I actually listened to a very interesting lecture about this the other day. He did touch on the almost fluid previous "major war between two world powers" which seemed to come along every fifty years or so. He also touched on the fact that before WWI, there was an unnatural lack of a war that included several world powers. Essentially, the build up to WWI for the German people was huge. The thing that one needs to consider when looking into this, was that Germany before WWI was a major world power, and after WWI, was both economically and physically devestated. This decline began even during WWI, when the German people were so starved, they were forced to eat "Ersatz" food, which, in essence, was "fake" food. This included things like bread with sawdust mixed in. For years after the treaty of Versailles, the German people felt cheated, and were in dire economic straits. What the Nazis brought to the table were 3 things the German people wanted; wealth, strength, and a scapegoat, in the Jewish faith. So, in essence, there WERE things leading up to it that could be linked, however, the real solid reason that led to the Nazis' power grab was more or less the harsh terms set upon them by the treaty of Versailles. I can't for the life of me remember the name of the lecturer, but I seem to remember his name was something like Gwyn Ham? I'm not entirely certain, if anyone could ID the guy, I would be very grateful. Edit: Gwyn Dyer. That was his name.

This is obviously a very complicated question. And it's not like you can say "oh there was this one other thing too". It was a combination of factors that included the Prussian authoritarian military tradition, the still fairly young romantic ideal of "Germanism", a fear of the chaos of Communism, a latent underlying racism in Central Europe (and around the world, to an extent, at the time), a widespread suspicion in Germany that Democracy was an "un-Germanic" idea, the coincidence of the stock market crash ..

.. and dozens of other factors. I'm not sure you can get a definitive answer to this. It would take, and has taken, at least a book to give it a fair treatment.

One factor that I don't think gets enough attention is that for many in Germany there was a fear of the arriving 'new age'. Industrialism with it's dark smokey factories and unions, strange new "crazy" art and music (much of it coming from "Jews or negroes"), liberal universities, breeding grounds of "subversive philosophies", drawing children away from families and town homes to the "decadent" cities full of jazz halls and vices. Society, technology, and Europe were changing so dramatically. And then along with all of this societal change comes WW1 and the depression and Germany's worst decade up until that time. It was easy to draw hypothetical causes and effects. Many Germans pined for the clocks to be turned back. Back to "the good ol days" before everything had "started to go wrong". Hitler and his regard for German tradition and history, the family, morality, German purity and purification, catered to this sentiment. In his rise, he was very much "for the decent farmers and little folk, against the crafty bankers and corrupt politicians, against the foreign ideas that have made Germany sick, against the foreign blood that is diluting the greatness of the people" (as well as all his other rhetoric), and his message had a great deal of resonance for the conservative Germans in small towns who wanted the Germany of their youth back.