Nazi Germany
| Automatons led by a lunatic who looked like Charlie Chaplin |
| Notable figures |
| The Third Reich |
| Neo-Nazism |
Nazi Germany is the period of German history between 1933 and 1945 when one of the most evil men in the history of the world became German Chancellor, took over most of Europe and killed six million Jews, three million, seven hundred thousand Soviet prisoners of war, as well as Romani (Roma Gypsies), homosexuals, and anyone else who got in the way of the German geopolitical strategy of seizing lebensraum in Eastern Europe. Germany had lost the previous world war, barely, against powers with larger territories and populations. The British and French overseas empires made them even more formidable than their national homelands would suggest. Like other fascist movements, the Nazis were intensely nationalistic and thus obsessed with achieving ethnic homogeneity within the claimed national territory. Germanness was conceived in both cultural and racial terms. Thus the nonsense about blut und boden to provide an ideological gloss on the geopolitical strategy of territorial aggrandizement.
[edit] A brief history
The early 1930s was a pretty lousy time for most the world, what with the Great Depression and all; this led to support for extremism, such as communism and fascism all over Europe. Hitler was named Chancellor in January 1933 following parliamentary elections that gave his fascist Nazi party less than a legislative majority, his coalition government including both Nazi and conservative ministers. He was granted dictatorial powers a few months later in the infamous 1933 Enabling Act after he accused the communists of burning down the German parliament house, the only members of parliament to vote against the act were from the German Social Democratic Party. Hitler's government used effective diplomacy to convince Britain and France into thinking his annexation of Austria and his occupation of the Sudetenland and subsequent invasion of Czechoslovakia would not lead to further territorial annexations.
Hitler was one of history's most risk-acceptant national leaders. He ordered the (successful) invasion of eastern Poland in 1939, breaking his word to the Western Allies, which ultimately touched off World War II in Europe. After six years of fighting and the death of 25 million Europeans, Hitler, together with many other senior Nazi leaders, chose suicide.
In the postwar settlement, the Soviet Union got the eastern half of Germany that was not slated for inclusion in a redrawn Poland (gaining territory after the soviets took the lands they invaded in 1939) and the United States and its now junior allies the UK and France got the remaining two-thirds of Germany. West Germany prospered while East Germany continued to suffer Stalinist oppression, A divided germany was a Germany that could be deemed safe by all of the victorious allies.
But it all worked out in the end, and now Germany has a nice democracy where extremism is against the law and Scientology discouraged. Also Berlin ended up dominating most of Europe economically, anyway.