Ben Wilson

So check it out.

That podcast is called simply David Senra, and you can get it wherever you get your podcasts.

Okay, so they're rising so quickly, but they're not the biggest party.

They're the second biggest party.

So how do they actually go from there?

I mean, that is the hardest step to take, right?

To actually go from, all right, we're players, but how do we win?

How do we become the biggest?

So in order to understand sort of the chess match of what happens next, I need to give you a quick primer on the Weimar political system, because you need to understand the machinery to understand how Hitler navigated it.

So the Weimar Republic had two centers of executive power.

There was the president who was directly elected.

Okay.

So everyone voted for a president kind of like the U S uh, and the president commanded the military could dissolve parliament and could rule by emergency decree for up to 60 days while new elections were organized.

Okay, so the president is very powerful, but then there was also the chancellor who led the government, who needed the confidence of the Reichstag, the German parliament.

In practice, it was nearly impossible to build stable majorities from this crazy multi-party system, but the chancellor is essentially the prime minister.

So you have both the prime minister and the president, and they're both very powerful.

But the chancellor position in particular, towards the end of the Weimar Republic, is a very unstable position, which is emblematic of sort of larger instability in the system.

The government was deeply dysfunctional, very weak, and consequently very unpopular.

The president throughout all of this, his name is Paul von Hindenburg.

He's an 84-year-old field marshal, hero of the Battle of Tannenberg, one of the most revered figures in German history.