[1933 - 1945] Nazi Germany and World War II

The year is 1933. The air in Germany is thick with a strange mixture of desperation and a dangerous, intoxicating hope. The wounds of the Great War are still raw, and the humiliating terms of the Treaty of Versailles are a constant national irritant. The vibrant but chaotic Weimar Republic has been battered by hyperinflation that saw people carting worthless money in wheelbarrows, followed by the crushing weight of the Great Depression. Millions are unemployed, hungry, and angry. They crave a savior, someone to restore their pride and put food on the table. Into this void steps Adolf Hitler.

On January 30, 1933, Hitler is not elected by a popular majority but appointed Chancellor. The political establishment believes they can control the fiery, intense leader of the Nazi Party. It is a fatal miscalculation. Less than a month later, the Reichstag, Germany’s parliament building, is set ablaze. Blaming communists for the fire, Hitler convinces the aging President Hindenburg to sign the Reichstag Fire Decree, effectively suspending most civil liberties. It is the first step on a rapid, terrifying path to absolute power. The Enabling Act of March 1933 follows, allowing Hitler to pass laws without parliament’s consent. Democracy in Germany is dead.

The transformation is swift and total. Society is ‘coordinated’—a process called Gleichschaltung. Rival political parties are banned, trade unions are dissolved, and the press is muzzled. The sinister presence of the state is everywhere. There is the Gestapo, the secret state police, who encourage neighbors to spy on neighbors, creating a climate of pervasive fear. And there is the Schutzstaffel, the SS, Heinrich Himmler's black-uniformed elite, who evolve from Hitler’s bodyguards into a fanatical order responsible for state security and, later, the administration of genocide. Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels orchestrates a symphony of deceit, using radio—the 'people's receiver' installed in millions of homes—and cinema to deify Hitler and demonize the regime’s enemies, chief among them, the Jewish people.

For many Germans who fit the Nazis' narrow 'Aryan' ideal, life appears to improve. Massive public works projects, most famously the Autobahn highway system, and a swift rearmament program slash unemployment. The ‘Strength through Joy’ (Kraft durch Freude) organization offers affordable holidays, concerts, and cruises, creating an illusion of a prosperous, unified national community. Children are indoctrinated from a young age. Boys march in the Hitler Youth, learning military drills and absolute loyalty to the Führer. Girls join the League of German Girls, preparing them for their prescribed role as mothers of the future Reich. Conformity is the new creed, visible in the simple, practical clothing and the expectation of public displays of loyalty.

But this new order is built on a foundation of brutal persecution. The Nuremberg Laws of 1935 codify the racial ideology, stripping Jewish citizens of their rights, forbidding them from marrying 'Germans,' and systematically pushing them out of public life. Their businesses are boycotted, their children expelled from schools. The hatred explodes into open violence on the night of November 9-10, 1938—Kristallnacht, the 'Night of Broken Glass.' Across Germany, synagogues are burned, Jewish-owned shops are destroyed, and around 30,000 Jewish men are arrested and sent to the first concentration camps. It is a horrifying prelude of what is to come. Other groups are also targeted: Roma, Jehovah's Witnesses, homosexuals, and the disabled are deemed 'undesirable' and subjected to persecution, imprisonment, and sterilization.

Emboldened by a lack of international resistance, Hitler turns his ambitions outward. In 1936, his troops march into the demilitarized Rhineland, a direct violation of the Versailles Treaty. In 1938, he orchestrates the Anschluss, the annexation of his native Austria, followed by the seizure of the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia. The world watches, hoping to appease him. But Hitler’s vision was always one of conquest for 'living space'—Lebensraum. On September 1, 1939, the screech of Stuka dive bombers and the rumble of Panzer tanks echo across the Polish border. This new form of 'lightning war,' the Blitzkrieg, combines air power and mechanized ground forces with devastating speed and precision. Britain and France, honouring their pact with Poland, declare war on Germany. The Second World War has begun.

The initial years are a string of shocking victories for the Wehrmacht. Poland falls in weeks. In 1940, Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, and even the mighty French army are defeated with breathtaking speed. In Germany, Hitler's popularity soars; he appears to be an infallible military genius. Only the English Channel and the formidable Royal Air Force stand in his way, thwarting the Luftwaffe's attempt to gain air superiority in the Battle of Britain.

In June 1941, Hitler makes his most fateful decision: he launches Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union. It is a war of ideology and annihilation on an unimaginable scale. As the German army pushes east, special SS death squads called Einsatzgruppen follow, murdering over a million Jews, partisans, and Soviet officials in mass shootings. But the true, monstrous heart of the Nazi project is now fully revealed. At the Wannsee Conference in January 1942, top Nazi officials formalize the 'Final Solution to the Jewish Question.' A network of extermination camps, equipped with industrial gas chambers, is established in occupied Poland. At Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, Sobibor, and others, the murder of Europe's Jews becomes a horrifyingly efficient, bureaucratic process. By the war's end, approximately six million Jewish men, women, and children will be systematically murdered, along with millions of others, including Soviet prisoners of war, Poles, and Roma.

The brutal Russian winter and the fierce resistance of the Red Army halt the German advance just shy of Moscow. The tide begins to turn decisively in the frozen ruins of Stalingrad, where the German Sixth Army is encircled and annihilated in early 1943. It is a catastrophic military and psychological blow from which the Reich never recovers. The war now comes home to Germany with a vengeance. Allied bombing campaigns begin to systematically flatten German cities. The firebombing of Hamburg in 1943 creates a vortex of flame that kills over 40,000 people; in 1945, Dresden is reduced to a moonscape of rubble.

The end is slow, brutal, and inevitable. On June 6, 1944—D-Day—Allied forces land in Normandy, opening the long-awaited Western Front. As Soviet armies advance relentlessly from the east and the Western Allies push from the west, the Third Reich, which was meant to last a thousand years, crumbles. A final, desperate German offensive in the Ardennes, the Battle of the Bulge, fails. By April 1945, Soviet shells are falling on Berlin. Deep beneath the smoking ruins of his Chancellery, in a concrete bunker, Adolf Hitler dictates his final political testament, blaming the Jews for the war he started, before taking his own life on April 30. On May 8, 1945, what remains of the German high command signs an unconditional surrender. The guns finally fall silent across a continent in ruins, leaving behind a legacy of destruction and a moral abyss from which Germany and the world would take generations to recover.