Section A: Source-Based Case Study

Question 1 is compulsory for all candidates.

Study the Background Information and the sources carefully, and then answer all
the questions.

You may use any of the sources to help you answer the questions, in addition to
those sources you are told to use. In answering the questions, you should use your
knowledge of the topic to help you interpret and evaluate the sources.

1 (a) Study Source A.

What does this source tell you about the Weimar government? Explain
your answer. [5]

(b) Study Source B and Source C.

How different are these two sources? Explain your answer. [7]

(c) Study Source D.

Why do you think this photo was published? Explain your answer. [6]
Source A: A German writer describing what he saw in Germany, 1930.

I saw an almost unbroken chain of homeless men, gathered into groups of fifty or a hundred
men, attacking fields of potatoes. I saw them digging up the potatoes and throwing them into
sacks while the farmer who owned the field watched them in despair and the local policemen
looked on gloomily from the distance. I saw them staggering towards the lights of the city as
night fell, with their sacks on their backs. One of them even went around and exchanged a
bag of potatoes for a pair of socks. What did it remind me of? Of the war, of the worst period
of starvation in 1917 and 1918, but even then, people paid for the potatoes.

Source B: An oral excerpt from an interview with Hitler published in a Nazi

newspaper, Der Sturmer, 1933.

People have said that I owe my success merely to my image and charisma. Let me tell you
what has carried me to where I am. The political problems in Germany were very
complicated. The German people did not comprehend them. In these conditions, they
preferred to leave the issues and the politics to the professional politicians to get them out
of this confusing mess. I, on the other hand, simplified the problems for them. I reduced
these issues and their solutions to the simplest and most basic terms. The masses
understood this and they have followed me ever since.

Source C: A written comment made by Otto Strasser, an ex-Nazi leader, in a British

newspaper, but became a political opponent of the Nazi Party when he
left the party in 1930.

As the spirit moves him, he is promptly transformed into one of the greatest speakers in
history. Adolf Hitler enters a hall. He sniffs the air. For a minute he gropes, feels his way,
and senses the atmosphere. Suddenly, he bursts forth. His words go like an arrow to their
target. He touches each private wound on the raw, expressing every man’s innermost
aspirations, telling each person what each most wants to hear. But if he tries to support his
argument with theories or quotations from books and other political thinkers, he is nothing,
he is just ordinary.

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Source D: A photograph of Hitler released by the Ministry of Propaganda in 1933 in
a pro-Nazi German newspaper.