Hitler Helmut was a German boy his father was Prominent physician, deliberated with his wife Whether the time had come to kill the entire

Family or if he should commit suicide alone . He said to his wife about his fear of revenge, saying,’ now the Allies will do to us what we did to the crippled and Jews.’

The whole family committed suicide . Helmut's father was a Nazi and a supporter of Adolf Hitler.

Allied Military58%Axis Military

13%

Axis Civilians 4%

Allied Civilians

25%

Chart Title

1st Qtr 2nd Qtr 3rd Qtr 4th Qtr

The Weimar Republic is the name given by historians to the federal republic and parliamentary representative democracy established in 1919 in Germany to replace

the imperial form of government. It was named after Weimar, the city where the constitutional assembly took

place. Its official name was German Reich

Following World War I, the republic emerged from the German Revolution in November 1918. In 1919, a national assembly convened inWeimar, where a new constitution for the German Reich was written, then adopted on 11 August of that same year.

The ensuing period of liberal democracy lapsed in the early 1930s, leading to the ascent of the nascent Nazi Party and Adolf Hitler in 1933. The legal measures taken by the Nazi government in February and March 1933, commonly known as Gleichschaltung ("coordination") meant that the government could legislate contrary to the constitution. The republic nominally continued to exist until 1945, as the constitution was never formally repealed.

However, the measures taken by the Nazis in the early part of their rule rendered the constitution irrelevant. Thus, 1933 is usually seen as the end of the Weimar Republic and the beginning of Hitler's Third Reich.

The war had a devastating impact on the entire

continent both psychologically and financially.

Unfortunately, the infant Weimar Republic was

being made to pay for the sins of the old empire.

The republic carried the burden of war guilt and

national humiliation and was financially crippled by

being forced to pay compensation.

Those who supported the Weimar Republic, mainly

Socialists, Catholics and Democrats, became easy

targets of attack in the conservative nationalist

circles.

This crisis in the economy,

polity and society formed the background to Hitler’s rise to power.

When the First World War broke out, he enrolled for the army, acted as a messenger in the front, became a corporal, and earned medals for bravery.

The German defeat horrified him and the Versailles Treaty made him furious. In 1919, he joined a small group called the German Workers’ Party. He subsequently took over the organisation and renamed it the National Socialist German Workers’ party.

In 1923, Hitler planned to seize control of Bavaria, march to Berlin and capture power. He failed, was arrested, tried for treason, and later released.

The Nazis could not effectively mobilise popular support till the early 1930s. It was during the Great Depression that Nazism became a mass movement. As we have seen, after 1929, banks collapsed and businesses shut down, workers lost their jobs and the middle classes were threatened with destitution. In such a situation Nazi propaganda stirred hopes of a better future. In 1928, the Nazi Party got no more than 2. 6 per cent votes in the Reichstag ñ the German parliament. By 1932, it had become the largest party with 37 per cent votes.

Hitler was a powerful speaker. His passion and

his words moved people.

He promised to build a strong nation, undo the

injustice of the Versailles Treaty and restore

the dignity of the German people.

He promised employment for those looking for

work, and a secure future for the youth. He

promised to weed out all foreign influences

and resist all foreign ‘conspiracies’ against

Germany.

On 30 January 1933, President Hindenburg offered the Chancellorship, the highest

position in the cabinet of ministers, to Hitler.

Having acquired powers, Hitler set out to dismantle the structure of Democracy.

On March 3, 1993, the famous Enabling Act was passed. This Act established dictatorship in Germany

All political parties and trade unions in Germany were banned except for the Nazi party and its affiliates .

• Hitler assigned the responsibility of economic recovery to the economist Hjalmar Schacht

who aimed at full production and full

employment through a state-funded work-creation program.

• In foreign policy also, Hitler acquired quick successes. He pulled out of the League of Nations in 1933, reoccupied the Rhineland in 1936, and integrated Austria and Germany in 1938 under the slogan, One people, One empire and One Leader.

