The day itself: history has made its first move, and the next one is yours.
Briefing
30 January 1933. Hindenburg has made Hitler Chancellor of a cabinet in which the Nazis are a minority and Papen expects to steer them. Six million Germans are out of work, Roosevelt waits for his inauguration while American banks fail, and famine grips Ukraine and Kazakhstan. Japan prepares to take Jehol and to leave the League, Bolivia and Paraguay fight in the Chaco, and Chiang Kai-shek encircles the Jiangxi Soviet. The peace can still be kept – or broken.
Real history stays a strong tendency: what happened later is planned for its date – until your actions change the world.
You govern: the orders are the state's.
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The world on 30 January 1933
On the morning of 30 January 1933 President Paul von Hindenburg swears in Adolf Hitler as Chancellor of Germany. The leader of the National Socialists, the largest party in the Reichstag, heads a cabinet in which his party holds only two seats besides his own; Vice-Chancellor Franz von Papen and the conservatives around the old field marshal are sure they have hired Hitler to do their work. That evening columns of storm troopers march with torches through the Brandenburg Gate.
Germany is in the fourth year of the Great Depression: six million are out of work, the banks failed in 1931, and Communists and Nazis fight in the streets. The whole world suffers with it. In the United States a quarter of the workforce is idle and banks are closing again; Franklin D. Roosevelt, elected in November, takes office only in March, and Herbert Hoover governs without a mandate. In the Soviet Union Stalin's first five-year plan has built factories at the price of a famine that is killing millions in Ukraine and Kazakhstan.
Collective security is being tested and is failing. Japan has turned Manchuria into the puppet state of Manchukuo and is preparing to strike at Jehol; the League of Nations will soon vote on the Lytton Report, and Japan threatens to walk out. The Disarmament Conference in Geneva cannot decide whether Germany may rearm. Bolivia and Paraguay fight over the Chaco, Peru and Colombia over Leticia, and in China Chiang Kai-shek's armies besiege Mao's soviet in Jiangxi. Whether Hitler can be contained, by his partners at home or by the powers abroad, is the question of the year.