Download The Third Reich

The Third Reich
Class Lecture
Introduction
• The Third Reich refers to Germany in the years
of 1933 to 1945, when it was governed by the
Nazi Party (National Socialist German Workers'
Party) with Adolf Hitler as head of state.
• The foreign policy pursued by Nazi Germany,
based on the concept of Lebensraum (living
space), was among the leading causes of the
Second World War.
Land Area
• In addition to Weimar-era Germany proper, the
Reich came to include the following areas:
1. Austria
2. Czechoslovakia
3. Alsace-Lorraine
4. Poland
5. All German speaking regions of Europe
(Danzig, Luxembourg, The Sudetenland,
Moravia, Bohemia, and Upper Silesia)
The Schutzstaffel (The S.S.)
• The policies of Hitler and the Third Reich were enforced
by the Schutzstaffel (The S.S.).
• The SS was established in 1925 as a personal guard
unit for Nazi leader Adolf Hitler.
• Under the leadership of Heinrich Himmler between 1929
and 1945, the SS grew from a small paramilitary
formation to become one of the largest and most
powerful organizations in Nazi Germany.
• The Nazis regarded the SS as an elite unit, the party's
"Praetorian Guard," with all SS personnel selected on
the principles of racial purity and unconditional loyalty to
the Nazi Party.
Nazi Ideology
• Ideologically, the Nazis endorsed the
concept of a "Greater Germany”.
• They believed that the incorporation of the
Germanic people into one nation was a
vital step towards their national success.
• According to the “Lebensraum Program”,
the occupation of Eastern Europe was
necessary because Germany needed
additional living space.
Nazi Ideology
• The Slavic population who met the Nazi racial
standard would be absorbed into the Reich.
• Those not fitting the racial standards were to be
used as cheap labor force or deported eastward.
• Racialism was an important aspect of society
within the Third Reich.
• The Nazis combined anti-Semitism with antiCommunist ideology.
Nazi Social Policy
• The Nazi regime was characterized by
political control of every aspect of society
in a quest for racial (Aryan, Nordic), social
and cultural purity.
• Modern abstract art and avant-garde art
was thrown out of museums and put on
special display as "degenerate art", where
it was to be ridiculed. Books were burned
throughout the Reich.
Nazi Social Policy
• The Nazi Party pursued its aims through
persecution and killing of those considered
"impure," especially targeting minority groups
such as Jews, Gypsies, Jehovah's Witnesses,
and homosexuals.
• Under the Nuremberg Laws passed in 1935,
Jews were stripped of their German citizenship
and denied government employment.
• The Nazis also undertook programs targeting
"weak" or "unfit" people, such as the T-4
Euthanasia Program.
Nazi Social Policy
• Under the T-4 program, tens of thousands of
disabled and sick Germans were killed in an
effort to "maintain the purity of the German
Master race“.
• 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.
Nazi Social Policy
• Another component of the Nazi program of creating
racial purity was the Lebensborn, or "Fountain of Life"
program founded in 1936.
• The program was aimed at encouraging German
soldiers (mainly members of the SS) to reproduce.
• This included offering SS families support services
(including the adoption of racially pure children into
suitable SS families).
• The government housed “racially-valuable” women,
pregnant with 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.
Nazi Social Policy: The Holocaust
• The persecution of minorities and "undesirables"
continued both in Germany and the occupied
countries.
• From 1941 onward, Jews were required to wear
a yellow badge in public and most were
transferred to ghettos, where they remained
isolated from the rest of the population.
• In January 1942, at the Wannsee Conference
and under the supervision of Reinhard Heydrich,
and Heinrich Himmler, a plan for the "Final
Solution of the Jewish Question" in Europe was
hatched.
Nazi Social Policy: The Holocaust
• From then until the end of the war some six
million Jews and many others, including
homosexuals, Slavs, and political prisoners,
were systematically killed.
• In addition, more than ten million people were
put into forced labor. This genocide is called the
Holocaust in English and the Shoah in Hebrew.
• Thousands were shipped daily to extermination
camps and concentration camps.
• Some concentration camps were originally
detention centers but later converted into death
camps for the purpose of killing of their inmates.
Nazi Social Policy: The Holocaust
• Another distinctive feature was the use of human
subjects in medical experiments.
• German physicians carried out such experiments at
Auschwitz, Dachau, Buchenwald, Ravensbrück,
Sachsenhausen, Sobibór, Treblinka, and Natzweiler
concentration & death camps.
• The most notorious of these physicians was Dr. Josef
Mengele, who worked in Auschwitz.
• His experiments included placing subjects in pressure
chambers, testing drugs on them, freezing them,
attempting to change eye color by injecting chemicals
into children's eyes, and various amputations and other
brutal surgeries.
Nazi Social Policy: The Holocaust
• The full extent of his work will never be known
because the two truckloads of records he sent to
the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute were destroyed by
Dr. Otmar von Verschuer.
• Subjects who survived Mengele's experiments
were almost always killed and dissected after
the experiments.
• He seemed particularly keen on working with
Romani children. He would bring them sweets
and toys, and would personally take them to the
gas chamber.
Victims
Killed
Soviet POWs
2–3 million
Political Enemies
1–1.5 million
Non-Jewish Poles
200,000+
Roma (Gypsies)
220,000–500,000
Freemasons
80–200,000
Disabled
75,000-250,000
Gay men
5,000-15,000
Jehovah’s Witnesses
2,500-5,000