ADOLF
HITLER
By
Wikipedia
Removal of remaining
limits
With this combination of
legislative and executive
power, Hitler's government further suppressed the remaining political opposition.
The KPD
and the SPD
were banned, while all other political parties dissolved themselves. Labour
unions were merged with employers' federations into an organisation
under Nazi control and the autonomy of state governments was abolished.
Adolf Hitler greeting
supporters from aboard a parade
vehicle.
Hitler also used the SA
paramilitary to push Hugenberg into resigning and proceeded to politically
isolate Vice Chancellor Papen. As the SA's demands for political and
military caused much anxiety among the populace in general and especially
among the military, Hitler used allegations of a plot by the SA leader Ernst
Röhm to purge the paramilitary force's leadership during the Night
of the Long Knives. Opponents unconnected with the SA
were also murdered,
notably Gregor
Strasser and former Chancellor Kurt
von Schleicher.
Soon after, president Paul
von Hindenburg died on 2
August 1934.
Rather than holding new presidential elections, Hitler's cabinet passed a
law proclaiming the presidency dormant and transferred the role and powers
of the head of state to Hitler as Führer und Reichskanzler (leader
and chancellor). Thereby Hitler also became supreme commander of the
military, which swore their military oath
not to the state or the constitution but to Hitler personally. In a
mid-August plebiscite
these acts found the approval of 90% of the electorate. Combining the
highest offices in state, military and party in his hand, Hitler had
attained supreme rule that could no longer be legally challenged.
The Third Reich
Having secured supreme
political power, Hitler went on to gain their support by persuading
most Germans he was their saviour from the Depression, the Communists, the
Versailles Treaty, and the Jews along with other "undesirable" minorities.
Economics and culture
Hitler oversaw one of the
greatest expansions of industrial
production and civil improvement Germany had ever seen, mostly based on debt
flotation and expansion of the military. Nazi policies toward women strongly
encouraged them to stay at home to bear children and keep house. The unemployment
rate was cut substantially, mostly through arms production and sending women
home so that men could take their jobs. Given this, claims that the German
economy achieved near full
employment are at least partly artifacts of propaganda from the era.
Much of the financing for Hitler's reconstruction and rearmament came from
currency manipulation by Hjalmar
Schacht, including the clouded credits through the Mefo
bills. The negative effects of this inflation
were offset in later years by the acquisition of foreign gold
from the treasuries of conquered nations.
Hitler also oversaw one of
the largest infrastructure
improvement campaigns in German history, with the construction of dozens of dams,
autobahns, railroads
and other civil works. Hitler's policies
emphasised the importance of family life: Men were the "breadwinners",
while women's priorities were to lie in bringing up children and in
household work. This revitalising of industry and infrastructure came at the
expense of the overall standard of living, at least for those not affected
by the chronic unemployment of the later Weimar Republic, since wages were
slightly reduced in pre-war years despite a 25% increase in the cost of
living (Shirer
1959).
Hitler's government sponsored
architecture
on an immense scale, with Albert
Speer becoming famous as the first architect of the Reich. In 1936
Berlin hosted the summer
Olympic games, which were opened by Hitler and choreographed
to demonstrate Aryan
superiority over all other races. Olympia,
the movie about the games and documentary propaganda films for the German
Nazi Party were directed by Hitler's personal filmmaker Leni
Riefenstahl.
Although Hitler made plans
for a Breitspurbahn
(broad
gauge railroad network), they were pre-empted by World War II. Had the
railroad been built, its gauge would have been three metres, even wider than
the old Great
Western Railway of Britain.
Hitler contributed to the
design of the car
that later became the Volkswagen
Beetle, and charged Ferdinand
Porsche with its construction.[4]
Repression
Adolf Hitler and Heinrich
Himmler (left)
The Gestapo-SS complex
(the SS
and Gestapo
organizations) were primarily responsible for repression
in the Nazi state. This was implemented not only against political enemies
such as communists but also against perceived "asocials" such as
habitual criminals
and the work-shy along with "racial enemies," mainly Jews.
The racial policies of Nazi
Germany during the early to mid-1930s included the harassment and
persecution of Jews through legislation, restrictions on civil rights and
limiting their economic opportunities. Under the 1935 Nuremberg
Laws Jews lost their German citizenship and were expelled from
government employment, their professions and most forms of economic activity.
To indicate their Jewishness, Jews were forced to adopt a second name and
had their papers stamped with a big red "J". The policy was
successful in causing the emigration
of many thousands but nevertheless turned increasingly violent in the mid to
late 1930s. In 1938 a pogrom
orchestrated by Joseph
Goebbels and endorsed by Hitler called Kristallnacht
destroyed many Jewish businesses and synagogues
and resulted in about 100 deaths. Between November 1938 and September 1939
more than 180,000 Jews fled Germany and the Nazis seized whatever property
they left behind. From 1941 Jews were required to wear a yellow Star
of David in public. Throughout the 1930s the Propaganda Ministry
disseminated anti-Semitic propaganda
Rearmament and new
alliances
In March 1935 Hitler
repudiated the Treaty
of Versailles by reintroducing conscription
in Germany. He set about building a massive military machine, including a
new Navy (the Kriegsmarine)
and an Air Force (the Luftwaffe).
The enlistment of vast numbers of men and women in the new military seemed
to solve unemployment
problems but seriously distorted the economy. For the first time in a
generation, Germany's armed forces were as strong as those of her antagonistic
neighbour, France.
In March 1936 Hitler again
violated the Treaty
of Versailles by reoccupying the demilitarized
zone in the Rhineland.