• The crimes that the Nazi’s committed

were linked to a system of belief and a set

of practices.

• Nazi Ideology was synonymous with Hitler’s Worldview.

• According to this, there was no equality between people, but only a racial hierarchy.

• Hitler’s racism borrowed from thinkers like Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer.

• The other aspect of Hitler’s ideology related to the geopolitical concept of Lebensraum, or living space.

• Once in power, the Nazi’s quickly began to implement their dream of creating an exclusive racial community of pure Germans by physically eliminating all those who were seen as ‘undesirable’ in the extended empire.

• Nazi’s wanted only a society of ‘pure and healthy Nordic Aryans’. They alone were considered desirable. Only they were seen as worthy of prospering and multiplying against all others who were classed as undesirable.

• This meant that even those Germans who were seen as impure or abnormal had no right to exist.

• Jews remained the worst sufferers in Nazi Germany. Gypsies and blacks in living in Nazi Germany were also treated as inferiors

• Under the shadow of war, the Nazi’s proceeded to realise their murderous, racial ideal. Genocide and war became two sides of the same coin. Occupied Poland was divided up. Much of north-western Poland was annexed to Germany. Poles were forced to leave their homes and properties behind to be occupied by ethnic Germans brought in from occupied Europe.

• The other part of Germany was known as the General Government, the destination of all the ‘undesirables’ of the empire.

• With some of the largest ghettos and gas chambers, the General government also served as the killing fields for the Jews.

Stage 1 : 1933-1939

You have no right to line among us.

The Nuremberg Laws of citizenship of September 1935:

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

the German forbidden.

2. Marriages between Jews and Germans were forbidden.

3. Extramarital relations between Jews and Germans became a 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 properties

1) Park benches announces : ‘ Only for ARYANS.

2) The sign declares that the North sea bathing

resort is free of Jews.

Stage 2 : Ghettoization 1940- 1944

You have no right to live among us

From September 1941, all Jews had to wear a yellow Star of David on. This identity mark was stamped on their passport,

All legal documents and houses. They were kept in Jewish houses in Germany, and in ghettos like Lodz and Warsaw in 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 :

You have no Right to Live.

Jews from Jewish houses, concentration

camps and ghettos from different parts of

Europe were brought to death factories by

goods trains. In Poland and elsewhere in the

east, most notably Belzek, Auschwitz,

Sobibor, Treblinka, Chelmno and Majdanek,

they were charred in gas chambers. Mass

killings took place within minutes with

scientific precision.

1) Killed while trying to escape. The camps were enclosed with live wires.

2) Piles of clothes outside the gas chambers.

3 & 4 ) Concentration chambers

Germany was in one of its strongest stances for

nearly 20 years. It was this that Hitler wanted to capitalize

on for the future of Nazi Germany and by doing this they

need to take advantage of the young people as they are the

next generation of Nazis. Using the ideas of Social Darwinism they

Nazis decided that only the most strongest and ruthless should survive.

This was to be the Aryan race. How was Hitler supposed to tackle such a massive

task? Would it work? And what effects would it have? The Nazis would have to

brainwash the German youth in every possible way. So they did, they took over the

lives of

the German children, and run them for them. If Hitler wanted his anticipated 1000-

year regime to succeed the future generations were the children. To get people on

your side you need to get them on your side when they are young, Younger people

are far easier to influence than when they are adults. This is because the younger

you are the more you believe other people as they are more dependent on them,

and the younger generations look up to the older generations who lead by example

to make the younger people the perfect Nazis.

