Download HITLER AND NAZISM. Early life. Adolf Hitler was born in Branau am

HITLER AND NAZISM.
Early life.
Adolf Hitler was born in Branau am Inn, Austria, a village close to German-Austrian border,
on April 20, 1889, and was the fourth of six children born to Alois Hitler and Klara Polzl. When
Hitler was 3 years old, the family moved from Austria to Germany.
As a child, Hitler clashed frequently with his father. His father did
not approve of his interest in Arts. Hitler's father died suddenly in
1903. Hitler left school at 16 with no qualifications and struggled to
make a living as a painter in Vienna. In Vienna he worked as a
casual laborer and a watercolor painter. Hitler applied to the
Academy of Fine Arts twice and was rejected both times. Out of
money, he moved into a homeless shelter, where he remained for
several years. Hitler later pointed to these years as the time when he
first cultivated his anti-Semitism.
World War I.
At the beginning of World War I, Hitler applied to serve in the German army. He was
accepted in August 1914, though he was still an Austrian citizen. Although he spent much of his
time away from the front lines. He was decorated
for bravery, receiving the Iron Cross First Class.
Hitler became embittered over the collapse of the
war
effort.
The
experience
reinforced
his
passionate German patriotism, and he was
shocked by Germany's surrender in 1918. Like
other German nationalists, he believed that the
German army had been betrayed by civilian
leaders and Marxists. He found the Treaty of
Versailles degrading, particularly the demilitarization of the Rhineland and the stipulation that
Germany accept responsibility for starting the war.
Freikorps.
The Freikorps was the name adopted by some right wing nationalists after World War One
had ended. Members of the Freikorps could be described as conservative, nationalistic, antiSocialism/Communism and once it had been signed, anti-the Treaty of Versailles. Many members of
the Freikorps had fought in World War One and had military experience. They did not believe that
Germany had suffered a military defeat in World War One and members of the Freikorps were very
vocal supporters of the ‘stab-in-the-back’ legend.
The Freikorps was used to put down the German Revolution of 1918-1919 and it crushed the
Bavarian Soviet Republic in May 1919. A Freikorps unit in Berlin attempted to overthrow Ebert’s
government (first president of the German Republic from 1919 to 1925, member of the Socialist
Party).
Members of the Freikorps also murdered leading communists Karl Liebknicht and Rosa
Luxemburg. Many of the Freikorps escaped without punishment for their crimes or sentenced to
only brief periods in jail.
The Freikorps officially disbanded in 1920 but many members joined the Nazi Party and
became the party’s original enforcers.
Political Activity: NSDAP.
After World War I, Hitler returned to Munich and continued to work for the military as an
intelligence officer. While monitoring the activities of the German Workers’ Party (DAP), Hitler
adopted many of the anti-Semitic, nationalist and anti-Marxist ideas of DAP founder Anton Drexler.
Drexler invited Hitler to join the DAP, which he did in 1919.
To increase its appeal, the DAP changed its name to the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche
Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP). Hitler personally designed the party banner, featuring a swastika in a
white circle on a red background. Hitler soon gained notoriety for his speeches against the Treaty of
Versailles, rival politicians, Marxists and Jews. In 1921, Hitler replaced Drexler as NSDAP party
chairman.
Beer Hall Putsch (1923).
Hitler's beer-hall speeches began attracting regular audiences. Early followers included
army captain Ernst Rohm, the head of the Nazi paramilitary organization, the Sturmabteilung (SA),
which protected meetings and frequently attacked political opponents.
On November 8th and 9th 1923, Hitler
used the anger felt against the Berlin
government in Bavaria to attempt an overthrow
of the regional government in Munich in
prelude to the takeover of the national
government. This incident is generally known
as the Beer Hall Putsch.
On November 8th 1923, the Bavarian
Prime Minister, Gustav Kahr, was addressing
a meeting of around 3000 businessmen at a beer hall in Munich. Kahr was joined by some of the
most senior men in Bavarian politics including Seisser, Bavaria’s police chief, and Lossow, the local
army commander. Then, Hitler and the 600 SA stormed the public meeting. Hitler announced that
the national revolution had begun and declared the formation of a new government. After a short
struggle including 20 deaths, the coup, known as the "Beer Hall Putsch," failed.
