Hitler's Rise to Power

Okay, so in one of my comments last week I was essentially blaming the German people for going along with Hitler's rise to power, even in its early stages. So, to be fair, I thought I would talk about some of the evidence that lines up more in defense of the German people. First of all, Hitler gained his original public attention by joining the German Worker's Party. At the time of his joining it, it was disorganized and had little focus, it was anti-communism, but it was certainly not a anti-Semitic force at this time. Hitler used this party as a vehicle to his own success, he implemented anti-Semitic points into party speeches, and his charismatic and powerful speech giving skills allowed him to force his way to the head of the party. It is understandable that party members would be glad to give Hitler more leadership in their party because it was his speeches that were attracting new members to the still-growing party and bringing in huge monetary donations to the party's cause. Hitler became chairman of the party, and with the help of his staff, he assembled a party program made up of 25 points. He presented these ideas at a public meeting in 1920. This is where the point I made last week about those initial audiences being willing to listen comes into dispute. There were 2,000 people at this speech, eager to hear about Hitler's anti-Semitic ideas. However, there were also hundreds of protesters that were forcibly removed by party members armed with truncheons and whips. Hitler's speech focused not only on criticism of the Jewish population, but also very valid-sounding ideas on how to recover from the Versailles Treaty, on ways to get around some of its conditions and on solutions to the economic crisis. So, in this situation, I can see how some people may have been misled. A leader who came along with all of the answers, it would certainly seem like an okay deal that he had a prejudice towards Jews. Nobody knew what he really had in mind for them, and there was a lot of pre-existing animosity towards the Jewish population. The thing that bothered me here, that is really evidence to my original statement  that Hitler's rise to power was the fault of the German population, is that Hitler spoke openly of plans to limit the civil rights of the Jewish population. This seems to be like one step too far for the average German citizens to wave off as a nasty idiosyncrasy. This same year the party was renamed the National Socialist German Worker's Party, or the Nazi Party. In 1923, Hitler led the Munich Putsch, a rebellion against the Bavarian government, declaring that he would rid the government of communists and Jews. He was tried for  treason and went to prison. Following his internment, he pursued an electoral rise to power rather than a militaristic rise. In January 1933 he became Chancellor of Germany. It seems to me that Hitler's rise to power reached the point of no return as soon as he renamed the Worker's Party. Obviously, when he had to be elected to further his power to the point of Chancellor, but I think that the German public was too far gone by this point to back out. These original speeches that promised recovery from the war, recovery of territories, recovery of pride are what did it, what got him started on a constantly accelerating rise to power. And at the time, there was no precedent. Nobody would assume that a leader who promised these things was merely power hungry and driving his own agenda. Everyone believed the government wanted to help them, had their best interests in mind.  So, now that there's some evidence for both sides, I guess the question is still, what do you think? Was the naivete and selfishness of the German people to blame for Hitler's rise, or was the master manipulation of this political genius just too much to expect an everyday citizen to understand?