First off, there really was not much of an anarchist movement in the terminal years of the Weimar Republic. There were some anarchist groups in operation in the confused early days of the Republic, but most of them had fizzled out by the mid-1920s. Most of the street violence of the 1930s was conducted by organized paramilitaries associated with organized parties.

Secondly, the idea that the NSDAP owed its electoral successes to the violence of its left-wing opponents is not a sustainable argument. Such an assertion flies in the face of both the NSDAP's role in creating violence as well as the complicated dynamics of paramilitary politics in late-Weimar.

The late years of the Republic did certainly witness a massive uptick in street violence. One of the important catalysts in the escalation of street violence: the NSDAP. The SA and other right-wing paramilitaries took to the streets in the crisis years of 1929-33 and the SA in particular was quite violent. To omit them from any narrative of the impact of violence on Weimar's politics is just plain wrong. Much of the SA's actions in the street battles was about asserting control over territory, such as marching in districts that were political strongholds of the KPD, and as such was deliberately provocative. Of the paramilitaries active in these years, the SA was arguably the most "military" with a strong hierarchical structure, uniforms, and martial ethos.

Neither the SPD nor the KPD were innocent lambs in these years, and both had their own paramilitaries, the main ones being Reichsbanner Schwarz-Rot-Gold and Roter Frontkämpferbund (RFB- note, although banned in 1929, there were various successor organizations and rather than throwing out more acronyms, RFB will stand as a placeholder). Both of these paramilitaries engaged in battles with the SA and between each other and justified their violence as serving ultimate political ends, whether preserving the Republic or carrying forth the workers' revolution. However, to portray them as attacking people on the streets is a rather myopic way to view their actions that obscures the very specific context violence on the left often had and makes them out to be thugs accosting non-political Germans on the streets. Street-brawls between factions often had collateral damage for bystanders, but such brawls were typically a consequence of trying to disrupt another groups' rally or defend/reclaim territory perceived to be taken by the enemy. Violence was both real and symbolic, such as stripping insignia or destroying banners, which meant that a hypothetical apolitical German in regular clothes had little signifiers of their political loyalty.

Both the Reichsbanner and the RFB were also as much at odds with each other in this period as they were with the SA. Lumping them together loses the very real and important distinctions between the two. The Reichsbanner was caught in a very peculiar bind of being a defender of the Republic, but through extralegal methods. This actually proved detrimental for the Reichsbanner's internal cohesion as it became increasingly unclear what they were fighting for in these street battles. The RFB hemmed and hawed between local activism and wider calls for revolutionary discipline from the KPD leadership. This actually made it rather difficult to parse out what exactly was the RFB's strategy in this period. After the state ban, the RFB briefly abandoned its strategy of confrontation against fascist and cell-based organization and sought to recruit among elements in the SA as part of "organized mass struggle," leading to a brief period of strange political bedfellows between the SA and RFB. This move was unpopular among the rank and file of KPD activists and violence continued at the local level despite moments of seeming cooperation like the 1932 Berlin transportation strike.

One of the major propaganda lines of the NSDAP was that voting for them would eliminate this chaos on the streets. Naturally, there was an amount of self-serving chutzpah here in that the NSDAP was creating the problem it claimed it would solve. The Republic's police forces were increasingly impotent to stop these various street battles, and this did undermine the popularity of the Republic for some Germans. However, the German police force was not a neutral, apolitical force in Weimar. Police leaders were notoriously sympathetic to the right-wing political spectrum- the German term was auf dem rechten Auge blind (blind in the right eye)- and they devoted a considerable effort to bringing down KPD-affiliated groups. Statistics gathered by the Berlin police for Prussian Ministry of Interior over police intervention in political assemblies in 1931 shows the police disproportionately targeted KPD assemblies. Such a tilt against the KPD and the left in general was typical for Weimar law enforcement and extended into the judicial system; Hitler's Beer Hall Putsch ended with a slap on the wrist for the conspirators even though they committed high treason. Such clemency was seldom the case for left-wing offenders and Hitler judge in the Putsch trial, Georg Neithardt, was notorious for throwing the book at left-wing defendants as were other justices in the Weimar courts. The police's refusal to place the NSDAP as an active political force and instigator in the street violence gave the SA a considerable leeway to be provocative and more violent. This illustrates how much Weimar's police was in resonance with the illiberal and right-wing politics of the NSDAP. The Weimar police after January 1933, along with the NSDAP which had deputized the SA, proved to be quite ruthless in stamping out left-wing paramilitaries showing their clear biases against the German left.

One of the more common rationalizations of the Nazi seizure of power was that the Nazis were considered the political and economic saviors of Germany from political chaos. This was of course a line of Nazi propaganda, but it had a curious lifespan that lasted beyond 1945. The NSDAP's social and foreign policies were controversial even at the time and calls for a return to order were often a cloak to hide the contradictions of the NSDAP's politics. One of the strengths the NSDAP had both in the seizure of power and its rule over Germany was its ideological platform was often incredibly hazy and quite inconsistent. This allowed itself to graft onto existing ideas, institutions, and mentalities within German society. For example, the phrase Volksgemeinschaft which became ubiquitous during the Third Reich was one of the favorite catchphrases of the great SPD leader and one of the founders of the Republic, Friedrich Ebert. Some ideas were indeed controversial, but they also found resonance among a broad swath of German society. This growth in support alarmed many within the Republic, whether among conservatives like the DNVP or left-wing parties like the SPD and KPD. Both Hitler and the NSDAP were not the only political actors promising the German people that they were the saviors from political paralysis of 1929-33 and economic dislocation caused by the Depression. The late Weimar period saw a renewal of this type of millenarian form of politics; returning Germany to stability was only one plank in the NSDAP's platform and its political discourse often stressed law and order as an integral component of the new order. One of the important questions for historians of modern Germany is why the NSDAP managed to succeed here when other parties failed.

And therein lies a considerable that this skewed and incomplete view of late Weimar politics does to understanding how events unfolded between 1929-33. Putting the onus on Hitler's seizure of power not on the SA street brawlers, the conservative camarilla around von Hindenburg that brought Hitler to the Chancellorship, or even the voters that cast ballots for the NSDAP, but rather on the cardinal political opponents of the NSDAP. This absolves all the former groups of responsibility for Hitler and this exculpatory narrative dates back to 1945. Many postwar Germans of all political stripes would claim that their support for the NSDAP was often conditional and predicated support for Hitler as the only real alternative. This obscured many German's active support and co-option of Nazi ideals as well as their active participation in the dictatorship. The choice of "Hitler or chaos" was a highly politicized historical narrative that in many ways was more about providing an alibi than understanding the actual mechanics of Hitler's seizure of power.

This was not to say violence and chaos were unimportant factors in Hitler's ascent, but they were far from the only ones and focusing only on chaos runs the danger of justifying Hitler's dictatorship and denying that many ordinary German supported the NSDAP for reasons other than law and order.