Imprisonment.
Hitler was arrested three days later and tried for high treason.
He served a year in prison, during which time he dictated most of the
first volume of Mein Kampf ("My Struggle") to his deputy, Rudolf
Hess. The book laid out Hitler's plans for transforming German
society into one based on race.
Economic Crisis.
The Weimar Republic was devastated by Wall Street Crash of October 1929 and the Great
Depression that followed. After 1924 American banks supported the german economy with huge
loans. When the Depressión began in the US, American banks withdrew their money invested in
Europe, especially in Germany.
Companies throughout Germany went bankrupt and workers were laid off. In september
1928 about 600.000 workers were unemployed in Germany; by January 1933 6 million people were
unemployed.
The government failed to respond effectively to the crisis. Heinrich Bruning, who became
chancellor in March 1930, feared inflation and budget deficits more than unemployment. Rather
than spending to stimulate the economy and create jobs, Bruning opted to increase taxes (to reduce
the budget deficit) then implemented wage cuts and spending reductions (to lower prices).
Bruning’s measures failed, and probably increased German unemployment and public suffering
rather than easing it.
In the 1930 Reichstag election, the Nazis gained
143 seats, a vast improvement on their previous election.
Hitler only expected between 50 to 60 seats. A senior Nazi
official, Gregor Strasser, claimed that what was a disaster
for the Republic was "good, very good for us."
In the July 1932 Reichstag election, the Nazis
gained 230 seats making them the largest party in the
Reichstag.
Rise to the power.
The Great Depression in Germany provided a political opportunity for Hitler. Germans were
increasingly open to extremist options. In 1932, Hitler ran against Paul von Hindenburg for the
presidency. Hitler came in second in both rounds of the election, obtaining more than 35 percent of
the vote in the final election. The election established Hitler as a strong force in German politics.
Hindenburg reluctantly agreed to appoint Hitler as chancellor in order to promote political balance.
Hitler used his position as chancellor to form a de facto legal dictatorship.
Reichstag Fire (Parliament).
On the night of February 27th Hitler and Goebbels
were having dinner at Goebbel’s Berlin home. There,
Goebbels received a phone call informing him that the
Reichstag building was on fire. Hitler declared that the fire
was the work of the Communists and Socialists and the SA
was put on alert to maintain order if and when the communist
insurrection started.
The Nazis captured the alleged perpetrator of the
crime, a Dutch communist. The Reichstag ceased all its
activities after the fire and it could not be used. The March 5th
election went ahead as planned but now in the shadow of the ‘attempted communist revolt’. Even
so, the Nazis only obtained 288 seats out of 647. But
Hitler had already decided that the Reichstag as a
properly working entity should cease to exist and be
replaced by himself.
The Reichstag Fire Decree suspended basic rights
and
allowed
detention
without
trial.
Hitler
also
engineered the passage of the Enabling Act, which gave
his cabinet full legislative powers for a period of four
years and allowed deviations from the constitution.
Having achieved full control over the legislative
and executive branches of government, Hitler and his
political allies embarked on a systematic suppression of
the political opposition. On July 14, 1933, Hitler's Nazi
Party was declared the only legal political party in
Germany.
The Night of Long Knives.
By the summer of 1934, the SA' had two million men. They were under the control of Ernst
Röhm, a loyal follower of Hitler since the early days of the Nazi Party. The SA had given the Nazi's
an iron fist with which to disrupt other political parties meetings before January 1933. The SA was
also used to enforce law after Hitler became Chancellor in January 1933. There is no evidence that
Röhm was ever planning anything against Hitler.
However, Röhm had made enemies within the Nazi Party.
Himmler, Goering and Goebbels were angered by the power he had
gained and convinced Hitler that this was a threat to his position. On the
night of June 29th - June 30th 1934, units of the SS arrested the leaders of
the SA and other political opponents.
The Night of the Long Knives, which took place from June 30 to
July 2, 1934. Ernst Röhm and other SA leaders, along with a number of
Hitler's political enemies, were arrested, shot or executed. After this date,
the SS lead by Heinrich Himmler was to become far more powerful
in Nazi Germany.
