IB History Hitler: Why Did Authoritarian Rule Emerge? Key Definitions

The catastrophic collapse in the value of the German mark in 1923, driven by the Ruhr occupation crisis, which destroyed the savings of much of the German middle class.

A failed right-wing attempt to overthrow the Weimar government in March 1920, defeated by a general strike after the army declined to intervene against it.

Germany's broad middle class of small business owners, farmers, and salaried professionals, a social group whose economic anxiety and fear of communism proved significant in Nazi electoral support.

The Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, the Nazi Party. Founded in 1919 as the German Workers' Party (DAP) and renamed in 1920, it was led by Adolf Hitler from 1921. The party combined extreme German nationalism, anti-Semitism, anti-communism, and opposition to the Weimar Republic's democracy. Its paramilitary wing, the SA (Sturmabteilung), used violence against political opponents. The NSDAP won only 2.6% of the vote in 1928 but surged to 18.3% in 1930 and 37.4% in July 1932 as the Great Depression deepened. Hitler became Chancellor on January 30, 1933, and the party established a one-party state within months.

A failed left-wing revolutionary uprising in Berlin in January 1919, led by the Spartacist League, crushed by the Weimar government with the help of the army and Freikorps paramilitaries.

The false claim that Germany's army was never defeated in battle in the First World War but was betrayed on the home front by civilians, socialists, and Jews. It let nationalists blame Germany's defeat and the Treaty of Versailles on internal enemies rather than military failure, and Nazi propaganda used it extensively.

The Nazi concept of a racially pure "people's community" that transcended class divisions. It was used to promote national unity and justify the exclusion and persecution of Jews, Roma, and other "non-Aryans."

The collapse of the New York stock market in October 1929, which triggered the Great Depression and, in Germany, led to the recall of American loans that had sustained the Weimar recovery.