Please stop propagating the myth. Hitler did have genuine support, but he lost the 1932 presidential election. The Nazis never achieved a parliamentary majority as a party until all the other parties were banned.

In 1932 Germany, the Chancellor was appointed by the President, who was elected. Paul von Hindenberg won the election. He appointed Hitler to the Chancellorship. Hitler achieved power via the Reichstag Fire Decree and the Enabling Act, not ballots.

The whole story is complex and full of details. Was Hitler’s rise to power fully constitutional within the framework of the Weimar constitution? Probably not. But that’s a complex story where the details matter. One thing is true, and that is that Hitler took great pains to make it at least look constitutional and legitimate. His rise to power was obviously not a democratic one, if for his goons on the streets alone, but he did manage to get the necessary majorities in parliament as long as he needed them (and did that via working together with other, more conventional conservative parties, as is regularly necessary to get majorities in democracies with proportional representation and just normal – well, the stupidity of those other conservative parties in cooperating with Hitler is very much not normal, but they thought they could control him).

The Nazi party was the largest party in both 1932 parliamentary elections, with no party securing a governing majority after the July election (leading to rule by emergency decree by the President and a minority government), but after the November election the Nazi party formed a coalition with various others to form a government (now, those others thought that they'd be able to blunt the Nazi party and their growing popularity more by including them in a government and giving Hitler the chancellorship, but that's not an uncommon reason for bringing trying to bring a party into a governing coalition.)

Hitler was elected in the same sense that Benjamin Netanyahu, or any other head of government in a parliamentary system whose party only directly controls a minority of seats, was, or is, elected.

> Hitler achieved power via the Reichstag Fire Decree and the Enabling Act, not ballots.

Hitler achieved greater power through those mechanisms, sure, but he was in a position to do so only because of the Nazi parties strong showing in both of the 1932 elections, and the inability of any opponents of the Nazis to form a government without them.

Which is to say... not elected. Becoming the head of a coalition government is more akin to a negotiation than an election.

In this case, the "negotiation" involved a lot of arm-twisting.

Well, except for the whole election to the parliament that is necessary to even be in the negotiation -- the same election that if you won enough seats outright would make you the leader without the need for a coalition -- and which sets the degree of power you have in the negotiation.

> In this case, the "negotiation" involved a lot of arm-twisting.

Arm twisting which was only possible because the Nazis were the largest party in the July election, and then again in the November election, and because there was less common ground between the non-Nazi parties around which to form a majority coalition than between the Nazis and the various conservative parties (who, to be sure, still hated the Nazis, but hated them less than the they hated the other non-Nazi parties.)

A critical amount of people voted for the candidates of the NSDAP (33.1% of all votes, the relative majority of the last 1932 election), who in turn formed a coalition, with Hitler als Chancellor. Formally, the president appoints the government and the chancellor, and the party resp. coalition of parties with an absolute majority of seats in parliament is who is normally appointed (and I think there is a certain legal obligation, but I'm not 100% sure on that).

The current German political system is in fact very similar to the one of the Weimar Republic (with details like certain thresholds to prevent dozens of tiny parties). Claiming Hitler was never elected is like claiming Angela Merkel was never elected.

US President Obama was not elected, either. He was appointed by majority vote of the Electoral College. This is a hair-splitting, technical, de jure distinction, obviously, but denying that it exists is pretending that the republic is more democratic than it is in fact.

An election is a popular vote. A parliamentary or republican representative vote is not an election, regardless of how much it may superficially resemble one.

Except in the U.S., electors are required to vote for the candidate that won the majority of the popular vote in their state. They're honorary officials and rarely have any autonomy, though that is governed by state laws, not national laws.

http://www.archives.gov/federal-register/electoral-college/e...

The facts are still the definition of the word "election" and the contents of the national constitutions. There is no amount of rhetorical gymnastics that you can perform to make "Hitler was elected" anything other than a provably false statement.

It doesn't matter. Clearly, there is no specific requirement that a democratic society has to pick its leadership in free and fair elections, nor do elections prevent jerkasses from becoming dictators.

http://www.zum.de/psm/weimar/weimar_vve.php

[English translation of] the Weimar Constitution, Chapter 3, Article 53.

The second reads like so much resentment of an amorphous group. I'm not sure why I should prefer your brand to the other.

I don't see resentful language and I built an argument on reasonbaly well-established facts. I understand my point may provoke members of that group; that's not my goal but it may be unavoidable when making a point that critical.

I'd be interested in learning from you where you think the argument falls short. Your comment is only a negative characterization.