Federal Republic of Germany

F3

b

Economic and Political Crises

The economic situation of Germany during the first five postwar years made the political situation even more precarious. Because Germany could not meet reparations requirements, France invaded the industrial center of the Ruhr in 1923, seizing control of all its coal deposits. The German government encouraged the workers to resist passively, and it printed vast amounts of devalued money to pay them. Before July 1922, the value of the Reichsmark had already dropped from about 4 to 493 to the dollar, but during the next 16 months it plummeted to 4.2 trillion to the dollar. The resulting inflation wiped out the savings, pensions, insurance, and other forms of fixed income of most middle-class and working-class Germans.

In 1924 the Dawes Plan was implemented to ease the German reparations burden and provide for foreign loans. The brilliant chancellor and foreign minister Gustav Stresemann reorganized the monetary system and encouraged industrial growth. For the next five years, Germany enjoyed relative peace and prosperity, gradually fulfilling its obligations under the Versailles treaty. In 1925 England, France, Italy, and Germany signed the Treaties of Locarno, which finally established the western borders of Germany and began the withdrawal of occupation forces along the Rhine. In 1926 Germany was admitted to the League of Nations.

The worldwide depression of the 1930s, however, plunged the country once more into disaster. Millions of unemployed Germans, disillusioned by capitalist democracy, turned either to the Communist Party or to the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP), the party of National Socialism, or Nazism. By 1930 the Nazis were the second largest party in the Reichstag.

F

4

The Third Reich (1933-1945)

Probably no regime in the 20th century or any other has been so closely identified with institutionalized terror and evil as that of the Third Reich under the control of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. Its rise and demise had worldwide consequences, and its legacy continued to shape the identity of Germans long afterward.

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F4

a

Hitler and National Socialism

A failed artist and former army corporal in World War I, Adolf Hitler hated aristocrats, capitalists, Bolsheviks (Communists), and liberals, as well as Jews and other so-called non-Aryans. He had already tried to topple the government in the ill-fated “beer hall putsch” of 1923. This early abortive attempt at revolution occurred when Hitler (then chairman of the NSDAP), the right-wing general Ludendorff, and several Nazi supporters stormed a Munich beer hall and forced local political leaders to declare their support for the “national revolution.” Nazi attempts to take over the Bavarian War Ministry were quickly defeated, however, and Hitler was sentenced to five years in prison for treason.

Released after serving less than one year, he immediately rejoined the NSDAP, and in 1926 again became its leader. Hitler used his public speaking gifts to win supporters for the Nazi cause, seizing every opportunity to denounce the unpopular Weimar government as weak and decadent. He also proposed giving the jobs of Jews—whom he painted as parasitical and villainous—to deserving Germans. In return for restoring Germany’s former glory and honor, he asked for the unconditional loyalty and obedience of all patriotic Germans. To reinforce his message, his followers, brown-shirted storm troopers, sporadically harassed and attacked Communists, Jews, and other enemies of the National Socialists.

In 1927 the entire Nazi membership was only 40,000. Yet by the depths of the depression of 1932, the Nazis were the most successful party in the country, although still garnering only 38 percent of the vote. Many right-wing military and civilian leaders thought that Hitler could be effectively manipulated and so, with the backing of several prominent businessmen, they succeeded in having him named chancellor on January 30, 1933.

Their belief that Hitler would be a Nazi figurehead was soon shattered, however. To secure supreme power for himself as the nation’s Führer (leader), Hitler blamed a fire in the Reichstag building on the Communists, banned the Communist Party, and called new elections. Even in this highly coercive atmosphere, the Nazis still did not obtain an absolute majority in the new Reichstag. Nevertheless, together with their political allies, they succeeded in passing the revolutionary Enabling Act, which granted the government dictatorial powers over all aspects of German life.

F4

b

Totalitarian Germany

Armed with this power, Hitler set out to create a new totalitarian, nationalist empire, the Third Reich. The groundwork had been laid in the old Prussian militarist tradition and in World War I, when the military ran the government. From that foundation, Hitler proceeded with formidable efficiency. He consolidated legislative, executive, judicial, and military authority and then assumed that authority himself. He also became head of state after the death of President von Hindenburg in 1934. The Nazis combined extreme nationalism and political authoritarianism to produce a fascist state, akin to the states created in Italy by Benito Mussolini and in Spain by Francisco Franco.

All political parties except the Nazis were banned. Strikes were forbidden and the unemployed were enrolled in labor camps or the army as Germany strove to be economically self-sufficient. Unemployment plummeted from 6 million to less than 2 million by July 1935. A professional army, enlarged by conscription, was established to carry out Hitler’s plan for conquest. Hermann Wilhelm Göring oversaw the buildup of the new German air force. Paul Joseph Goebbels directed a sophisticated system of propaganda employing the mass media of publishing, film, and radio. Children were thoroughly indoctrinated at every turn, especially in groups such as the Hitler Youth and the League of German Girls. Spectacular rallies were staged to galvanize the German public into support for Hitler’s agenda.

Backing up the propaganda were various bureaus of organized brutality, most notoriously the secret police, or Gestapo, and Hitler’s elite bodyguard, known as the SS (Schutzstaffel), both eventually under Heinrich Himmler. Together with other military and civilian departments, these groups had virtually free rein to arrest, torture, imprison, and execute anyone who challenged the government.

F4

c

The Holocaust

Already in 1933, the Nazi government had begun construction of concentration camps to imprison enemies of the regime, including political opponents, as well as Jews, Roma (Gypsies), homosexuals, Communists, religious dissenters, Jehovah’s Witnesses, professional criminals, and prostitutes. Many people fled the country as Nazi repression became increasingly severe, particularly after the 1935 enactment of the Nürnberg Laws, which deprived German Jews of citizenship and various civil rights. Once the international attention of the Berlin Olympic Games in 1936 had passed, Jewish firms were systematically liquidated or purchased for a fraction of their actual value. Sporadic attacks on Jewish individuals and property were also common. The most dramatic was Kristallnacht (“Night of Broken Glass”) on November 9, 1938, when Nazis and their sympathizers randomly killed more than 90 Jews, set fire to synagogues, and smashed the windows of thousands of Jewish-owned stores. Hundreds of thousands of Jews fled the country to escape persecution, but many more could not or would not leave.

When Germany occupied Poland in September 1939, Polish Jews were killed or forced into walled ghettos, where many died of starvation and illness. The conquests of France, Belgium, Holland, Norway, Denmark, Yugoslavia, and Greece brought hundreds of thousands more Jews under German rule. Following its invasion of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) in June 1941, the German army sent in death squads to execute nearly 1 million Jews in Russia, Belorussia, and Ukraine.

In the growing number of concentration camps throughout the expanded German empire, Jews and other inmates were exploited as forced laborers; when no longer able to work, they were killed by gassing, shooting, or fatal injections. Inmates were also used for medical experiments. By January 1942 Hitler’s staff had formulated a “final solution” to what they called “the Jewish problem.” Extermination centers were built to kill entire populations in the most efficient manner possible; at full operation, the gas chambers and crematoria at Auschwitz and Birkenau could kill up to 9,000 people within 24 hours. By the end of the war, Jewish dead numbered between 5.6 million and 5.9 million, an unprecedented act of genocide later known as the Holocaust. Hundreds of thousands of other “inferior” or “treasonous” individuals also perished in German camps during the 12 years of the Third Reich.

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