I have been re-reading the Harry Potter books for the first time since DH came out (I recommend everyone do this as Fanfiction and the movies had totally altered my take on what HP really was).

One big thing that occurred to me during HBP and DH was that Voldemort seemed able to take over the Ministry and a rather large population with surprisingly few assets.


By the time the take over happens he has only been back two years, one of which was spent getting his old team back together.

At the end of Gof into OotP he has:

Between 8-12 Death Eaters
Probably 2-3 times that amount in supports like wives and friends who help but arent branded and full time.

Between OotP and DH he seems to maybe double his amount of Death Eaters (the second chapter in DH shows somewhere between 20-30 Death Eaters in Malfoy Manor.

Add to that supports of probably around double that again, Giants, and GReyback and his werewolves.

By DH they are also getting people under Imperio and killing off people like Madam Bones.

But even then...

The Ministry seems to be hundreds in not thousands strong. Add to that Magical Britain by in large was very Happy Voldemort was over thrown so he obviously does not have anything close to popular support.

How in the hell did a few dozen people, many of which are fugitives and not allowed to be seen in public able to take the Ministry.

In story they get the new head of Magical Law Enforcement and supposedly a few other. Even so, the second it becomes clear what is happening, Rufus is taken out and known Death Eaters show up. Kingsly and the Aurors along with the OotP and almost any general Ministry worker would supposedly storm them and win on shear weight of Numbers.

So my question is, how did a few dozen people topple a government and hold power pretty solidly for a year?

 

I think you are over estimating his support.

Give him 1/4 out of the box. But then name a pure blood from any of the three other houses and you'd be hard pressed to name more than a couple that are Voldemort sympathisers. Bones, Abbot, McMillan and several other are pure bloods and very anti Voldemort.

Take the final Battle of Hogwarts. It's all the teachers, free ministry, Hogsmead residents, students and teachers, some even Slytherins.

If Voldemort had anything close to 40% support it wouldn't matter if he died. They would be able to go on with out him.

I'd but his support well under 10% actual with double that helping out of fear and happy to see him gone.

 

We don't know every surname of every student in canon therefore we can't know how many supporters were in other houses. Pettigrew was confirmation that there were sympathizers in other houses, though. Personally, I've always thought that had the war gone on a little longer, Z. Smith might have been like Pettigrew. Also, sympathizers don't have to be pureblood. They can be self-hating halfbloods like Snape and Umbridge.

My headcanon for why the MoM fell so easily is because they swept everything from the first war under the rug. So many Death Eaters got off and, like MacNair, many of them could have taken Ministry positions. Some could have joined the Wizengamot and others could have worked behind the scenes like Malfoy, paying people off to get what they wanted.

 

Let's say for arguments sake that there's 20% of the population that strongly favors Voldemort, another 20% who strongly oppose them and a very comfortable middle of around 60% of the population who don't care what happens as long as it doesn't interfere with their daily lives. I believe cannon bears this out, the "war" against Voldemort was a disruption, people couldn't go out to go shopping and there were aurors everywhere. Voldemort taking over meant an end to the disruption as long as you weren't muggleborn or Harry Potter, which for most people was a good thing.

 

I wouldn't say Voldemort taking over was a good thing for the general populace, or caused any improvement over the Scrimgeour martial law; take for example Hogsmeade in DH: there's a magically enforced curfew in place stopping people from going out during nighttime, and there's dementors hanging around everywhere. In Hogwarts 3/4 of the students are being tortured by teachers and the last quarter of students.

The Death Eaters really weren't all subtle about who was in charge, even if Voldemort didn't openly declare himself an emperor.

 

The people in the RoR were just those the Carrows were trying to "get rid of", that is kill or send to Azkaban. Torture was for everyone who got detention. Even the first year Ravenclaws react with delight when they see Alecto Carrow's apparently dead body in their common room, and then they are terrified when Amycus comes knocking. Doesn't sound like someone who's just peachy about the situation, does it?

 

I think the main thing to understand is that, when it comes to wizards, size of the army doesn't matter. One really powerful wizard can be a driving force in a war. Once Dumbledore dies, there isn't anyone really on par with Voldemort. Sure, he can be fought (as seen when 3(?) professors duel him at once during the Battle of Hogwarts), but there's no way he can be beaten without some serious shenanigans (coughcoughDumbledorecoughcough).

That said, the main driving force in the Death Eaters gaining control is simply their strategy for war. Wars in the wizarding world are not like wars in the muggle war. There are very few confrontational battles involving both sides sending large amounts of soldiers at each other.

Wizards, and more specifically, Death Eaters, fight with assassination, blackmail, mind control, torture, hit and run tactics, paranoia of the masses, and false information campaigns. Wizards fight wars in the shadows, not in the sunlight.

The fact is, the Death Eaters were able to win because they were willing to go to greater lengths than both the Ministry and the Order. When the Ministry want to send a message, they send someone to Azkaban. Where, if they're actually a Death Eater, they'll probably get broken out (Voldemort is probably powerful enough to break his supporters out of Azkaban on his own.)

When the Death Eaters want to send a message, they cast the Imperius Curse on your wife, force her to strangle your children, and then commit suicide.

