- Introduction
- About this Site
- Germany's History
- Hitler Comes to Power
- The Holocaust
- Nazi Death Camps
- Anne Frank
- Anne's Diary
- Hiroshima
- Sadako's 1000 Cranes
- Sadako Lives On!
- Singapore
- Lim Bo Seng
- Mrs Kathigasu
- Comfort Women
- Comfort Women: 01
- Comfort Women: 02
- Aftermath
- Epilogue
- Sign Guestbook
- View Guestbook
- banning the communist deputies from coming to the Reichstag, so that they
could not use their votes.
- persuading the Centre Party to vote for the act by vague promises of things
he would do for them in the future
- using the votes of his allies, the Nationalists
Hitler in Power
When Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933, he set about creating a 'thousand year Reich', in other words an empire that would last a thousand years. He and his supporters had high hopes that Nazi rule would go on forever. In fact, Hitler's Third Reich (third empire) lasted only twelve years. It ended in 1945, with Germany's defeat in the Second World War and Hitler's own suicide amidst the ruins of Berlin.
The Reichstag Fire
Hitler became Chancellor in January 1933 with the support of the President, the German army and many politicians. These people hoped that he would made the government strong again and sort out Germany's economic problems. Then they intended to get rid of him. Hitler, however, was determined to stay. As soon as he became Chancellor, he set about making sure that he had complete power.
His first step was to call new elections for the Reichstag (parliament). The Nazis were already the largest single party in the Reichstag but Hitler wanted them to have an overall majority. Now that he was in control of the government, Hitler was able to make sure that his party had all the advantages. He stopped the newspapers from writing hostile things about the Nazis. He dismissed those officials who were opposed to him. He used his uniform followers to break up the meetings of other parties and had a group known as the SA or brownshirts (he also had a group known as the SS or blackshirts, who ran his secret police force). There was extreme Nazi violence throughout the election campaign, especially against the communists.
A week before the election, the Reichstag building in Berlin went up in flames. Hitler blamed the fire on the communists. He used it as an excuse to issue an emergency law taking away the freedoms people had been promised by the Weimar Republic, such as the right to a fair trial and to a free press. The German people now had very few rights left. The Reichstag Fire was almost certainly started deliberately by the Nazis, though the German people did not know this at the time.
As you might expect, the Nazis increased their support in the election. However, they still only obtained 43% of the votes. With the help of the Nationalist party, which supported Hitler, they just managed to scrape together an overall majority of 51%.
Treaties of Locarno:
Hitler's violation of the Treaties
The Treaties of Locarno
In October 1925 a conference attended by Germany, France, Britain, Italy, Belgium, Czechoslovakia and Poland took place in Locarno, Switzerland. The countries involved agreed to a series of treaties to guarantee peace in Western Europe. Germany agreed not to use force to change its western frontiers and to use arbitration over its eastern frontiers. Britain promised to defend Belgium and France but not Poland and Czechoslovakia.
In 1936, Germany sent its troops into the Rhineland and violated the Locarno Treaties but no action was taken against Germany. Germany again violated the treaties when it did not use arbitration to settle its dispute with Czechoslovakia in 1938 and Poland in 1939.
The Swastika
In his book 'Mein Kampf' (My Struggle), Adolf Hitler mentioned the choice of the new flag for the Nazi Party. He finally chose a red flag with a white disc bearing a black swastika. To him, "the red expressed the social thought... the white the national thought... the swastika... the struggle for the victory of Aryan mankind."
The black, white and red Swastika banner snapping in the wind is the most emotive and easily recognised emblem of Hitler's Third Reich. In war, the Swastika became the symbol of Nazi domination, flying over public and government buildings in six European capitals.
Originally a purely Nazi Party emblem, the red flag with a Swastika within a white disk became an ensign when Hitler came to power in 1933, flying from merchant ships and serving as an identification symbol on the tail of civil aircraft. In 1935 it was officially declared the German National Flag.
A pre-war political meetings, especially the massive gatherings at Nuremberg, huge Swastika banners attached to buildings or scaffolding served as a backdrop for everything from military parades through torchlit rallies to the Fuhrer's speeches.
Red, White and Black
The Swastika incorporated the red, white and black national colours which were first adopted for the national cockade in 1897 as the symbol of the German Empire. In its earliest form the Swastika was worn as an armband on both civilian clothes or as part of a political uniform. Later, armbands became a uniform item in their own right.
One flag in particular had a special place in Nazi mythology. The Blutfahne or 'Blood Banner' was so called from allegedly having been drenched in the blood of the 16 Nazi 'martyrs' killed during the abortive 1923 Beer Hall Putsch in Munich. At the yearly Nuremberg rallies Hitler consecrated new party colours by touching them with one hand while his other held the bullet-tattered Blutfahne.
