Why Democracies Fell: Disenchantment, Depression, and the Men Who Used Them

The idea

This unit answers the exam's question about the Nazis' rise with the anchor's answer, and then shows the answer was general. The nineteenth century's movements had all succeeded by nineteen twenty, nations for empires, republics for kings, and the reward was a war that killed twenty million and a peace that satisfied no one. Democracy was the form nearly every state took and the form nearly every people came to despise, because it delivered deadlock, thirty-two parties in Germany, a mutilated victory and a red scare in Italy, anarchy in Spain, and then, in nineteen twenty-nine, a slump its governments met with cuts. Fascism offered what democracy could not, order and a nation to die for, and it offered it first in Italy, where a king appointed a man with a hundred followers because the alternative looked like Russia. Germany repeated the sequence a decade late with a biological creed added: a fringe at two point six percent became the largest party the moment the Depression arrived, and a president appointed its leader to control him. The takeover was legal, a fire, a decree, an Enabling Act, and the state that followed enrolled everyone and excluded Jews by law. Spain's republic was strangled by its own army with German bombs. The democracies that survived watched. They rearmed too late, let the Rhineland go, let Ethiopia go, gave away the Sudetenland at Munich, and called it preserving peace until Prague showed the price. Stalin, who trusted no democracy, signed with Hitler instead. Unit seventeen begins in Poland, in September nineteen thirty-nine.