The Night of Broken Glass (Kristallnacht).
On November 7, in Paris, a 17-year-old German Jewish refugee shot and killed the third
secretary of the German embassy. He had intended to avenge the deportation of his father to Poland
and the ongoing persecution of Jews in Germany by killing the German ambassador.
As revenge for this shooting, Joseph Goebbels, Nazi minister of propaganda, and Reinhard
Heydrich, second in command of the SS after Heinrich Himmler, ordered "spontaneous
demonstrations" of protest against the Jewish citizens of Munich. They ordered the destruction of
Jewish homes and businesses. The local police were not to interfere with the rioting stormtroopers,
and as many Jews as possible were to be arrested
and deported to concentration camps.
In Heydrich's report to Hermann Goering
after Kristallnacht, the damage was assessed:
"...815 shops destroyed, 171 houses set on fire or
destroyed... 119 synagogues were set on fire, and
another 76 completely destroyed... 20,000 Jews
were arrested, 91 deaths were reported and those
seriously injured were also numbered at 36..."
The extent of the destruction was actually
greater than reported. Later estimates were that as many as 7,500 Jewish shops were looted, and
there were several incidents of rape. This, in the ideology of Nazism, was worse than murder,
because the racial laws forbade intercourse between Jews and gentiles. The rapists were expelled
from the Nazi Party and handed over to the police for prosecution. And those who killed Jews?
They "cannot be punished," according to authorities, because they were merely following orders.
To add insult to massive injury, those Jews who survived the monstrous pogrom were forced
to pay for the damage inflicted upon them.
Insurance firms teetered on the verge of
bankruptcy because of the claims. Hermann
Goering came up with a solution: Insurance
money due the victims was to be confiscated
by the state, and part of the money would
revert back to the insurance companies to keep
them afloat.
Nazist Racial Measures.
After president Hindenburg's death in August 1934, Hitler became head of state as well as
head of government, and was formally named as leader and
chancellor. As head of state, Hitler became supreme commander of the
armed forces. He began to mobilize for war. Germany withdrew from
the League of Nations, and Hitler announced a massive expansion of
Germany’s armed forces.
A main Nazi concept was the notion of racial hygiene. New laws
banned marriage between non-Jewish and Jewish Germans, and
deprived "non-Aryans" of the benefits of German citizenship. Hitler's
early eugenic policies targeted children with physical and
developmental disabilities, and later authorized a euthanasia
program for disabled adults. The Holocaust was also conducted under
the auspices of racial hygiene. Between 1939 and 1945, Nazis and
their collaborators were responsible for the deaths of 11 million to 14 million people, including
about 6 million Jews, representing two-thirds of the Jewish population in Europe. Deaths took place
in concentration and extermination camps and through mass executions. Other
persecuted groups included Poles, communists, homosexuals, Jehovah's
Witnesses and trade unionists, among others.
Nazi Leaders.
Hermann Goering.
A WW1 veteran, he was head of the luftwaffe, and the founder of the Gestapo. After the fall
of France he stole hundreds of pieces of Arts from Jews, and amassed a personal fortune. Goering
took part in the beer hall putsch of 1923 and was wounded in the groin. Subsequently, taking
morphine for pain relief, he became addicted to the drug for the rest of his life. In 1940, the Marshal
ordered the bombing of the civilian population of Britain and was involved in planning the
holocaust. Goering was the highest ranking defendant during the Nuremberg Trials. Sentenced to
hang, he committed suicide in his cell the night before his execution by cyanide ingestion.
Joseph Goebbels.
Dr. Paul Josef Goebbels was the Reich Minister of Propaganda.
Goebbels speeches of hatred against Jews initiated the final solution.
A sufferer of polio, Goebbels had a club foot, but this did not effect his
standing as the second best orator in The Reich. At the end of the war,
a devoted Goebbels stayed in Berlin with Hitler and killed himself,
along with his wife Magda and their six young children.
Heinrich Himmler.
Heinrich Himmler, the architect of the
holocaust and considered to be the biggest mass murderer ever, by some
(although it’s really Josef Stalin). The holocaust would not have happened if
not for this man. He tried to breed a master race of Nordic appearance, the
Aryan race. He executed plans for racial purity. Himmler was captured after
the war. He unsuccessfully tried to negotiate with the west, and was genuinely
shocked to be treated as a criminal upon capture. He committed suicide by
swallowing a cyanide capsule.