At the 1933 gathering - the first since the Nazis gained power - the audience listened in silence as the SA leader Ernst Roehm read a long list of Nazi martyrs. He could not have known that he would be dead a year later, as at Hitler's orders the SS eliminated the top SA leadership. Those fellow followers of the Swastika were wiped out in the June 1934 'Night of the Long Knives'.
The Reichskriegsflagge or Reich War Flag combined the Swastika with the Prussian Iron Cross, which had been instituted by Kaiser Friedrich Willhelm in 1813. It was the official ensign of the German armed forces and was flown from warships, over barracks and at formal ceremonies.
The flag was introduced in November 1935 and consisted of a red rectangle with a Swastika (its arms edged with a narrow black and white border) within a white disk surrounded by a black border off-centre, closer to the mast. The disk was at the centre of a cross with arms made up of four white and three black bars runing to the borders of the flag. In the canton (top left hand corner) was an Iron Cross.
The Swastika was everywhere. It was incorporated into the layout of barrack blocks, trees were planted in Swastika patterns, and at the German Solstice Festival of 21 June 1938 thousands of torch-bearing participants formed a living Swastika in the Berlin Olympic stadium.
Ubiquitous Symbol
The Reichsarbeitsdienst (RAD), the State Labour Organisation in which young men served before the entered the armed forces, incorporated the Swastika into a shovel design, while under the slogan Blut und Boden or 'Blood and Soil', the Reich Farmers' organisation intersected the Swastika with a dagger and an ear of corn.
With the outbreak of war, the Swastika became a useful air identification panel. It was carried on the tailplane of combat aircraft, though without the bright red and white colours of the pre-war flag. In its original form it was useful, however, as it enabled Luftwaffe pilots to distinguish between fast-moving German armoured vehicles from the enemy as they advanced through France, Greece, Russia and North Africa. It was attached to the bonnet of wheeled vehiclesand the rear decking of tanks.
Despite its modern association with the Nazis, the Swastika is far more ancient than Germany itself. Known as the hakenkreuz (hooked cross) or 'flyfot', it is defined in heraldic terms as "a cross of equal arms with rectangular continuations all clockwise or all counter clockwise".
It takes its most common name from the Sanskrit words su meaning 'well' and asti meaning 'being'. Swastikas can be found in 4th Century BC ceramics from Iran and appeared later in Troy, Greece, Tibet and Japan. In primitive cultures it has been used as a charm against the 'evil eye', while North American Indians often used the Swastika in their bead work designs. In India it was employed to denote the movement of the sun - indeed, pre-war editions of Rudyard Kipling's books set in India usually featured the Swastika on the spine or the cover.
'Aryan Origins'
In 19th Century Europe the racial and political ideas which were to shape much of the character of Nazi Germany were focused around the confusion between the Indo-European group of languages and the so-called Indo-European race. Late in the century Friedrich Max Muller, an Anglo-German philologist, used the word 'Aryan' to designate the Indo-European language group. He stated very plainly that he was talking about language, and that language and race were two very different things.
Unwittingly Muller had given German racialists a word and a concept on which to hang their bigotry. 'Aryan' came to mean nobility of blood, incomparable beauty of form and mind, and a superior breed.
Swastika was a Skanskrit word, Snaskrit being the oldest of the Indo-European languages, and thereby acquired its 'Aryan' racial association. It began to be used as a racist symbol in Germany as early as 1910.
In the years of turmoil after the end of World War I, the right-wing Freikorps Ehrhardt painted large white Swastikas on their helmets as a distinguishing mark, and the symbol was picked up by the nascent National Socialists.
One of the by-products of Nazi fascination with the Aryan race was a bizarre form of pseuodo-academic research into the runes and symbols used by ancient Norse tribes of nothern Europe. Many of these would be adopted as insignia for Waffen-SS and Nazi Party uniforms and as divisional markings. The 'sun wheel' version of the Swastika, which had curved outer arms, was adopted by the 11th SS Panzergrenadier Division Nordland. It was also used in the badge awarded for anti-Partisan operations.
The German Reiches
The First Reich refers to the rule of the Holy Roman Emperors
(800 - 1806).
The Second Reich refers to the rule of the German Emperors (1871 - 1918).
The Third Reich refers to the rule of Adolf Hitler (1933 - 1945).
The Reichstage Fire
The German Parliament Building (the Reichstag) was burnt down on 27 February 1933.
A young Dutchman, Marinus van der Lubbe, was caught lighting fires in the building. He was former member of the Communist Party. However, he left the party as he "did not like the way they (the Communist leaders) lord it over the workers, instead of letting the workers decide for themselves." Nevertheless, his communist connections was used as a justification for the Nazis to arrest Communist leaders. About 4,000 Communists were arrested.
