Assess the leadership qualities of Hitler.

Essay by Sarah1991High School, 11th grade February 2008

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Assess the leadership qualities of Hitler, as leader of the Nazi party, as Chancellor and as Führer of Germany in the period 1930 to 1938 from the perspective of a committed member pf the German Communist Party.

I must confess myself at a loss. In recent years, I have often found myself pondering those years, back before the Second World War. I wonder to myself why Hitler was so popular. The Nazi party did not promise anything more attractive than my own party, the German Communist Party, yet they gained an unrivalled popularity, lead by Hitler. He was, admittedly, charismatic, and that does explain a large amount of the following he gained. But surely, I ask myself, that can't have been all. That can't have been enough for people to close a blind eye to what happened during that time. It is in this I find my quandary: was Hitler a political mastermind, steering the smallest of events to gain his way, or merely a figurehead, a puppet leader who was lucky enough to get into power? For some time, I leant toward the latter option, merely because I couldn't bear to think of the former.

But now I see that only the first option can be true, right from the moment that Hitler outlined his goals in Mein Kampf.

The election of 1930 was the first time that the Nazis had ever beaten us in an election, but to us at the time, this was no cause to worry. It should have been, if only we had known then that Hitler would destroy all our hopes of a communal Utopia. Perhaps we could have done something then, or perhaps not. We will never know that, but we do know that he was already on the rise to power...