Width	320px
Native name	Deutsches Reich1933–1943Großdeutsches Reich1943-1945
Conventional long name	German Reich1933–1943Greater German Reich1943-1945
Common name	Germany
Continent	Europe
Country	Germany
Era	Interwar period/WWII
Event start	Machtergreifung
Year start	1933
Date start	30 January
Event1	Gleichschaltung
Date event1	27 February 1933
Event2	Anschluss
Date event2	12 March 1938
Event3	World War II
Date event3	1 September 1939
Event4	Death of Adolf Hitler
Date event4	30 April 1945
Event end	German Instrument of Surrender
Year end	1945
Date end	7/8 May
House1	Reichsrat 4
Type house1	State council
P1	Weimar Republic
Flag p1	Flag_of_Germany_(3-2_aspect_ratio).svg
P2	Saar (League of Nations)
Flag p2	Flag of Saar 1920-1935.svg
P3	Federal State of Austria
Flag p3	Flag of Austria.svg
P4	Czechoslovak Republic (1918–1938)Czechoslovak Republic
Flag p4	Flag of Czechoslovakia.svg
P5	Klaipėda Region
Flag p5	Flag of Lithuania 1918-1940.svg
P6	Free City of Danzig
Flag p6	Gdansk flag.svg
P7	Second Polish Republic
Flag p7	Flag of Poland.svg
P8	Kingdom of Italy (1861–1946)Kingdom of Italy
Flag p8	Flag of Italy (1861-1946).svg
P9	Eupen-Malmedy
Flag p9	Flag of Belgium.svg
P10	Luxembourg
Flag p10	Flag of Luxembourg.svg
P11	Alsace-Lorraine
Flag p11	Flag of France.svg
P12	Drava Banovina
Flag p12	Flag of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia.svg
S1	Flensburg Government
Flag s1	Flag_of_Germany_1933.svg
S2	Allied-occupied Germany
Flag s2	Flag of Germany (1946-1949).svg
S3	Allied-occupied Austria
Flag s3	Flag of Austria.svg
S4	History of Czechoslovakia (1945–1948)Third Republic of Czechoslovakia
Flag s4	Flag of Czechoslovakia.svg
S5	People's Republic of PolandRepublic of Poland
Flag s5	Flag_of_Poland.svg
S6	Alsace-Lorraine
Flag s6	Flag_of_France.svg
S7	Eupen-Malmedy
Flag s7	Flag_of_Belgium.svg
S8	Luxembourg
Flag s8	Flag_of_Luxembourg.svg
S9	Kingdom of Italy (1861–1946)Kingdom of Italy
Flag s9	Flag of Italy (1861-1946).svg
S10	Kaliningrad Oblast
Flag s10	Flag of the Soviet Union 1923.svg
S11	Saar protectorate
Flag s11	Flag of Saar (1947–1956).svg
S12	Socialist Federal Republic of YugoslaviaDemocratic Federal Yugoslavia
Flag s12	Flag of SFR Yugoslavia.svg
S13	Dutch_annexation_of_German_territory_after_World_War_II#ImplementationElten and Selfkant
Flag s13	Flag of the Netherlands.svg
Flag	List of German flags
Image coat	Reichsadler.svg
Symbol type	National Insignia
Symbol type article	Coat of arms of Germany
Image map caption	Europe at the height of Nazi German domination, 1941-1942. }}

}} }} }} }} |national_motto =
"One People, one Reich, one Führer" |national_anthem = (official)First stanza offollowed by |capital = Berlin |largest_city = capital |common_languages = German |government_type = Totalitarian dictatorship, Single-party state |title_leader = President |leader1 = Paul von Hindenburg |year_leader1 = 1933–1934 |leader2 = Adolf Hitler ² |year_leader2 = 1934–1945 |leader3 = Karl Dönitz |year_leader3 = 1945 |title_deputy = Chancellor |deputy1= Adolf Hitler |year_deputy1 = 1933–1945 |deputy2 = Joseph Goebbels |year_deputy2 = 1945 |deputy3 = Lutz Graf Schwerin von Krosigk ³ |year_deputy3 = 1945 |stat_area1 = 696265 |stat_pop1 = 90030775 |stat_year1 = 1941 (Großdeutschland) |ref_area1 = |currency = Reichsmark (ℛℳ) |today = |footnotes = 1: Including ''de facto'' annexed/incorporated territories. 2: Office formally vacant. Adolf Hitler styled himself Führer und Reichskanzler from August 1934. 3: Lutz Graf Schwerin von Krosigk used the title of Leading Minister. 4: Through the Enabling Act of 1933, the German government was vested with legislative powers, although the Reichstag formally continued to exist as a law-making body. }}

Nazi Germany (), also known as the Third Reich (German: ''Drittes Reich''), but officially called German Reich (German: ''Deutsches Reich'') from 1933 to 1943 and Greater German Reich (German: ''Großdeutsches Reich'') from June 26 1943 onward, is the name commonly used to refer to the state of Germany from 1933 to 1945, when it was a totalitarian dictatorship ruled by Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party. Colloquially the state was also called Greater Germany (German: ''Großdeutschland'') after 1938. Historiographically the period is generally referred to as ''die Zeit des Nationalsozialismus'' or ''NS-Zeit'' ("the National Socialist era") in Germany.

On 30 January 1933, Adolf Hitler legally became Chancellor of Germany, appointed by President Paul von Hindenburg. Although he initially headed a coalition government, he quickly made Hindenburg a figurehead and eliminated his non-Nazi partners. The Nazi regime restored economic prosperity and ended mass unemployment using heavy military spending while suppressing labor unions and strikes. The return of prosperity gave the regime enormous popularity and made Hitler's rule mostly unchallenged, although resistance grew after the onset of military aggression, culminating in the failed 20 July plot in 1944. The Gestapo (secret state police) under Heinrich Himmler destroyed the liberal, Socialist and Communist opposition and persecuted the Jews, attempting to force them into exile while taking their property. The Party took control of the courts, local government, and all civic organizations except the Protestant and Catholic churches. All expressions of public opinion were controlled by Hitler's propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, who made effective use of film, mass rallies, and Hitler's skillful oratory.

The Nazi state idolized Hitler as its Führer ("Leader"), centralizing all power in his hands. Nazi propaganda centered on Hitler and was quite effective in creating what historians call the "Hitler Myth" – that Hitler was all-wise and that any mistakes or failures by others would be corrected when brought to his attention. In reality, Hitler had a narrow range of interests and decision-making was diffused among overlapping, feuding power centers; on some issues he was passive, simply assenting to pressures from whoever had his ear. All top officials still reported to Hitler and followed his basic policies, but they had considerable autonomy on a daily basis.

Hitler's foreign policy during the 1930s used a diplomatic strategy of making seemingly reasonable demands, threatening war if they were not met. When opponents tried to appease him, he accepted the gains that were offered, then moved on to his next goal. That aggressive strategy worked as Germany pulled out of the League of Nations (1933), rejected the Versailles Treaty and began to re-arm (1935), won back the Saar (1935), remilitarized the Rhineland (1936), formed an alliance ("axis") with Benito Mussolini's Italy (1936), sent massive military aid to Francisco Franco in the Spanish Civil War (1936–39), annexed Austria in the Anschluss (1938), took over Czechoslovakia after the British and French appeasement of the Munich Agreement of 1938, formed a peace pact with the Soviet Union (Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact) in August 1939, and finally invaded Poland in September 1939. Britain and France declared war, resulting in the start of World War II - somewhat sooner than the Nazis had prepared for or expected.

During the war, Germany conquered or controlled most of Europe and North Africa, intending to establish a "New Order" in Europe and elsewhere of complete Nazi German hegemony. The Nazis also persecuted and killed millions of Jews, Romani people and others in the Holocaust. Despite its Axis alliance with other nations, mainly Italy and Japan, by 8 May 1945 Germany had been defeated by the Allied Powers, and was occupied by the Soviet Union, the United States, Britain and France. Some 40 million Europeans may have died as a consequence of the war.

Hitler, the Nazis and their Holocaust became the symbol of evil in the modern world. Newman and Erber (2002) write, "The Nazis have become one of the most widely recognized images of modern evil. Throughout most of the world today, the concept of evil can readily be evoked by displaying almost any cue reminiscent of Nazism...."

Name and boundaries

The most popular name to refer to this state in English is Nazi Germany (), mostly used to differentiate it from other historical German states such as Imperial Germany and Weimar Germany (although there is direct legal continuity between the Weimar and Nazi periods, see below). Third Reich (German: ''Drittes Reich'') is another common but informal term, suggesting a historical succession from the medieval Holy Roman Empire (962–1806) and to the modern German Empire (1871–1918). This term, although in common usage among many Germans at the time, eventually fell from favor with the Nazi authorities, who banned its continued use by the press in the summer of 1939. Germany had two official names during the Nazi period; German Reich (German: ''Deutsches Reich''), which was in use from the Unification of Germany in 1871 onward until 1943, when the regime legally renamed it Greater German Reich (German: ''Großdeutsches Reich'').

The German national borders in 1933 were those mapped out by the victors in World War I, at the Treaty of Versailles (1919). To the north, Germany was bounded by the North Sea, Denmark, and the Baltic Sea; to the east, it was divided into two and bordered Lithuania, the Free City of Danzig, Poland, and Czechoslovakia; to the south, it bordered Austria and Switzerland, and to the west, it touched France, Luxembourg, Belgium, the Netherlands, and the Saarland. These borders changed after Germany regained control of the Saarland, transformed itself into Greater Germany by annexing Austria, and also gained control of the Sudetenland, the remainder of Bohemia and Moravia, and the Memel Territory before the war. Germany expanded further by seizing even more land during World War II, which began in September 1939.

History

Nazi Germany arose in the wake of the national shame, embarrassment, anger and resentment resulting from the Treaty of Versailles (1919), that dictated, to the vanquished Germans, responsibility for: Germany's acceptance of and admission to sole responsibility for causing World War I The permanent loss of various territories and the demilitarization of other German territory The payment by Germany of heavy reparations, in money and in kind, such payments being justified in the Allied view by the War Guilt clause Unilateral German disarmament and severe military restrictions

Other conditions fostering the rise of the Third Reich include nationalism and Pan-Germanism, civil unrest attributed to Marxist groups, hyperinflation in the Weimar Republic, the global Great Depression of the 1930s, the reaction against the counter-traditionalism and liberalism of the Weimar Republic and the rise of communism in Germany, i.e. the growth of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD). Many voters, seeking an outlet for their frustrations and an expression for their repudiation of parliamentary democracy which appeared incapable of keeping a government in power for more than a few months, began supporting far right-wing and far left-wing political parties, opting for political extremists such as the Nazi Party.

The Nazis promised strong, authoritarian government in lieu of effete parliamentary republicanism, civic peace, radical economic policy (including full employment), restored national pride (principally by repudiating the Versailles Treaty), and racial cleansing, partly implemented via the active suppression of Jews and Marxists, all in the name of national unity and solidarity rather than the partisan divisions of democracy, and the social class divisiveness of Marxism. The Nazis promised national and cultural renewal based upon ''Völkisch'' movement traditionalism and proposed rearmament, repudiation of reparations, and reclamation of territory lost to the Treaty of Versailles.

The Nazi Party claimed that through the Treaty, the Weimar Republic’s liberal democracy, the traitorous “November criminals” had surrendered Germany's national pride by the inspiration and conniving of the Jews, whose goal was national subversion and the poisoning of German blood. To establish that interpretation of recent German history, Nazi propaganda effectively used the ''Dolchstoßlegende'' (“Stab-in-the-back legend”) explaining the German military failure.

