Nazism and the Rise of Hitler

HIDDEN LETTER

 It's very crucial, to begin with, the real picture of the horror of the holocaust because any wrong conclusion would be unfair with millions of innocent souls. In 1980 a letter belongs to Marcel Nadjari was found in Auschwitz which gave us a glimpse of the holocaust. In the letter, he tried to describe what he saw to his family and world.

Hitler(center) and Goebbels(left) leaving after meeting 1932

 

When the package was discovered it was soaked through, leaving the handwriting barely legible. But with the help of a new multi-spectral procedure, Russian historian Pavel Polian has reconstructed 90% of the shocking eye-witness report from inside the Nazi extermination machine. Nadjari was a Greek Jew brought to Auschwitz in April 1944. Two years earlier, his parents and younger sister, Nelli, were among the first Greek Jews to be deported and killed.

In Auschwitz, Nahjari became a member of the Sonderkommando who accompanied new arrivals to changing rooms where they were ordered to strip. "After all, were naked they went into the death chamber, where the Germans had attached pipes so they would think it was a bath," he wrote. "After half an hour we opened the door and our work begin. We carried the bodies of these innocent women and children to the lift that brought them to the room with the furnace where they were put in and burned without any fuel because of the fat they had." In sober language, he described how a person could be reduced to about 640 grams of ash, which was reduced further,seived and disposed of in a nearby river." The dramas I have seen are impossible to describe, around 600,000 Jews in Hungary, France,80,000 Poles from Litzmannstadt have passed my eyes," he wrote.

By the time he wrote the letter-in itself a death sentence- Nadjari did not expect to live long. As part of the Auschwitz system, Sonderkommando members were regularly murdered and replaced by new arrivals. Facing almost certain death, he told his family in the letter he was the only sad that he would not have a chance to avenge his family's death.

Unlike almost all other Sonderkommando members, however, Nadjari survived: he escaped from the sealed area with the gas chamber and hid his identity from the camp guards. Two days before the Red Army liberated Auschwitz he was sent to another camp in Austria and eventually liberated there. Later he emigrated to the US with his wife where he worked as a tailor in New York. Nadjari died in July 1971, aged 54, and left behind one daughter. Historian Pavel Polian tracked her down and presented her with her father's letter, deciphered after 70years.

To know French revolution-https://historicever.blogspot.com/2020/01/French-Revolution.html


CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH

• Hitler was born on April 20, 1889, in a small Austria village of Braunau just across the border from German Bavaria. He was the son of Alois Hitler and Klara Polz. Hitler got special treatment from his mother but his differences with his father grew with age because his father wanted him to be a civil servant but he always dreamt of becoming an artist. 

• In May of 1895 at age six, young Adolf Hitler entered his first school in the village of Fischlham near Linz, Austria. The Hitler household consisted of Adolf, little brother Edmund, little sister Paula, older half brother Alois Jr., older half-sister Angela.

• On 3 January 1903, his father died which left him a tragic impact on him after this he was sent to live at a boys boarding house in Linz where he was attending the technical high school and got terrible marks in the first semester. Later using poor health as his excuse, he dropped his school at the age of seventeen never returned.

• On 21 December 1907, his mother died because of breast cancer. He was very closed to his mother, after this he was very devastated and depressed. In his youth, Hitler had some unusual qualities. He was prone to sudden outbursts, very argumentative, not listening to anyone, moody undisciplined, keen to discuss politics. 

.To understand Russian Revolutionhttps://historicever.blogspot.com/2020/02/russian-revolution-russian-civil-war.html


BIRTH OF WEIMAR REPUBLIC

• The Weimar Republic was Germany's government from 1919 to 1933. The defeat of Imperial Germany and the abdication of the emperor gave an opportunity to parliamentary parties to recast German polity. A National Assembly met at Weimar and established with the federal structure. Deputies (a person who is appointed to undertake the duties of a superior in the superior's absence)  were now elected to the German Parliament on the basis of equal and universal votes cast by all adults including women.

Streets of Berlin during 1918-1919

• This republic, however, was not received well by its own people largely because of the terms it was forced to accept after Germany's defeat in World War. The peace treaty Versailles with the Allies was harsh and humiliating peace. Germany lost its overseas colonies, a tenth of its population, 13% of its territories, 75% of its iron and 26% of its coal to France, Poland, Denmark, and Lithuania.

