Nazi Germany

Although Germany became a democracy after its defeat in the First World War, the new Weimar Republic faced a series of economic and political crises in the 1920s. Although it looked as stability had been achieved in the mid-1920s, the impact of the Wall Street Crash in the USA in 1929 and the ensuing Great Depression was to lay the foundation of Hitler's rise to power and an authoritarian state. This was to have profound consequences not just for the German population but for Europe as a whole.