NAZI IDEOLOGY

From 1920 to 1923, Hitler formulated his ideology, then published it

in 1925–26, as Mein Kampf, a two-volume, biography and political

manifesto. Though Hitler for "tactical" reasons had rhetorically declared a

1920 party platform with socialist platitudes "unshakable," actually "many

paragraphs of the party program were obviously merely a demagogic appeal

to the mood of the lower classes at a time when they were in bad straits and

were sympathetic to radical and even socialist slogans...Point 11, for

example...Point 12...nationalization...Point 16...communalization....

apparently really believed in the 'socialism' of National Socialism. "In actual

practice, such points were mere slogans, "most of them forgotten by the

time the party came to power. The Nazi

leader himself was later to be embarrassed when reminded

of some of them. "Historian Conan Fischer argues that

the Nazis were sincere in their use of the adjective

socialist, which they saw as inseparable from the

adjective national, and meant it as a socialism of

the master race, rather than the socialism of the

"underprivileged and oppressed

seeking justice and equal rights."

JEWS UNDER NAZIS

One should differentiate between the cultural antisemitism

symptomatic of the German conservatives – found especially in the German

officer corps and the high civil administration – and mainly directed against the

Eastern Jews on the one hand, and völkisch antisemitism on the other.

On April 1, 1933, Jewish doctors, shops, lawyers and stores were

boycotted. Only six days later, the Law for the Restoration of the Professional

Civil Service was passed, banning Jews from being employed in government. This

law meant that Jews were now indirectly and directly dissuaded or banned from

privileged and upper-level positions reserved for “Aryan” Germans. From then

on, Jews were forced to work at more menial positions, beneath non-Jews,

pushing them to more labored positions.

On August 25, 1933, the Haavara Agreement was signed, which allowed 60,000

German Jews to emigrate to Palestine by 1939.

At the same time the Reich Citizenship Law was passed and was

reinforced in November by a decree, stating that all Jews, even quarter- and

half-Jews, were no longer citizens. This meant that they had no basic civil rights,

such as that to vote. In 1936, Jews were banned from all professional jobs,

effectively preventing them from exerting any influence in education, politics,

higher education and industry. Because of this, there was nothing to stop the

anti-Jewish actions which spread across the Nazi-German economy.

In particular, Jews were penalized financially for their perceived racial status.

Government contracts could no longer be awarded to Jewish businesses.

Next “Aryan” doctors could only treat “Aryan” patients. Provision of medical care

to Jews was already hampered by the fact that Jews were banned from being

doctors or having any professional jobs. Later Jews with first names of non-Jewish

origin had to add Israel (males) or Sarah (females) to their names, and a

large J was to be imprinted on their passports beginning October 5. Jewish

children were banned from going to normal schools. Nearly all Jewish companies

had either collapsed under financial pressure and declining profits, or had been

forced to sell out to the Nazi German government.

The storefronts of Jewish shops and offices were smashed and

vandalized, and many synagogues were destroyed by fire. Approximately 91 Jews

were killed, and another 30,000 arrested, mostly able bodied males, all of whom

were sent to the newly formed concentration camps. In the next 3 months

some2000–2500

of them died in the concentration camps, the rest were released

under the condition that they leave Germany. Many Germans

were disgusted by this action when the full extent of the

damage was discovered, Hitler ordered it to be blamed on

the Jews. Collectively, the Jews were made to pay back one

billion Reichsmark in damages, the fine being raised by

confiscating 20% of every Jewish property. Of the 522,000

Jews living in Germany in January 1933, only 214,000 were

left by the eve of World War II.

Jews killed in camps!!

Jews emigrating from Berlin to Jews in concentration camps

the United States, 1939

NAZI CULT OF MOTHERHOOD

Children in Nazi Germany were told that women were different from men,

the fight for equal rights for men and women 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 good mothers and rear pure blooded Aryan

children, they have to maintain the purity of the German race, distance themselves

from Jews, look after the home and teach their children Nazi values.

In Nazi Germany all mothers were not treated equally, women who bore

racially undesirable children were punished and those who produced racially

desirable children were awarded like –better treatment in hospital, concessions in

shop, theater tickets and railway pass. To encourage women to produced more

children, honour Crosses were awarded, a bronze Cross for four children, silver for

six and gold for eight children.

