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— CH. 1 · INTRODUCTION —

Nazi Germany

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  • Nazi Germany lasted just twelve years, from 1933 to 1945, yet in that span it launched the deadliest war in human history and carried out the systematic murder of millions of people. Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany on the 30th of January 1933, and within months a single party controlled every lever of power in a modern industrial state. The regime called itself the Third Reich, meaning Third Empire, claiming to be the rightful heir of the Holy Roman Empire and the German Empire that preceded it. Its leaders promised it would endure for a thousand years. It did not. What made such a rapid transformation of a democratic republic into a totalitarian dictatorship possible? How did a state built on racial hatred sustain a continent-wide war? And what did that state leave behind when it finally collapsed in May 1945? The answers begin in the wreckage of the First World War.

  • The Treaty of Versailles in 1919 imposed reparations payments on Germany that the government struggled to meet. When the government printed money to cover those debts, hyperinflation followed, bringing economic chaos and food riots. The government defaulted on reparations payments in January 1923, and French troops occupied German industrial areas along the Ruhr. In this climate of humiliation, the National Socialist German Workers' Party took shape. Founded in 1920, the Nazi Party received only 2.6 per cent of the federal vote in 1928. Then the American stock market crashed in 1929. Millions of Germans lost their jobs and major banks collapsed. By 1930, the Nazis had captured 18.3 per cent of the vote, making them the second-largest party in parliament. After the federal election of 1932, they were the largest, holding 230 seats with 37.4 per cent of the popular vote. President Paul von Hindenburg, under pressure from politicians and industrialists, reluctantly appointed Hitler Chancellor on the 30th of January 1933. The event was later called the Machtergreifung, the seizure of power, and it set in motion a transformation that would be essentially complete within eighteen months.

  • On the night of the 27th of February 1933, the Reichstag building burned. A Dutch communist named Marinus van der Lubbe was convicted of starting the fire, and Hitler proclaimed it the opening of a communist uprising. The Reichstag Fire Decree, issued the next day, suspended civil liberties including freedom of assembly and freedom of the press, and allowed police to detain people indefinitely without charges. Four thousand members of the Communist Party of Germany were arrested. On the 23rd of March 1933, the Enabling Act passed by a vote of 444 to 94, allowing Hitler and his cabinet to pass laws without parliament's consent, even laws that violated the constitution. The Nazis used intimidation and the provisions of the Fire Decree to prevent Social Democratic deputies from attending. Within months, all trade unions were dissolved, their funds seized, their leaders arrested. On the 14th of July 1933, Germany became a one-party state by law. Later that year, the first major concentration camp opened at Dachau, initially for political prisoners. The only institutions not yet absorbed by the party were the churches. Hindenburg died on the 2nd of August 1934, and on that day a law merging the offices of chancellor and president came into effect, making Hitler head of state as well as head of government. A plebiscite held on the 19th of August confirmed the merger with 90 per cent approval. Germany was now a totalitarian state, and the armed forces swore an oath of unconditional personal obedience to Hitler himself.

  • Racism and antisemitism were not peripheral to the Nazi regime. They were its foundation. Within days of taking power, Nazi officials declared a national boycott of Jewish businesses on the 1st of April 1933. A law passed the following week forced non-Aryan civil servants out of their jobs, stripping Jewish teachers, judges, professors, and government officials from public life. Books deemed un-German were burned in a nationwide bonfire on the 10th of May. In September 1935, the Nuremberg Laws formalised the exclusion of Jews from German citizenship and prohibited marriage or sexual relations between Jews and those the law classified as Aryan. A supplementary decree defined as Jewish anyone with three Jewish grandparents, or two if the Jewish faith was practiced. On the 7th of November 1938, a young Jewish man named Herschel Grynszpan shot a German legation official in Paris to protest the treatment of his family. Two days later, SS and SA members destroyed synagogues and Jewish property across Germany. At least 91 Jews were killed in what became known as Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass. The Jewish community was then fined one billion marks to pay for the damage, and told that any insurance payments would be confiscated. By 1939, around 250,000 of Germany's 437,000 Jews had fled to the United States, Argentina, the United Kingdom, Palestine, and other countries. Romani people faced parallel persecution: deportations to concentration camps began in 1935, and 23,000 were eventually deported to Auschwitz, of whom 19,000 died. Under Action T4, a programme of systematic murder targeting people deemed physically or mentally disabled ran mainly from 1939 to 1941. Over 400,000 people had been forcibly sterilised under a 1933 law before that programme began.

  • Germany invaded Poland on the 1st of September 1939, capturing the Free City of Danzig. Britain and France declared war two days later. Poland fell quickly; the Soviet Union, bound by a secret protocol in the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, attacked from the east on the 17th of September. By May 1940 Hitler ordered the attack on France and the Low Countries. France surrendered on the 22nd of June. In violation of the Hague Convention, industrial firms across occupied western Europe were put to work producing war materiel for Germany. Food in occupied territories became scarce; famine followed in many countries. Hitler's peace overtures to British Prime Minister Winston Churchill were rejected in July 1940, and the German Luftwaffe failed to defeat the Royal Air Force in the Battle of Britain. The planned invasion of Britain was permanently postponed. On the 22nd of June 1941, contravening the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, around 3.8 million Axis troops attacked the Soviet Union in Operation Barbarossa. The invasion seized vast territory including the Baltic states, Belarus, and western Ukraine. After the successful Battle of Smolensk in September 1941, Hitler diverted forces away from Moscow; this pause allowed the Red Army to mobilise fresh reserves. The Moscow offensive, resumed in October, ended disastrously in December. On the 7th of December 1941, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. Four days later, Germany declared war on the United States. Germany launched Fall Blau in June 1942, aimed at the Caucasian oilfields. Soviet forces encircled the Axis army at Stalingrad on the 23rd of November; of the 91,000 men who surrendered there on the 31st of January 1943, only 6,000 eventually returned to Germany.

