Weimar Republic Nazi Germany - Hitler's rise to Chancellor Usefulness Skills

Support your middle and high school students in developing source analysis and historical thinking with this no-prep, printable and digital source usefulness worksheet activity focused on Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor of Germany in 1933. Perfect for history, social studies, and civics classrooms, this engaging lesson helps students explore how historians evaluate the usefulness of primary and secondary sources in understanding major historical events.

With a teacher-guided slide deck, scaffolded source evaluation tasks, and editable student worksheets, this activity supports explicit instruction in content and provenance while encouraging independent critical thinking.

Product Purpose and Benefits

This resource helps students:

• Understand how Hitler came to power through historical interpretation and propaganda
• Practise evaluating sources using both content and provenance
• Build confidence in analyzing historical perspectives and reliability
• Apply sentence starters and models to build well-supported historical writing
• Deepen source evaluation skills ahead of assessment tasks
  

What’s Included in This Resource:

1. Editable Slide Deck – “Understanding Source Usefulness”

The lesson begins with a teacher-guided slide deck that introduces key concepts of source usefulness, including content and provenance, bias, perspective, and purpose, with sample questions, sentence starters, and modelled examples to support discussion and explicit teaching of historical thinking skills.

2. Source Evaluation Worksheet

After the slide deck, students apply their learning to a structured, scaffolded worksheet focused on two real sources.

Students are guided to:

• Evaluate each source’s content (what is being said/shown)
• Analyse the provenance (who, when, where, why)
• Make informed judgments about usefulness for understanding the event
• Use evidence to support their evaluation in a clear, written format

3. Source Usefulness Activity

Worksheet designed to deepen understanding.

This task encourages students to:

• Examine the surface and subtext of both sources
• Explore tone, language, and visual cues

• • Build confidence in engaging with unfamiliar source types

Learn more about this product’s features, care instructions, and other useful details to help you make an informed choice.

Learn more about this product’s features, care instructions, and other useful details to help you make an informed choice.