From 1925 to the 1930s, the German government evolved from a democracy to a ''de facto'' conservative–nationalist authoritarian state under war hero-President Paul von Hindenburg, who disliked the liberal democracy of the Weimar Republic and wanted to make Germany into an authoritarian state. The natural ally for establishing authoritarianism was the German National People's Party (''Deutschnationale Volkspartei'', DNVP), "the Nationalists", but after 1929, with the German economy floundering, more radical and younger nationalists were attracted to the revolutionary nature of the National Socialist Party, to challenge the rising popular support for communism. Moreover, the middle-class political parties lost support as the voters aggregated to the left- and right- wings of the German political spectrum, thus making a majority government in a parliamentary system even more difficult.

In the federal election of 1928, when the economy had improved after the hyperinflation of the 1922–23 period, the Nazis won only 12 seats. Two years later, in the federal election of 1930, months after the US stock market crash, the Nazi Party won 107 seats, progressing from ninth-rated splinter group to second-largest parliamentary party in the ''Reichstag''. After the federal election of 1932, the Nazis were the largest party in the ''Reichstag'', holding 230 seats. President Hindenburg was reluctant to confer substantial executive power to Hitler, but former chancellor Franz von Papen and Hitler concorded an NSDAP–DNVP party alliance that would allow Hitler’s chancellorship, subject to traditional-conservative control, to develop an authoritarian state. In the event, Hitler consistently demanded to be appointed chancellor in exchange for Hindenburg’s receiving any Nazi Party support of the cabinets appointed under his authority.

On 30 January 1933, Hindenburg appointed Hitler as Chancellor of Germany after General Kurt von Schleicher’s failure to form a viable government (see ''Machtergreifung''). Hitler pressured Hindenburg through his son Oskar von Hindenburg and via intrigue by von Papen, former leader of the Catholic Centre Party. By becoming the Vice Chancellor and keeping the Nazis a cabinet minority, von Papen expected to be able to control Hitler. Although the Nazis had won the greatest share of the popular vote in the two ''Reichstag'' general elections of 1932, they had no majority of their own, not even with the NSDAP–DNVP alliance that started governing in 1933 by Presidential Decree per Article 48 of the 1919 Weimar Constitution.

The National Socialist treatment of the Jews in the early months of 1933 marked the first step in a longer-term process of removing them from German society. This plan was at the core of Adolf Hitler's "cultural revolution".

Consolidation of power

Within a few months, the new government installed a single party dictatorship in Germany with legal measures establishing a coordinated central government, (see ''Gleichschaltung''). On the night of 27 February 1933, the ''Reichstag'' building was set afire (the Dutch council communist Marinus van der Lubbe was found inside; he was arrested, charged with arson, tried, and then decapitated.). The Nazis claimed that the arson was a signal for a communist uprising and thousands of communist party members were arrested, the party offices raided and all KPD publications banned. The Nazis imprisoned many in the Dachau concentration camp. The ''Reichstag Fire Decree'' (27 February 1933), rescinded most German civil liberties including ''habeas corpus'', to so suppress their opponents. While Van der Lubbe had had contacts with communists in Holland, there was no evidence that the KPD was in any way implicated in planning or execution of the fire. The 'Fire Decree' was the second enactment that allowed the Nazi administration to restrict civil liberties. The first was a rule that forbade Germans from 'insulting the flag' and this was used consistently to repress any kind of opposition.

In March 1933, with the Enabling Act, was passed by 444–94 (the remaining Social Democrats), the ''Reichstag'' changed the Weimar Constitution to allow Hitler's government to pass laws without parliamentary debate for a four-year period, even such deviating from other articles in the constitution (the Act, forming the legal basis for the regime, was subsequently renewed by Hitler's government in 1937 and 1941). Forthwith, throughout 1934, the Nazi Party ruthlessly eliminated all political opposition; the Enabling Act already had banned the Communists (KPD), the Social Democrats (SPD) were dissolved in June, and in the June–July period, the Nationalists (DNVP), the People's Party (DVP) and the German State Party (DStP) were likewise obliged to disband, their members urged to join the Nazi Party or else leave politics. Moreover, at the urging of Franz von Papen, the remaining Catholic Centre Party disbanded on 5 July 1933 after obtaining Nazi guarantees for Catholic religious education and youth groups. On 14 July 1933, Germany became a ''de facto'' single-party state, as the founding of new parties was banned. Further elections in late 1933, 1936 and 1938 were entirely Nazi-controlled and only saw the Nazis and a minor number of independent "guests" (such as Hugenberg) elected for the rubber-stamp legislature.

The Nazi regime abolished the symbols of the Weimar Republic, including the black-red-gold tricolor flag, and adopted new and old imperial symbolism representing the dual nature of Germany’s third empire. The previous, imperial black-white-red tricolor was restored as one of Germany's two official national flags; the second was the swastika flag of the Nazi party which became the sole national German flag in 1935. The national anthem remained ''Deutschland über Alles'' (aka the ''Deutschlandlied'', "Song of Germany"), but only the first stanza was sung, immediately followed by the Nazi anthem ''Horst-Wessel-Lied'' ("Horst Wessel Song") accompanied by the Nazi salute.

On 30 January 1934, Chancellor Hitler formally centralized government power to himself with the ''Gesetz über den Neuaufbau des Reichs'' (Act to Rebuild the Reich) by disbanding ''Länder'' (federal state) parliaments and transferring states’ rights and administration to the Berlin central government. The centralization began soon after the March 1933 Enabling Act promulgation, when state governments were replaced with ''Reichsstatthalter'' (Reich governors). Local government also was deposed; Reich governors appointed mayors of cities and towns with populaces of fewer than 100,000; the Interior Minister appointed the mayors of cities with populaces greater than 100,000; and, in the cases of Berlin and Hamburg (and Vienna after the ''Anschluss Österreichs'' in 1938), Hitler had personal discretion to appoint their mayors.

By spring of 1934, only the ''Reichswehr'' remained independent of government control; traditionally, it was separate from the national government, a discrete political entity. The leaders of the Nazi paramilitary ''Sturmabteilung'' (SA, "Storm Detachment") which had well over a million members, had expected to assume command of the German army and absorb the ''Reichswehr'' (German Army) into its ranks under Ernst Röhm’s leadership. The ''Reichswehr'' opposed Röhm's ambition; moreover, Röhm favoured a "socialist revolution" to complement the "nationalist revolution" and which would in Röhm's view complete the Nazi revolution. Industrialists, who had provided funds for the Nazi victory, were unhappy with Röhm's socialistic goals and weary of SA political violence. Matters came to a head in June 1934 when President Hindenburg, who had the complete loyalty of the Army, informed Hitler that if he didn't move to curb the SA then Hindenburg would dissolve the Government and declare martial law.

Possessing absolute power only in theory without the support of the ''Reichswehr'', and wanting to preserve good relations with both the army and certain politicians and industrialists, Hitler ordered the ''Schutzstaffel'' (SS) and the ''Gestapo'' to assassinate his political enemies both in and outside the Nazi Party with the "Night of the Long Knives". The purges of Ernst Röhm, his SA cohort, the Strasserist, left-wing Nazis, and other political enemies lasted from 30 June to 2 July 1934. While some Germans were shocked by the killing, many others saw Hitler as the one who restored "order" to the country.

Upon the death of Hindenburg, on 2 August 1934, the Nazi-controlled ''Reichstag'' consolidated the offices of ''Reichspräsident'' (Reich President) and ''Reichskanzler'' (Reich Chancellor), and reinstalled Adolf Hitler as ''Führer und Reichskanzler'' (Leader and Reich Chancellor). After the "Night of the Long Knives" and Hindenburg’s death, the ''Reichswehr'' was prepared to accept Hitler's leadership. As Hitler had announced plans to rearm and increase the size of the Reichswehr, the agreement of the generals was unsurprising. The assassination of Röhm and the SA leaders consolidated the ''Reichswehr'' as the sole armed force of the ''Reich'', and the ''Führer''’s promises of military expansion guaranteed him military loyalty. Hindenburg’s death facilitated changing the German soldiers’ oath of allegiance from the ''Reich'' of the German Constitution to personal fealty to Adolf Hitler.

In the event, the Nazis ended the official NSDAP–DNVP government alliance and began introducing Nazism and Nazi symbolism to public and private German life; textbooks were revised, or rewritten to promote the Pan-German racist doctrine of ''Großdeutschland'' (Greater Germany) to be established by the Nazi ''Herrenvolk''; teachers who opposed curricular Nazification were dismissed. Furthermore, to coerce popular obedience to the state, the Nazis established the ''Gestapo'' (secret state police) as independent of civil authority. The ''Gestapo'' controlled the German populace with some 100,000 spies and informers, thereby were aware of anti-Nazi criticism and dissent.

The majority of the German people were relieved that the conflicts and street fighting had been ended and were deluged in a barrage of propaganda orchestrated by Josef Goebbels and which promised peace and plenty for all in a united, marxist-free country that would redress the wrongs done to Germany in the Versailles Treaty. The first concentration camp for political prisoners was opened at Dachau near Munich in 1933 and "between 1933 and 1945, more than 3 million Germans had been in concentration camps, or prison, for political reasons". "Tens of thousands of Germans were killed for one or another form of resistance. Between 1933 and 1945, Sondergerichte (Nazi "special courts") sentenced some 12,000 Germans to death, courts-martial ordered the execution of 25,000 German soldiers on charges of cowardice, while civil courts sentenced 40,000 Germans. Many of these Germans were part of the government, civil, or military service, a circumstance which enabled them to engage in subversion and conspiracy, while involved, marginally or significantly, in the government’s policies."

Foreign policy

Hitler began to systematically undermine and eradicate the provisions of the Versailles Treaty that were still valid in 1933. The disarmament clauses had been long since abandoned and Hitler achieved a minor victory when he withdrew Germany from the League of Nations on the grounds that disarmament was applied only to Germany. In January 1935 the Saarland voted to become part of Germany. The region had been placed under League of Nations supervision for 15 years and the decision was greeted as a great victory for the new Germany. In March 1935 Hitler announced that the Reichswehr would be increased to 550,000 men and that there would be a German Air Force. When Britain agreed that the Germans would be allowed to build a naval fleet, the Treaty had become little more than a piece of paper. The signees were ready in the name of peace, to negotiate away on a bilateral basis the terms that Germany had agreed to in 1919.

Hitler's next test of the resolve of the French and British governments' intention to uphold the Versailles Treaty came in March 1936. Mussolini, Hitler's forerunner as a dictator and at the time an object of admiration, invaded Ethiopia, leading to mild protests by the British and French governments. In the wake of this crisis, Hitler ordered the Reichswehr to march into the demilitarised zone along the Rhine, with the proviso that they should withdraw if the French mobilised in response. The French government was in its usual state of internal bickering and Britain had no interest in, and no way of stopping the Reichswehr. The result was a huge victory for Hitler. He had tested the resolve of his opponents and they had been found wanting. Not that there was anything they could have done, for French military strategy was dictated by the existence of the Maginot Line, behind which their army was to remain, come what may, and British politicians regarded the Rhineland as Germany's own backyard. Hitler then held an election in which he received an overwhelming vote of support and his reputation as a vigorous and determined leader was growing fast. The following year was relatively quiet on the foreign affairs front. The Spanish Civil War occupied the headlines in Europe, which was a useful trial ground for the growing Luftwaffe (German Air Force).

The Fate of Minorities in Nazi Germany From the very earliest speeches and writings of Hitler it was clear that the Jewish community in Germany were an object of hatred, together with gypsies, the mentally disdavantaged or the handicapped. The Nazi ideology laid down strict rules about who was or was not a 'pure German' and actions were set into motion to 'purify' the 'German race' soon after the Nazi takeover. The first wave of anti-semitism began in 1933, when the S.A. attacked Jewish-owned stores and called for a boycott of all Jewish commercial activities. Many Jewish families prepared to leave, but many others hoped that as they were German citizens, their livelihoods and property would be safe.

In 1935 the Nuremberg Laws were enacted depriving Jews of all citizens' rights, using public transportation, banned from public parks and restaurants, theatres and cinemas, they were forced to bear a yellow star to show that they were Jewish.