Rudolf Hess.
Rudolf Hess was born in 1894 and died in Spandau Prison in
19. Rudolf Hess was Hitler's deputy leader in the Nazi Party. Hess
had been involved with the Nazi Party from its earliest days and was
on the march to the Beer Hall that lead to his and Hitler's
imprisonment at Landsberg Prison from 1923 to 1924.It was in
prison that Hitler dictated "Mein Kampf" to Hess who acted as
Hitler's personal secretary while in prison. In fact, Hess was seen by
many to be Hitler's most loyal follower.
In May 1941, Hess did something that took everybody by
surprise. On May 10th, he took a plane and flew it to Scotland where he crash landed the plane. It
seems that Hess took it upon himself to secure a negotiated peace between the British government
and Germany. Hess was found by a Scots farmer and arrested.
He was sent to trial at Nuremburg in 1946 where he was sent to prison for life. With other
Nazi leaders, he was sent to Spandau Prison and from 1966 on, he was the only prisoner there. His
death while in prison is a bit of a mystery. It appears that Hess committed suicide by hanging
himself.
Reynhard Heydrich.
Heydrich was appointed Protector of Bohemia and Moravia. Heydrich
chaired the 1942 Wannsee Conference, which discussed plans for the
deportation and extermination of all Jews in German occupied
territory, thus being the mastermind of the holocaust. He was attacked
by British trained Czech agents on 27 May, 1942, sent to assassinate
him in Prague. He died slightly over a week later from complications
arising from his injuries. The foundations of genocide were laid by
Heydrich.
Adolf Eichman.
Eichmann was the organizational talent of the mass deportation of Jews from their
countries into waiting ghettos and extermination camps. He is sometimes referred
to as “the architect of the Holocaust”. He learned Hebrew and studied all things
Jewish in order to manipulate Jews. He fled Germany at the end of the war via a
ratline to south America, and was captured by the Mossad (Israel Intelligence
Service) in Argentina. He was judged in Israel and executed by hanging in 1962,
after a highly publicized trial.
Joseph Mengele.
Mengele initially gained notoriety for being one of the SS
physicians who supervised the selection of arriving transports of
prisoners, determining who was to be killed and who was to become a
forced laborer, but is far more infamous for performing human
experiments on camp inmates, for which Mengele was called the
“Angel of Death”. His crimes were evil and of many. Mengele used
Auschwitz as an opportunity to continue his research on heredity,
using inmates for human experimentation. He was particularly
interested in identical twins. Mengele’s experiments included attempts
to take one twin’s eyeballs and attach them to the back of the other twin’s head, changing eye color
by injecting chemicals into children’s eyes, various amputations of limbs, and other brutal
surgeries. He survived the war, and after a period living incognito in Germany, he fled to South
America, where he evaded capture for the rest of his life, despite being hunted as a Nazi war
criminal.
Holocaust.
Soon after they took power, the Nazis began their persecutions with several anti-Jewish
laws, including the Nuremberg Laws (1935), which defined Jews according to 'racial' criteria and
stripped them of citizenship. However, the Nazis at first refrained from major acts of violence.
By late 1938, the Nazis could claim an impressive series of successes. Germany had staged
the 1936 Olympics, annexed Austria and part of Czechoslovakia, and was in the midst of a strong
economic recovery fuelled by rearmament. These triumphs had increased the Nazis' popularity and
their confidence. President Hindenburg had died and all opposition parties had been abolished. The
last conservatives in the cabinet had been replaced by Nazis. The way was clear for radical action.
On the night of 9-10 November 1938, Nazi Propaganda Minister Dr Josef Goebbels
organised the violent “Night of
broken
glass”.
stormtroopers
clothes
Nazi
in
civilian
burned
down
synagogues and broke into
Jewish
homes
Germany
and
throughout
Austria,
terrorising and beating men,
women and children. Ninetyone Jews were murdered and
over 20,000 men were arrested
and taken to concentration
camps. Afterwards the Jewish
community was fined one
billion Reichsmarks to pay for
the damage.