  • Around the time of the failed Moscow offensive in December 1941, Hitler resolved that the Jews of Europe were to be exterminated without delay. Plans to murder eleven million people were formalised at the Wannsee Conference on the 20th of January 1942. Reinhard Heydrich had already ordered on the 21st of September 1939 that Polish Jews be concentrated into cities with good rail connections. By the 8th of July 1941, Heydrich announced that all Jews in the eastern conquered territories were to be treated as partisans; by August, this order extended to the entire Jewish population regardless of age or sex. Initially, mobile killing units called Einsatzgruppen carried out mass shootings. By 1942, extermination camps equipped with gas chambers were operating at Auschwitz, Chelmno, Sobibor, Treblinka, and other sites. German soldiers returning from occupied territories brought accounts of what they had witnessed, and historian Richard J. Evans states that most German citizens disapproved of the genocide, though the state provided no legal means of resistance. The total number of Jews murdered is estimated at between 5.5 and six million, including over a million children. Separately, Germany enslaved some 12 million people from 20 European countries to work in factories and on farms; approximately 75 per cent were Eastern European. An estimated 19.3 million civilians and prisoners of war died across the USSR and elsewhere in Europe as a result of the Generalplan Ost and related policies. In occupied Poland alone, 2.7 million ethnic Poles died during the German occupation.

  • Losses at Stalingrad triggered a sharp drop in popular support for the Nazi Party. Soviet forces continued pushing west after the failed German offensive at the Battle of Kursk in the summer of 1943. Field Marshal Erwin Rommel's Afrika Korps were defeated in Egypt in October 1942. The Allies landed in Sicily in July 1943 and reached the Italian peninsula by September. American and British bomber fleets began striking targets inside Germany, eventually crippling oil refining and transport networks by late 1944. On the 6th of June 1944, American, British, and Canadian forces landed in Normandy. On the 20th of July 1944, Hitler survived an assassination attempt; he ordered reprisals resulting in 7,000 arrests and the execution of more than 4,900 people. The last major German offensive on the western front, the Ardennes Offensive, ran from the 16th of December 1944 to the 25th of January 1945 and failed. Soviet forces entered Germany on the 27th of January. Hitler ordered a scorched-earth decree to destroy German infrastructure, though Armaments Minister Albert Speer worked to prevent its full execution. During the Battle of Berlin, from the 16th of April to the 2nd of May 1945, Hitler lived in the underground Führerbunker. On the 30th of April, with Soviet troops within two blocks of the Reich Chancellery, Hitler and his wife Eva Braun took their own lives. General Helmuth Weidling surrendered Berlin unconditionally on the 2nd of May. The German Instrument of Surrender was signed on the 8th of May 1945. Estimates of total German war dead range from 5.5 to 6.9 million. In the town of Demmin, more than a thousand people out of a population of around 16,000 died by suicide around the 1st of May 1945 as Soviet forces entered. The surviving Nazi leadership faced trial for war crimes at the Nuremberg trials, as the Allies began the process of denazification across occupied Germany.

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Common questions

When did Nazi Germany exist and how long did it last?

Nazi Germany existed from 1933 to 1945, a period of twelve years. Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor on the 30th of January 1933 and the regime ended on the 8th of May 1945 when the German Instrument of Surrender was signed.

What was the Third Reich and why was it called that?

The Third Reich was the name used by the Nazis to describe their German state, meaning Third Empire or Third Realm. The term counted the Holy Roman Empire (800-1806) as the first Reich and the German Empire (1871-1918) as the second. The phrase was first used in a 1923 book called Das Dritte Reich by Arthur Moeller van den Bruck.

How did Hitler gain total control of Germany so quickly?

Hitler exploited the Reichstag fire of the 27th of February 1933 to push through emergency decrees suspending civil liberties. The Enabling Act, passed on the 23rd of March 1933 by a vote of 444 to 94, allowed him to govern by decree without parliamentary approval. By the 14th of July 1933, Germany had been declared a one-party state.

What was Kristallnacht and when did it happen?

Kristallnacht, or the Night of Broken Glass, was a pogrom carried out on the 9th-the 10th of November 1938, in which SA members destroyed synagogues and Jewish businesses across Germany. At least 91 Jews were killed. Afterwards, the Jewish community was fined one billion marks for the destruction and told that insurance payouts would be confiscated.

How many people died in the Holocaust during Nazi Germany?

The total number of Jews murdered is estimated at between 5.5 and six million, including over a million children. Romani victims numbered around 220,000, roughly 25 per cent of the Romani population in Europe. Estimates of overall civilian and prisoner-of-war deaths from Nazi racial and occupation policies reach 19.3 million across the USSR and elsewhere in Europe.

How did Nazi Germany's war economy use forced labour?

Germany imported and enslaved some 12 million people from 20 European countries to work in factories and on farms. Approximately 75 per cent of these forced labourers were Eastern European. By 1944, the war was consuming 75 per cent of Germany's gross domestic product, and the wartime economy had come to rely heavily on slave labour and the plunder of occupied territories.

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All sources

153 references cited across the entry

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  139. 139Children during the HolocaustUSHMM
  140. 140DachauUSHMM
  141. 141Genocide of European Roma (Gypsies), 1939–1945USHMM
  142. 142The German Churches and the Nazi StateUSHMM
  143. 143Women in the Third ReichUSHMM
  144. 144BookDas Sonderrecht für die Juden im NS-Staat: Eine Sammlung der gesetzlichen Maßnahmen und Rechtlinien, Inhalt und BedeutungJoseph Walk — Müller Verlag — 1996
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