In November 1938, a young Jewish male in Paris requested an interview with the German ambassador in Paris, was shown in to a meeting with a legation secretary, whom he shot in protest against the treatment meted out to his family in Germany. (By coincidence, both men were from Frankfurt and knew each other slightly. The attempt was used by the Nazi Party to stir up hatred against the Jewish communities in Germany and the SA was given the task of attacking synagogues and Jerwish property throughout Germany. On the night of 9-10 November at least 91 German Jews were killed and Jewish property destroyed. This was entitled 'Kristallnacht' by the Nazis - the Night of Broken Glass. This phase of exclusion made it very clear that the Jews in Germany were to be targetted in the future. To make this crystal clear, the Jewish communities were fined 1000 million marks and told that they would not receive compensation for their losses. The road to the Holocaust had begun.

Austria and Czechoslovakia

In November 1937, Hitler drew the military leadership together for a conference at which he elucidated the need for Germany to expand eastwards for "Lebensraum". At first he would have to deal with Austria and Czechoslovakia, but he was confident that Britain and France would do nothing when the German armies moved in.

In February 1938, Hitler called the Austrian Chancellor Kurt Schuschnigg to a meeting at the Berghof at which he harangued Schussnigg on the need for Germans to secure their frontiers. To forestall Hitler and to preserve Austria's independence, Schuschnigg scheduled a plebiscite on the issue for 13 March but Hitler demanded that it be canceled. On 11 March, Hitler sent an ultimatum to Schuschnigg, demanding that he hand over all power to the Austrian Nazis or face an invasion. On 12 March the Wehrmacht entered Austria, to be greeted with enthusiasm by the Austrians.

Hitler told the leader of the Sudetenland Nazi Party, Heinlein, to make a number of unacceptable demands to the Czech government. Mussolini insisted that Hitler meet the British and French prime ministers to discuss the Czech crisis. Hitler demanded the immediate annexation of the German areas (called "Sudetenland"). Two more meetings followed, in the second of which, the infamous Munich Agreement was signed, forcing the Czech government to accept the annexation, but having no part in the negotiations.

The Munich Agreement has had a highly controversial reception among historians and political scientists. One interpretation sees it as a cowardly "Appeasement"-- an unwise and unnecessarily capitulation to vehement threats. Other scholars argue that risking war at that stage was unwise because France and Britain had neither the weapons nor a coherent strategy to defeat Germany in 1938. Chamberlain was greeted as a hero when he landed in London bringing, he said, "peace in our time." The agreement lasted six months before Hitler seized the rest in March 1939. Hitler's next move was to call for adjustments to the borders of Poland. In the House of Commons, Chamberlian warned that any further attempts by Hitler to change the status quo would lead to war. In effect, this declaration guaranteed help to Poland and made the outbreak of war inevitable. The German Wehrmacht began to prepare for an invasion of Poland, while the German foreign office made attempts to keep Britain out of the conflict. On 23 May, 1939 Hitler ordered his generals to prepare for the attack on Poland This has been described as a typical Hitler 'bluff' by Taylor buy the dynamics of mobilisation probably belie this position, for it takes several months to prepare an army for such an attack and the war began with the invasion of Poland on 1 September, just as Hitler had ordered. Hitler was still uncertain what Stalin would do when Poland was attacked. The Russian regime might be the 'anti-christ' (Kershaw) to the Nazis but it was a crucial element in the invasion of Poland. Britain and France had sent envoy to Moscow with the aim of tying Stalin into a pact. Molotov, Stalin's foreign minister, visted Berlin in July 1939 and elegant hints were dropped about the need for an agreement between Berlin and Moscow. But Stalin was in no hurry. On 20 August, Hitler telegraphed Stalin with an offer of an agreement to be signed on 22 or 23 August. Ribbentrop, the german foreign minister, flew to Moscow and an agreement was signed between Russia and Germany that made the second world war inevitable. Hitler was delighted. He knew, he told his entourage, that Britain and France would do nothing. Their leaders were worms, he said, he had seen them at Munich. The compromise over Sudentenland still rankled. The agreement signed in Moscow provided for peace for a period of ten years between the two countries. There was a secret protocol attached in which Poland was divided up 'in the event of a conflict' between Russia and Germany. Russia got the Baltic countries and Hitler could attack Poland.

World War II

Conquest of Europe

The "Danzig crisis" peaked in early 1939, around the time that reports of controversy in the Free City of Danzig increased, the United Kingdom "guaranteed" to defend Poland's territorial integrity and the Poles rejected a series of offers by Nazi Germany regarding both the Free City of Danzig and the Polish Corridor. Then, the Germans broke off diplomatic relations. Hitler had learned that the Soviet Union was willing to sign a non-aggression pact with Germany and would support an attack on Poland. Germany invaded Poland on 1 September 1939 and two days later, the United Kingdom and France declared war on Germany. World War II was underway, but Poland fell quickly, as the Soviets attacked it on 17 September. The United Kingdom proceeded to bomb Wilhelmshaven, Cuxhaven, Heligoland and other areas. Still, aside from battles at sea, no other activity occurred. Thus, the war became known as "the Phoney War".

The year 1940 began with little more than the UK dropping propaganda leaflets over Prague and Vienna but a German attack on the British High Seas fleet was followed by the British bombing the port city of Sylt. After the Altmark Incident off the coast of Norway and the discovery of the United Kingdom's plans to encircle Germany, Hitler sent troops into Denmark and Norway. This safeguarded iron ore supplies from Sweden through coastal waters. Shortly thereafter, the British and French landed in Mid- and North Norway, but the Germans de facto defeated these forces in the ensuing Norwegian Campaign. In May 1940, the Phoney War ended. Against the will of his advisors, Hitler ordered an attack on France through the Low Countries. The Battle of France ended with an overwhelming German victory. However, with the British refusing Hitler's offer of peace, the war continued. Germany and Britain continued to fight at sea and in the air. However, on 24 August, two off-course German bombers accidentally bombed London – against Hitler's orders, changing the course of the war. In response to the attack, the British bombed Berlin, which sent Hitler into a rage. The German leader ordered attacks on British cities, and the UK was bombed heavily during The Blitz. This change in targeting priority interfered with the Luftwaffe's objective of achieving the air superiority over Britain necessary for an invasion and allowed British air defenses to rebuild their strength and continue the fight.

Hitler hoped to break British morale and win peace. However, the British refused to back down; eventually, Hitler called off the Battle of Britain strategic bombing campaign in favor of the long-planned invasion of the Soviet Union: Operation Barbarossa. Germany and its allies invaded the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941. On the eve of the invasion, Hitler's former deputy, Rudolf Hess, attempted to negotiate terms of peace with the United Kingdom in an unofficial private meeting after crash-landing in Scotland. By contrast, Hitler had hoped that rapid success in the Soviet Union would bring Britain to the negotiating table.

Operation Barbarossa was supposed to begin earlier than it did; however, failed Italian ventures in North Africa and the Balkans concerned Hitler. In February 1941, the German ''Afrika Korps'' was sent to Libya to aid the Italians and hold the British Commonwealth forces from British-held Egypt. As the North African Campaign continued, in spite of orders to remain on the defensive, the ''Afrika Korps'' regained lost Italian territory, pushed the British back across the desert and advanced into Egypt. In April, the Germans launched the invasion of Yugoslavia to aid friendly forces and restore order in the midst of what was believed to be a British-supported coup. This was followed by the Battle of Greece, again to bail out the Italians, and the Battle of Crete. Because of the diversions in North Africa and the Balkans, the Germans were not able to launch Barbarossa until late in June. Moreover, men and material were diverted to create the "fortified Europe" that Hitler wanted before Germany focused its attention on the East.

Nevertheless, Barbarossa began with great success. Only Hitler worried that the German Army and its allies were not advancing into the Soviet Union fast enough. By December 1941, the Germans and their allies were at the gates of Moscow; to the north, troops had reached Leningrad and surrounded the city. Meanwhile, Germany and its allies controlled almost all of mainland Europe, with the exception of neutral Switzerland, Sweden, Spain, Portugal, Liechtenstein, Andorra, Vatican City and Monaco.

On 11 December 1941, four days after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, Nazi Germany declared war on the United States. Not only was this a chance for Germany to strengthen its ties with Japan, but after months of anti-German hysteria in the American media and Lend-Lease aid to Britain, the leaking of Rainbow Five and the foreboding content of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Pearl Harbor speech made it clear to Hitler that the US could not be kept neutral. Moreover, Germany's policy of appeasement towards the US, designed to keep the US out of the war, was a burden to Germany's war effort. Germany had refrained from attacking American convoys, even if they were bound for the United Kingdom or the Soviet Union. By contrast, after Germany declared war on the US, the German navy began unrestricted submarine warfare, using U-boats to attack ships without warning.

The goal of Germany's navy, the ''Kriegsmarine'', was to cut off Britain's supply line. Under these circumstances, one of the most famous naval battles in history took place, with the , Germany's largest and most powerful warship, attempting to break out into the Atlantic and raid supply ships heading for Britain. ''Bismarck'' was sunk – but not before sending Britain's largest warship, the battlecruiser , to the depths of the ocean. German U-boats were more successful than surface raiders like ''Bismarck''. However, Germany failed to make submarine production a top priority early on and by the time it did, the British and their allies were developing the technology and strategies to neutralize it. Furthermore, in spite of the submarines' early success in 1941 and 1942, material shortages in Britain failed to fall to their World War I levels. The Allied victory in the Battle of the Atlantic was achieved at a huge cost: between 1939 and 1945, 3,500 Allied ships were sunk (gross tonnage 14.5 million) at a cost of 783 German U-boats.

Persecution and extermination campaigns

The persecution of racial, ethnic, and social minorities and "undesirables" continued in Germany and the occupied countries. From 1941, Jews were required to wear a yellow badge in public; most were kept in walled ghettos, where they remained isolated from the general populace. In January 1942, the Wannsee Conference, headed by Reinhard Heydrich (direct subordinate of ''Reichsführer-SS'' Heinrich Himmler), redacted the plans for the "Final Solution of the Jewish Question" (''Endlösung der Judenfrage''). From then until the end of the war some six million Jews and many others, including Slavs, homosexuals and political prisoners, were systematically killed. In addition, more than ten million people were put into forced labour. In 1978, the term "Holocaust" came into general use to describe this genocide in English. It is called the ''Shoah'' in Hebrew. Thousands were shipped daily to concentration- and extermination camps.

Parallel to the Holocaust, the Nazis executed the ''Generalplan Ost'' (General Plan East) for the conquest, ethnic cleansing, and exploitation of the populaces of the captured Soviet and Polish territories; some 13.7 million Soviet civilians (including Jews & 2.0 million deaths in the annexed territories which are also included with Poland's war dead). and 2.5 million non-Jewish Polish citizens died as a result of warfare, genocide, reprisals, forced labor or famine. The Nazis' aggressive war for ''Lebensraum'' (Living space) in eastern Europe was waged “to defend Western Civilization against the Bolshevism of subhumans”. Estimates indicate that, had the Nazis won the war and established the New Order, they would have deported some 51 million Slavs from Central and Eastern Europe to western Siberia. Because of the atrocities suffered under Joseph Stalin, many Ukrainians, Balts, and other oppressed nationalities, fought for the Nazis. The populaces of Nazi-occupied Soviet Russia who racially qualified as of the Aryan race, or had no immediate Jewish ancestors, were not persecuted, and often were recruited to the ''Waffen Schutzstaffel'' (''Waffen-SS'') divisions.

Eventually, the Nazi regime meant to Germanize the racially acceptable ''volk'' (ethnic groups) of occupied eastern Europe, with the rest to be exterminated. Parts of the plan were implemented in Polish areas annexed by Nazi Germany, with the classification of Poles on the Nazi Volksliste, according to their racial characteristics. People classified as Germans who resisted were sent to concentration camps. Those who were not classified as Germans were expelled. Ethnic Germans from the Baltic states were encouraged to leave them, and were settled in Poland in the houses of the expelled Poles. These, and the Poles classified as Germans, were subjected to programs to Germanize them. Children were also abducted from Eastern Europe for Germanization.

