Adolf Hitler - Military Leader, Dictator

Adolf Hitler Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) was the founder and leader of the Nazi Party and the most influential voice in the organization, implementation and execution of the Holocaust, the systematic extermination and ethnic cleansing of six million European Jews and millions of other non-aryans. Hitler was the Head of State, Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces and guiding spirit, or fuhrer, of Germany's Third Reich from 1933 to 1945. - Hitler's Early Years - World War I - Hitler Starts to Lead - Rise of the Nazi Party - Hitler As German Fuhrer - World War II - Allied Victory & Hitler's Death Early Years Born in Braunau am Inn, Austria, on April 20, 1889, Hitler was the son of a fifty-two-year-old Austrian customs official, Alois Schickelgruber Hitler, and his third wife, a young peasant girl, Klara Poelzl, both from the backwoods of lower Austria. World War I Hitler Becomes a Leader Rise of the Nazi Party Hitler As Fuhrer World War II Allied Victory and Hitler's Death

Concentration Camps, 1933–1939 Concentration camps (Konzentrationslager; abbreviated as KL or KZ) were an integral feature of the regime in Nazi Germany between 1933 and 1945. The term concentration camp refers to a camp in which people are detained or confined, usually under harsh conditions and without regard to legal norms of arrest and imprisonment that are acceptable in a constitutional democracy. THE FIRST CONCENTRATION CAMPS IN GERMANY The first concentration camps in Germany were established soon after Hitler's appointment as chancellor in January 1933. In the weeks after the Nazis came to power, The SA (Sturmabteilungen; commonly known as Storm Troopers), the SS (Schutzstaffel; Protection Squadrons—the elite guard of the Nazi party), the police, and local civilian authorities organized numerous detention camps to incarcerate real and perceived political opponents of Nazi policy. Special “political units on alert” (Politische Bereitschaften) originally guarded the SS concentration camps.

Nazism Nazism, or National Socialism in full (German: Nationalsozialismus), is the ideology and practice associated with the 20th-century German Nazi Party and state as well as other related far-right groups. Usually characterised as a form of fascism that incorporates scientific racism and antisemitism, Nazism originally developed from the influences of pan-Germanism, the Völkisch German nationalist movement and the anti-communist Freikorps paramilitary culture in post-First World War Germany, which many Germans felt had been left humiliated by the Treaty of Versailles. German Nazism subscribed to theories of racial hierarchy and social Darwinism, asserted the superiority of an Aryan master race, and criticised both capitalism and communism for being associated with Jewish materialism. The Nazi Party was founded as the pan-German nationalist and antisemitic German Workers' Party in January 1919. Etymology Position in the political spectrum Origins Völkisch nationalism

Aggression as a Basic Nazi Idea: Mein Kampf [Page 644] Hitler's Mein Kampf, which became the Nazi statement of faith, gave to the conspirators adequate foreknowledge of the unlawful aims of the Nazi leadership. It was not only Hitler's political testament; by adoption it became theirs. Mein Kampf may be described as the blueprint of the Nazi aggression. Its whole tenor and content demonstrate that the Nazi pursuit of aggressive designs was no mere accident arising out of an immediate political situation in Europe and the world. A great German philosopher once said that ideas have hands and feet. A copy of Mein Kampf was officially presented by the Nazis to all newly married couples in Germany. "To the newly married couple, Friedrich Rosebrock and Else Geborene Zum Beck, with best wishes for a happy and blessed marriage. This copy of Mein Kampf, which was the 1945 edition, contains the information that the number of copies- published to date amount to 6,250,000.] [Page 646] entry into the League of Nations.

Escape of the Jewish People from Europe Even before the beginning of World War II, many Jews sought to escape from countries under Nazi control. Between 1933 and 1939, more than 90,000 German and Austrian Jews fled to neighboring countries (France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, Czechoslovakia, and Switzerland). After the war began on September 1, 1939, escape became much more difficult. Most non-Jews neither aided nor hindered the "Final Solution" and relatively few people helped Jews escape. ESCAPE TO SOVIET-OCCUPIED POLAND AND THE INTERIOR OF THE SOVIET UNION Between 1939 and 1941 nearly 300,000 Polish Jews, almost 10 percent of the Polish Jewish population, fled German-occupied areas of Poland and crossed into the Soviet zone. ESCAPE TO NEUTRAL COUNTRIES Close to 30,000 Jews were admitted into Switzerland, although an estimated 20,000 were turned away at the Swiss border. Neutral Sweden provided sanctuary for some Norwegian Jews in 1940 and for virtually the entire Danish Jewish community in October 1943.

Anne Frank Born on June 12, 1929, Anne Frank was a German-Jewish teenager who was forced to go into hiding during the Holocaust. She and her family, along with four others, spent over two years during World War II hiding in an annex of rooms above her father’s office in Amsterdam. Since it was first published in 1947, Anne Frank’s diary has become one of the most powerful memoirs of the Holocaust. Its message of courage and hope in the face of adversity has reached millions. The diary has been translated into 67 languages with over 30 million copies sold. After being betrayed to the Nazis, Anne, her family, and the others living with them were arrested and deported to Nazi concentration camps. Her bravery and legacy live on, however, and she is frequently cited as a model for today.