• The Allied Powers demilitarised Germany to weaken its power. The War Guilt Clause held Germany responsible for the war and damages the Allied countries suffered. Germany was forced to pay reparation amounting to £6 billion. The allied armies also occupied the resource-rich Rhineland for much of the 1920s. Many Germans held the new Weimar Republic responsible for not only the defeat in the war but the disgrace at Versailles.

THE EFFECT OF THE WAR

• The war had a devastating impact on the entire continent both psychologically and financially. From the continent of creditors, Europe turned into debtors. The republic carried the burden of war guilt and national humiliation and was financially crippled by being forced to pay compensation

• Those who support the Weimar Republic were mainly Socialists, Catholics and Democrats, became easy targets of conservative nationalist circles. They were mockingly called the 'November criminals'. The First World War left a deep imprint on European society and polity. Soldiers came to be placed above civilians. The media glorified trench life, the truth, however, was that soldiers lived miserable lives in these trenches, trapped with rats feeding on corpses. They faced poisonous gas and enemy shelling and witnessed their ranks reduce rapidly. 

• Aggressive war propaganda and national honor occupied center stage in the public sphere, while popular support grew for conservative dictatorships that had recently come into being.

Nuremberg Rally 1936

• The birth of the Weimar Republic coincided with the revolutionary uprising of the Spartacist Leauge on the pattern of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. Those who opposed this such as the socialist, Democrats and Catholics met in Weimar to give shape to the  Democratic Republic. The Weimar Republic crushed the uprising with the help of a war veterans organization called Free Corps. The anguished Spartacists later founded the Communist Party of Germany. Later Communists and Socialists henceforth become irreconcilable enemies and could not make common cause against Hitler.

• Political radicalization was only highlighted by the economic crisis of 1923. Germany had fought the war largely on loans and had to pay war reparations in gold but Germany refused to pay and the French occupied its leading industrial area Ruhr, to claim their coal. Germany retaliated with passive money circulation, the value the German marks fell. In April the US dollar was equal to 24,000 marks, in July 353,000 marks and the figure run into trillions. 

• This crisis came to be known as hyperinflation, a situation when prices rise phenomenally high.  Eventually, the Americans intervened and bailed Germany out of the crisis by introducing the Dawes Plan, which reworked the terms of reparation to ease the financial burden on Germans but this could not last for long because of the Great economic crisis between 1929 and 1932. 

• The German economy was the worst hit by the economic crisis. By 1932, industrial production was reduced to 40% of the 1929 level. As jobs disappeared, the youth took to criminal activities and total despair commonplace.

• Politically too the Weimar Republic was fragile. The Weimar constitution had some inherent defects, which made it unstable and vulnerable to dictatorship. This made achieving a majority for a single party impossible, leading to a rule by coalitions. Another defect was Article 48, which gave the President the powers to impose emergency, suspend civil rights and rule by decree.

THE RISE OF HITLER

Image source-Google| Image by-https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:NSDAP-Logo.svg

• When the first World War broke out, Hitler enrolled in the army. He was an unusual soldier but he was a good runner. His duty was to transfer messages on the battlefield for this he was awarded "Iron Cross".

• Germany lost in the war in 1919 and signed the humiliating  TREATY OF VERSAILLES and Hitler was very furious about this treaty. Under this Germany had to pay huge war reparation.

•  Hitler had extraordinary skills which made Germany believe that the kingdom of Germany will last forever known as the THIRD REICH. It was a very difficult time for him but he knew his fortune will turn. In 1919, he joined a small group called the German Workers Party. and later took over the organization because of his remarkable orating skills. Later he renamed it the National Socialist German Workers Party. ( Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei) in Short, Nazi.

• Hitler realized one thing the movement lacked was a recognizable symbol or flag. In the summer of 1920, he chose the symbol which to this day remains perhaps the most infamous in history, the Swastika. In 1923  he made a plan in which they would kidnap the leaders of the government and force them at gunpoint to accept Hitler as their leader but he failed and arrested for treason and later released but this attempt made him a hero and was treated like a celebrity in jail also.   

• After this, he had been forbidden to speak in public until 1927. In 1928, the Nazi Party got no more than 2.6% votes in the Reichstag- the German parliament. By 1932 it had become the largest party with 37% votes.

