Nazism and the rise of Hitler

The Great War, World War One, consisted of two stages:

conventional warfare that lasted from 1914 to 1916, and a war of desperate expedients, when both

sides struggled for their own existences, lasting until the end.

The two sides of the war consisted of the Allied Powers (France, Great Britain, Russia, the United States, and other smaller counties) and the Central Powers (Germany,

Austria-Hungary,  and Turkey/Ottoman Empire, along with

other smaller country support).

WORLD WAR I

Though Germany turned out to be the Central Power most involved in the war, there is little or no evidence that the Germans had planned for

war.  There are several fundamental causes that had brought the world to the brink of war:

nationalism, imperialist competition, militarism, and the build up of pre-war alliances.  These growing appearance of these factors perhaps

inevitably led to what was called the Great War, World War One. Though, Germany made initial

gains by occupying France and Belgium. But got defeated in November 1918 by the entry of U.S.

in 1917.

Physical effects • Starvation• Disease• Farming disruption

IMPACT OF WORLD WAR I ON GERMANY

Germany 1914Land taken from GermanyLand under League of Nations controlDemilitarised zone

Psychological effects• The soldiers had to be called out of the

battlefield when the Germans surrendered, so they were very bitter and angry, having had experience of war

• This caused conflict among the German people because lots of people blamed the Government for making the truce and signing the Treaty of Versailles

• Political effects• The Reichstag was weak• Working and middle classes had little say

The Weimar Republic is the name given by historians to

the federal republic and  parliamentary representative

democracy established in 1919 in Germany to replace

the imperial form of government. It was named

after Weimar, the city where the constitutional

assembly took place.

WEIMAR REPUBLIC

When the stock market collapsed on Wall Street on Tuesday,

October 29, 1929, it sent financial markets worldwide into a tailspin

with disastrous effects. The German economy was especially vulnerable since it was built upon foreign capital, mostly loans from America and was very dependent

on foreign trade. When those loans suddenly came due and

when the world market for German exports dried up, the well oiled German industrial machine

quickly ground to a halt.

THE GREAT DEPRESSION

As production levels fell, German workers were laid off. Along with this, banks failed throughout Germany. Savings accounts, the result of years of hard work, were instantly wiped out. Inflation soon followed making it hard for families to purchase expensive

necessities with devalued money.Overnight, the middle class standard of living so many German families enjoyed was ruined by events outside

of Germany, beyond their control. The Great Depression began and they were cast into poverty and

deep misery and began looking for a solution, any solution.

In the good times before the Great Depression the Nazi Party experienced slow growth, barely reaching 100,000 members in a country of over sixty million. But the Party, despite its

tiny size, was a tightly controlled, highly disciplined organization of fanatics poised to spring into action. Since the

failed Beer Hall Putsch in 1923, Hitler had changed tactics and was for the most part playing by the rules of democracy.

Hitler had gambled in 1923, attempting to overthrow the young German democracy by force, and lost. Now he was

determined to overthrow it legally by getting elected while at the same time building a Nazi shadow government that would

one day replace democracy.

THE RISE OF HITLER

Hitler had begun his career in politics as a street brawling revolutionary appealing to disgruntled World

War I veterans predisposed to violence. By 1930 he was quite different, or so it seemed. Hitler counted among his supporters a number of German industrialists, and upper middle class socialites, a far cry from the semi-

literate toughs he started out with.He intentionally broadened his appeal because it was

necessary. Now he needed to broaden his appeal to the great mass of voting Germans. His chief assets were his

speech making ability and a keen sense of what the people wanted to hear.

By mid-1930, amid the economic pressures of the Great

Depression, the German democratic government was

beginning to unravel. Gustav Stresemann, the

outstanding German Foreign Minister, had died in October

1929, just before the Wall Street crash. He had spent years

working to restore the German economy and stabilize the republic and died, having

exhausted himself in the process.

The crisis of the Great Depression brought disunity to the political parties in the Reichstag.

Instead of forging an alliance to enact desperately need legislation, they broke up into squabbling,

uncompromising groups. In March of 1930, Heinrich Bruening, a member of the Catholic

Center Party, became Chancellor.Despite the overwhelming need for a financial

program to help the German people, Chancellor Bruening encountered stubborn opposition to his

plans.

