What were the forces that led to Hitler's rise to power ? The rise to power of Hitler has been blamed on many factors: the mistakes of the German Communist Party, the leadership of Stalin in the international communist movement, the backwardness or gullability of German workers, the strength of the German bourgeoisie and/or international imperialism in general. My own view is that Hitler was installed to power by the German bourgeoisie which felt acutely threatened by working class militancy. But there are lots of factors involved here and the various forces and their interrelationships are deserving of extensive exploration and discussion.

Here are excerpts from some correspondence on the Spoon's Marxism-International list-serve. Date: Thu, 4 Dec 1997 12:29:05 -0500 (EST) From: Justin Schwartz Subject: Re: M-I: Cheating history To: marxism-international@jefferson.village.Virginia.EDU Louis G mentions the David Abraham incident, documented among other places in Jon Weiner's book Politics, Professors, and Pop. Abraham was dropped from the Princeton U.P. list; I think a corrected version of the book was published by U-Mass, though I wouldn't swear that's who took it. If I recall correctly he was washed out of academia and went to law school, like some others. (Me, though not as spectacularly washed out as D.A.) It's a nasty story. It's an important one. ... On Thu, 4 Dec 1997, Louis R Godena wrote: > Back in 1985 or 1986, there was a young American historian who published a > scholarly book with, I think, Princeton University Press, purporting to show > that it was indeed German capital that facilitated the rise to power of the > Nazis in 1930-33. Well, it didn't take long for his burgeoning career to go > terminally into eclipse; historians everywhere, and especially those who > would never answer to the nickname "Lefty", went after this fellow with > hammer and hook, attacking his scholarship and pointing out dozens of > impecunious errors (wrongly cited pagination, misplaced negatives in > official documents, etc). I don't know what ever became of this particular > author, but I assume he's painting houses somewhere far from the environs of > Princeton University Press. Oh, yeah, the guy who more or less led the > attack, a Professor Turner from Yale, went on to become the unofficial > "official" historian of the CIA. He may be dead now, I don't know.