Allied victory

In early 1942, the Red Army counter-attacked, and, by winter’s end, the ''Wehrmacht'' were no longer immediately outside Moscow. Yet the Germans and their allies held a strong line, and, in the summer, launched a major attack against the petroleum fields of the Caucasus in Southern Russia. For securing the flanks of this offensive, a line at the Volga had to be held, which led to the Battle of Stalingrad (17 July 1942 – 2 February 1943), wherein Germany and its allies were defeated. After winning a major tank battle at Kursk-Orel in July 1943, the Red Army progressed west, to Germany; henceforth, the ''Wehrmacht'' and its allies remained on the defensive.

In Libya, the ''Afrika Korps'' failed to break through the line at First Battle of El Alamein (1–27 July 1942), having suffered repercussions from the Battle of Stalingrad. Beginning in 1942, Allied bombing of Germany increased, razing, among others, the cities of Hamburg, Cologne and Dresden, killing thousands of civilians, and causing hardship for the survivors. Contemporary estimates of Nazi German military dead is 5.5 million.

In November 1942, the ''Wehrmacht'' and the Italian Army retreated to Tunisia, where they fought the Americans and the British in the Tunisia Campaign (17 November 1942 – 13 May 1943). The Allies invaded Sicily and Italy next, but met fierce resistance, particularly at Anzio (22 January 1944 – 5 June 1944) and Cassino (17 January 1944 – 18 May 1944), and the campaign continued from mid-1943 to nearly the end of the war. In June 1944, American, British and Canadian forces established the western front with the D-Day (6 June 1944) landings in Normandy, France. After the successful Operation Bagration (22 June – 19 August 1944), the Red Army was in Poland; and in East Prussia, West Prussia, and Silesia the German populaces fled ''en masse'', fearing Communist persecution, atrocity, and death. In spring of 1945, the Red Army was at Berlin; US and UK forces had conquered most of west Germany (and would go on to meet up with the Red Army at Torgau on the Elbe on 26 April 1945).

During the Battle of Berlin (16 April 1945 – 2 May 1945), Hitler and key staff members lived in the armoured, underground ''Führerbunker'' while aboveground the Red Army fought remnant forces made up of the German army, Hitler Youth, and ''Waffen-SS'', for control of the ruined capital city of Nazi Germany. In the ''Führerbunker'', Adolf Hitler, became psychologically isolated and detached. At the situation conference of 22 April, Hitler suffered a total nervous collapse when he was informed that the instructions he had issued the previous day for SS-General Felix Steiner's Army Detachment Steiner to move to the rescue of Berlin had not materialised. Hitler openly declared for the first time the war was lost and blamed the generals. Hitler announced he would stay in Berlin until the end and then shoot himself. On 23 April, as Berlin became more isolated, Hermann Göring sent Hitler an ultimatum, threatening to assume command of Nazi Germany if he received no reply—which he would interpret as Hitler being incapacitated. Upon receiving the ultimatum, the ''Führer'' ordered Göring's immediate arrest, and despatched an aeroplane delivering the reply to Göring in Bavaria. By 25 April the Red Army encirclement of Berlin was complete and secure radio communications with defending units had been lost; the command staff in the bunker were depending on telephone lines for passing orders and on public radio for news and information. Despite the losses of armies and lands, the ''Führer'' neither relinquished power, nor surrendered. On 28 April, a BBC report stated that ''Reichsführer-SS'' Heinrich Himmler had offered surrender to the western Allies. Hitler ordered Himmler's arrest and had Hermann Fegelein (Himmler's SS representative at Hitler's HQ in Berlin) shot.

Capitulation of German forces

On 30 April 1945, after intense street-to-street combat in Berlin, when Soviet troops were within a block or two of the Reich Chancellery, Hitler and Eva Braun committed suicide in his underground bunker. Two days later, on 2 May 1945, German General Helmuth Weidling unconditionally surrendered Berlin to Soviet General Vasily Chuikov.

Hitler was succeeded by Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz as Reich's President and Dr. Joseph Goebbels as Reich Chancellor. No one was to replace Hitler as the ''Führer'', a position Hitler abolished in his will. However, Goebbels committed suicide in the ''Führerbunker'' a day after assuming office. The caretaker government Dönitz established near the Danish border unsuccessfully sought a separate peace with the Western Allies. On 4–8 May 1945 most of the remaining German armed forces throughout Europe surrendered unconditionally (German Instrument of Surrender, 1945). This was the end of World War II in Europe.

The war was the largest and most destructive in human history, with 60 million dead across the world, including approximately 6 million Jews who perished during the Holocaust, 3 million Soviet prisoners of war and at least 3 million civilian non-Jewish victims of Nazi crimes. The Soviet Union lost around 27 million people during the war, about half of all World War II casualties. One in four Soviets were killed or wounded. The postwar Soviet population was 45 to 50 million smaller than it would have been if pre-war demographic growth had continued. Towards the end of the war, Europe had more than 40 million refugees, the European economy had collapsed, and 70% of the European industrial infrastructure was destroyed.

With the creation of the Allied Control Council on 5 July 1945, the four Allied powers "assume[d] supreme authority with respect to Germany" (Declaration Regarding the Defeat of Germany, U.S. Department of State, Treaties and Other International Acts Series, No. 1520).

The fall of the Third Reich

The Allies' Potsdam Conference in August 1945 created arrangements for the Allied occupation and denazification of the country, as well as war reparations involving the removal of war-related factories. All German annexations in Europe after 1937, and Germany's eastern border was shifted westwards to the Oder-Neisse line. France took temporary control of a large part of Germany's remaining Saar region. The Allies each had its zone, which lasted until 1949; Berlin was also divided four ways, and remained under Allied control until 1990.

The United Nations organized trials of Nazi leaders for war crimes and crimes against humanity. At the Nuremberg Trials, the first, major trial was the ''Trial of the Major War Criminals Before the International Military Tribunal'' (IMT), of 24 key Nazi officials—including Hermann Göring, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Rudolf Hess, Albert Speer, Karl Dönitz, Hans Frank, and Julius Streicher. Most defendants were found guilty, 12 were sentenced to execution.

The victorious Allies outlawed the Nazi Party, its subsidiary organizations, and most of its symbols and emblems especially the swastika throughout Germany and Austria; this prohibition remains in force.

The end of Nazi Germany also saw the rise in unpopularity of related aggressive manifestations of nationalism in Germany such as Pan-Germanism and the ''Völkisch'' movement which had previously been significant political ideas there, and in other parts of Europe, before World War II. Those that remain are largely fringe movements.

Geography

Administration

To consolidate Adolf Hitler’s control of Germany, in 1935, the Nazi régime de facto replaced the administration of the ''Länder'' (constituent states) with ''gaus'' (regional districts) headed by governors answerable to the central ''Reich'' government in Berlin. The reorganization politically weakened Prussia, which had historically dominated German politics. Moreover, despite having centralised and assumed the ''Gau'' governments, some Nazis still retained leadership title to the different ''Länder''; Hermann Göring was and remained the ''Reichsstatthalter'' (Reich state governor) and ''Minister President of Prussia'' until 1945, and Ludwig Siebert remained as ''Minister President of Bavaria''.

Territorial changes

In the years leading to war, in addition to the Weimar Republic proper, the ''Reich'' came to include areas with ethnic German populations, such as Austria, the Czechoslovak Sudetenland, and the Lithuanian territory of Memel (the Klaipėda Region). Regions conquered after the war's start include Eupen-Malmedy, Alsace-Lorraine, Danzig, and territories of Poland (Second Polish Republic).

From 1939 to 1945, the Third Reich ruled the ethnically-Czech parts of Czechoslovakia as the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, with its own currency; Czech Silesia was incorporated into the province of Silesia; and Luxembourg was a wartime annexation in 1940. Central Poland and Polish Galicia were governed by the German-administered General Government. Eventually, the Polish people were to be removed, and Poland proper then re-populated with 5 million Germans. By late 1943, Nazi Germany had conquered South Tyrol and Istria, which had been parts of Austria-Hungary before 1919, and seized Trieste after the (erstwhile Axis Ally) Italian Fascist government capitulated to the Allies. Two puppet-districts were set up in their place, the Operational Zone of the Adriatic Littoral and the Operational Zone of the Alpine Foothills.

Reichskommissariats

Beyond the territories incorporated into Germany were the ''Reichskommissariate'' (Reich Commissariats), quasi-colonial regimes established in a number of occupied countries and regions that were ruled by Nazi civilian administrators (Reichskommissars). Although "outside" of the Reich in a legal sense these were intended for eventual incorporation into it, most notably as sources for future Lebensraum. Nazi-occupied Soviet Russia included the ''Reichskommissariat Ostland'' (encompassing the Baltic states, eastern parts of Poland, and western parts of Belarus) and a ''Reichskommissariat Ukraine''. More such districts, the ''Reichskommissariat Moskowien'' for much of Western Russia, the ''Reichskommissariat Kaukasus'' for the Caucasus, and the ''Reichskommissariat Turkestan'' for Central Asia were also proposed in the event that they were brought under German rule.

In Northern and Western Europe, the Germans established a ''Reichskommissariat Norwegen'' (Norway), and a ''Reichskommissariat Niederlande'' (the Netherlands). In June 1944 a Franco–Belgian ''Reichskommissariat'', derived from the previous Military Administration in Belgium and Northern France was also established to "facilitate" the area's intended annexation into Germany. This subsequently happened in December 1944, when it was split into three new Reichsgaue of the Greater German Reich: Flanders, Wallonia, and Brussels. This meant little in reality however as the majority of Belgium had already been liberated by the Allied forces at this point, although the Wehrmacht did make some small gains in retaking Wallonia during the Ardennes offensive.

Adolf Hitler and other leading Nazi politicians believed that the non-German Germanic peoples of Europe, such as the Scandinavians, the Dutch, and the Flemish, were part of the "Aryan master race". Hitler stated that he wanted to undo the "unnatural division" of the Nordic race into many different countries ("''kleinstaatengerümpel''"). This was expanded on by Nazi ideologists, who made the analogy that since the union with Austria had transformed the German Reich into a Greater German Reich (''Grossdeutsches Reich''), so too would its union with the rest of historically Germanic Europe create a Greater Germanic Reich (''Grossgermanisches Reich''). The United Kingdom however was expected to be accorded a somewhat higher status, as partners in the Nazis' New Order rather than subjects. Hitler professed an admiration for the British Empire and its people as proof of Aryan superiority in Zweites Buch.

Post-war changes

The ''de facto'' borders of the ''Reich'' changed long before its vanquishment in May 1945; as the Red Army progressed westwards, the colonist German populaces fled to Germany proper, as the Western Allies advanced eastwards, from France. At war’s end, a small strip of land, from Austria to Bohemia and Moravia (and other isolated regions) was the only area not occupied by the Allies. Upon its defeat, some historians have proposed that the ''Reich'' was in debellation. France, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States, established occupation zones. The prewar German lands east of the Oder-Neisse line and Stettin, and environs (nearly 25 per cent of pre-war German territory) were under Polish and Soviet administration, sundered for Polish and Soviet annexation; the Allies expelled the German inhabitants. In 1947, the Allied Control Council disestablished Prussia with Law No. 46 (20 May 1947); per the Potsdam Conference (6 July–2 August 1945), the Prussian lands east of the Oder-Neisse Line were divided and administered by Poland and the Kaliningrad Oblast, pending the final peace treaty Later, by signing the Treaty of Warsaw (1970) and the Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany (1990), Germany renounced claims to territories lost during World War II (1939–45).

Economy

In keeping with the political syncretism of fascism, the Nazi war economy was a mixed economy of free-market and central-planning practices; historian Richard Overy reports: “The German economy fell between two stools. It was not enough of a command economy to do what the Soviet system could do; yet it was not capitalist enough to rely, as America did, on the recruitment of private enterprise.”