After that,
Jewish
businesses were expropriated,
private employers were urged
to sack Jewish employees, and
offices were set up to speed
emigration. Imprisoned Jews could buy freedom if they promised to leave the country. By
September 1939, half of Germany's 500,000 Jews had fled, as had many Jews from Austria and the
German-occupied parts of Czechoslovakia.
Organised killing began with the beginning of war in September 1939, but the first victims
were not Jews. The Nazis set about killing people with physical and mental disabilities, whom they
regarded as a burden on the state and a threat to the nation's 'racial hygiene'. About 170,000
people were eventually killed under this so-called Euthanasia programme.
When the Nazis occupied western Poland in 1939, two-thirds of Polish Jews, Europe's
largest Jewish community, fell into their hands. The Polish Jews were rounded up and placed in
ghettos, where it is estimated that 500,000 people died of starvation and disease.
With the invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22 1941, the Nazis launched a crusade against
'Judaeo-Bolshevism', the supposed Jewish-Communist conspiracy. Behind the front lines, four
police battalions called Einsatzgruppen (operations groups) moved from town to town in the
occupied Soviet territories, rounding up Jewish men and suspected Soviet collaborators and
shooting them. Using local volunteers, the Einsatzgruppen targeted Jewish women and children as
well. In total, the Einsaztgruppen murdered some two million people, almost all Jews.
The Final Solution
While these massacres were happening, the Nazis elsewhere were laying plans for an overall
'solution to the Jewish question'. Death camp operations began in December 1941 at Semlin in
Serbia and Chelmno in Poland, where people were killed by exhaust fumes in specially modified
vans, which were then driven to nearby sites where the bodies were plundered and burnt. 250,000
Jews were killed this way at Chelmno and 15,000 at Semlin.
More camps opened in the spring and summer of 1942, when the Nazis began systematically
clearing the ghettos in Poland and rounding up Jews in western Europe for 'deportation to the East'.
The killing of the Polish Jews was carried out in three camps: Treblinka, near Warsaw (850,000
victims); Belzec, in south-eastern Poland (650,000 victims); and Sobibor, in east-central Poland
(250,000 victims). Some Jews from western Europe were sometimes taken to these camps as well,
but most were killed at the biggest and most advanced of the death camps, Auschwitz.
Industrial killing: Auschwitz-Birkenau
Originally a concentration camp for Polish political prisoners, Auschwitz was greatly
expanded in 1941 with the addition of a much larger camp at nearby Birkenau. In all, AuschwitzBirkenau and its sub-camps held 400,000 registered prisoners including 205,000 Jews, 137,000
Poles, 21,000 Gypsies, 12,000 Soviet soldiers and 25,000 others (including a few British soldiers).
But Auschwitz-Birkenau became more than a concentration camp. In the spring of 1942 gas
chambers were built at Birkenau and mass transports of Jews began to arrive. The great majority
of the Jews were gassed immediately. These gassing operations were greatly expanded in the spring
of 1943 with the construction of four new gas chamber and crematorium complexes. Each
crematorium could handle 2,000 victims daily. In a nearby group of barracks, nicknamed 'Canada'
by the prisoners, victims' belongings were sorted for transportation to the Reich. The victims' hair
was used to stuff mattresses; gold teeth were melted down and the gold deposited to an SS
account.
In all about 900,000 people were gassed at Birkenau without ever being registered as
prisoners, almost all of them Jews. This brought the total death toll of the Auschwitz complex to
about 1.1 million, of whom one million were Jewish.
The end of the Holocaust.
As Allied forces began to close in on Germany in 1944, Germans began digging up and
burning the bodies of those killed by the Einsatzgruppen. Prisoners remaining in Auschwitz and
other concentration camps were transported or force-marched to camps within Germany. Thousands
of prisoners on these death marches died of starvation, exhaustion and cold, or were shot for not
keeping up the pace. Jewish
prisoners were concentrated at
Bergen-Belsen.
When British troops came
across the camp on 15 April 1945,
they encountered 10,000 unburied
corpses, a typhus epidemic and
60,000 sick and dying prisoners
into
overcrowded
without food or water.
barracks