Direct confrontations by the Order would have been stupid. Why not, say, take an Auror delegation to beat back the Death Eaters once they take control of the ministry? Because, a) you don't actually know who the Death Eaters are, and it's not like they're going to stick around once they've killed the Minister, and b) if you force a direct confrontation you run the risk of the Death Eaters discovering your strong opposition, and then having them attack your home and kill your family in front of you.

Furthermore, the Ministry and the Order of the Phoenix stayed on the defensive for large portions of the war. The impression I got was there main strategy was - protect important targets, and fight back when they find out about an attack in time. And that very rarely worked, even with a spy like Snape in their midst. Once Snape was gone, it likely became even more difficult.

tl;dr: The Death Eaters were willing to do fucked up shit, everyone else wasn't, therefore they had a pretty distinct advantage.

 

Well, 3/4 of the students are willing to stand up against Voldemort's demand that Harry is given to him with only a moments hesitation. There's no confusion about who that weird sounding guy making demands is, there's no confusion about Harry's status as "public enemy number 1", there's no confusion about who the real enemy is.

Really everyone knows that Voldemort is pulling the strings, it's no ordinary coup-d'etat where most of the people continue to believe the government has legit legal authority over them.

 

I think opposition against Voldemort was just too disorganized and lacked real leader to rally them up. It took presence of Harry and Voldemort himself to spark them into action.

 

If Fidel Castro and twenty other guerrillas could make a revolution in Cuba, then Voldemort should be able to take the ministry all by himself.

 

Dark Lord's Forces:

40-50 Death Eaters (assuming an surge in post-resurrection recruitment among the new generation and those too young to be Marked during the previous war)

6 -12 giants

Unknown number of trolls, dementors, werewolves etc.

Approximately 5-6 times as many unMarked active supporters as Marked Death Eaters. Hundreds (or thousands depending on your views on the wizarding world's population) of passive supporters i.e. people who agree with the Dark Lord's policies and won't stand in his way but won't actively fight for him.

Imperiused Ministry employees, often people occupying key positions. Let's say about 15 employees, though I think some canon comments on the issue could support much larger numbers. However, I tend to read those numbers as being inflated by the hysteria that the curse can generate.

Ministry Forces:

300 employees (I'm assuming that the Quidditch World Cup task force of 500 includes a large number of people contracted for the job)

30-40 DMLE employees - Law Enforcement Patrol, Hit Wizards and Aurors.

I assume that about fifty Ministry employees work the night shift (10 of these being DMLE employees) and so won't be available when Voldemort's daytime takeover happens.

The Takeover:

The Ministry has been at war for a year. It's spread thin and, thanks to Voldemort's magical creatures, heavily outnumbered. The DMLE is running two watches, meaning that 20 personnel are on duty at any one time. However, three quarters of those are out of the building, following up leads, attending to general law enforcement etc. That leaves a 5 person quick response force in the Ministry.

Voldemort launches his actual assault on the Ministry building at 3pm.

However, the battle begins an hour earlier when Voldemort unleashes some giants near a mixed wizarding/muggle village. the quick response force deploys to fight them, along with obliviators, emptying the Ministry of law enforcement personnel except for the sub-par security wizards.

Off-duty DMLE personnel are called in to staff the Ministry but are quickly deployed by Pius Thicknesse in response to more attacks by magical creatures aligned with Voldemort. This goes on until all of the Ministry's DMLE assets are deployed along with its obliviators and personnel from the Department for the Control and Regulation of Magical Creatures.

Using his Imperiused followers and/or his hard-earned badass wizardry talents Voldemort compromises the Ministry's defences and sends a couple of dozen dementors into the building where they incapacitate most employees while Voldemort personally attacks and kills Scrimgeour with a small support team. His Imperiused followers further compromise the defences by murdering key members of the Ministry who aren't under their control or sympathisers.

While this is happening more Death Eater teams are ambushing DMLE personnel that have been deployed in response to the creature attacks, forcing them back to the Ministry where they're killed on arrival.

Caught between Death Eaters, dementors and the dark lord the Ministry quickly falls, especially when it becomes apparent that the DMLE is helpless, with its personnel being killed or hunted.

Soon after Voldemort makes a public appearance in Diagon Alley and take over key buildings like the Daily Prophet and wireless station. The British Wizarding World is now effectively under Voldemort's control - he has the most important buildings, the active support of a sizable percentage of the population, passive support of an even larger section of the population and an army of horrors which even adult wizards struggle to protect themselves against (even though Harry Potter was badass enough to beat them when he was thirteen).

Some DMLE personnel survive. Kingsley Shacklebolt kills his would-be assassin and evades the trap at the Ministry. He's able to warn colleagues who are recuperating from injuries in St. Mungo's and evacuate them with the assistance of Auror-friendly Healers.

This is my basic takeover scenario, though I've always imagined Voldemort as having a larger support base than I've mentioned here, corresponding with a larger wizarding population.

 

It's how I always thought I'd write it and, frankly, I can't remember the details of it from DH.

From memory the details about the actual Ministry takeover are pretty scarce in canon, aren't they?

 

Huh, I guess this is another example of fanfiction twisting someone's view of canon.

The way Voldemort is described in that quote is awesome, gives hints of a devious, competent dark lord that we rarely see in fanfiction and is barely seen in canon.