History - World Wars: The Rise of Adolf Hitler History of the Jews during World War II Group of Jewish parachutists under British command, who was sent into Slovakia. Palestine, wartime World War II is the most tragic period in Jewish history. German Nazi occupied Europe[edit] By World War II, 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 as part of the "Aryanization" policy inaugurated in 1937. As the war started, large massacres of Jews took place. The first of these pogroms was Kristallnacht in Nazi Germany, often called Pogromnacht, or "night of broken glass," in which Jewish homes were ransacked in numerous German cities along with 11,000 Jewish shops, towns and villages,[1] as civilians and SA stormtroopers destroyed buildings with sledgehammers, leaving the streets covered in smashed windows — the origin of the name "Night of Broken Glass." By December 1941, Adolf Hitler decided to completely exterminate European Jews. Spain[edit] References[edit]

The Holocaust The Holocaust (from the Greek ὁλόκαυστος holókaustos: hólos, "whole" and kaustós, "burnt")[2] also known as Shoah (Hebrew: השואה, HaShoah, "the catastrophe"; Yiddish: חורבן, Churben or Hurban, from the Hebrew for "destruction"), was the mass murder or genocide of approximately six million Jews during World War II, a programme of systematic state-sponsored murder by Nazi Germany, led by Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party, throughout the German Reich and German-occupied territories.[3] Of the nine million Jews who had resided in Europe before the Holocaust, approximately two-thirds were killed.[4] Over one million Jewish children were killed in the Holocaust, as were approximately two million Jewish women and three million Jewish men.[5] A network of over 40,000 facilities in Germany and German-occupied territory were used to concentrate, hold, and kill Jews and other victims.[6] The persecution and genocide were carried out in stages. Etymology and use of the term Distinctive features Origins

History of Germany: Primary Documents - EuroDocs Flag of Germany EuroDocs > History of Germany: Primary Documents Chronological History of Germany Germany in Late Antiquity Medieval Germany Renaissance, Reformation and Early Modern Germany Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Germany Germany: World War I and Weimar Republic Germany: National Socialism and World War II Germany Divided and Reunified Other Sources for German History German Sources by Topic German Constitutions and Legal Documents German Local and Regional History Sources Historic German Newspapers and Journals Online Other Collections Relevant to German History EuroDocs Creator: Richard Hacken, European Studies Librarian,Harold B.

Diary Excerpts On Deportations"Our many Jewish friends and acquaintances are being taken away in droves. The Gestapo is treating them very roughly and transporting them in cattle cars to Westerbork, the big camp in Drenthe to which they're sending all the Jews....If it's that bad in Holland, what must it be like in those faraway and uncivilized places where the Germans are sending them? We assume that most of them are being murdered. The English radio says they're being gassed." - October 9, 1942On Nazi Punishment of Resisters"Have you ever heard the term 'hostages'?

Hitler's Failed Coup - The Beer Hall Putsch Ten years before Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany, he tried to take power by force during the Beer Hall Putsch. On the night of November 8, 1923, Hitler and some of his Nazi confederates stormed into a Munich beer hall and attempted to force the triumvirate, the three men that governed Bavaria, to join him in a national revolution. The men of the triumvirate initially agreed since they were being held at gunpoint, but then denounced the coup as soon as they were allowed to leave. Hitler was arrested three days later and, after a short trial, was sentenced to five years in prison, where he wrote his infamous book, Mein Kampf. A Little Background In the fall of 1922, the Germans asked the Allies for a moratorium on the reparations payments that they were required to pay according to the Versailles Treaty (from World War I). The French occupation of German land united the German people to act. In August 1923, Gustav Stresemann became Chancellor of Germany. The Plan The Putsch The Downfall

German Jews during the Holocaust, 1939–1945 1933-1939 In January 1933, some 522,000 Jews by religious definition lived in Germany. Over half of these individuals, approximately 304,000 Jews, emigrated during the first six years of the Nazi dictatorship, leaving only approximately 214,000 Jews in Germany proper (1937 borders) on the eve of World War II. In the years between 1933 and 1939, the Nazi regime had brought radical and daunting social, economic, and communal change to the German Jewish community. Six years of Nazi-sponsored legislation had marginalized and disenfranchised Germany's Jewish citizenry and had expelled Jews from the professions and from commercial life. By early 1939, only about 16 percent of Jewish breadwinners had steady employment of any kind. Thousands of Jews remained interned in concentration camps following the mass arrests in the aftermath of Kristallnacht (Night of the Broken Glass) in November 1938. World War II Deportation

"Weimar Culture and the Rise of National Socialism: The <i>Kampfbund fü" by Alan E. Steinweis Abstract Between 1928 and 1932, the National Socialist movement transformed itself from an insurgent fringe party into Germany's most potent political force. The most important factor in this dramatic turnabout in political fortunes was the rapid deterioration of the German economy beginning in 1929. It does not, however, logically follow that the German people simply fell into the lap of the party and its charismatic leader. To the contrary, the party aggressively employed sophisticated propagandistic and organizational strategies for attracting and mobilizing diverse segments of German society.