Hungry. You're starving. According to Germany during the Great Depression you would have been jobless and hungry for many years now. You take your trillion marks to the corner store, wait in line, claw and fight for the last two items and then find out when you get to the checkout that, due to ever-increasing inflation, your trillion marks won't be enough for a single piece of bread, as life was like in Germany in the late 1920s and early 1930s. According to Commanding Heights: The German Inflation, most people, especially young people, grew up in these terrible conditions where it was cheaper to take German marks, burn them, and use them as wallpaper rather than real money. These days we hear about a new political party that is slowly gaining momentum. They had an answer to all your problems. A cause, an effect and a solution. They tell you that you are the greatest people on Earth and that you have the strength of a lineage to rise up and become a great and powerful empire. You are immediately fascinated by it. In desperation people do what they would probably never do in their right mind. It is this historically justified statement that helped Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party come to power. For almost a decade the German people had lived in an extremely impoverished state. Hitler and his party provided the country with a pillar of support to lean on. They promised economic change through the creation of public projects, including the construction of highways and other infrastructure. They blamed the rest of the world and, more specifically, the Jewish people for the problems Germany faced. While this anti-Semitism may not have seemed that bad to most people at the time, they should have known what Hitler was... at the center of the paper... of all time. From his constant false calls for peace, to Germany's completely legal seizure of power, to maintaining power through a combination of fear, guilt and flattery, it's something that, if not mass killings, can almost be revealed about. Personally I can believe that when the Germans said they had no idea what was happening, they meant it. It's a shame that one man could deceive so many people, but perhaps he will set an example for future generations of the power of words, actions and desperation. Works Cited George JW Goodman. German Hyperinflation, 1923 pbs.org/Commanding Heights. PBS. 1981. May 16, 2014Holocaust Timeline: The Rise of the Nazi Party. A teachers' guide to the Holocaust. University of South Florida. 2005. May 16, 2014The Rise of Adolf Hitler. The place of history. The place of history. 1996. May 16, 2014