Kinlore
1933–1945

The Nazi Dictatorship and the Second World War

Hitler's regime destroys democracy within months, persecutes its enemies and launches a war of conquest that kills tens of millions.

  • The Coming of the Third Reich — Richard J. Evans, Penguin (2003)
  • The Third Reich at War — Richard J. Evans, Penguin (2008)
  • A History of Germany 1918–2014: The Divided Nation — Mary Fulbrook, Wiley-Blackwell (2015)
  • Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 — Tony Judt, Penguin (2005)

Well established dictatorshipconflictmemory

Within months of Hitler becoming chancellor on 30 January 1933, German democracy was gone. After the Reichstag fire in February, emergency decrees suspended civil rights. The Enabling Act of 23 March let the government make laws without parliament. Trade unions were dissolved, other parties banned, and the first concentration camps, such as Dachau, filled with communists, socialists and other opponents. Books were burned in university squares.

  • The Coming of the Third Reich — Richard J. Evans, Penguin (2003)

A “national community”

The regime promised to restore German greatness and to build a Volksgemeinschaft, a racial “people’s community”. Many Germans welcomed the falling unemployment, the motorways and the defiance of Versailles. At the same time, Jews were driven out of public life. The Nuremberg Laws of 1935 stripped them of citizenship and banned marriage with non-Jews, and on 9–10 November 1938, the November Pogrom (“Kristallnacht”), synagogues burned and Jewish shops were smashed across the country while neighbours watched.

  • The Coming of the Third Reich — Richard J. Evans, Penguin (2003)
  • The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939–1945 — Saul Friedländer, HarperCollins (2007)
People with disabilities, Roma and Sinti, gay men, Jehovah’s Witnesses and political opponents were also persecuted.

A war of annihilation

Germany invaded Poland on 1 September 1939, starting the war in Europe. After quick victories over Poland and France, Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941 in a war planned from the start as a racial war of extermination. Millions of Soviet prisoners of war were starved to death, and civilians in Poland, Ukraine, Belarus and Russia were murdered in vast numbers.

  • The Third Reich at War — Richard J. Evans, Penguin (2008)
Under cover of the war, the regime carried out the Holocaust.

Resistance

Resistance existed but was small and isolated. The student group White Rose, including Sophie and Hans Scholl, was executed in 1943. On 20 July 1944 Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg’s bomb failed to kill Hitler, and the plotters were executed. Communists, socialists, church people and ordinary individuals who hid Jews also resisted, often paying with their lives. Post-war West Germany made 20 July a founding memory; the East honoured the communist resistance.

  • The Third Reich at War — Richard J. Evans, Penguin (2008)
  • A History of Germany 1918–2014: The Divided Nation — Mary Fulbrook, Wiley-Blackwell (2015)

Total defeat

From 1943 Allied bombing destroyed German cities, and from 1944 armies closed in from east and west. Hitler killed himself in his Berlin bunker on 30 April 1945, and Germany surrendered unconditionally on 8 May. The war in Europe had cost tens of millions of lives, the great majority of them in the Soviet Union, Poland and the rest of eastern Europe. About 5.3 million German soldiers had died, and hundreds of thousands of civilians had been killed in the bombing.

  • The Third Reich at War — Richard J. Evans, Penguin (2008)
  • Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 — Tony Judt, Penguin (2005)

Why it still matters

The question “How could it happen here?” runs through German schooling, literature and politics. It explains Germany’s caution about nationalism, flags and military power; its strict laws against Nazi symbols and Holocaust denial; and its constitution, which begins not with the state but with the words “Human dignity shall be inviolable.”

How it's seen
The question of ordinary Germans

For decades many Germans told themselves that a small criminal clique had seduced or terrorised the nation. Since the 1990s, research and exhibitions, such as the controversial Wehrmacht Exhibition (1995), have shown how widely ordinary soldiers, officials and neighbours took part in or benefited from Nazi crimes, while a minority resisted at great cost.

  • The Third Reich at War — Richard J. Evans, Penguin (2008)
  • Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil — Susan Neiman, Farrar, Straus and Giroux (2019)
  • A History of Germany 1918–2014: The Divided Nation — Mary Fulbrook, Wiley-Blackwell (2015)

Why it matters today

Germany

The twelve years of Nazi rule are the fixed point against which modern Germany defines itself. Post-war institutions, from the constitution's first article on human dignity to the reluctance to use military force, were built as answers to them. Most Germans learn about this period in depth at school, and many families still wrestle with what grandparents did, knew or suffered.