THE DAWN OF NAZISM

How do you explain the rise of Nazism? How did an ultra-nationalist party – once small and marginal – manage to claw its way out of political obscurity and seize control of one of Europe’s greatest powers? How did Germany’s first Republic collapse so fast?

Despite countless accounts and decades of research, the rise of Nazism remains widely misunderstood. The common assumption is that Hitler seized power suddenly, brutally, and inevitably, through the ballot box. In reality, the Nazis did not so much seize power as have it handed to them. German democracy did not simply collapse – it dismantled itself, handing the Nazi Party the keys to the state. To understand how, we need to examine Nazism from the inside out, tracing its roots back long before Hitler took office as Chancellor in 1933.

Drawing on the research of three leading Nazism scholars – co-authors of one of the most powerful accounts of how this genocidal regime took rook – and featuring a rich collection of archives, this three-part documentary unpacks the tipping points that pushed the German Republic into dictatorship. Revisiting these events also means confronting, with new urgency, the very mechanisms now threatening our own democracies.