When the Nazis assumed German government, their most pressing economic matter was a national unemployment rate of approximately 30 per cent; at the start, Third Reich economic policies were the brainchildren of the economist Dr. Hjalmar Schacht, President of the ''Reichsbank'' (1933) and Minister of Economics (1934), who helped ''Reichskanzler'' Adolf Hitler implement Nazi redevelopment, reindustrialization, and rearmament of Germany; formerly, he had been Weimar Republic currency commissioner and ''Reichsbank'' president. Trade unions were abolished, as well as collective bargaining and the right to strike. The right to quit also disappeared: Labour books were introduced in 1935, and required the consent of the previous employer in order to be hired for another job. Nazi control of business retained a diminished investment profit-incentive, controlled with economic regulation concording a company’s functioning with the ''Reich''’s national production requirements. Government financing eventually dominated private investment; in the 1933–34 biennium, the proportion of private securities issued diminished from more than 50 per cent of the total, to approximately 10 per cent in the 1935–38 quadrennium. Heavy profit taxes limited self-financing companies, and the largest companies (usually government contractors) mostly were exempted from paying taxes on profits—in practice. Peter Temin writes that government control allowed “only the shell of private ownership” in the Third Reich economy. By contrast, Christoph Buchheim and Jonas Scherner counter that despite state control, business had much production and investment planning freedom — while the economy was still to a larger degree politically controlled it "does not necessarily mean that private property of enterprises was not of any significance [...] For despite extensive regulatory activity by an interventionist public administration, firms preserved a good deal of their autonomy even under the Nazi regime".

In 1937, Hermann Göring replaced Schacht as Minister of Economics, and introduced the Four Year Plan that would establish German self-sufficiency for war—within four years—by curtailing foreign importations; fixing wages and prices (violators merited concentration-camp internment); stock dividends were restricted to six per cent on book capital, et cetera. Strategic goals were to be achieved regardless of cost (as in Soviet economics): thus the rapid construction of synthetic-rubber factories, steel mills, automatic textile mills, et cetera.

Politics

Through staffing of most government positions with Nazi Party members, by 1935 the German national government and the Nazi Party had become virtually one and the same. By 1938, through the policy of ''Gleichschaltung'', local and state governments lost all legislative power and answered administratively to Nazi Party leaders, known as Gauleiters, who governed ''Gaue'' and ''Reichsgaue''.

Government

Nazi Germany was made up of various competing power structures, all trying to gain favor with the ''Führer'', Adolf Hitler. Thus many existing laws were stricken and replaced with interpretations of what Hitler wanted. Any high party/government official could take one of Hitler's comments and turn it into a new law, of which Hitler would casually either approve or disapprove. This became known as "working towards the ''Führer''", as the government was not a coordinated, co-operating body, but a collection of individuals each trying to gain more power and influence through the Führer. This often made government very convoluted and divided, especially with Hitler's vague policy of creating similar posts with overlapping powers and authority. The process allowed the more unscrupulous and ambitious Nazis to get away with implementing the more radical and extreme elements of Hitler's ideology, such as anti-Semitism, and in doing so win political favor. Protected by Goebbels' extremely effective propaganda machine, which portrayed the government as a dedicated, dutiful and efficient outfit, the dog-eat-dog competition and chaotic legislation was allowed to escalate. Historical opinion is divided between "intentionalists", who believe that Hitler created this system as the only means of ensuring both the total loyalty and dedication of his supporters and the impossibility of a conspiracy; and "structuralists", who believe that the system evolved by itself and was a limitation on Hitler's supposedly totalitarian power.

Executive Cabinets

Cabinet Hitler

Cabinet Schwerin von Krosigk

National authorities

Office of the Reich Chancellery (Hans Lammers)

Office of the Party Chancellery (Martin Bormann)

Office of the Presidential Chancellery (Otto Meißner)

Privy Cabinet Council (Konstantin von Neurath)

Chancellery of the Führer (Philip Bouhler)

Reich offices

Office of the Four-Year Plan (Hermann Göring)

Office of the Reich Master Forester (Hermann Göring)

Office of the Inspector for Highways

Office of the President of the Reich Bank

Reich Main Security Office (Reinhard Heydrich)

Reich Youth Office

Reich Treasury Office

General Inspector of the Reich Capital

Office of the Councilor for the Capital of the Movement (Munich, Bavaria)

NSDAP offices

NSDAP Office of Racial Policy

NSDAP Office of Colonial Policy

NSDAP Office of Foreign Affairs

Amt Rosenberg

Reich ministries

Reich Foreign Ministry (Joachim von Ribbentrop)

Reich Interior Ministry (Wilhelm Frick, Heinrich Himmler)

Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda (Joseph Goebbels)

Reich Ministry of Aviation (Hermann Göring)

Reich Ministry of Finance (Lutz Schwerin von Krosigk)

Reich Ministry of Justice (Franz Gürtner, Otto Thierack)

Reich Economics Ministry (Alfred Hugenberg, Kurt Schmitt, Hjalmar Schacht, Hermann Göring, Walther Funk)

Reich Ministry for Nutrition and Agriculture (Richard Walther Darré, Herbert Backe)

Reich Labour Ministry (Franz Seldte)

Reich Ministry for Science, Education, and Public Instruction (Bernhard Rust)

Reich Ministry for Ecclesiastical Affairs (Hanns Kerrl)

Reich Transportation Ministry (Julius Dorpmüller)

Reich Postal Ministry (Wilhelm Ohnesorge)

Reich Ministry for Weapons, Munitions, and Armament (Fritz Todt, Albert Speer)

Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories (Alfred Rosenberg)

Reich Ministers without Portfolio (Konstantin von Neurath, Hans Frank, Hjalmar Schacht, Arthur Seyss-Inquart)

State ideology

National Socialism had some of the key ideological elements of fascism which originally developed in Italy under Benito Mussolini; however, the Nazis never officially declared themselves fascists. Both ideologies involved the political use of militarism, nationalism, anti-communism and paramilitary forces, and both intended to create a dictatorial state. The Nazis, however, were far more racially oriented than the fascists in Italy, Portugal, and Spain. The Nazis were also intent on creating a completely totalitarian state, unlike Italian fascists who while promoting a totalitarian state, allowed a larger degree of private liberties for their citizens. These differences allowed the Italian monarchy to continue to exist and have some official powers. However the Nazis copied much of their symbolism from the Fascists in Italy, such as copying the Roman salute as the Nazi salute, use of mass rallies, both made use of uniformed paramilitaries devoted to the party (the SA in Germany and the Blackshirts in Italy), both Hitler and Mussolini were called the "Leader" (''Führer'' in German, ''Duce'' in Italian), both were anti-Communist, both wanted an ideologically driven state, and both advocated a middle-way between capitalism and communism, commonly known as corporatism. The party itself rejected the fascist label, claiming National Socialism was an ideology unique to Germany.

The totalitarian nature of the Nazi party was one of its principal tenets. The Nazis contended that all the great achievements in the past of the German nation and its people were associated with the ideals of National Socialism, even before the ideology officially existed. Propaganda accredited the consolidation of Nazi ideals and successes of the regime to the regime's ''Führer'' ("Leader"), Adolf Hitler, who was portrayed as the genius behind the Nazi party's success and Germany's saviour.

To secure their ability to create a totalitarian state, the Nazi party's paramilitary force, the ''Sturmabteilung'' (SA) or "Storm Detachment" used acts of violence against leftists, communists, democrats, Jews and other opposition or minority groups. The SA "storm troopers" violently clashed with the Communist Party of Germany (''German Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands'' – KPD) which created a climate of lawlessness and fear. In the cities, people were anxious over punishment or even death, if they displayed opposition to the Nazis. Given the frustrations of the people (after World War I and during the Great Depression) it was easy for the SA to attract large numbers of alienated (and unemployed) youth and working class people for the party.

The "German problem", as it is often referred to in English scholarship, focuses on the issue of administration of Germanic regions in Northern and Central Europe, an important theme throughout German history. The "logic" of keeping Germany small worked in the favor of its principal economic rivals, and had been a driving force in the recreation of a Polish state. The goal was to create numerous counterweights in order to "balance out Germany's power".

The Nazis endorsed the concept of ''Großdeutschland'', or Greater Germany, and believed that the incorporation of the Germanic people into one nation was a vital step towards their national success. It was the Nazis' passionate support of the Volk concept of Greater Germany that led to Germany's expansion, that gave legitimacy and the support needed for the Third Reich to proceed to conquer long-lost territories with overwhelmingly non-German population like former Prussian gains in Poland that it lost to Russia in the 19th century, or to acquire territories with German population like parts of Austria. The German concept of ''Lebensraum'' ("living space") or more specifically its need for an expanding German population was also claimed by the Nazi regime for territorial expansion.

Two important issues were administration of the Polish corridor and Danzig's incorporation into the Reich. As a further extension of racial policy, the ''Lebensraum'' program pertained to similar interests; the Nazis determined that Eastern Europe would be settled with ethnic Germans, and the Slavic population who met the Nazi racial standard would be absorbed into the Reich. Those not fitting the racial standard were to be used as cheap labour force or deported eastward.

Racialism and racism were important aspects of society within the Third Reich. The Nazis combined anti-Semitism with anti-Communist ideology, regarding the leftist-internationalist movement—as well as international market capitalism—as the work of "Conspiratorial Jewry". They referred to this so-called movement with terminology such as the "Jewish-Bolshevistic revolution of subhumans". This platform manifested itself in the displacement, internment, and systematic extermination of an estimated 11 million to 12 million people in the midst of World War II, roughly half of them being Jews targeted in what is historically remembered as the Holocaust (''Shoah''), 3 million ethnic Poles that died as a result of warfare, genocide, reprisals, forced labor or famine, and another 100,000–1,000,000 being Roma, who were murdered in the Porajmos. Other victims of Nazi persecution included communists, various political opponents, social outcasts, homosexuals, freethinkers, religious dissidents such as Jehovah's Witnesses, Christadelphians, the Confessing Church and Freemasons.

Foreign relations

Foreign relations between Germany and the rest of Europe were riddled with political maneuvers and opportunistic decisions. Fearing a second world war, Britain and France sought a policy of appeasement towards Germany, and refused aggressive foreign policies to satisfy the newly empowered Nazis. Hitler aims upon coming to power was threefold; destroy Versailles, re-unite lost German territories under the decrees of Versailles, and ''Lebensraum''. It is said that Hitler wanted Britain as an ally with wars with the USSR, and eventually the USA. Hitler used the Appeasement policies of Britain and France to his opportunistic advantage when he announced in March 1935 that he would conscript men into his army and create the ''Luftwaffe''; both a direct violation of Versailles. His foreign policies were designed to test the nerve of Britain and France so he could see what else he was able to get away with. His other concern was Italy, whom under Mussolini had become a similarly fascist country, but had so much internal civil disruption Hitler wanted a more stable and powerful ally.

Although Germany's relations with Italy improved with creation of the Rome-Berlin Axis, tensions remained high because the Nazis wanted Austria to be incorporated into Germany. Italy was opposed to this, as were France and Britain. In 1938, an Austrian-led Nazi coup took place in Austria and Germany sent in its troops, annexing the country. Italy and Britain no longer had common interests and, as Germany had stopped supporting the German speaking population under Italy's control in South Tyrol, Italy began to gravitate towards Germany.

Germany's annexation of the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia in September 1938 came about during talks with British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, in which Hitler, backed by Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, demanded that the German territories be ceded. Chamberlain and Hitler came to an agreement when Hitler signed a piece of paper which said that with the annexation of the Sudetenland, Germany would proceed with no further territorial aims. Chamberlain took this to be a success in that it avoided a potential war with Germany. However, the Nazis helped to promote Slovakian dissention and declaring that the country was no more, seized control of the Czech part.

