How did Hitler and the nazi party gain and maintain power?
Adolf Hitler first came into political power as the head of the National Socialist German Worker's (NAZI) party. After a failed attempt to violently overthrow the government, and a brief stay in prison, Hitler returned to his leadership and started to grow the Nazi party. Gaining hundreds of thousands of members, Hitler's party became the largest in the Reichstag easily. Germany was in a time of extreme unemployment due to the depression. German people wanted immediate change, which made extremist parties like this that much more attractive. Nearly every citizen supported him, from the working class to the wealthy. With the addition of Hitler's genius propaganda and excellent public speaking abilities, the Nazi did nothing if not grow. Under pressure from the public, German President Hindenburg agreed to appoint Hitler as the chancellor of Germany. Within two months, Nazi influence was everywhere. The Reichstag soon passed the enabling act, which gave government the power to ignore the constitution. This was the final move in Hitler's rise to complete power. Hitler remained in power for many years, through a world war, until he committed suicide in his emergency bunker as invading Russians were less than 300 yards away, in 1945. To stay in power, Adolf Hitler used mass propaganda, framing the Jews and Allies to be evil and the Aryan cause and race to be noble and just. He created a personality cult for himself, compared himself to God, and media made into Germany's indestructible, refutable savior. He censored radios, newspapers, TVs, and anything else that could be used to broadcast an anti-Nazi message. He burned books and other media written by Jews, sent controversial authors and playwrights off to concentration camps, and made sure that his autobiography, Mein Kampf, and other pro-Nazi and anti-semitic books were widely circulated. His secret police, the SS, were used to enforce Hitler's extremist policies. He had political rivals assassinated, and anyone who dared to challenge him was at first "encouraged" by the SS to emigrate from Germany, then later in Hitler's rule, troublemakers were convicted of treason and shot.