Hitler also took advantage of the situation and persuaded President Hindenburg to sign the 'Emergency Decree for the Protection of the People and State'. Thus, anyone could be arrested and put in prison without a fair trial.
The SA (Sturmabteilunyen) and
the SS (Schutz-Staffel)
The Nazi party had two military organisations, the SA (storm troopers or brown shirts) and the SS (protective squads or blackshirts). They were independent of the German army.
The SA was formed by the Nazis in 1921 as a military organisation to protect the meetings of the Nazis and to disrupt those of their opponents. The SA would beat up their opponents, break up their meetings or start riots. By 1933, under the leadership of Ernst Rohm, the SA grew to about two and a half million strong.
However, the SA was getting too powerful and Rohm was beginning to be a threat to Hitler himself. Thus, on 30 June 1934, Rohm and other leaders as well as members of the SA were killed.
The SS was a small elite group formed from within the SA. It began as a small and elite bodyguard for Hitler. It was later used to execute many SA leaders and private enemies of Hitler. It came under the control of Heinrich Himmler (who later became responsible for the extermination and concentration camps set up by the Nazis). Thus, the Black-shirted SS replaced the SA as the real power behind Hitler's Reich.
The Enabling Act, 1933
Hitler's aim was to persuade the Reichstag to give up its power and allow him to rule as a dictator. To do this, he had to get the Reichstag to pass an 'Enabling Act'. This needed a two-thirds majority, whih he achieved in three ways:
The end of democracy in Germany
Due to the Enabling Act, democracy in Germany ended. Other political parties were banned. Trade unions were taken over by the Nazi party. Press, radio and cinema were placed under total Nazi control. Opponents of Hitler were arrested, killed or imprisoned. Some went to concentration camps, forced labour camps which were set up in different parts of Germany. The Gestapo (secret police) and SS struck terror into the hearts of opponents of the Nazis. Many Jews, democrats and other opponents fled the country. They included some of the most famous Germans of their day, such as the scientist Albert Einstein and the writer Thomas Mann.
The Night of the Long Knives, 1934
Hitler also wanted to make sure he had complete power within his own party. The leader of his brownshirts (SA), Ernst Rohm, was disappointed that he was not playing a more important in the new government, and that Hitler was not keeping his promise to introduce social reforms. He begun to cause trouble. Hitler therefore decided to get rid of him and many of his followers. He did this by calling the leaders of the SA to a special conference. During the night he had them dragged from their beds and shot. On the same night many other opponents all over Germany were dealt with in the same way. The fact that there were no public protests about what happened show how powerful Hitler had become. This became known as The Night of the Long Knives.
Two months later, President Hindenburg died. To complete his power, Hitler decided to combine the jobs of Chancellor and President. At the same time he became commander in chief of the armed forces. Hitler was now the supreme dictator of Germany.
Hitler's Germany
The Young People
The Nazi party had many ways of controlling the lives and influencing the thought of the German people. Party officials were everywhere: at work, at school, at university. Even at home people were carefully watched. Every street had its blockwart, a party representative who watched what everyone was doing and reported on their behaviour to party headquarters. There was also the Gestapo and the SS . In these ways, Hitler did his best to establish in Germany a totalitarian dictatorship where the government controlled every aspect of people's lives.
Hitler was especially keen to win over the minds of young people. Education was carefully controlled. Children were encouraged to be loyal to their Fuhrer (leader) and to put him and their Fatherland (Germany) before everything else.
Girls and boys were also strongly encouraged to join the Hitler Youth. This was divided up into different sections according to age. People who did not join found it difficult to go on to university or even to get a job when they left school. The Hitler Youth was another way of making young people believe what the Nazis wanted them to believe. Older boys also did a lot of physical exercises, to prepare them for military service in the German army.
Nazi Education
National Socialist education saw the developement of a number of party schools outside the normal German school system. Intended to foster future leaders of the Party, the SA and the SS, the various schools were neither coordinated or complimentary. Created by Hess, Rohm, Ley and Himmler, they reflected the struggle for power within the party aristocracy.
The first to be established were the Napolas, or National Political Training Institutes. Successors to the old Prussian training academies, they were initially run by the SA and the SS, with the cooperation of the Ministry of Education. By the time the SS took complete control in the late 1930s, there were as many as 40 Napolas in existence. A purely SA school had been established at Feldafing near Munich, which was taken over by the PArty itself after the Rohm purge.
The rival Adolf-Hitler-Schulesystem was created in 1936 by Baldur von Schirach and Robert Ley. Intimately associated with the Hitler Youth, the schools were purely party institutions, in which the Ministry of Education had no say. Common to all of the Nazi schools was a syllabus which was heavy on sports and military training, with what academic work there was being weightedly heavily on the side of Germanic history and 'Aryan' biology. Religious instruction was completely ignored.