The Nazi Regime
In the aftermath of World War I, Germany remained in turmoil throughout the 1920s, providing an ideal setting for the rise of extremist ideologies and firebrand political leaders. To Germans burdened by reparations payments to war victors, and threatened by hyperinflation, political chaos, and a possible Communist takeover, Adolf Hitler offered some solutions. Germans were provided with an easy explanation to all their problems: Jews and democracy. It was the “International Jewry” that had been responsible for Germany’s defeat in World War I and the humiliating peace treaty. The Nazis cleverly played on the “political paranoia” of the middle class. Following the rise of the Nazi Party, Adolf Hitler was appointed as chancellor of Germany on January 30, 1933.The Nazi rise to power brought an end to the Weimar Republic, a quasi-democratic regime that had ruled Germany after World War I. Hitler immediately began laying the foundations of the Nazi state. Guided by racist and authoritarian principles, the Nazis eliminated individual freedoms and pronounced the creation of a Volk Community, a society which would transcend class and religious differences. In February 1933, Hitler used a suspicious fire in the German parliament to suspend basic civil rights.
The Third Reich became a police state in which Germans enjoyed no guaranteed basic rights and the SS, the elite guard of the Nazi state, wielded increasing authority through its control over the police. Political opponents, along with Jews, were subject to intimidation, persecution, and discriminatory legislation. Using the Civil Service Law of April 1933, German authorities began eliminating Jews from governmental agencies, and state positions in the economy, law, and cultural life. The Nazi government abolished trade unions.By mid-July, 1933, the Nazi Party was the only political party left in Germany. All other parties had either been outlawed or ad dissolved themselves under pressure. Hitler had the final say in both domestic legislation and German foreign policy. Nazi foreign policy was guided by the racist belief that Germany was biologically destined to expand eastward by military force and that an enlarged, racially superior German population should establish permanent rule in eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. After Reichtag elections on March 5th, 1933, Nazi organisations began to unleash their anger against the Jews. Jews were molested, some even killed, and Jewish businesses were harassed or destroyed. The Nazis did not exclusively view the Jews as a religious community, but rather as belonging to the ‘Semitic race’ that tried to gain power at the expense of the Aryan race. In schools, the Nazi regime put much energy into showing the children why it was necessary to take action against the Jews. Through anti-Semitic literature, the pupils were indoctrinated with delusions of the Jews’ hunger for world dominance, that the Jews were an inferior and criminal race, and that the Jews were a serious danger to the German people. |