Subscribe for fascinating stories connecting the past to the present. Hitler capitalized on economic woes, popular discontent and political infighting to take absolute power in Germany beginning in Since , the word has taken on a new and horrible meaning: the ideological and systematic state-sponsored Heinrich Himmler , a It was a frigid day in occupied Poland, and for all Shmuel Beller knew, it could be his last.
As Russian forces advanced toward Auschwitz, Beller and other prisoners had been told by their captors that they had to leave the death camp. So he ran into one of the storage facilities Dachau, the first Nazi concentration camp, opened in , shortly after Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany. Located in southern Germany, Dachau was initially a camp for political prisoners; however, it eventually evolved into a death camp where countless Auschwitz, also known as Auschwitz-Birkenau, opened in and was the largest of the Nazi concentration and death camps.
Located in southern Poland, Auschwitz initially served as a detention center for political prisoners. However, it evolved into a network of camps where On July 20, , during World War II , a plot by senior-level German military officials to murder Adolf Hitler and then take control of his government failed when a bomb planted in a briefcase went off but did not kill the Nazi leader.
The assassination But during the Third Reich, you were more likely to hear a hymn called Exalted Night instead of one about a silent night. The German army was radically downsized and the nation forbidden to have submarines or an air force. Paying the crushing reparations destabilized the economy, producing ruinous, runaway inflation. By September , four billion German marks had the equal value of one American dollar.
Consumers needed a wheelbarrow to carry enough paper money to buy a loaf of bread. Hitler, a mesmerizing public speaker, addressed political meetings in Munich calling for a new German order to replace what he saw as an incompetent and inefficient democratic regime. This New Order was distinguished by an authoritarian political system based on a leadership structure in which authority flowed downward from a supreme national leader.
Jews represented everything the Nazis found repugnant: finance capitalism controlled, the Nazis believed, by powerful Jewish financiers , international communism Karl Marx was a German Jew, and the leadership of the German Communist Party was heavily Jewish , and modernist cultural movements like psychoanalysis and swing music.
Once conquered, the Soviet Union would be ruled by the German master race, which would exterminate or subdue millions of Slavs to create lebensraum living space for their own farms and communities.
In a conquered and racially cleansed Russia, they would work on model farms and factories connected to the homeland by new highways, called autobahns. Hitler was the ideologue as well as the chief organizer of the Nazi Party. By , the party had a newspaper, an official flag, and a private army—the Sturmabteilung SA storm troopers —made up largely of unemployed and disenchanted WWI veterans. By , the SA had grown to 15, men and had access to hidden stores of weapons.
Before the economic depression struck, the Nazis were practically unknown, winning only 3 percent of the vote to the Reichstag German parliament in elections in In the elections, the Nazis won 33 percent of the votes, more than any other party. In January Hitler was appointed chancellor, the head of the German government, and many Germans believed that they had found a savior for their nation.
Hitler Comes to Power. Germany, under threat of invasion, is forced to sign the treaty. Among other provisions, Germany accepts responsibility for the war and agrees to make huge payments known as reparations , limit its military to , troops, and transfer territory to its neighbors.
The terms of the treaty lead to widespread political discontent in Germany. Adolf Hitler gains support by promising to overturn them. October 24, Stock market crash in New York The plummet in the value of stocks that is associated with the New York stock market crash brings a rash of business bankruptcies. Widespread unemployment occurs in the United States. The "Great Depression," as it is called, sparks a worldwide economic crisis. In early , Hitler used blackmail to consolidate his hold over the military by instigating the Blomberg-Fritsch Affair.
Army commander Colonel-General Werner von Fritsch was removed after the Schutzstaffel SS paramilitary produced allegations that he had engaged in a homosexual relationship.
On the same day, sixteen generals were stripped of their commands and 44 more were transferred; all were suspected of not being sufficiently pro-Nazi. By early February , 12 more generals had been removed. Hitler took care to give his dictatorship the appearance of legality.
Many of his decrees were explicitly based on the Reichstag Fire Decree and hence on Article 48 of the Weimar Constitution. The Reichstag renewed the Enabling Act twice, each time for a four-year period.
Privacy Policy. Skip to main content. Search for:. Learning Objective Describe the events that led to Hitler becoming chancellor. On August 2, , President Hindenburg died.
Over the next few years, Hitler continued to consolidate his power, taking care to give his dictatorship the appearance of legality, by eliminating many military officials and taking personal command of the armed forces. It passed in both the Reichstag and Reichsrat on March 24, , and was signed by President Paul von Hindenburg later that day.
0コメント