To break the bitter stalemate, he went to President Hindenburg and asked the Old Gentleman to invoke Article 48 of the German constitution which gave

emergency powers to the president to rule by decree. This provoked a huge

outcry from the opposition, demanding withdrawal of the decree.

As a measure of last resort, Bruening asked Hindenburg in July 1930 to dissolve the

Reichstag according to parliamentary rules and call for new elections.

The elections were set for September 14th. Hitler and the Nazis sprang into action. Their

time for campaigning had arrived. The German people were tired of the political haggling in Berlin. They were tired of misery,

tired of suffering, tired of weakness. These were desperate times and they were willing to listen

to anyone, even Adolf Hitler.

Reconstruction of Germany under Hitler:• Hitler made economist Hjalmar Schacht

work for the economic recovery. He aimed at full production and full employment through a

state-funded work-creation programe.• 1933: Hitler pulled out of the League of

Nations.• 1936: Reoccupied the Rhineland.

• 1938: Integrated Austria and Germany.• Captured Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia

and later the country itself.

RECONSTRUCTION

• Accumulation of resources was carried out through expansion policies in order to prevent

economic crisis.• 1939: Germany invaded Poland which

instigated France and England.• September, 1940: A Tripartite Pact was signed between Germany, Italy and Japan.

• Puppet regimes were installed in a large part of Europe that supported the Nazi

Germany.

Nazi policies included "Lebensmum", or view that German speaking people needed more living

space (thus, justifying their thirst for conquest of neighboring lands). Also, Aryanism was practiced,

with the central belief being that blue-eyed, blonde-haired, fair-skinned northern European Christians were to be prized above all others. Central control by the state, with dictatorial

leadership was also viewed as more efficient than any other form of government. Propaganda was also viewed as essential to keeping the populace

under control.

NAZI WORLDVIEW

The Holocaust also known as the Shoahwas the mass murder or

genocide of approximately six million European Jews during World War II, a

programme of systematic state-sponsored murder by Germany, led by

Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party, throughout German-occupied territory.

Of the nine million Jews who had resided in Europe before the

Holocaust, approximately two-thirds were killed. In particular, over one

million Jewish children were killed in the Holocaust, as were approximately two million Jewish women and three

million Jewish men.

THE HOLOCAUST

A few scholars would argue the mass murders of the Romani and people

with disabilities should be included in the definition, and some use the

common noun "holocaust" to describe other Nazi mass murders, for example

Soviet prisoners of war, Polish and Soviet civilians, and homosexuals. Recent estimates based on figures obtained since the fall of the Soviet

Union indicates some ten to 11 million civilians and prisoners of war were intentionally murdered by the

Nazi regime.

The persecution and genocide were carried out in stages. Various laws to remove the Jews from civil society, most

prominently the Nuremberg Laws, were enacted in Germany years before the outbreak of World War II. Concentration

camps were established in which inmates were subjected to slave labor until they died of exhaustion or disease. Where

Germany conquered new territory in eastern Europe, specialized units called Einsatzgruppen murdered Jews and

political opponents in mass shootings. The occupiers required Jews and Romani to be confined in overcrowded ghettos

before being transported by freight train to extermination camps where, if they survived the journey, most were systematically killed in gas chambers. Every arm of

Germany's bureaucracy was involved in the logistics that led to the genocides, turning the Third Reich into what one

Holocaust scholar has called "a genocidal state".

CONCENTRATION CAMP

GHETTOS

The Hitler Youth (German: Hitler-Jugend, abbreviated HJ) was a

paramilitary organization of the Nazi Party. It existed from 1922 to 1945.

The HJ was the second oldest paramilitary Nazi group, founded one year after its adult counterpart, the Sturmabteilung(SA). It was made up of the Hitlerjugend proper, for male

youth ages 14–18; the younger boys' section Deutsches Jungvolk for ages 10–14; and the girls' section Bund

Deutscher Mädel (BDM), the League of German Girls

HITLER YOUTH

The HJ were viewed as future "Aryan supermen" and were indoctrinated in anti-Semitism. One aim was to instill the motivation that would enable HJ

members, as soldiers, to fight faithfully for theThird Reich. The HJ put

more emphasis on physical and military training than on academic study. The Nationalsozialistischer Reichsbund für Leibesübungen

(NSRBL), the umbrella organization promoting and coordinating sport

activities in Germany during the Nazi period, had the responsibility of overseeing the physical fitness

development programs provided to the German youth.

