Lots of luck I´d say. Add in some cunning up to 1940?
Just consider a few situations:
In the mid-1920s Bavaria tried to deport Hitler back to Austria.
Austria refused, citing that Hitler lost his Austrian citizenship when he didn´t report to the Austrian military once WW1 started.
Making him a deserter.
Of course that was after the 1923 putsch attempt in Munich so I can somewhat understand the Austrians.
Which means that Hitler was stateless in the 1920s.
It was only through the efforts of some Nazi sympathizers that Hitler finally got German citizenship in February 1932.
Seven earlier efforts since 1925 were unsuccessful.
If that effort in 1932 had been unsuccessful too, he couldn´t have been a Presidential candidate in 1932.
And he couldn´t have been nominated as Chancellor in January 1933.
In 1932 there were two Reichstag (federal) elections because no government with a majority could be formed after the first elections.
One in July and one in November. In the November elections the Nazi party lost 4.2% of the votes compared to July.
Some time ago I did read some newspaper articles about some notes written by Goebbels after the November elections.
In them Goebbels basically said that the Nazi party was bankrupt. The November elections were financed with IOUs signed by Hitler.
And Hitler was fretting about what to do once he was asked to pay.
No money to finance the party organization, no money to repay the IOUs.
According to Goebbels Hitler considered either suicide or emigrating to South America.
He (and the Nazi party) were only saved by the machinations of Hugenberg (leader of the right-wing nationalist DNVP party) and his clique.
They pressured Hindenburg (then President of the German Weimar Republic) to call on Hitler to form a new government.
Hindenburg didn´t like Hitler, he called him the "Bohemian Corporal".
But in 1932 Hindenburg was already old, he would die in 1934, and so he finally surrendered to get a little quiet.
If he had held out a few months more it is possible that the Nazi party would have "imploded".
(One of the great attractions for example was food, a warm meal given to party members. Great Depression remember?)
Then there are his political "successes" in the 1930s (up to 1938?) before WW2.
Pretty much all of them (less re-armament though and certainly not a World War) were things the Weimar Republic was working for too.
Hitler just had the luck to be government leader when Britain and France (mainly Britain) finally decided that some of Germany´s demands were reasonable.
If the allies had obliged me just one single time, I would have brought the German people behind me, yes; even today, I could still get them to support me. However, they (the allies) gave me nothing and the minor concessions they made, always came too late. Thus, nothing else remains for us but brutal force. The future lies in the hands of the new generation. Moreover, they, the German youth, who we could have won for peace and reconstruction, we have lost. Herein lies my tragedy and there, the allies' crime.
— Stresemann (German foreign minister), to diplomat Sir Albert Bruce Lockhart in 1928
Not sure if this is a real Stresemann quote. It´s a Wikipedia quote. I cite it here because it really describes the tragedy of the Weimar Republic. Pretty much everything that was denied the democratically elected Weimar governments in the 1920s was given for free to Hitler in the 1930s.
Saarland, Rhineland, re-armament, stop of reparations, Anglo-German Naval agreement, unification with Austria (something that Austrians wanted in 1919 and refused by the Entente).
And let´s not forget all the
assassination attempts.
28 attempts after Hitler became leader of Germany in January 1933. That´s 28 in 12 years!
Plus 7 between 1921 and 1923.
If I were to write a TL with the "evil hero" surviving 35 assassination attempts, quite likely my story would be moved either to the ASB forum or the History Writer´s forum.
