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 during which 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 non-Jewish Poles, 700,000 Soviet prisoners of war, as well as Romani, 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 increased support for extremism, such as communism and fascism all over Europe. Hitler was named Chancellor in January 1933. Shortly thereafter, the German Reichstag (parliament) building was burned down and left-wing extremists were blamed for it (although the Nazis may have done it themselves). An "emergency" was declared and Hitler was able to harrass voters into voting for him and his right-wing allies. His coalition government gained a slim supermajority in the Reichstag and wasted little time granting him dictatorial powers less than a month later in the infamous 1933 Enabling Act.[1] Hitler then thanked those conservatives for their support by banning their parties and forcing them to join the Nazi Party. Hitler's government used effective diplomacy to convince Britain and France that his annexation of Austria, 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 western Poland in 1939, breaking his word to the Western Allies. That ultimately touched off WWII 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) while 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.