Question

What was wrong with Germany in the 1930's that made them so desperate they looked at Hitler as their''last hope''?

Answer 1

Read this....its self explanatory...
http://english.pravda.ru/world/europe/02-07-2009/107924-hitler-0/

Answer 2

They were under a depression, and with the treaty of versailles- had to pay over $30 million in war reparations. It also didnt help that they were basically considered the scum of the earth so when hitler came along and promised to bring back germany to a great nation, they leaped to his requests

Answer 3

Nothing has to be unusually wrong for people to look to fascism and the Strong Leader for a solution. Men act that way with great ease. Just this week, for example, a number of Democratic Senators wrote the US President, saying that if the Republican-controlled House presented spending cuts along with raising the debt ceiling of the United States (which is necessary to avoid a government shutdown), then they urged the President to take measures to increase the debt ceiling *without* the participation of Congress. That would be clearly unconstitutional -- indeed, a wild usurpation of power, since Article I of the Constitution clearly gives only Congress the power to borrow money in the name of the United States.

But here we have actual Senators more or less urging the President to behave like a dictator, Constitution be damned. And how much trouble is the US in? Not all *that* much. Throughout history, people routinely and often turn to dictators when times get a little tricky. You have only to look at the history of Louis XIV in France or Philip II during the Counter-Reformation, Hitler and the Third Reich of course, Lenin and Stalin in the USSR, and so on, all the way back to Caesar himself and the end of the Roman Republic. Men quite often prefer dictatorship to the messiness of a republic.

In the case of German in the 1930s, the initial difficulty was that the former ruling class -- the German aristocracy, all those guys with "von" in their name -- had been disgraced by the debacle of the loss of the First World War, and the fairly humiliating conditions imposed by the Allies at its end, e.g. the "war guilt," the reparations, the loss of Alsace-Lorraine, the occupation of the Rhineland.

This left rather a power vacuum at the top in Germany, and the immediate post-war government was weak and did not enjoy the confidence of the people. Worse, the Communist revolution in the Soviet Union, and the active efforts of the Soviets to export that revolution to Germany, made Germans extremely fearful of a communist revolution or coup d'etat. While the hyperinflation of the 20s had by then been brought under control, and the Great Depression so seared into the memory of Americans did not affect Europe so calamitously, both were clear evidence to the typical German that the existing republican government was ineffectual on economic and business issues, as well as international policy and national security.

What Hitler offered was, first, a strong and clear leadership. No one doubted his determination and clear vision. Second, he offered to take the best of socialism -- the concern for the masses, for the workers, for those not privileged or wealthy -- and purge it of its allegiance to Moscow, make it a patriotic *German* form of socialism. (This was of course reflected in the full name of his Nazi party: the National Socialist German Worker's Party.) So to most Germans he seemd the perfect amalgam of the best of socialism -- no more of the 1% exploiting the 99% -- with a strong patriotism and focus on German interests. (People did not forget that the Communists actually betrayed their own country, Russia, during the First World War, and worked for Russia's defeat so as to hasten their revolution. The Communists explicitly said their goal was to destroy the distinctions between nations.)

Finally, he offered scapegoats. Just like today, nobody could quite believe the country was really as impoverished as it seemed. Today, there is a widespread feeling that the wealth and income of the United States is being hoarded by the 1%, or businesses, or banks, whatever, and that all the financial woes of the country could easily be solved if taxes on those rich buggers could just be cranked up a bit. This is completely false, of course, but it plays well in Peoria, as they say. Heck, the President got re-elected essentially by promising to get the money needed for general wealth and prosperity from the rich.

Well, Hitler offered the same simple scapegoating solution to the Germans. Only in his case, he also invoked the tradition of anti-Semitism in Europe (not just in Germany) by blaming not just the wealthy businessmen and banks, but the wealthy *Jewish* businessmen and banks. He promised to find and extract their wealth and use it for the good of all Germans. That, too, was a popular pitch. People love the idea that the country's problems are a lot simpler than they seem, and that some wicked rich minority is the problem, and if we just get rid of them, or control them, everything will be fine.