After the boy scout movement was banned through German-controlled countries, the HJ appropriated many of its activities, though

changed in content and intention. For example, many HJ activities closely resembled military

training, with weapons training, assault course circuits and basic tactics. Some cruelty by the

older boys toward the younger ones was tolerated and even encouraged, since it was believed this would weed out the unfit and

harden the rest.[5]The HJ wore uniforms very like those of the SA,

with similar ranks and insignia

HITLER YOUTH

Many social programs were implemented by Hitler to

encourage the growth of a strong German Nazi Volk. One such program was to advocate the virtues of motherhood. This

program included a gigantic Nazi propaganda campaign to urge women to increase the size of their families. Cash incentives

were paid for each child born. On the 16th of December 1938 Hitler instituted a new award to honor

German Nazi motherhood, especially the large family

WOMEN IN NAZI GERMANY

The cross of Honor of the German Mother was created in three classes with the criteria as

follows:Bronze 3rd Class Mother 's Nazi Cross - A

bronze Christian Cross normally worn about the neck suspended by a 10mm blue ribbon with two white stripes at each edge. A round shield was affixed to the cross, bearing the

inscription 'Der Deutschen Mutter ' encircling a black enamel Nazi swastika on a white

enamel field.

Behind the shield and between the arms of the cross was a projection of rays. The arms

of the cross were blue enamel with white enamel edges. The reverse was plain save

for the date '16 Dezember 1938 ' followed by a facsimile of Hitler 's signature. From 16th December 1938, when the decoration was first instituted, to mid 1939, Nazi mother 's crosses bore the inscription 'Das Kind adelt

die Mutter ' (The child ennobles the mother).

Why this change on the reverse of the cross was brought about is not known. The manufactures

logo was sometimes found on the back as well. This award was normally presented in a blue

envelope bearing the title of the award on the front. The award

was also accompanied by a large certificate bearing a facsimile of

Hitler 's signature.

Silver 2nd Class Mother 's Nazi Cross - similar to the 3rd class Mother 's Nazi Cross except that the metal

parts were finished in silver. It was presented for bearing 6 to 7 children.

Gold 1st Class Mother 's Nazi Cross - again similar to the 3rd class except all the metal parts were finished

in Gold and also it was presented in a hard presentation case that consisted of a hinged and

compartmentalized box. The exterior was a very dark blue simulated leather with a facsimile of the award embossed in gold. The interior of the lid was a white

satin and the base was an off white velvet. It was presented for bearing eight or more children

When the award was first instituted approximately 3 million women

qualified for one of these awards. Only families of German origin qualified. Females from Danzig,

Austria and the Sudetenland were eligible when these teritories were absorbed into the Greater German

Reich. Awards were rendered only on 'Mothering Sunday ' (Mothers Day) the second Sunday in May. The first awards were rendered on the 21st

May 1939, and the last awards were presented in 1944.

Propaganda, the coordinated attempt to influence public opinion through the use of media, was skillfully used by the NSDAP in the years leading up to and during Adolf

Hitler's leadership of Germany (1933–1945). National Socialist propaganda provided a

crucial instrument for acquiring and maintaining power, and for the

implementation of their policies, including the pursuit of total war and the extermination

of millions of people in the Holocaust.

NAZI PROPAGANDA

The pervasive use of propaganda by the Nazis is largely responsible for the word "propaganda" itself acquiring its present

negative connotations.[

Dr. Joseph Goebbels, head of Germany's Ministry of Public Enlightenment and

Propaganda. His masterful use of propaganda for Adolf Hitler and

the NSDAP made him an archetype of the modern spin doctor in public conscience

Nazi propaganda promoted Nazi ideology by demonizing the enemies of the Nazi Party, especially Jews and communists, but also capitalists and intellectuals. It promoted the values

asserted by the Nazis, including heroic death, Führerprinzip (leader

principle), Volksgemeinschaft (people's community), Blut und Boden

(blood and soil) and pride in the German race. Propaganda was also

used to maintain the cult of personality around Nazi leader Adolf Hitler, and to promote campaigns for

eugenics and the annexation of German-speaking areas.

After the outbreak of World War II, Nazi propaganda

vilified Germany's enemies, notably the United Kingdom,

the Soviet Union and the United States, and exhorted the population to partake in

total war.

NAZI PROPAGANDA

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