closer look at some of the key points of Mein Kampf.

You might like to pause the video and jot these down.

I saw that some of you, like Noah, making amazing notes as you go through, that's an amazing skill.

So year six, in fact, let me just interrupt myself here.

Year six, I also teach, sometimes, 17- and 18-year-olds at A-Level, and I have to say, the work that's coming through, from what I'm seeing on Twitter that's being shared by your parents, the standard of work you are doing and the notes that you're taking are better than some of the 17- and 18-year-olds that I see and teach.

You're doing amazing work with your notes, so keep it up and keep writing down all of this information.

It's great work.

So let's go back to Mein Kampf and look at those key points.

The first thing is Hitler believed that there was a kind of race called the Aryan race.

It's roughly sort of like Scandinavian, so, it's kind of like blond hair, blue eyes, perfect eyesight, muscular, tall, and he thought that the Aryan race, people that looked like that, they were the master race, they were a genius race, they were better than other races.

This is, as you may have noticed, you might be going, gosh, that sounds really racist.

You're right, it is really racist, so Hitler was a racist.

He thought that some races were better than other races.

So, he, for example, thought that Black people were worse than Aryan people.

He thought that Eastern European people, Slavic people, were worse, and that the master race, the genius race, were this Aryan race.

Of course, it's nonsense.

Of course, that's absolutely nonsense.

One race isn't better than another race, how silly, but that's what Hitler believed, and that's what he wrote in his book, Mein Kampf.

Group of people were the Jews.

He thought they were parasites.

Parasites are like kinds of bugs which feed off other animals, and he thought that the Jews were parasites, and he thought that the Jews were the reason that other Germans had little, so whenever he saw a Jewish person in charge of a shop or something, instead of thinking, oh, look, there's somebody that's being successful and they got a shop, well done to that, he would think, oh, that's a Jew, and because they've got a shop, I should have a shop.

It's their fault that I haven't got much money, and he encouraged other people to blame the Jews for all of the problems after the First World War.

Hitler hated the Treaty of Versailles.

He thought that it was a huge betrayal.

The politicians had betrayed ordinary Germans by signing up to it.

They should never have signed up to it, and so, the head of the Treaty of Versailles needed listening to it and agreeing to it, and more than that, they should get revenge, they should get revenge on France for what they did following the First World War.

And lastly, Hitler believed that Germans needed what he called Lebensraum.

That's a fun word to say, so let's say it together, Lebensraum, Lebensraum, your turn.

Actually say it, say it out loud, it'll help you to remember it, Lebensraum.

Good, yeah, that was good, Lebensraum, so it's two German words squished together, lebens, raum, and it translates as living space or living room, and he thought they needed more land.

They'd had land taken away from the Treaty of Versailles, they needed more land, and they should take it from territories in the east.

So these are the ideas of Hitler in Mein Kampf, and this book was really popular.

It sold lots and lots of copies.

Lots of Germans read Hitler's book and they read Mein Kampf.

Here are some of the quotes from it.

It was a popular book, and I want to be really clear, just how disgraceful and despicable these ideas are, but it's important that we know that Hitler wrote this book and that they were his beliefs, and people in Germany were reading this and buying this book at the time.

So here are some of the quotes.

I'll put them up and let you read them.

So he was certain that some races were better than others, and some races should be, races should be dominant, they should be in charge.

Good race if you're a personal colour, people,.

Then you should, you are chaff, so chaff is kind of like when you have a plant and you have the rubbish, so you take the bit that you want to eat, like the wheat, and the left is chaff, just throw it away, and that's what he thought of other races.

He said, other races are chaff that should be thrown away.

And Hitler said, just as we breed dogs to be stronger dogs, and horses to be fast horses, we should also breed people so that only pure Germans mate with pure Germans, and we have a purity of blood.

Other races don't get involved.

And very clearly, he wanted to eliminate the Jews.

