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Showing posts from November, 2020

Establishment of the Racial State (1933-1938)

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Once in power, the Nazis 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. Nazis 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. Under the Euthanasia Programme , Helmuths father along with other Nazi officials had condemned to death many Germans who were considered mentally or physically unfit. Jews were not the only community classified as undesirable. There were others. Many  Gypsies  and blacks living in Nazi Germany were considered as racial inferiors who threatened the biological purity of the superior Aryan race. They were widely  persecuted. Even Russians and Poles were considered subhuman, and

The Nazi Worldview

The crimes that Nazis committed were linked to a system of beliefs and a set of practices. Nazi ideology was synonymous with Hitlers worldview. According to this there was no equality between people, but only a racial hierarchy. In this view blond, blue-eyed, Nordic German Aryanswere at the top, while Jews were located at the lowest rung . They came to be regarded as an anti-race, the arch-enemies of the Aryans. All other coloured people were placed in between depending upon their external features. Hitlers racism borrowed from thinkers like Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer . Darwin was a natural scientist who tried to explain the creation of plants and animals through the concept of evolution and natural selection. Herbert Spencer later added the idea of survival of the fittest . According to this idea, only those species survived on earth that could adapt themselves to changing climatic conditions. We should bear in mind that Darwin never advocated human intervention in what he tho

Reconstruction of Germany by Hitler (1933), Hitler's aim of conquering Eastern Europe and second world war

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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 programme. This project produced the famous German super highways and the peoples car, the Volkswagen . The poster announces: Your volkswagen.Such posters suggested that owning a car was no longer just a dream for an ordinary worker. In foreign policy also Hitler acquired quick successes. He pulled out of the League of Nations in 1933, reoccupied the Rhineland in1936, and integrated Austria and Germany in 1938 under the slogan ,One people, One empire, and One leader. He then went on to wrest German-speaking Sudentenland from Czechoslovakia, and gobbled up the entire country. In all of this he had the unspoken support of England , which had considered the Versailles verdict too harsh.These quick successes at home and abroad seemed to reverse the destiny of the country. Hitler did not stop here. Schach

Destruction of Democracy in Germany and the Start of Hitler's Dictatorship

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In 1932, the Nazi party (National Socialist German Worker's party) had become the largest party with 37 per cent votes in Germany. On 30 January 1933, President Hindenburg offered the Chancellorship, the highest position in the cabinet of ministers, to Hitler. By now the Nazis had  managed to rally the conservatives to their cause. Having acquired power, Hitler set out to dismantle the structures of democratic rule. A mysterious fire that broke out in the German Parliament building in February facilitated his move. The Fire Decree of 28 February 1933 indefinitely suspended civic rights like freedom of speech, press and assembly that had been guaranteed by the Weimar constitution . Then he turned on his archenemies, the Communists, most of whom were hurriedly packed off to the newly established  concentration camps. The repression of the Communists was severe. Out of the surviving 6,808 arrest files of Duesseldorf, a small city of half a million population, 1,440 were those of Comm