Adolf Hitler’s rise to Reich Chancellor on January 30, 1933 changed world history, yet a new Berlin exhibition imagines how things might have turned out differently.
In the early 1930s it looked as if Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party would be unlikely to ever take power.
By the autumn of 1932, the Nazis were losing support as the Depression-hit economy began to improve. In the November 1932 federal election — the last free and fair one held before the Nazis seized power — Hitler’s National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP) won the most votes, but failed to obtain a majority, which meant he had to form a coalition amid ongoing political deadlock.
So few would have then predicted that Hitler would rise to the Chancellorship on January 30, 1933, according to Dan Diner, a German-Israeli historian, author and emeritus professor of modern history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