He thought the Jews should be got rid of and he said this will be a bloody process.

So these are all actually Adolf Hitler's views that he wrote in Mein Kampf.

It sold really well, however, Hitler, after being released from prison, he only spent about nine months in prison, and this book sold well, but the Nazi Party wasn't getting many votes, and one of the reasons for that was that the Americans put a plan in place called the Dawes Plan, which gave money to Germany, gave loans to Germany, and those loans, Germany used to pay their reparations, so America realised that Germany being in this horrible economic position was not good for the region, and so they said, look, we'll loan you the money so that you can pay back your debts and start to get your country back on track.

That meant that Hitler didn't have such a large following, and so even though people were buying his book, it didn't translate into votes for him.

Now you might also say, well, maybe that's because people were just buying it to see how shocking it was and they didn't actually really want to vote for him.

That could also be the case, so, although Mein Kampf sold really well, people weren't really voting for him.

Only still wasn't getting that political power.

So let's have a go at a quick writing task to make sure you've got all of those ideas down.

I'd like you to pause the video and complete this sentence.

Although Mein Kampf sold well in the 1920s, and finish that sentence.

Pause the video and do that now.

Okay, so you might have said something like, although Mein Kampf sold well in the 1920s, Hitler still didn't have much political power, or not many people voted for the Nazi Party or Hitler didn't get to put his ideas into place because nobody voted for him.

So, well done if you got any of those ideas.

You can give yourself a tick.

So the Dawes Plan was working, America were giving money to Germany and Germany was starting to get back on track, but then in 1929, something happens, a huge global event.

In 1929, there is what's called a global financial crash and it became known as the Great Depression afterwards.

Money, not just in Germany, across the world, started to become worthless because in America, Wall Street, which is where money was sort of traded, there's a huge crisis of confidence, every stock trading with each other, and so, money, which is just a promise, really, bits of paper, just promises, people stopped believing in the promise, and so money became worthless everywhere, and it was a horrible situation for everybody, so this graph shows you exactly what happened with the value of money, the value of stock on the stock market in America, and you can see that across 1929, as we go through the months, it crashes, it recovers a little bit, but then it continues to crash, and so people lost millions and billions of pounds.

Other people would have to have their homes taken away, horrible situation.

So, now, all of a sudden, Germany, like other countries, are not in such a good place.

America can't afford to give so much money to Germany.

The Allies are really asking for their reparations because they need as much money as they can get even though Germany can't afford it.

They have huge mass unemployment, six million people unemployed, without jobs, without able to feed themselves.

So here's another task for you.

Thinking about this, how this Great Depression will have impacted people's beliefs and what they vote for because after the Great Depression, more people start to vote for the Nazi Party, more people start to vote for Hitler.

So why might that be? Why might people turn to a fringe extremist party with extreme views after the Great Depression, after this big financial crash? Pause the video and see if you can answer that now.

Okay, well done, so, I've got a few ideas here.

I'd like you to tick them if you got any of them, the same as me.

So you might have got here that people might have turned to the Nazi Party after the Great Depression because their normal politicians had clearly failed them.

They're in a global crash, they didn't have any money, they haven't got any jobs, so they said, look, you politicians, the person that are in charge, you're doing a terrible job, so we're going to throw you out, we're going to try somebody new.

It might have been that they were looking for somebody to blame.

Hitler blamed the Jews and said, it's all their fault that we haven't got much money.

Maybe people thought, yeah, I don't, I want somebody to blame.

When things go wrong, it's nice to have somebody to blame and say, oh, it's their fault, it's that group's fault.

Now, of course, that's grossly unfair.

How could a whole group be responsible for one thing going wrong? That doesn't really matter in the eyes of the, some of those people.

They just need somebody to blame.

They need what's called a scapegoat, somebody that they can put the blame on, and Hitler said, yes, it's the Jews, it's all the Jews' fault, and look, that started to become attractive to people.

