Federal elections were held in Germany on 31 July 1932, following the premature dissolution of the Reichstag. They saw great gains by the Nazi Party, which for the first time became the largest party in parliament, though without winning a majority. With the Communists remaining strong, anti-republican parties together now had a majority in the Reichstag (called a "negative majority" by contemporary observers since the two parties would never have allied), making a (majority) government by any union of pro-republican parties impossible.

Since 1929, Germany was suffering from the Great Depression as unemployment rose from 8.5% to nearly 30% between 1929 and 1932, while industrial production inside Germany dropped roughly 42%.

In 1930, the governing grand coalition of the pro-republican parties - Social Democrats, Centre Party and the two liberal parties - had broken apart. President Hindenburg had then appointed a minority government headed by the Centre Party's Heinrich Brüning which could only govern via the President's emergency powers. Shortly afterwards, in the elections of 1930, the democratic parties lost their majority in the Reichstag, making any parliamentary government impossible. These elections also saw Hitler's Nazi Party rise to national prominence, it became the largest anti-democratic party for the first time. Brüning's policies, implemented via presidential decree and tolerated by parliament, failed to solve the economic crisis while weakening the parliamentary system.

Adolf Hitler (German: [ˈadɔlf ˈhɪtlɐ] ( listen); 20 April 1889 – 30 April 1945) was an Austrian-born German politician and the leader of the National Socialist German Workers Party (German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP), commonly referred to as the Nazi Party). He was chancellor of Germany from 1933 to 1945 and dictator of Nazi Germany (as Führer und Reichskanzler) from 1934 to 1945. Hitler is commonly associated with the rise of fascism in Europe, World War II, and the Holocaust.

A decorated veteran of World War I, Hitler joined the German Workers' Party, precursor of the Nazi Party, in 1919, and became leader of the NSDAP in 1921. In 1923, he attempted a coup d'état, known as the Beer Hall Putsch, in Munich. The failed coup resulted in Hitler's imprisonment, during which time he wrote his memoir, Mein Kampf (My Struggle). After his release in 1924, Hitler gained popular support by attacking the Treaty of Versailles and promoting Pan-Germanism, antisemitism, and anticommunism with charismatic oratory and Nazi propaganda. After his appointment as chancellor in 1933, he transformed the Weimar Republic into the Third Reich, a single-party dictatorship based on the totalitarian and autocratic ideology of Nazism. His aim was to establish a New Order of absolute Nazi German hegemony in continental Europe.

Lyndon Hermyle LaRouche, Jr. (born September 8, 1922), also known as Lyn Marcus, is an American political activist and founder of the LaRouche movement. He has written on economic, scientific, and political topics, as well as on history, philosophy, and psychoanalysis. Journalists and government officials in China, Italy and Russia have credited LaRouche with forecasting that unrestricted financial speculation would cause the late-2000s financial crisis.

LaRouche was a presidential candidate eight times between 1976 to 2004, running once for his own U.S. Labor Party and campaigning seven times for the Democratic Party nomination. He was sentenced to 15 years' imprisonment in 1988 for conspiracy to commit mail fraud and tax code violations, and was released in 1994 on parole. Ramsey Clark, his chief appellate attorney and a former U.S. Attorney General, said that LaRouche was denied a fair trial. The Court of Appeals unanimously rejected the appeal.

Supporters of LaRouche call him a political leader in the tradition of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Commentators for The Washington Post and The New York Times have described him as a conspiracy theorist and a political extremist. Some have called him fascist or antisemitic, and a 1979 editorial in the New York Times characterized his movement as a 'cult'.Norman Bailey, formerly with the National Security Council, described LaRouche's staff in 1984 as one of the best private intelligence services in the world, while the Heritage Foundation, a think tank, wrote that he leads "what may well be one of the strangest political groups in American history."

The Fat Boys are a successful American hip hop trio from Brooklyn, New York City, that emerged in the early 1980s. Briefly, the group was known originally as the Disco 3.

Big Buff Love, the Human Beatbox, was a pioneer in beatboxing (using his mouth to create hip hop percussion sounds). He and another contemporary, Doug E. Fresh, popularized beatboxing, inspiring other artists to innovate, including Biz Markie and, later, others such as Rahzel. Attempting to capitalize on the appearance-oriented name of the Fat Boys, another hip hop group dubbed itself the Skinny Boys, and yet another the Fat Girls. The popularity of those groups was mild in comparison, however.

The group's 1984 self-titled debut, The Fat Boys, is considered by many to be an early hip hop classic, with artists like Boogie Down Productions and Redman, among others, making references to the album. For its 1987 album, Crushin', the Fat Boys made a cover version of The Surfaris' hit "Wipe Out" with The Beach Boys singing back-up vocals. The single made it to #12 on the Billboard chart, and #10 on the corresponding R&B listing. The Fat Boys also recorded a version of "The Twist" with Chubby Checker, who performed it originally in 1960.