When Britain
and France did nothing, he grew bolder. In July 1936 the Spanish
Civil War began when the military, led by General Francisco
Franco, rebelled against the elected Popular
Front government of Spain.
Hitler sent troops to support Franco and Spain served as a testing ground
for Germany's new armed forces and their methods, including the bombing of
undefended towns such as Guernica,
which was destroyed by the Luftwaffe in April 1937, prompting Pablo
Picasso's famous eponymous
painting.
An Axis
was declared between Germany and Italy by Galeazzo
Ciano, foreign
minister of Fascist dictator Benito
Mussolini on October
25, 1936.
This alliance
was later expanded to include Japan, Hungary, Romania
and Bulgaria.
They were collectively known as the Axis
Powers. Then on November
5, 1937, at
the Reich
Chancellory, Adolf Hitler held a secret meeting and stated his plans for
acquiring "living space" (Lebensraum)
for the German people.
The Holocaust
Between 1939 and 1945 the
SS, assisted by collaborationist
governments and recruits from occupied
countries, systematically killed about 11 million people, (about 5-6 million
of whom are believed to have been Jews[5])
in concentration
camps, ghettos
and mass executions,
or through less systematic methods elsewhere. Besides being gassed to death,
many also died of starvation
and disease
while working as slave
labourers. Along with Jews, non-Jewish Poles
(over 3 million of whom died), alleged communists
or political opposition, members of resistance groups, homosexuals, dissenting
Roman
Catholics and Protestants, Roma,
the physically handicapped
and mentally retarded, Soviet prisoners
of war, Jehovah's
Witnesses, anti-Nazi clergy, trade
unionists, and psychiatric patients
were killed. This industrial-scale genocide
in Europe is referred to as the Holocaust
(the term is also used by some authors
in a narrower sense, to refer specifically to the unprecedented destruction
of European Jewry in particular).
The massacres that led to
the coining of the word "genocide"
(the Endlösung
der jüdischen Frage or "Final
Solution of the Jewish Question") were planned and ordered by
leading Nazis, with Himmler
playing a key role. While no specific order from Hitler authorizing the mass
killing of the Jews has surfaced, there is documentation showing that he
approved the Einsatzgruppen
and the evidence also suggests that sometime in the fall of 1941 Himmler and
Hitler agreed in principle on mass extermination by gassing. During interrogations
by Soviet intelligence
officers declassified over fifty years later, Hitler's valet Heinz
Linge and his military aide
Otto Gunsche said Hitler had "pored over the first blueprints
of gas
chambers."
To make for smoother
intra-governmental cooperation
in the implementation of this "Final Solution" to the "Jewish
question", the Wannsee
conference was held near Berlin on January
20, 1942,
with fifteen senior officials participating, led by Reinhard
Heydrich and Adolf
Eichmann. The records of this meeting provide the clearest evidence of
central planning for the Holocaust. Days later, on February
22, Hitler was recorded saying to his closest associates, "we shall
regain our health only by eliminating the Jews".[citation
needed]
World War I
Opening moves
On March
12, 1938,
Hitler pressured his native Austria
into unification
with Germany (the Anschluss)
and made a triumphal entry into Vienna.
Next, he intensified a crisis over the German-speaking Sudetenland
districts of Czechoslovakia.
This led to the Munich
Agreement of September 1938, which authorized the annexation and
immediate military occupation of these districts by Germany. As a result of
the summit, Hitler was TIME
magazine's Man
of the Year in 1938. British prime
minister Neville
Chamberlain hailed this agreement as "Peace in our time", but
by giving way to Hitler's military demands Britain and France also left
Czechoslovakia to Hitler's mercy.
Hitler ordered Germany's
army to enter Prague
on March 10, 1939 and from Prague
Castle proclaimed Bohemia and Moravia a German protectorate.
After that, Hitler was claiming territories ceded to Poland
under the Versailles
Treaty. Britain had not been able to reach an agreement with the Soviet
Union for an alliance against Germany, and, on August
23, 1939,
Hitler concluded a secret non-aggression
pact (the Molotov-Ribbentrop
Pact) with Stalin
on which it was likely agreed that Soviet Union and Nazi Germany would
partition Poland. On September
1, Germany invaded the western portion of Poland. Britain and France,
who had guaranteed assistance to Poland, declared war on Germany. Not long
after this, on September
17, Soviet forces invaded eastern Poland.
After conquering Western
Poland by the end of September, Hitler built up his forces much further
during the so-called Phony
War. In April 1940, he ordered German forces to march into Denmark
and Norway.
In May 1940, Hitler ordered his forces to attack France,
conquering the Netherlands, Luxembourg
and Belgium
in the process. France surrendered
on June 22, 1940. This
series of victories convinced his main ally, Benito
Mussolini of Italy, to join the war on Hitler's side in May 1940.
Britain,
whose defeated forces had evacuated France from the coastal town of Dunkirk,
continued to fight with Canadian forces in the Battle
of the Atlantic. After having his overtures for peace systematically
rejected by the British Government, now led by Winston
Churchill, Hitler ordered bombing
raids on the British Isles, leading to the Battle
of Britain, a prelude
of the planned German invasion. The attacks began by pounding the RAF
airbases and the radar
stations protecting South-East England. However, the Luftwaffe
failed to defeat the RAF
by the end of October 1940. Air superiority for the invasion, code-named Operation
Sealion, could not be assured and Hitler ordered bombing raids to be
carried out on British cities, including London
and Coventry,
mostly at nigh
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