Nazi Germany

After World War I Germany abandoned its emperor and established a parliamentary democracy, the Weimar Republic. Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) led the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (commonly known as the Nazi Party) during its years as a mass movement, then as a totalitarian dictatorship between 1933 and 1945. The Nazi regime overturned Weimar, replacing it with the Third Reich, the Nazi state that abandoned all guarantees of basic rights. From the 1930s Hitler attempted to overturn the Treaty of Versailles. The Nazi foreign policy rested on the racist view that Germany had a destiny to expand to the east by military force in order to establish a new German Reich in eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Hitler removed Germany from the League of Nations in 1933, rebuilt German armed forces beyond league-authorized levels, reoccupied the German Rhineland in 1937, annexed Austria in 1938, and invaded Czechoslovakia in 1939. When Hitler invaded Poland in 1939 the allies finally responded with a declaration of war.

Background

Under the Weimar Republic, Germany was politically and economically unstable and citizens were dissatisfied with the new system and the discomfort of creating a new liberal democracy from the ashes of an empire. In 1919 a new party began, as the German Workers’ Party, with a platform emphasizing anti-Semitism and German pride. The founders were Anton Drexler and Karl Harrer, among others. It objected to the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, the 1919 agreement that ended World War I (1914–18) and required reparations and concessions by Germany. The Nazi Party offered nationalism, military power, racial purity, and authoritarian leadership.

Adolf Hitler legally became chancellor on January 30, 1933. After a suspicious fire in the German parliament (the Reichstag) on February 28, 1933, the government suspended civil rights and declared a state of emergency that allowed official acts to take effect without parliamentary approval.

Hitler joined the Nazi Party in 1919 and proved to be a charismatic speaker capable of attracting new members by blaming Marxists and Jews for German problems. He espoused rabid nationalism and touted the Aryan master race, and became leader in 1921. Through the 1920s Hitler blamed the nation’s unemployment, economic stagnation, rampant inflation, and hunger on the communists and Jews who, he argued, needed to be driven out of Germany if the nation were to prosper. Young, poor Germans were attracted to him and his ideas. The 1923 Beer Hall Putsch was a failed effort by Hitler to seize governmental power in Bavaria, which led Hitler to spend time in prison for treason. There he wrote Mein Kampf, the book that made him a millionaire. Hitler was determined on his release to rebuild the Nazi Party and to take power legally. He led the party into power in 1933 and assumed dictatorial powers shortly after taking control of the German government.

The Nazi regime quickly began a policy of “coordination,” aligning institutions and individuals to the goals of the party. Control stretched to encompass education, the economy, culture, the law, and virtually all elements of German life. There was no room for dissent and the Gestapo (state secret police) and Security Service (SD) of the Nazi Party ensured that none surfaced. The regime was for the most part regarded favorably by Germans. There was occasional non-conformance, however, and an attempt was made to assassinate Hitler on July 20, 1944. Some resistance came from religious organizations, but the Nazi Party then gained support from the majority of Protestant and Catholic clergymen.

Under the Nazis, party organization and individuals replaced democratic government at all levels. Dissent and membership in rival parties was made illegal. Political opponents went into exile, were forced into concentration camps, or stood trial at “People’s Court.” Enforcement was conducted by paramilitary organizations such as the Schutzstaffel (SS) and the Gestapo. Nazism was the sole political philosophy and the social economic controller. (Although Nazis allowed private companies to operate, the state owned all resources and outlawed unions.) One method of promoting coordination was the use of propaganda.

Impact

Nazi propaganda was everywhere—in schools, the workplace, and in homes. Despite rivalries and duplications, the Nazi system thrived because it appealed to the national German tendencies toward organization and order.

When Paul von Hindenburg died in August 1934, Hitler assumed his presidential powers. Hitler was then president (head of state), chancellor (head of government), and Fuehrer (head of the single party, the Nazi party). He required the army to swear personal loyalty to him. He was above the state, able to set domestic and foreign policy by himself.

The policy also required that “racially pure” Aryan German women bear as many “pure” children as possible. Because the eastern lands were populated by races deemed “inferior,” such as Gypsies and Jews, it was believed to be necessary to “cleanse” the new territory of these races. Thus, genocide was considered imperative. The Holocaust and war with Soviet Russia were two goals of Nazi foreign policy from the onset, regardless of short-term maneuvers.

The Nazi regime pursued a systematic anti-Semitism that by late 1938 resulted in banning Jews from most German public places. The first concentration camp, Dachau, opened in 1933 for political prisoners. It later became a death camp where Jews were worked to death or died of malnutrition, disease, or execution. Dachau also housed artists, Gypsies, intellectuals, homosexuals, and the mentally and physically handicapped. In Poland the Germans confined Jews they did not shoot outright in ghettos, leaving them to starve to death. To speed the process they sent Jews to death camps throughout Poland to starve to death or die there as slave laborers. Immediate execution of the unfit was also practiced. In 1941 Nazi death squads machine-gunned tens of thousands of western Russian Jews during the invasion. The Nazi plan—the Final Solution—came after the Wannsee Conference of 1942; the plan meant exterminating all Jewish people, including those in France, Belgium, and other occupied European countries. At camps in Poland and elsewhere, the Third Reich killed six million Jews and almost as many of other races that were deemed unfit to live.

The Nazi era in Germany ended with the German surrender to the Allies on May 8, 1945. The Nazi party was outlawed after World War II with many of its top officials convicted of war crimes associated with the genocide of millions of Europeans. During the postwar occupation the Allies outlawed the party and its flag. Hitler and many others committed suicide to avoid justice, but those who were captured were tried at the Nuremberg trials between 1945 and 1949. Germany then went through a period of “de-Nazification.”

Bibliography

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