AP World History DBQ #1



World History DBQ

The Rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis

Directions: The following question is based on the accompanying documents. (The documents have been edited for the purpose of this exercise.)

This question is designed to test your ability to work with and understand historical documents. Write a paragraph that:

• Has a relevant thesis and supports that thesis with evidence from the documents.

• Uses at least 2 of the documents as evidence.

• Analyzes the documents by discussing how multiple documents support the same idea.

Does not simply summarize the documents individually.

• Comments on the point of view of the document

You may refer to relevant historical information not mentioned in the documents.

Question: Based on the following documents, what methods did the Nazis use to rally support from German citizen and eventually gain political popularity in Germany?

Historical Background: The peace and prosperity promised by the Treaty of Versailles was short lived. Disappointment and despair grew over issues like new boundary disputes, reparations payments, national pride and inflation until the American stock market crash sent the European economy into a depression as well. Eventually, through a well designed poliAdolf Hitler and the National Socialists gained power in 1933 and created a fascist dictatorship.

Document 1

Document 2

|Document 3 |Document 4 |

| | |

|[pic] |[pic] |

|We will rebuild and strengthen together | |

| |Long Live Germany |

|Document 5 |Document 6 |

| | |

|[pic] |[pic] |

|"Before: Unemployment, hopelessness, desolation, strikes. Today: Work, joy, |Smash the enemies of Germany into dust |

|discipline, comaradarie. Give the leader your vote!" | |

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Kurt Ludecke, Nazi Ambassador to North America in a pamphlet entitled “I Had Given Him My Heart,” (1938) referring to his conversion to Nazism during a political rally in the 1930s.

“Hitler’s words were like a scourge. When he spoke of the disgrace of Germany, I felt ready to spring on any enemy…glancing around, I saw that his magnetism was holding these thousands as one….I was a man of 32, weary of disgust and disillusionment, a wanderer seeking a cause….a yearner after the heroic without a hero. The intense will of the man, the passion of his sincerity, seemed to flow from him into me. I experienced a feeling that could be likened only to a religious conversion ….I felt sure that no-one who heard Hitler that night that he was the man of destiny…I had given him my heart.”

Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, 1925. Referring to the future of the German state.

The … state will have to fight for its existence. It will neither obtain it by Dawes [treaty] signatures, nor be able to defend its existence by them. For its existence and its protection, it will need the very things that people today think they can do without. The more incomparable and precious [the state’s] form and content will be, the greater will be the envy and resistance of it enemies. The state’s best defense will lie not in its weapons, but in its citizens; no fortress walls will protect it, but a living wall of men and women filled with supreme love of their fatherland and fanatical national enthusiasm.

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