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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, anti-Socialism/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”. Nazi stormtroopers in civilian clothes burned down synagogues and broke into Jewish homes throughout Germany and Austria, terrorising and beating men, women and children. Ninety-one 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, Auschwitz-Birkenau 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 barracks without food or water.

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