It's different group, especially they seem to be doing well, it's their fault.

In crises, people like a strongman, what's sometimes called a strongman.

Of course, it could be a strong woman.

The phrase is a strongman, somebody that is very, very aggressive and speaks their mind and speaks real strong in statements and certainty and will take real action, and that's exactly what Hitler was.

Lots of people felt they had nothing to lose.

They'd had the normal traditional parties, but they had nothing anyways.

They might as well give one of these fringe parties a go, they've got nothing to lose.

And maybe they will get a job or a better life.

That's what Hitler was promising for them, and what was especially attractive for lots of people was Hitler's idea of Volksgemeinenschaft, Volksgemeinschaft, sorry, Volksgemeinschaft, Volksgemeinschaft, and that roughly means the people's community.

He said, we need to, he was a real nationalist, Hitler, and he said, what we need to do is we need to all come together as one community and work together and rebuild Germany.

We need to make Germany great again, rebuild the roads, rebuild the infrastructure, and have national pride and think that our country is the best, and that was attractive to people during that Depression and during that crisis.

And it worked.

By 1933, just four years later, Hitler became Chancellor, so we're really there at the time, and they're going to explain why this was so attractive because, now, looking back at the horrible things that Hitler did, so we now know that he murdered six million Jews and caused the Second World War, and always responsible for the deaths of millions and millions more.

So knowing that now, we think, how on Earth could anybody have voted for this monster? How on Earth could anybody have thought, yeah, that's the person that I want to be in charge.

In the next campaign that, in the next elections that took place, if you can see here that this is the Reichstag, so these little bars here represent seats, members that are, members of parliament in the German parliament, and in 1928, Nazi Party only had this, only had this green bit here, so they only had 12 seats in 1928, but then the global crash happens, and Hitler does this huge charm offensive and tour, uses propaganda a lot, lots of videos and posters, and by 1932, they'd taken over 230 seats.

Now, all of the rest was broken up into lots of other parties, and so Hitler's party was able to dominate it and, in fact, was able to become Chancellor or leader, prime minister, of the parliament, so here he is in 1933 as Chancellor, and as soon as he becomes Chancellor, he passes a law that says that he doesn't have to speak to the rest of parliament.

He alone can make the decisions.

He becomes a dictator or a Fuhrer.

He says, I am the person that's completely in charge, and anybody that disagrees with me, well, no, they're not allowed to disagree with me, and we'll be moving on in a future lesson to exactly what that meant because it meant that it started to put any political enemies, anybody that disagreed with him, into work camps or concentration camps throughout the early 1930s, which would go on to feature as part of the, Hitler's awful, cruel regime, but this is how it's all started, and it's important to know how it started, it's important to know how people rise to these powers because it doesn't suddenly happen overnight.

We need to think about the things that caused them, and so that's what we're going to do now.

We're going to look at the different factors that led to Hitler rising to power, rising to this position of Chancellor, and so I'd like you to pause the video and write.

It could be a few sentences, it could be a few paragraphs, depending on how much energy you feel that you have and how much passion you have for this particular history subject.

So, these are some of the factors that you could talk about, the things that had a role in getting Hitler to power.

You could talk about how harsh the Treaty of Versailles was.

You could talk about Germany's domestic, that means at home, their economic condition at home.

The unemployment they had, the hyperinflation, the lack of resources, and you can also talk about the global economic situation like the Great Depression.

That might have been a factor in Hitler's rise to power.

And then lastly, Hitler's skill as an orator or speaker, and a propagandist, so he puts propaganda, posters trying to change people's minds, and leaflets and films, and he was very skilled at that.

So which of those do you think was most important and why? You might like to discuss all of them.

Pause the video and try that now.

So complete your end of unit quiz now.

Ask your parents or carers to take a photo of your work, send it over on Twitter, so that I can see it.

Well done for another great lesson today, well done for listening so hard, thinking so hard, making such good notes.

You guys rock.