For quite some time, Germany had engaged in informal negotiations with Poland regarding the issue of territorial revision, but after the Munich Agreement and the reacquisition of Memel, the Nazis became increasingly vocal. Poland refused to allow the annexation of the Free City of Danzig.

Germany and the Soviet Union began talks over planning an invasion of Poland. In August 1939, the Molotov Pact was signed and Germany and the Soviet Union agreed to divide Poland along a mutually agreed set boundary. The invasion was put into effect on 1 September 1939. Last-minute Polish-German diplomatic proceedings failed, and Germany invaded Poland as scheduled. Germany alleged that Polish operatives had attacked German positions, but the result was the outbreak of World War II, as Allied forces refused to accept Germany's claims on Poland and blamed Germany for the conflict.

From 1939-1940, the so-called "Phoney War" occurred, as German forces made no further advances but instead, both the Axis and Allies engaged in a propaganda campaign. However in early 1940, Germany began to concern that the British intended to stop trade between Sweden and Germany by bringing Norway into an alliance against Germany, with Norway in Allied hands, the Allies would be dangerously close to German territory. In response, Germany invaded Denmark and Norway ending the Phoney War (leapfrogging the British invasion troops bound towards Norway by just 24 hours). After sweeping through the Low Countries and occupying northern France, Germany allowed French nationalist and war hero Philippe Petain to form a fascist regime in southern France known as the "French State" but more commonly referred to as Vichy France named after its capital in Vichy.

On October 23, 1940 Adolf Hitler and Francisco Franco, the dictator of Spain, met in Hendaye to discuss Spain entering the war. Franco asked too much from Hitler. Even though Spain would remain neutral during World War II Spain and Nazi Germany would remain allies during the war. Spain would send Volunteer soldiers to fight for Germany but only against the Soviet Union. Spain was subsequently isolated following the war until re-aligning towards economic liberalism and a pro-Western foreign policy in the 1950s.

In 1941, Germany's invasion of Yugoslavia resulted in that state's splintering. In spite of Hitler's earlier view of inferiority of all Slavs, he supported Mussolini's agenda of creating a fascist puppet state of Croatia, called the Independent State of Croatia. Croatia was led by the extreme nationalist Ante Pavelić a long-time Croatian exile in Rome, whose Ustashe movement formed a government in modern-day Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina. The Ustashe were allowed to persecute Serbs, while Germany contributed to that goal in German-occupied Serbia.

From 1941 to the end of the war, Germany engaged in war with the Soviet Union in its attempt to create the Nazi colonial goal of ''Lebensraum'' "living space" for German citizens. The German occupation authorities set up occupation and colonial authorities called ''Reichskommissariats'' such as ''Reichskommissariat Ostland'' and ''Reichskommissariat Ukraine''. The Slavic populations were to be destroyed along with Jews there to make way for German colonists.

As the fortunes of war changed, Germany was forced to occupy Italy when Mussolini was thrown out as Prime Minister by Italy's king in 1943. German forces rescued Mussolini and instructed him to establish a fascist regime in Italy called the Italian Social Republic. This was the last major foreign policy delivered. The remainder of the war saw the decline of German power and desperate attempts by Nazi officials such as Heinrich Himmler to negotiate a peace with the western Allies against the wishes of Hitler.

Law

Most of the judicial structures and legal codes of the Weimar Republic remained in use during the Third Reich, but significant changes within the judicial codes occurred, as well as significant changes in court rulings. The Nazi party was the only legal political party in Germany; all other political parties were banned. Most human rights of the constitution of the Weimar Republic were disabled by several ''Reichsgesetze'' ("Reich's laws"). Several minorities such as the Jews, opposition politicians and prisoners of war were deprived of most of their rights and responsibilities. The Plan to pass a ''Volksstrafgesetzbuch'' ("people's code of criminal justice") arose soon after 1933, but didn't come into reality until the end of World War II.

As a new type of court, the ''Volksgerichtshof'' ("people's court") was established in 1934, only dealing with cases of political importance. From 1934-September 1944, a total of 5,375 death sentences were spoken by the court. Not included in this numbers are the death sentences from 20 July 1944-April 1945, which are estimated at 2,000. Its most prominent jurist was Roland Freisler, who headed the court from August 1942-February 1945.

Military

The military of the Third Reich – the Wehrmacht – was the name of the unified armed forces of Germany from 1935-1945 with ''Heer'' (Army), ''Kriegsmarine'' (Navy), ''Luftwaffe'' (Air Force) and a military organization ''Waffen-SS'' (military branch of the ''Schutzstaffel'', which was, de facto, a fourth branch of the ''Wehrmacht'').

The German Army furthered concepts pioneered during World War I, combining Ground and Air Force assets into combined arms teams. Coupled with traditional war fighting methods such as encirclements and the "battle of annihilation", the German military managed many lightning quick victories in the first year of World War II, prompting foreign journalists to create a new word for what they witnessed: ''Blitzkrieg''. The total number of soldiers who served in the ''Wehrmacht'' during its existence from 1935-1945 is believed to approach 18.2 million.

Racial policy

The effects of Nazi social policy in Germany was divided between those considered to be "Aryan" and those considered "non-Aryan", Jewish, or part of other minority groups. For "Aryan" Germans, a number of social policies put through by the regime to benefit them were advanced for the time, including state opposition to the use of tobacco, an end to official stigmatization toward Aryan children who were born from parents outside of marriage, as well as giving financial assistance to Aryan German families who bore children.

The Nazi Party pursued its racial and social policies through persecution and killing of those considered social undesirables or "enemies of the Reich". Especially targeted were minority groups such as Jews, Romani (also known as Gypsies), Jehovah's Witnesses, people with mental or physical disabilities and homosexuals.

In the 1930s, plans to isolate and eventually eliminate Jews completely in Germany began with the construction of ghettos, concentration camps, and labour camps which began with the 1933 construction of the Dachau concentration camp, which Heinrich Himmler officially described as "the first concentration camp for political prisoners."

In the years following the Nazi rise to power, many Jews were encouraged to leave the country and did so. By the time the Nuremberg Laws were passed in 1935, Jews were stripped of their German citizenship and denied government employment. Most Jews employed by Germans lost their jobs at this time, which were being taken by unemployed Germans. Notably, the government attempted to send 17,000 German Jews of Polish descent back to Poland, a decision which led to the assassination of Ernst vom Rath by Herschel Grynszpan, a German Jew living in France. This provided the pretext for a pogrom the Nazi Party incited against the Jews on 9 November 1938, which specifically targeted Jewish businesses. The event was called ''Kristallnacht'' (Night of Broken Glass, literally "Crystal Night"); the euphemism was used because the numerous broken windows made the streets look as if covered with crystals. By September 1939, more than 200,000 Jews had left Germany, with the government seizing any property they left behind.

The Nazis also undertook programs targeting "weak" or "unfit" people, such as the T-4 Euthanasia Program, killing tens of thousands of disabled and sick Germans in an effort to "maintain the purity of the German Master race" (German: ''Herrenvolk'') as described by Nazi propagandists. The techniques of mass killing developed in these efforts would later be used in the Holocaust. Under a law passed in 1933, the Nazi regime carried out the compulsory sterilization of over 400,000 individuals labeled as having hereditary defects, ranging from mental illness to alcoholism.

Another component of the Nazi programme of creating racial purity was the ''Lebensborn'', or "Fountain of Life" programme founded in 1935. The programme was aimed at encouraging German soldiers—mainly SS—to reproduce. This included offering SS families support services (including the adoption of racially pure children into suitable SS families) and accommodating racially valuable women, pregnant with mainly SS men's children, in care homes in Germany and throughout Occupied Europe. ''Lebensborn'' also expanded to encompass the placing of racially pure children forcibly seized from occupied countries—such as Poland—with German families.

In 1941 it was decided to destroy the Polish nation completely and the German leadership decided that in 10 to 20 years the Polish state under German occupation was to be fully cleared of any ethnic Poles and settled by German colonists. The Nazis considered Jews, Romani people, Poles along with other Slavic people like the Russians, Ukrainians, Czechs and anyone else who was not an "Aryan" according to the contemporary Nazi race terminology to be ''Untermenschen'' ("subhumans"). The Nazis rationalized that the (Aryan) Germans had a biological right to displace, eliminate and enslave inferiors. After the war, under the "Big Plan", ''Generalplan Ost'' foresaw the deportation of 45 million non-Germanizable people from Eastern Europe, 85% of Poles, Belorussians (75%) and Ukrainians (65%), to West Siberia, and about 14 millions were to remain, but were to be treated as slaves. In their place, Germans would be settled in an extended ''"living space"'' of the ''1000-Year Empire''.

Herbert Backe was one of the orchestrators of the Hunger Plan - the plan to starve tens of millions of Slavs in order to ensure steady food supplies for the German people and troops. In the longer term, the Nazis wanted to exterminate some 30–45 million Slavs. According to Michael Dorland, "As Yale historian Timothy Snyder reminds us, had the Nazis succeeded in their war on Russia, the implementation of two further dimensions of the Holocaust, the ''Hunger Plan'' and ''Generalplan Ost'', would have led to the elimination through starvation of an additional 80 million people in Belarus, northern Russia and the USSR."

At the outset of World War II, the German authority in the General Government in occupied Poland ordered that all Jews face compulsory labour and that those who were physically incapable such as women and children were to be confined to ghettos.

To the Nazis, a number of ideas appeared on how to answer the "Jewish Question". One method was a mass forced deportation of Jews. Adolf Eichmann suggested that Jews be forced to emigrate to Palestine. Franz Rademacher made the proposal that Jews be deported to Madagascar; this proposal was supported by Himmler and was discussed by Hitler and Italian dictator Benito Mussolini but was later dismissed as impractical in 1942. The idea of continuing deportations to occupied Poland was rejected by the governor, Hans Frank, of the General Government of occupied Poland as Frank refused to accept any more deportations of Jews to the territory which already had large numbers of Jews. In 1942, at the Wannsee Conference, Nazi officials decided to eliminate the Jews altogether, as discussed the "Final Solution of the Jewish Question". Concentration camps like Auschwitz were converted and used gas chambers to kill as many Jews as possible. By 1945, a number of concentration camps had been liberated by Allied forces and they found the survivors to be severely malnourished. The Allies also found evidence that the Nazis were profiteering from the mass murder of Jews not only by confiscating their property and personal valuables but also by extracting gold fillings from the bodies of some Jews held in concentration camps.

Social Policy

Education

Education under the Nazi regime focused on racial biology, population policy, culture, geography and especially physical fitness. Military education (''Wehrerziehung'') became the central component of physical education; the historical mission of Germany and the study of its “great men” were the primary subject of history classes; and science textbooks presented natural selection in terms meant to underline the concept of racial purity.

Anti-Semitic policy led to the expulsion of Jewish teachers and professors and officials from the education system. Likewise, politically undesirable teachers, such as socialists, were expelled as part of the “Law for the Restoration of the Civil Service” (''Gesetz zur Wiederherstellung des Berufbeamtentums''). The success of this policy is reflected in the membership of the National Socialist Teachers' Association (''Nationalsozialistischer Lehrerbund'' , NSLB), which by 1937 claimed 97% of all teachers as members. All university professors were required to be a member of the National Socialist Association of University Lecturers in order to be able to be employed as professors.

While the official line mandated that all vestiges of liberal education be discarded, the teaching methods promoted under National Socialism were experiential and active in their orientation. This was largely an extension of the anti-intellectual attitude of the Nazi leadership, however, and not primarily an attempt to experiment with new didactic methods. As Henrich Hansen, the head of the NS-Teachers' Association, put it: :"The youth of Germany will no longer be 'objectively' posed with the choice between an upbringing that is materialistic or idealistic, ethnic [''völkish''] or international, religious or godless, rather it will be consciously formed according to principles that have shown themselves to be true: the principles of the national socialist worldview.

