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Nazi Germany: A Visual History

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Twelve years, one dictator, a war that killed tens of millions and a genocide that murdered six million Jews. The 'Thousand Year Reich' lasted from January 1933 to May 1945.

Existed
1933 to 1945
Duration
12 years
Peak area
About 3.6 million km2 controlled or occupied (late 1942)
Population
About 80 million in the Reich proper (1939, with Austria and Sudetenland)
Capital
Berlin
Leader
Adolf Hitler, Fuhrer 1934-1945
Ended
Unconditional surrender 8 May 1945

Nazi Germany, officially the German Reich and from 1943 the Greater German Reich, was the state ruled by Adolf Hitler and the National Socialist party. Coming to power legally in 1933 amid the Depression, the Nazis dismantled democracy within months, rearmed, and expanded by threat and then by war. By late 1941 German forces controlled most of Europe from the Atlantic to the outskirts of Moscow. The regime's racial ideology drove the Holocaust, the systematic murder of Europe's Jews, alongside the killing of Roma, disabled people, Soviet prisoners and political enemies. Total defeat came in May 1945.

When it existed: the era ribbon

The bold bar is Nazi Germany. The lighter bars are empires and wars from the same era and the same part of the world. Click any bar to jump to its page.

14001500160017001800190020002100Nazi Germany (1933 to 1945)Open: Spanish EmpireSpanish Empire (1492 to 1976)Open: British EmpireBritish Empire (1583 to 1997)Open: United StatesUnited States (1776 to present)Open: Empire of JapanEmpire of Japan (1868 to 1947)Open: Italian EmpireItalian Empire (1882 to 1947)Open: Italo-Senussi warsItalo-Senussi wars (1911 to 1932)Open: World War IWorld War I (1914 to 1918)Open: Soviet Union (USSR)Soviet Union (USSR) (1922 to 1991)Open: Spanish Civil WarSpanish Civil War (1936 to 1939)Open: World War IIWorld War II (1939 to 1945)Open: Greek Civil WarGreek Civil War (1946 to 1949)Open: Cold WarCold War (1947 to 1991)

Territory under German control

Reich territory plus occupied countries and puppet states, excluding allies such as Italy and Hungary.

012341933: 0.471938: 0.581939: 0.81940: 1.61941: 31942: 3.61943: 3.21944: 2.21945: 0.35193519401945million km2 (approximate)

Timeline of Nazi Germany

  1. 1933
    Hitler appointed chancellor30 January; the Enabling Act follows in March.
  2. 1934
    Night of the Long Knives; FuhrerSA purged; Hitler merges chancellor and president.
  3. 1935
    Nuremberg LawsJews stripped of citizenship; conscription reintroduced.
  4. 1936
    Rhineland and Berlin OlympicsRemilitarisation unopposed; the Games as propaganda.
  5. 1938
    Anschluss and MunichAustria annexed; Sudetenland ceded; Kristallnacht in November.
  6. 1939
    Invasion of PolandWorld War II begins on 1 September.
  7. 1940
    Fall of FranceParis occupied in June; Battle of Britain lost.
  8. 1941
    BarbarossaInvasion of the USSR; mass shootings of Jews begin.
  9. 1942
    Wannsee and peakThe Final Solution coordinated; German power at its widest extent.
  10. 1943
    Stalingrad and KurskThe tide turns on the Eastern Front.
  11. 1944
    D-Day and the July plotAllies land in Normandy; Stauffenberg's bomb fails.
  12. 1945
    Hitler's suicide and surrender30 April and 8 May.

Seizure of power

The Nazi party was a fringe movement until the Depression. Its vote jumped from 2.6 percent in 1928 to 37 percent in July 1932, and on 30 January 1933 President Hindenburg appointed Hitler chancellor of a coalition, believing conservatives could control him. The Reichstag fire a month later became the pretext for suspending civil liberties, and the Enabling Act of 23 March let Hitler's cabinet legislate without parliament.

By July 1933 all other parties were banned. In June 1934 the SA leadership and assorted rivals were murdered in the Night of the Long Knives, and when Hindenburg died in August, Hitler merged the presidency into his own office as Fuhrer. The army swore an oath to him personally.

Dictatorship, rearmament and persecution

The regime combined terror (the Gestapo, concentration camps from Dachau in 1933) with genuine popularity, built on falling unemployment, public works and foreign policy triumphs. The Nuremberg Laws of 1935 stripped Jews of citizenship, and Kristallnacht in November 1938 turned discrimination into open violence. Rearmament in defiance of Versailles was announced in 1935.

Hitler remilitarised the Rhineland in 1936, annexed Austria in March 1938, and at Munich in September 1938 got the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia with British and French consent. He took the rest of Czechoslovakia in March 1939, signed a pact with Stalin in August, and invaded Poland on 1 September 1939.

War and the Holocaust

Blitzkrieg victories over Poland, Denmark, Norway, the Low Countries and France in 1939-1940 seemed to confirm Hitler's genius; the failure to defeat Britain in the air was the first check. Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, was intended as a war of annihilation and opened the largest land conflict in history. Germany declared war on the United States four days after Pearl Harbor.

Behind the front, Einsatzgruppen shot over a million Jews in the occupied Soviet Union in 1941-1942. The Wannsee Conference of January 1942 coordinated the 'Final Solution', and extermination camps at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec, Chelmno and Majdanek murdered millions in gas chambers. About six million Jews were killed, two thirds of Europe's Jewish population.

Collapse

Stalingrad (winter 1942-1943) and Kursk (July 1943) broke the Wehrmacht's offensive power in the east; the Allies landed in Italy in 1943 and Normandy in June 1944. A bomb planted by Claus von Stauffenberg failed to kill Hitler on 20 July 1944. German cities were reduced to rubble by bombing, and the regime turned on its own population with a Volkssturm militia of boys and old men.

The Red Army entered Berlin in April 1945; Hitler shot himself in his bunker on 30 April. Admiral Donitz's rump government surrendered unconditionally on 7-8 May. The victors divided Germany into occupation zones, tried the surviving leadership at Nuremberg, and the country remained split until 1990.

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10 surprising things about Nazi Germany

  1. Hitler was not a German citizen until 1932; he was Austrian, stateless for seven years, and got German nationality through a minor post in Brunswick so he could run for president.
  2. The Nazis never won a majority in a free election. Their best result was 37 percent in July 1932, and their vote fell in November 1932.
  3. The famous autobahn network was planned under the Weimar Republic; the Nazis took the credit and the first stretch had opened in 1932.
  4. The Volkswagen Beetle was a Nazi project sold to workers through a savings-stamp scheme; almost no civilian ever received a car before the war, and the money went to the war effort.
  5. Hitler was a vegetarian, teetotal, hated smoking, and his regime ran the world's most aggressive anti-smoking campaign while planning mass murder.
  6. The Nazis staged the 1936 Berlin Olympics with the first ever torch relay, an invention of the regime's propaganda machine, not ancient Greece.
  7. The Enigma cipher machine was a commercial product available in the 1920s; British codebreakers at Bletchley Park, building on Polish work, read German messages for most of the war.
  8. The Wehrmacht relied heavily on horses: about 2.75 million served, and most infantry divisions were never motorised.
  9. Hitler's last will and testament, dictated hours before his suicide, expelled Goring and Himmler from the party and blamed the war on the Jews he had murdered.
  10. The word 'Nazi' was a nickname coined by opponents, a play on 'Ignaz', a stereotypical Bavarian bumpkin's name; party members called themselves National Socialists.

Sources

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