The Spiritual Triumph of Wladyslaw Szpilman: Resistance in the Face of Tragedy
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HITLER'S RISE TO POWER
"Adolf Hitler salutes a passing SS formation at the third Nazi Party Congress." August 19, 1929 -US Holocaust Memorial Museum
ECONOMIC DEVASTATION
After WWI, the Treaty of Versailles punished Germany with billions of reparations, lands, and resources. This economic depression led to the support of radical anti-democratic parties including Adolf Hitler with the National Socialist German Workers' Party. “Germany appeared to be on the brink of civil war. The young Weimar Republic was wracked by armed street fighting waged mainly between Communists and Nazis. Foreclosures, bankruptcies, suicides and malnourishment all skyrocketed. Six million Germans, 40 percent of the working population, were unemployed; and thousands found themselves without a place to live…" |
"WE DEMAND THE UNIFICATION OF ALL GERMANS IN THE GREATER GERMANY ON THE BASIS OF THE RIGHT OF SELF-DETERMINATION OF PEOPLES."
-Program of the German Workers Party, 1920
"Morning after morning, all over the immense, damp, dreary town and the packing-case colonies of huts in the suburb allotments, young men were waking up to another workless empty day, to be spent as they could best contrive: selling boot-laces, begging, playing draughts in the hall of the Labour Exchange, hanging about urinals, opening the doors of cars, helping with crates in the market, gossiping, lounging, stealing, overhearing racing tips, sharing stumps of cigarette ends picked up in the gutter." |
“Unknown heights have now been reached. The floating debt increased this morning by 160,000 milliard [billion] paper marks… The shops are demanding pounds, francs, Danish crowns, any other foreign currency you may care to enumerate… Except for things like tram fares we are now charged for most articles a few hundred million more than… present exchange rates in London… The Adlon Hotel charges the equivalent of four pounds or five pounds for a bottle of wine.”
-Friedrich Kroner on hyperinflation, August 1923
Promising to restore pride in the motherland, Hitler was viewed as the nation’s savior.
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“If today I stand here as a revolutionary, it is as a revolutionary against the Revolution.”
-Adolf Hitler, 1924
“No class or group or party in Germany could escape its share of responsibility for the abandonment of the democratic Republic and the advent of Adolf Hitler. The cardinal error of the Germans who opposed Nazism was their failure to unite against it.”
-William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany