in 1923 and nearly 14,000 receiving some kind of government assistance in 1928.
Politically, Osnabr�ck in the 1920s was a bastion of support for the Social Democrats and the Catholic Centre Party. However, in the Reichstag elections of September 1930, the Nazi party received the highest percentage of votes in the city (nearly 28%), exceeding all the other parties. This was a significant increase on their electoral performance of 1928, when only 3.7% of Osnabr�ckers had supported the party. During the campaigns prior to the two federal elections of 1932, both Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels made speeches before crowds of thousands in the city.
Following the Nazi seizure of power in January 1933, Osnabr�ck saw the implementation of National Socialist economic, political, and social programs. These resulted in economic growth for ethnic Germans who did not run afoul of the new regime, and the town went from over 10,000 unemployed in early 1933 to an actual labor shortage by 1938. However, dissenters, supporters of opposition parties, and Jews did not share in this growth and found themselves discriminated against, imprisoned, or forced to close their businesses and leave town as Nazi pressure increased as the Second World War approached. During the war, both Jews and Romany were deported to concentration camps and extermination camps The city suffered heavy bombing during World War II, but was rebuilt after the war. In January 2009, more than 15,000 residents were evacuated when German bomb disposal teams had to come in and detonate two World War II bombs and defuse another two 250 kg (551 lb) World War II bombs.
The war ended in Osnabr�ck on April 4, 1945, when the XVII Corps of Montgomery's Second Army entered the city with little resistance. Leading Nazis fled the city and the British appointed a new mayor, Johannes Petermann. However, power rested chiefly with the occupiers, represented locally by the military governor, Colonel