In seeking a way to make education less abstract, less intellectual and less distant from children, educators called for a much-expanded role for film. Reichsfilmintendant and Head of the Film Section in the Propaganda Ministry Fritz Hippler wrote that film affects people “primarily on the optical and emotional, that is to say, non-intellectual” level,. Film also appealed to the Nazi leadership as a medium through which they could speak directly to children without the mediation of teachers. Dr. Bernhard Rust saw film as an essential tool, saying "The National Socialist State definitely and deliberately makes the film the transmitter of its ideology."

Social welfare

Recent research by academics such as Götz Aly has emphasized the role of the extensive Nazi social welfare programs that focused on providing employment for German citizens and insuring a minimal living standard for German citizens. Heavily focused on was the idea of a national German community or ''Volksgemeinschaft''.

To aid the fostering of a feeling of community, the German people's labour and entertainment experiences—from festivals, to vacation trips and traveling cinemas—were all made a part of the "Strength through Joy" (''Kraft durch Freude'', KdF) program. Also crucial to the building of loyalty and comradeship was the implementation of the National Labour Service and the Hitler Youth Organization, with compulsory membership. In addition to this, a number of architectural projects were undertaken. KdF created the ''KdF-wagen'', later known as the ''Volkswagen'' ("People's Car"), which was designed to be an automobile that every German citizen would be able to afford. With the outbreak of World War II the car was converted into a military vehicle and civilian production was stopped. Another national project undertaken was the construction of the Autobahn, which made it the first freeway system in the world.

The Winter Relief campaigns not only collected charity for the unfortunate, but acted as a ritual to generate public feeling. As part of the centralization of Nazi Germany, posters urged people to donate rather to give directly to beggars.

Health

According to the research of Robert N. Proctor for his book ''The Nazi War on Cancer'', Nazi Germany had arguably the most powerful anti-tobacco movement in the world. Anti-tobacco research received a strong backing from the government, and German scientists proved that cigarette smoke could cause cancer. German pioneering research on experimental epidemiology led to the 1939 paper by Franz H. Müller, and the 1943 paper by Eberhard Schairer and Erich Schöniger which convincingly demonstrated that tobacco smoking was a main culprit in lung cancer. The government urged German doctors to counsel patients against tobacco use.

German research on the dangers of tobacco was silenced after the war, and the dangers of tobacco had to be rediscovered by American and English scientists in the early 1950s, with a medical consensus arising in the early 1960s. German scientists also proved that asbestos was a health hazard, and in 1943—as the first nation in the world to offer such a benefit—Germany recognized the diseases caused by asbestos, e.g., lung cancer, as occupational illnesses eligible for compensation. The German asbestos-cancer research was later used by American lawyers doing battle against the Johns-Manville Corporation.

As part of the general public-health campaign in Nazi Germany, water supplies were cleaned up, lead and mercury were removed from consumer products, and women were urged to undergo regular screenings for breast cancer.

The Nazi health care system also held as a central idea the concept of Eugenics. Certain people were deemed 'genetically inferior' and were targeted for elimination from the gene pool through sterilization (Hereditary Health Courts) or wholesale murder (Action T4). Medical information professionals used new processes and technology, like punch card systems, and cost analysis, to aid in the process and calculate the 'benefit' to society of these killings.

Women's rights

Women in the Third Reich were a cornerstone of Nazi social policy, however, this meant a sharp curtailment of women's rights. The Nazis opposed the feminist movement, claiming that it had a left-wing agenda (comparable to Communism) and was bad for both women and men. The Nazi regime advocated a patriarchal society in which German women would recognize the "world is her husband, her family, her children, and her home." Hitler claimed that women taking vital jobs away from men during the Great Depression was economically bad for families in that women were paid only 66 percent of what men earned. Simultaneously with calling for women to leave work outside the home, the regime called for women to be actively supportive of the state regarding women's affairs. In 1933, Hitler appointed Gertrud Scholtz-Klink as the Reich Women's Leader, who instructed women that their primary role in society was to bear children and that women should be subservient to men, once saying "the mission of woman is to minister in the home and in her profession to the needs of life from the first to last moment of man's existence.". The expectation even applied to Aryan women married to Jewish men—a necessary ingredient in the 1943 Rosenstrasse protest in which 1800 German women (joined by 4200 relatives) obliged the Nazi state to release their Jewish husbands. This position was so strongly held as to make it extremely difficult to recruit women for war jobs during World War II.

The Nazi regime discouraged women from seeking higher education in secondary schools, universities and colleges. The number of women allowed to enroll in universities dropped drastically under the Nazi regime, which shrank from approximately 128,000 women being enrolled in 1933 to 51,000 in 1938. Female enrollment in secondary schools dropped from 437,000 in 1926 to 205,000 in 1937. However with the requirement of men to be enlisted into the German armed forces during the war, women made up half of the enrollment in the education system by 1944.

On the other hand, the women were expected to be strong, healthy, and vital; a photograph subtitled "Future Mothers" showed teenage girls dressed for sport and bearing javelins. A sturdy peasant woman, who worked the land and bore strong children, was an ideal, contributing to praise for athletic women tanned by outdoor work.

Organizations were made for the indoctrination of Nazi values to German women. Such organizations included the ''Jungmädel'' ("Young Girls") section of the Hitler Youth for girls from the age 10 to 14, the ''Bund Deutscher Mädel'' (BDM, "German Girls' League") for young women from 14 to 18, and the NS-Frauenschaft, a woman's organization.

The NS-Frauenschaft put out the ''NS-Frauen-Warte'', the only approved women's magazine in Nazi Germany. Despite its propaganda aspects, it was predominantly a woman's magazine, even including sewing patterns.

The BDM's activities encompassed physical education, including running, the long jump, somersaulting, tightrope walking, rout-marching, and swimming. ''Das deutsche Mädel'' was less adventure-oriented than the boy's ''Der Pimpf'', but far more emphasis was laid on strong and active German women than in ''NS-Frauen-Warte''. Also, before entering any occupation or advanced studies, the girls, like the boys in Hitler Youth, had to complete a year of land service.

Despite the somewhat official restrictions, some women forged highly visible, as well as officially praised, achievements, such as the aviatrix Hanna Reitsch and film director Leni Riefenstahl.

On the issue of sexual affairs regarding women, the Nazis differed greatly from the restrictive stances on women's role in society. The Nazi regime promoted a liberal code of conduct as regards sexual matters, and were sympathetic to women bearing children out of wedlock. The collapse of 19th century morals in Germany accelerated during the Third Reich, partly due to the Nazis, and greatly due to the effects of the war. Promiscuity increased greatly as the war progressed, with unmarried soldiers often involved intimately with several women simultaneously. Married women were often involved in multiple affairs simultaneously, with soldiers, civilians or slave labourers. "Some farm wives in Württemberg had already begun using sex as a commodity, employing carnal favours as a means of getting a full day's work from foreign labourers." Nevertheless, publically, Nazi propaganda opposed adultery and upheld the sancticity of marriage. Several films shot in this era altered their source material so that the woman, rather than the man, would suffer death for sexual transgressions, reflecting whose fault it was held to be. When attempts were made to destigmatize illegitimate births, Lebensborn homes were presented the public as for married women. Overtly anti-marriage statements, such as Himmler's statements regarding the care of the illegimate children of dead soldiers, were greeted with protests.

An example of the way in which Nazi doctrines differed from practice is that, whilst sexual relationships among campers was explicitly forbidden, boys' and girls' camps of the ''Hitlerjugend'' associations were needlessly placed close together as if to make it happen. Pregnancy (including repercussions on established marriages) often resulted when fetching members of the ''Bund Deutscher Mädel'' were assigned to duties which juxtaposed them with tempted men. Ilsa McKee noted that the lectures of Hitler Youth and the BDM on the need to produce more children produced several illegitimate children, which neither the mothers nor the possible fathers regarded as problematic.

Marriage or sexual relations between a person considered “Aryan” and one that was not were classified as Rassenschande were forbidden and under penalty (people found guilty could face incarceration in a concentration camp, while non-Aryans could face the death penalty). Pamphlets enjoined all German women to avoid sexual intercourse with all foreign workers brought to Germany as a danger to their blood.

Abortion was heavily penalized in Nazi Germany unless on the grounds of "racial health"; from 1943 abortionists faced the death penalty. Display of contraceptives was not allowed and Hitler himself described contraception as "violation of nature, as degradation of womanhood, motherhood and love."

Environmentalism

In 1935, the regime enacted the "Reich Nature Protection Act". While not a purely Nazi piece of legislation, as parts of its influences pre-dated the Nazi rise to power, it nevertheless reflected Nazi ideology. The concept of the ''Dauerwald'' (best translated as the "perpetual forest") which included concepts such as forest management and protection was promoted and efforts were also made to curb air pollution.

In practice, the enacted laws and policies met resistance from various ministries that sought to undermine them, and from the priority that the war-effort took to environmental protection.

Animal protection policy

The Nazis had elements which were supportive of animal rights, zoos and wildlife, and took several measures to ensure their protection. In 1933 the government enacted a stringent animal-protection law. Many NSDAP leaders including Adolf Hitler and Hermann Göring were supporters of animal protection. Several Nazis were environmentalists (notably Rudolf Hess), and species protection and animal welfare were significant issues in the regime. Heinrich Himmler made efforts to ban the hunting of animals. Göring was an animal lover and conservationist. The current animal welfare laws in Germany are more or less modification of the laws introduced by the National Socialist regime.

Although enacting various laws for animal protection, there was a lack of enforcement. According to ''Pfugers Archiv für die Gesamte Physiologie'' (Pfugers Archive for the Total Physiology), a science journal at that time, there were many animal experiments during the Nazi regime. The Nazi regime disbanded several unofficial organizations advocating environmentalism and animal protection, such as the ''Friends of Nature''.

Culture

The regime sought to restore traditional values in German culture. The art and culture that came to define the Weimar Republic years was repressed. The visual arts were strictly monitored and traditional, focusing on exemplifying Germanic themes, racial purity, militarism, heroism, power, strength, and obedience. Modern abstract art and avant-garde art was removed from museums and put on special display as "degenerate art", where it was to be ridiculed. In one notable example, on 31 March 1937, huge crowds stood in line to view a special display of "degenerate art" in Munich. Art forms considered to be degenerate included Dada, Cubism, Expressionism, Fauvism, Impressionism, New Objectivity, and Surrealism. Literature written by Jewish, other non-Aryans, homosexual or authors opposed to the Nazis was destroyed by the regime. The most infamous destruction of literature was the book burnings by German students in 1933.

Despite the official attempt to forge a pure Germanic culture, one major area of the arts, architecture, under Hitler's personal guidance, was neoclassical, a style based on architecture of ancient Rome. This style stood out in stark contrast and opposition to newer, more liberal, and more popular architecture styles of the time such as Art Deco. Various Roman buildings were examined by state architect Albert Speer for architectural designs for state buildings. Speer constructed huge and imposing structures such as in the Nazi party rally grounds in Nuremberg and the new Reich Chancellery building in Berlin. One design that was pursued, but never built, was a gigantic version of the Pantheon in Rome, called the ''Volkshalle'' to be the semi-religious centre of Nazism in a renamed Berlin called ''Germania'', which was to be the "world capital" (''Welthauptstadt''). Also to be constructed was a Triumphal arch, several times larger than that found in Paris, which was also based upon a classical styling. Many of the designs for Germania were impractical to construct because of their size and the marshy soil underneath Berlin; later the materials that were to be used for construction were diverted to the war effort.

Cinema and media

The majority of German films of the period were intended principally as works of entertainment. The import of foreign films was legally restricted after 1936, and the German industry, which was effectively nationalised in 1937, had to make up for the missing foreign films (above all American productions). Entertainment also became increasingly important in the later years of World War II when the cinema provided a distraction from Allied bombing and a string of German defeats. In both 1943 and 1944 cinema admissions in Germany exceeded a billion, and the biggest box office hits of the war years were ''Die große Liebe'' (1942) and ''Wunschkonzert'' (1941), which both combine elements of the musical, wartime romance and patriotic propaganda, ''Frauen sind doch bessere Diplomaten'' (1941), a comic musical which was one of the earliest German films in colour, and ''Wiener Blut'' (1942), the adaptation of a Johann Strauß comic operetta. The importance of the cinema as a tool of the state, both for its propaganda value and its ability to keep the populace entertained, can be seen in the filming history of Veit Harlan's ''Kolberg'' (1945), the most expensive film of the era, for the shooting of which tens of thousands of soldiers were diverted from their military positions to appear as extras.