• On 30 January 1933, President Hindenburg offered Chancellorship, the highest position in the cabinet of ministers, to Hitler. The first thing he did after acquiring power was to dismantle the structures of democratic rule. A mysterious fire broke out in the German parliament building in February facilitated his move.

• The Fire  Decree of 28 February 1933 indefinitely suspended civic rights like Freedom of Speech, press, and assembly that had been guaranteed by the Weimar constitution. Then he turned to his arch enemies, the communists most of whom were hurriedly packed off to the newly established concentration camps.

• On 3 March 1933, the famous Enabling Act was passed, this act established a dictatorship in Germany. It gave Hitler all powers to sideline Parliament and all political parties and trade unions were banned except for the Nazi Party and its affiliates.

• The state had established complete control over the economy, media, army, and judiciary. Special surveillance and security forces were created to control and order society in the ways that the nazi wanted. Apart from existing regular police in a green uniform and the SA or storm Troopers, these included the Gestapo(secret state police), the SS(protection squad). criminal police and the Security Service(SD).It was the extra-constitutional powers of these newly organized forces that gave the Nazi state its reputation as the most dreaded criminal state.

RECONSTRUCTION

Hitler chose war as the way out of the approaching economic crisis, resources were to be accumulated through the expansion of territory. In September 1939, Germany invaded Poland. This started a war with France and England. In September 1940, a Tripartite Pact was signed between Germany, Italy, and Japan, strengthening Hitler's claim to international power.

• By the end of 1940, Hitler was at the pinnacle of his power. Hitler now moved to achieve his long term aim of conquering Eastern Europe. He wanted to ensure food supplies and living space for Germans.

• He attacked the Soviet Union in June 1941, this was a historic blunder which exposed the German western front to British aerial bombing and the eastern front to the powerful Soviet armies. Germans underestimated the power of the Soviets which resulted in the defeat of Germany at Stalingrad.

• Meanwhile, the USA had resisted involvement in the war. It was unwilling to once again face all the economic problems that the First World War had caused. But it could not stay out of the war for long. Japan was expanding its power in the east. It had occupied French Indo-China and was panning attacks on US naval bases in the Pacific.

• When Japan extended its support to Hitler and bombed the US base at Pearl Harbor, the US entered the Second World War. The war ended in Mat 1945 with Hitler's defeat and the US dropping of the atom bomb on Hiroshima in Japan.

THE NAZI IDEOLOGY

The Nazi ideology was equivalent to Hitler's worldview, according to this there was no equality between people but only racial hierarchy. In this view blond, blue-eyed, Nordic German Aryans at the top, while Jews located at the lowest rung.

• Hitler's racism was borrowed from thinkers like Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer. Darwin was a natural scientist who tried to explain the creation of plants and animals through the concept of evolution and natural selection. Herbert Spencer later added the idea of survival of the fittest. According to this idea, only those species survived on eath that could adapt to changing climatic conditions. We should keep in mind that Darwin never advocated human intervention in what he thought was a purely natural process of selection.

• The Nazi argument was simple the strongest race would survive and the weak ones would perish. The other aspect of Hitler's ideology related to the geopolitical concept of Lebensraum or living space. Hitler intended to extend German boundaries by moving eastwards, to concentrate all Germans geographically in one place. Poland became the laboratory for this experiment.

•  Nazi wanted only a society of pure and healthy Nordic Aryans. They were considered as desirable. This meant that even those Germans who were seen as impure or abnormal had no right to exist. Under the Euthanasia Programmes  Germans, officials condemned state harsh policy over mentally or physically unfit.

• Jews were not the only community classified as 'undesirable'. There were others. Many Gypsies and black living in Nazi Germany were considered as racial inferiors. Under the shadow of the Second World War, Germany had waged a genocidal was, which resulted in the mass murder of selected groups of innocent civilians of Europe. 

• The number of people killed included 6 million Jews, 200,000 Gypsies, 1 million Polish civilians, 70,000 Germans who were considered mentally and physically disabled, besides innumerable political opponents. 

• Nazi devised an unprecedented means of killing people, which is by gassing them in various killing centers like Auschwitz, many others were imprisoned for life. Nazi hatred of Jews had a precursor in the traditional Christain hostility towards Jews. They had been stereotyped as killers of Christ and usurers(moneylenders charging excessive interest.

