Federal Republic of Germany

F4

d

Opposition and Resistance

Although many people in the countries occupied by Germany collaborated with Germany’s extermination of Jews and others, there was also substantial resistance. Before invasion, Bulgaria, Hungary, Finland, and Italy refused to deport Jews to Germany. Widespread partisan resistance also existed in the occupied territories. Jews resisted with armed uprisings in Tarnow, Radom, Bedzin, and Białystok, as well as in the camp at Sobibór. For three weeks in 1943, the 65,000 Jews remaining in the Warsaw ghetto battled German police attempting a final roundup of Jews.

Within Germany, opposition to Hitler came from two different groups. The first comprised those individuals who felt a moral or philosophical repugnance to the Nazi state and thus defied it openly or passively. Many members of the German Evangelical Church formed a splinter institution known as the Confessing Church that openly opposed Nazi racism and brutality. Its leaders were imprisoned, exiled, or—as in the case of theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer—executed. A number of Catholic clerics and lay people also resisted without official church support. Some students and teachers at the University of Munich formed an underground resistance movement (“The White Rose”) but were eventually apprehended and executed in April 1943. Socialists and Communists who had escaped Nazi roundups also fought the fascist government, although with negligible results.

The second type of German resistance to Hitler came from highly placed individuals who believed that Hitler’s leadership and methods had grown erratic and thus threatened Germany. This group, which included civil servants, military staff officers of various ranks, and members of the East Prussian aristocracy, engaged in a conspiracy to remove him. Their very late—and unsuccessful—attempt to kill Hitler with a bomb on July 20, 1944, led to a bloodthirsty purge and a series of especially brutal public executions.

F

5

World War II

F5

a

Prelude to World War II

The massive destruction of World War I did not resolve the international tensions within Europe and in many ways the Treaty of Versailles made the situation worse. Germany’s revived militarism and expansionism under the Nazis were met with concern by other Europeans, but the painful memory of World War I led them to make concessions in order to avoid another violent conflict. Hitler manipulated such war weariness to Germany’s advantage as long as possible and then launched the very war that Europeans had feared.

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Hitler threatened and bluffed the European powers into allowing him gradually to revise Germany’s boundaries. His goal, to unite all ethnic Germans and give them Lebensraum (living space), did not seem unreasonable to some foreign statesmen, who recognized that the Versailles treaty had been unjust. At the time, no single demand of Hitler’s seemed worth risking war to protest. In 1933 Germany left the League of Nations, and in 1935 it began to rearm—virtually unopposed—occupying the Rhineland the next year. It then signed an anti-Communist pact with Japan and made an alliance with Fascist Italy, agreements which led to the creation of the Rome-Berlin-Tokyo Axis in 1940. In 1938 Germany declared an Anschluss (union) with Austria, with little resistance from other powers or the Austrians themselves. In Munich later that year, Britain, France, and Italy signed the Munich Pact. This pact permitted Hitler to occupy the German-populated Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia in exchange for his promise that Germany would then be satisfied. The Munich Pact later became the symbol of the disastrous consequences of appeasing an aggressor.

In March 1939 Hitler broke his word and occupied the remainder of Czechoslovakia. In August, dramatically reversing his anti-Communist policy, he made a surprising nonaggression pact with the USSR; this pact contained a secret promise to split Poland between Germany and the USSR. His repeated demands for Danzig (Gdańsk) in the so-called Polish Corridor led to a Polish-British pact and Polish mobilization. On September 1, Germany invaded Poland, and Britain and France promptly declared war on Germany. World War II had begun.

F5

b

Course of the War

In a few weeks of Blitzkrieg (lightning war), mechanized German divisions easily overwhelmed the ill-equipped Poles, taking western Poland. The Soviets seized the eastern part. In 1940 Germany swallowed Denmark, Norway, and the Low Countries and invaded France, which rapidly collapsed. With relish, Hitler forced the French to sign an armistice in the same train car where the Treaty of Versailles had been imposed on Germany 20 years earlier. Hitler then blockaded Britain and launched air raids and bomb attacks. In 1941, to aid faltering Italian forces, he sent troops to North Africa, Greece, and Yugoslavia. Then he suddenly turned toward the east and invaded the USSR, breaking his nonaggression pact. As the Soviets retreated eastward, German armies engulfed the agriculturally rich Ukraine.

At this point, Hitler was master of continental Europe, although Britain was still resisting. In 1942 the United States entered the war after Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor in Hawaii and dramatically increased its shipments of supplies and personnel to Britain and the USSR. Hitler then ordered total mobilization of people and resources. Throughout Europe, conquered peoples, especially Slavs and Jews, were executed or enslaved in German war factories, while occupied countries were drained of food and raw materials.

By 1943 the tide had begun to turn. The German army’s supply lines in the USSR were overextended, and following Germany’s defeat at Stalingrad (modern Volgograd), the Germans were forced to retreat westward. The Allies defeated Axis forces in North Africa and invaded Italy. Meanwhile, from 1942 on, German cities and factories were systematically bombed from air bases in England, resulting in huge civilian casualties. The single-night fire bombings of Hamburg in 1943 and Dresden in 1945 caused 60,000 and 135,000 fatalities respectively. Although defeat appeared inevitable, Hitler refused to surrender. The war dragged on as British and U.S. forces invaded Normandy (Normandie) in June 1944 and swept inexorably east, while the Soviets closed in from the other front. Just before Soviet tanks rolled into Berlin in April 1945, Hitler committed suicide. Germany surrendered the following month.

F

6

Life in Germany During the 20th Century

F6

a

Population

The most significant demographic change of the early 20th century in Germany was increased urbanization. In 1871 only 36.1 percent of the population lived in cities; by the onset of World War I, the figure had risen to more than 60 percent, with the greatest population increase occurring in cities with more than 100,000 people. The overall population of Germany also grew considerably during this period, from 45 million in 1871 to 68 million in 1915; however, the toll of the two wars was heavy. In the postwar divided Germanys, West Germany experienced its biggest growth during the 1950s, increasing from 48 million to 54 million people, while the population of East Germany remained at about 17 million. At the time of reunification in 1990, the total German population was about 82 million.

F6

b

Economic and Technological Developments

Germany’s massive industrial buildup during the mid-19th century continued in the 20th century. By 1914, for instance, German coal production equaled that of the world’s largest producer, Britain. Numerous German technological innovations and scientific discoveries contributed to the nation’s industrial growth. In the automobile industry, the invention by Gottlieb Daimler of the gasoline motor and power carriage were complemented by Rudolf Christian Karl Diesel’s invention of the engine that bears his name. Daimler’s partnership with Karl Benz eventually yielded the world-famous Mercedes Benz and other car lines, rivaled by models from Bavarian Motor Works (BMW) and Volkswagen. In 1900 a dirigible airship was devised by Ferdinand Graf von Zeppelin. From 1901 to 1930 German scientists won 26 Nobel prizes in chemistry, physics, and medicine. Although most known for giants in quantum physics such as Albert Einstein and Max Planck, Germany’s scientific community has made numerous contributions in every area of the natural and social sciences.

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