Despite the emigration of many film-makers and the political restrictions, the German film industry was not without technical and aesthetic innovations, the introduction of Agfacolor film production being a notable example. Technical and aesthetic achievement could also be turned to the specific ends of the Greater German Reich, most spectacularly in the work of Leni Riefenstahl. Riefenstahl's ''Triumph of the Will'' (1935), documenting the Nuremberg Rally (1934), and ''Olympia'' (1938), documenting the 1936 Summer Olympics, pioneered techniques of camera movement and editing that have influenced many later films. Both films, particularly ''Triumph of the Will'', remain highly controversial, as their aesthetic merit is inseparable from their propagandizing of Nationalsocialism ideals. Irreplacable artists deemed fitting the National socialist ideals such as Marika Rokk and Johannes Heesters where placed on the Gottbegnadeten list by Joseph Goebbels during the war.

Religion

Sports

Established in 1934, the Nationalsozialistischer Reichsbund für Leibesübungen (NSRL), (sometimes also known under the acronym NSRBL) was the umbrella organization for sports during the Third Reich.

Two major displays of Nazi German art and culture were at the 1936 Summer Olympics and at the German pavilion at the 1937 International Exposition in Paris. The 1936 Olympics was meant to display to the world the Aryan superiority of Germany to other nations. German athletes were carefully chosen not only for strength but for Aryan appearance.

See also

Collaboration with the Axis Powers during World War II

German resistance

Glossary of German military terms

Glossary of Nazi Germany

List of Nazi Party leaders and officials

Nazi architecture

Nazi rule over the Danube River

Nazi songs

Orders, decorations, and medals of Nazi Germany

Sino-German cooperation (1911–1941)

Vergangenheitsbewältigung

Women in the Third Reich

References

Further reading

Surveys and reference

Karl Dietrich Bracher. ''The German Dictatorship; The Origins, Structure, and Effects of National Socialism''; New York, Praeger 1970.

Michael Burleigh. ''The Third Reich: A New History'', 2002. ISBN 0-8090-9326-X. Standard scholarly history, 1918–1945.

Richard J. Evans. ''The Coming of the Third Reich''. ISBN 0-14-100975-6, standard scholarly history; ''The Third Reich in Power'' 2005 ISBN 1-59420-074-2; ''The Third Reich at war 1939-1945'' (2009)

Ian Kershaw. ''The Nazi Dictatorship: Problems and Perspectives of Interpretation'', 4th ed. London: Arnold, 2000. ISBN 0-340-76028-1

Christian Leitz, ed. ''The Third Reich: The Essential Readings''. Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishers, 1999. ISBN 0-631-20700-7.

Mommsen, Hans. ''The Third Reich between Vision and Reality: New Perspectives on German History, 1918-1945'' (2001) online edition

Overy, Richard. ''The Dictators: Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia'' (2004)

Roderick, Stacke. ''Hitler's Germany: Origins, Interpretations, Legacies'' (1999)

Scheck, Raffael. “Lecture Notes, Germany and Europe, 1871-1945” (2008) full text online, a brief textbook by a leading scholar

William L. Shirer. ''The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich''. ISBN 0-671-72868-7

Zentner, Christian and Bedürftig, Friedemann, eds. ''The Encyclopedia of the Third Reich.'' 2 vol. Macmillan, 1991. 1120 pp.

Economics

Overy, R. J. ''The Nazi Economic Recovery 1932-1938'' (1996)

Adam Tooze. ''The Wages of Destruction: The Making and the Breaking of the Nazi Economy''. New York: Viking, 2006. ISBN 978-0-670-03826-8.

Henry Ashby Turner. ''German Big Business and the Rise of Hitler''. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. ISBN 0-19-503492-9.

Alfred Sohn-Rethel. ''Economy and Class Structure of German Fascism''. London, CSE Bks, 1978. ISBN 0-906336-00-7

Hitler

Bullock, Alan. ''Hitler: A Study in Tyranny, '' (1962) online edition

Geary, Dick. ''Hitler and Nazism,'' (2000) 97 pages

Kershaw, Ian. ''Hitler, 1889-1936: Hubris.'' vol. 1. 1999. 700 pp. ; vol 2: ''Hitler, 1936-1945: Nemesis.'' 2000. 832 pp.; the leading scholarly biography.

Kershaw, Ian. ''The "Hitler Myth": Image and Reality in the Third Reich.'' (1987). 297 pp.

Nicholls, David. ''Adolf Hitler: A Biographical Companion.'' ABC-CLIO, 2000. 344 pp.

Holocaust, ideology and racism

Gisela Bock "Racism and Sexism in Nazi Germany: Motherhood, Compulsory Sterilization, and the State" from ''When Biology Became Destiny: Women in Weimar and Nazi Germany'' edited by Renate Bridenthal, Atina Grossmann, and Marion Kaplan, New York: Monthly Review Press, 1984.

Friedlander, Saul. ''Nazi Germany and the Jews: Volume 1: The Years of Persecution 1933-1939'' (1998); ''The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945'' (2007), the standard history

Gilbert, Martin. ''The Routledge Atlas of the Holocaust'' (2002)

Heinz Höhne. ''The Order of the Death's Head: The Story of Hitler's SS.'' Translated by Richard Barry. London: Penguin Books, 1971.

Claudia Koonz. ''The Nazi Conscience''. Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003.

Niewyk, Donald, and Francis Nicosia. ''The Columbia Guide to the Holocaust.'' (2000) online edition

Detlev Peukert. ''Inside Nazi Germany: Conformity, Opposition and Racism in Everyday Life''. London: Batsford, 1987. ISBN 0-7134-5217-X.

Florian Ruhs: ''Foreign Workers in the Second World War. The Ordeal of Slovenians in Germany.'', in: aventinus nova Nr. 32 [29.05.2011].

Leadership

Martin Broszat. ''The Hitler State: The Foundation and Development Of The Internal Structure Of The Third Reich''. Translated by John W. Hiden. London: Longman, 1981. ISBN 0-582-49200-9.

Guido Knopp. ''Hitler's Henchmen''. 1998. Sutton Publishing, 2005. ISBN 0-7509-3781-5.

Frank McDonough, ''Hitler and the Rise of The Nazi Party,'' Pearson Longman, 2003.

Anthony Read. ''The Devils Disciples: The Devil's Disciples: Hitler's Inner Circle''. W. W. Norton & Co., 2003. ISBN 0-393-04800-4.

Ronald Smelser and Rainer Zitelmann, ''The Nazi Elite'' New York University Press, 1993, ISBN 0-8147-7950-6.

Local and regional

William Sheridan Allen. ''The Nazi Seizure of Power : the Experience Of A Single German Town, 1922–1945'' New York: F. Watts, 1984. ISBN 0-531-09935-0.

Paul Garson. ''Album of the Damned: Snapshots from the Third Reich'' 2008 ISBN 978-0-89733-576-8, Academy Chicago Publishers

Military and foreign policy

Sir John Wheeler-Bennett. ''The Nemesis of Power: The German Army in Politics 1918–1945'', Palgrave Macmillan: London: 1953, 1964, 2005 ISBN 1-4039-1812-0.

Andreas Hillgruber ''Germany and the two World Wars'', Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 1981 ISBN 0-674-35321-8.

David Irving. ''Hitler's War''. London: Focal Point Publications. ISBN 1-872197-10-8.

Norman Rich. ''Hitler's War Aims: Ideology, the Nazi State, and the Course of Expansion''. vol. 1. 1972. 352 pp.; vol. 2: ''Hitler's War Aims: The Establishment of the New Order''. 1974. 548 pp.; definitive analysis of Nazi German war aims in World War II.

Resistance

Hamerow, Theodore S. ''On the Road to the Wolf's Lair: German Resistance to Hitler'' (1997) 454 pages

R. P. Heller. ''The Flame of Freedom: The German Struggle against Hitler.'' (1994) focus on Army online edition

Roger Moorhouse. ''Killing Hitler''. London: Jonathan Cape, 2006. ISBN 0-224-07121-1.

Thomsett, Michael C. ''The German Opposition to Hitler: The Resistance, the Underground, and Assassination Plots, 1938-1945'' (2nd ed 2007) 278 pages

Society and culture

Cosner, Shaaron and Cosner, Victoria. ''Women under the Third Reich: A Biographical Dictionary.'' Greenwood, 1998. 203 pp.

Richard Grunberger. ''A Social History of the Third Reich'' 1974 ISBN 0-14-013675-4.

Claudia Koonz. ''Mothers In The Fatherland: Women, the Family, and Nazi Politics''. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1987. ISBN 0-312-54933-4.

Eric Michaud, ''The Cult of Art in Nazi Germany'', translated by Janet Lloyd, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004. ISBN 0-8047-4327-4.

Rempel, Gerhard. ''Hitler's Children: The Hitler Youth and the SS,'' (1989) online edition

David Schoenbaum ''Hitler’s Social Revolution; Class and Status in Nazi Germany, 1933-1939'', Garden City, N.Y. Doubleday, 1966.

Stibbe, Matthew. ''Women in the Third Reich,'' 2003, 208 pp.

External links

The Third Reich

Third Reich in Ruins (Photos)

Lebendiges Museum Online Category:Former republics Category:Nazi Germany Category:Single-party states Category:States and territories established in 1933 Category:States and territories disestablished in 1945

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Name	The Enigma
Birth name	Paul Lawrence
Birth place	Seattle
Known for	extensive body modifications
Occupation	performer, actor, musician
Footnotes	}}

The Enigma, born Paul Lawrence, is a sideshow performer, actor, and musician who has undergone extensive body modification, including horn implants, ear reshaping, multiple body piercings, and a full-body jigsaw-puzzle tattoo. His tattooing process began on December 20, 1992, under the needle of "Katzen the Tiger Lady," heavily tattooed herself, whom he later married, and has since divorced. To date, the Enigma has had more than two hundred tattoo artists work on him, with as many as twenty-three underway at one time.

Biography

The Enigma was raised in Seattle and began studying music when he was six years old. In 1991, he was a founding member of the Jim Rose Circus, with which he toured until 1998. The Enigma then toured with Katzen, playing music and doing sideshow performances under the moniker "Human Marvels". He performed at Universal Studios Orlando's Halloween Horror Nights event in fall 2007, performing various tricks with fire, power tools, and blades. He has also performed at Detroit's Theatre Bizarre.

Media Appearances

The Enigma has appeared in a number of television programs including ''The X-Files'' (episode "Humbug") where he played the Conundrum, and ''Penn & Teller: Bullshit!''. The Enigma was featured in the 2005 documentary film ''Freaky Circus Guy'' alongside sideshow performers Katzen, Danielle D'Meux, and William Darke. In 2004, The Enigma appeared with Mike Patton, Jane Wiedlin, Karen Black and Katzen, in Steve Balderson's film ''Firecracker''. A toy based on the Enigma's ''X-Files'' character the Conundrum was sold as part of Palisades Toys' ''X-Files'' PALz action figure line. He currently performs with Serana Rose in a freak show act called Show Devils.

References

External links

TheEnigmaLive.com

The Enigma on BMEzine

Interview in ''Prick'' magazine

Interviews with The Enigma and Katzen on tattoo website

Enigma Interview with Paul Clark, 1997

Official Website of Show Devils The Enigma's Current Touring Show

Category:American actors Category:Body modification Category:Sideshow performers Category:Pigface members Category:Year of birth missing (living people) Category:Living people Category:People from Seattle, Washington

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