NAZI SCHOOLING SYSTEM

ERIN BLAKEMOREHitler was fanatically interested in the youth of the country. He felt that a strong Nazi society could be only by teaching children Nazi ideology. All schools were 'cleansed' and 'purified'. This meant that teachers who were Jews or seen s 'politically unreliable' were dismissed.    

•  Children were first segregated this meant Germans and Jews could not sit together or play together. Subsequently 'undesirable children' - Jews, the physically handicapped, Gypsies- were thrown out of schools and finally in the 1940s they were taken to the gas chambers.

• Stereotypes about Jews were popularised even through math classes. Children were taught to be loyal and submissive, hate jews and worship Hitler. Even the function of sports was to nurture a spirit of violence and aggression among children. Hitler believed that boxing could make children iron-hearted, strong and masculine.

• Youth organizations were made responsible for educating German youth in 'the spirit of National Socialism' Ten years old had to enter Jungvolk(Nazi youth groups for children below14 years of age)..At 14, all boys had to join the Nazi youth organization- Hitler Youth- where they learned to worship war, glorify aggression and violence, condemn democracy, and hate Jews, communists, Gypsies and all those categorized as 'undesirable'.

• The youth League of the Nazis was founded in 1922. Four years later it was renamed Hitler Youth. To unify the youth movement under Nazi control, all other organization was banned.

NAZI CULT OF MOTHERHOOD

• Hitler believed that women were radically different from men. The fight for equal rights for men and women that had become part of democratic struggles everywhere was wrong and it would destroy society.

• While boys were taught to be aggressive, masculine and steel hearted, girls were told that they had to become a good mother and rear pure-blooded Aryan children. Women who bore racially undesirable children were punished and those who produced racially desirable children were awarded. They were given favored treatment in hospital and were also entitled to concessions in shops nd on theatre tickets and railway fares.

• Those who maintained contact with Jews, Poles and Russians were paraded through the town with shaved heads, blackened faces, and placards hanging around their neck announcing ' I have sullied the honor of the nation'.

 THE ART OF PROPAGANDA

• Nazis never used the words 'kill' or 'murder' in their official communications. Mass killings were termed special treatment, a final solution (for the Jews), euthanasia(for disabled), selection and disinfection.  'Evacuation' meant deporting people to gas chambers. Gas chambers were labeled 'disinfection-areas'  

• Media were carefully used to win support for the regime and popularise its worldview. Nazi ideas were spread through visual images, films, radio, posters, catchy slogans. Propaganda films were made to create hatred for Jews. The most infamous film was The Eternal Jew.

• Nazis worked on the minds of the people, tapped their emotions and turned their hatred and anger at those marked as undesirable.

ORDINARY PEOPLE REACTION 

• Many view the world through Nazi eyes and spoke their mind in the Nazi language. They had a hatred for someone who looked like Jews. They marked the houses of Jews and reported suspicious neighbors. They genuinely believed Nazism would bring prosperity and improve the general well being

• But not every German was a Nazi, large majority Germans, however, were passive onlookers and unresponsive. Charlotte Beradt secretly recorded people's dreams in her diary and later published them in highly disconcerting books called the Third Reich of Dreams.

STEPS TO DEATH

Stage 1: Exclusion 1933-1939

The Nuremberg laws of Citizenship of September 1935

1. Only Persons of Gemrnas or related blood would be henceforth the German citizens enjoying the protection of the German empire.

2. Marriages between Jews and Germans were forbidden.

3. Extramarital relation between Jews and Germans became crime\

4. Jews were forbidden to fly the national flag.

Other legal measures included:

• Boycott of Jewish businesses
• Expulsion from government services 
• Forced selling and confiscation of their property.

Stage2: Ghettoisation 1940-1944

From September 1941, all Jews had to wear a yellow Star of David on their breasts. This identity mark was stamped on their passport, all legal documents, and houses. They were kept in Jewish Houses in Germany and on Ghettos like Lodz and Warsaawin the east. These became sites of extreme misery and poverty. Jews had to surrender all their wealth before they entered a ghetto. Soon the ghettos were brimming with hunger, starvation, and disease due to deprivation and poor hygiene.

Stage 3: Annihilation 1941 onwards

Jews from their houses, concentration camps, and ghettos from the different parts of Europe were brought to death factories by good trains. In Poland and elsewhere in the east, most notably Belzek , Auschwitz , Sobibor, Chelmno and many more they were burnt in gas chambers. Mass killings took place within minutes with scientific precision.