Those who maintain contact with Jews, Poles and

Russians were paraded through the town with shaved heads,

blackened faces and play cards hanging around their neck

saying “ I Have spoiled the honour of the Nation”, many

received jail sentences and lost civic honour as well as their

husbands and families for this offence. This program included

a gigantic Nazi propaganda campaign to urge women to

increase the size of their families. Cash incentives were paid

for each child bornMutterKreuz ("Mother's

Cross")

Youth in Nazi Germany………..

Hitler felt that a strong Nazi society could be established only by teaching

children Nazi Ideology, and this requires a control over the child both inside and

outside school. The Following steps were taken for this………

1) All schools were cleansed and purified by dismissing all Jew teachers and all those

who were seen as politically unreliable.

2) German and Jew children cannot sit together or play together.

3) Subsequently Jews, Gypsies and the physically handicapped were thrown out of

schools and finally to the Gas chambers.

4) School textbook were rewritten, racial science was introduced to justify Nazi idea

of race.

5) Children were taught to be loyal and submissive, hate Jews and worship Hitler.

6) Even sports were nurture in the spirit of violence and aggression among children.

7) Youth organization were made responsible for educating German youth in the

Spirit of National socialism.

8) Ten year olds had to enter Jung – volk, at 14 all boys had to join the Nazi youth

organization HITLER YOUTH, where they learnt to worship war, glorify aggression

and violence, condemn democracy and hate Jews, Communist, Gypsies and all

those categorized as undesirable.

9) After a period of rigorous ideological and physical training they joined the Labour

service by 18, then they have to serve in the armed forces and enter one of the

Nazi organization.

THE ART OF PROPAGANDA ………..

The Nazi regime used language and media with care and often to great

effect for Propaganda, they coined different words for their official

communications such as – Mass Killing were termed “Special Treatment"," Final

solution” for the Jews, “euthanases” “ selection” and “disinfection” for the

disabled.

“Evacuation” meant deporting people to gas chambers and gas chambers

were termed as “disinfection area” and looked like bathroom equipped with fake

showerheads.

Nazi idea were spread through visual images, films, radio, posters,

catchy slogan and Leaflets, propaganda films were made to create hatred for

Jews and the most famous Film was “The Eternal Jew”.Jewish ghettos in

Europe existed

because Jews were viewed as

foreigners due to their non-

Christian beliefs in a Renaissance

Christian environment. As a

result, Jews were placed under

strict regulations throughout

many European cities

ORDINARY PEOPLE AND THEIR CRIMES AGAINST

HUMANITY

Common people reacted in different ways…….

(i) Many saw the world through Nazi eyes and felt hatred and anger

surge inside them when they saw a Jew. They willingly marked the

houses of the Jews and reported suspicious neighbor's.

(ii) They genuinely believed the Jews were responsible for their

misfortunes. Nazism they felt would bring prosperity, improve general

well being and pride of the nation.

(iii) Large majority of people were passive onlookers, apathetic

witnesses, because they were too scared to act, to differ to protest.

(iv) However, many organized active assistance braving police,

repression and even death.

KNOWLEDGE ABOUT THE HOLOCAUST

Historians differ as to where the responsibility for the

Holocaust lies. Intentionalist historians such as Lucy Dawidowicz argue that Adolf

Hitler planned the extermination of the Jewish people from as early as 1918,and that

he personally oversaw its execution.

Historical and philosophical interpretations

The enormity of the Holocaust has prompted much analysis. The Holocaust was

indeed characterized by an industrial project of extermination. Others have

presented the Holocaust as a product of German history, analyzing its deep roots in

German society. But it was only after the war ended and Germany was defeated that

the world came to realise the horrors of what had happened. While the Germans

were preoccupied with their own plight as a defeated nation emerging out of the

rubble, the Jews wanted the world to remember the atrocities and sufferings they

had endured during the Nazi killing operations , also called the

Holocaust.

Yet the history and the memory of the Holocaust live on in memoirs,

fiction, documentaries, poetry, memorials and museums in many

parts of the world today. These are a tribute to those who resisted it,

an embarrassing reminder to those who collaborated, and a warning

to those who watched in silence.