What if the 20th July Plotters escaped Germany?

[Bellacinos]

1. Thomas Childers talks about this in his great courses ww2 lectures and I completely agree, that given what happened during the 1932 election it’s just not accurate to say Hitler was “democratically” elected. Yes while the Nazis on paper received a plurality of votes, the amount of voter suppression, voter violence, voter fraud, and various other atrocities the Nazis did, to make sure they “won” that election was so widespread that one cannot say Hitler was fairly elected. He also as others had put it better than I could manipulated his way to become fuhrer after the election.

2. In terms of holding all of Germany responsible for what the Nazis did, while a lot of like to think if we were put in that position we’d do the right thing and rise up, as history has shown, the vast majority don’t. There is a reason people like Oskar Schindler and John Rabe are so rare and venerated.

 

[MorphyVSFischer]

1. Hitler was never elected. He was appointed Chancellor by Hindenburg. Hitler never received more than 36% of the vote in any straight election.

And Angela Merkel won 35 percent of the vote in 2005, 33 in 2009, 32 in 2017, was she illegitimate? In july and November 32 the Nazis won a perfectly reasonable majority by any standard parliamentary system in Europe at the time and today. To claim Hitler was never elected is to be technically correct in law but wrong in spirit, yes he was appointed but by any standard metric he was the choice of the German people.

 

[DUWANG]

Can we please stop spreading clean Wehrmacht stuff? Every single German in Nazi Germany was responsible for the crimes of the regime. The people voted Hitler into power knowing full well what he would do. Mein Kampf had been out for years by 1933. They knew about the Holocaust; There's no way they didn't. Even if they didn't know the full extent of it, they knew that Jews were being killed, and they profited off of it. The Wehrmacht massacred entire villages in the USSR. They intentionally starved Soviet PoWs. Germany planned to exterminate, enslave, or Germanize every single slavic person in the east. Everyone in Germany, from the Wehrmacht to the SS to the ordinary civilians, was fully responsible for the most evil crimes in human history, and that was their warmup act. Nobody else comes close, not even Imperial Japan.

Even the not able to vote? Even those voting for the other parties? Even those born only months before the end of the war?

 

[DUWANG]

Interesting. Still though, they actively supported Nazi policies, or at least didn't resist. All of those SS or Wehrmacht soldiers who commited those crimes were ordinary German citizens. They were all racists and anti-semites.

So easy for you too say.
Go tell people who live in an authoritarian murder state to just resist.
Then what?
That's basically saying "Hey you Nazi. Don't want to be a Nazi by default? Just get executed! Or just get send in a concentration camp! It's that easy to resist."

And Angela Merkel won 35 percent of the vote in 2005, 33 in 2009, 32 in 2017, was she illegitimate? In july and November 32 the Nazis won a perfectly reasonable majority by any standard parliamentary system in Europe at the time and today. To claim Hitler was never elected is to be technically correct in law but wrong in spirit, yes he was appointed but by any standard metric he was the choice of the German people.

It's called a coalition government.

 

[CalBear]

And Angela Merkel won 35 percent of the vote in 2005, 33 in 2009, 32 in 2017, was she illegitimate? In july and November 32 the Nazis won a perfectly reasonable majority by any standard parliamentary system in Europe at the time and today. To claim Hitler was never elected is to be technically correct in law but wrong in spirit, yes he was appointed but by any standard metric he was the choice of the German people.

I might be mistaken, but I do not believe that Merkel, nor any other German Chancellor since 1945 has been directly elected by the vote of the general electorate. I believe that Germany uses a variation of the Westminster system of Government at the Federal Level.

 

[DUWANG]

I might be mistaken, but I do not believe that Merkel, nor any other German Chancellor since 1945 has been directly elected by the vote of the general electorate. I believe that Germany uses a variation of the Westminster system of Government at the Federal Level.

People vote for their local district MEP who would go into the Bundestag in the first list.
The second list is for which party that person wants to vote for in the Bundestag. So if Party A got a federal wide 20%, they will be hold 20% of the vote seats. Most often people vote for the MEP who's in the same party they want to vote.

After the vote, the parties are allowed to form coalitions with each other and are allowed to form a government if said coalition reaches more than 50% of the seats in the Bundestag. After that the coalition parties are allowed to choose who to nominate to each position in government. That includes chancellor and all federal ministers. The president then may swore them in, or demand another candidate.

As far as I remember. Won't go into the complex things and minority governments.

 

[CalBear]

People vote for their local district MEP who would go into the Bundestag in the first list.
The second list is for which party that person wants to vote for in the Bundestag. So if Party A got a federal wide 20%, they will be hold 20% of the vote seats. Most often people vote for the MEP who's in the same party they want to vote.

After the vote, the parties are allowed to form coalitions with each other and are allowed to form a government if said coalition reaches more than 50% of the seats in the Bundestag. After that the coalition parties are allowed to choose who to nominate to each position in government. That includes chancellor and all federal ministers. The president then may swore them in, or demand another candidate.

As far as I remember. Won't go into the complex things and minority governments.

That is pretty much what I understood the process to be.