Uh... No? There was no two-party system in Weimar Germany what are you even talking about? Hitler came to power because conservatives and centrists prefered him over the left. Like, it was Hindenburg who appointed Hitler as chancellor.

I think that's a massive mischaracterization of the elections in 33. Hitler mainly rose to power because the traditional nationalist party and centrist party thought they could control him and use his popularity to ward off a coalition from leftist and unionists. The centrists were among the first parties to vote in favor of the Enabling act, which granted legislative powers to Hitler's government.

It's a bit pedantic to say that Hitler rose to power without the majority because he only received 43.9% of the vote..... especially considering that over 17 million people voted for him and the next most popular candidate only received 7 million votes.

That really only makes sense if you are reviewing the election through the lens of someone used to a two party system. If we are going to evaluate it as if it were a two party system and combine the right and left into two coalitions......the Nazi, Centre, DNVP, and BVP would make up nearly 26million voters while the SPD and kpd would only make up nearly 12 million people.

Even though the Centre party was much more willing to work with the Nazi than the SPD, if we added their votes to the left coalition you'd still have 22m on the right and 16m on the left.

::: spoiler Blackshirts and Reds - Michael Parenti - Ch 1

In Germany, a similar pattern of complicity between fascists and capitalists emerged. German workers and farm laborers had won the right to unionize, the eight-hour day, and unemployment insurance. But to revive profit levels, heavy industry and big finance wanted wage cuts for their workers and massive state subsidies and tax cuts for themselves.

During the 1920s, the Nazi Sturmabteilung or SA, the brown-shirted storm troopers, subsidized by business, were used mostly as an antilabor paramilitary force whose function was to terrorize workers and farm laborers. By 1930, most of the tycoons had concluded that the Weimar Republic no longer served their needs and was too accommodating to the working class. They greatly increased their subsidies to Hitler, propelling the Nazi party onto the national stage. Business tycoons supplied the Nazis with generous funds for fleets of motor cars and loudspeakers to saturate the cities and villages of Germany, along with funds for Nazi party organizations, youth groups, and paramilitary forces. In the July 1932 campaign, Hitler had sufficient funds to fly to fifty cities in the last two weeks alone.

In that same campaign the Nazis received 37.3 percent of the vote, the highest they ever won in a democratic national election. They never had a majority of the people on their side. To the extent that they had any kind of reliable base, it generally was among the more affluent members of society. In addition, elements of the petty bourgeoisie and many lumpenproletariats served as strong-arm party thugs, organized into the SA storm troopers. But the great majority of the organized working class supported the Communists or Social Democrats to the very end.

In the December 1932 election, three candidates ran for president: the conservative incumbent Field Marshal von Hindenburg, the Nazi candidate Adolph Hitler, and the Communist party candidate Ernst Thaelmann. In his campaign, Thaelmann argued that a vote for Hindenburg amounted to a vote for Hitler and that Hitler would lead Germany into war. The bourgeois press, including the Social Democrats, denounced this view as “Moscow inspired.” Hindenburg was re-elected while the Nazis dropped approximately two million votes in the Reichstag election as compared to their peak of over 13.7 million.

True to form, the Social Democrat leaders refused the Communist party’s proposal to form an eleventh-hour coalition against Nazism. As in many other countries past and present, so in Germany, the Social Democrats would sooner ally themselves with the reactionary Right than make common cause with the Reds.3 Meanwhile a number of right-wing parties coalesced behind the Nazis and in January 1933, just weeks after the election, Hindenburg invited Hitler to become chancellor.

Upon assuming state power, Hitler and his Nazis pursued a politico-economic agenda not unlike Mussolini’s. They crushed organized labor and eradicated all elections, opposition parties, and independent publications. Hundreds of thousands of opponents were imprisoned, tortured, or murdered. In Germany as in Italy, the communists endured the severest political repression of all groups.

Here were two peoples, the Italians and Germans, with different histories, cultures, and languages, and supposedly different temperaments, who ended up with the same repressive solutions because of the compelling similarities of economic power and class conflict that prevailed in their respective countries. In such diverse countries as Lithuania, Croatia, Rumania, Hungary, and Spain, a similar fascist pattern emerged to do its utmost to save big capital from the impositions of democracy.4

Oooh, and the divided, atomized left that couldn't agree with itself to save its life (and would occassionally actually physically shoot at each other).

This is a great analogy, actually.

I don’t know what they’re saying. I’m saying we all agreed on what to do with Nazis 80 years ago and that we should continue to do that. You have a problem?