The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany

Antisemitism, or hatred of Jewish people, constituted a core belief of National Socialism, the ideology of Hitler’s Nazi Party.

The most notorious of the Nazi death camps in Poland, Auschwitz has become synonymous with the Holocaust. The camp opened on June 14, 1940, and operated for the remainder of World War II. More than one million Jews were murdered in the gas chambers at Auschwitz.

The Balkan States are the countries of southeastern Europe. In the era of the Third Reich, these included Yugoslavia, Greece, Albania, Romania, and Bulgaria. Hitler’s invasion of the Balkans in 1941, for no greater purpose than to rescue Mussolini in Greece and punish the Yugoslavian Serbs for anti-Nazi activity, delayed his attack on the Soviet Union by four crucial weeks.

The Baltic States are, from north to south, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. In the era of the Third Reich, all three shared an eastern border with the Soviet Union, which, taking advantage of the Nazi-Soviet Pact and Hitler’s preoccupations elsewhere, proceeded to occupy the Baltics.

Fought in the skies over Britain during the late summer and autumn of 1940, the Battle of Britain resulted in a victory for the British Royal Air Force over the German Luftwaffe and prevented a German invasion of the British Isles. Aided by radar technology, the British Spitfire and Hurricane fighter planes inflicted major damage on the Luftwaffe, which helped persuade Hitler to call off the invasion and turn his focus elsewhere.

Located in southern Germany, across the border from Hitler’s native Austria, the state of Bavaria served as a hotbed of German nationalist activity in the 1920s. Munich, the Bavarian capital, was the site of the Nazi-led Beer Hall Putsch of 1923, an unsuccessful revolution against the Weimar Republic.

On November 8, 1923, Hitler and the Nazis attempted to overthrow the state government of Bavaria and initiate a national-socialist revolution that would topple the Weimar Republic. The putsch began when the Nazis stormed a Munich beer hall and took prominent hostages. It ended when Munich police suppressed the uprising. Hitler was arrested and served nine months in prison.

Site of Hitler’s mountain retreat in the southeastern German Alps, near the Austrian border, Berchtesgaden became the scene of many diplomatic exchanges, particularly in the late 1930s, when Austrian, Czech, Italian, and even British statesmen made visits to the Fuehrer. Hitler’s home itself was known as the “Berghof.”

On June 30, 1934, in an event also known as “The Night of the Long Knives,” Hitler ordered the SS and Gestapo to crush the SA, which for more than a decade had included the Nazi’s most loyal street thugs. Many SA leaders were murdered on this night, including Roehm, one of Hitler’s oldest associates in the Nazi Party. Hitler ordered the Blood Purge to satisfy the German Army officer corps, some of whose members regarded the SA as a dangerous rival.

In March 1941, as he prepared to invade the Soviet Union, Hitler ordered his commanders to conduct the war with criminal brutality. With respect to prisoners of war, this meant the execution of the commissars, Soviet political officers who, like the SS in Germany, were the most fanatical devotees of their regime’s ideology.

Located in the “Polish Corridor” between East Prussia and Germany proper, the “Free City of Danzig” was a small League-of-Nations protectorate consisting of approximately 400,000 residents, nearly all of whom were German-speaking. In the tense crisis of 1939, Hitler insisted that Danzig should be turned over to the Third Reich, though documentary evidence shows that Hitler merely used Danzig as a pretext for the September 1 invasion of Poland, which triggered World War II.

In late May and early June 1940, after German armies had rolled through Belgium, Holland, and France, the British managed to evacuate more than 300,000 trapped Allied troops from Dunkirk on the northern coast of France and then ferry them to safety across the English Channel. On May 24, Hitler inexplicably ordered his panzer units to halt, which caused a two-day delay in the advance and allowed time for the evacuation. The war in France gave Hitler another resounding military victory, but the Dunkirk evacuation probably saved the British and allowed them to continue the fight.

In October and November 1942, British forces in North Africa defeated the Germans at El Alamein. This battle marked the end of Germany’s threat against the British Empire in the Mediterranean and paved the way for an Allied assault on Italy the following year.

Under the Enabling Act of March 23, 1933, the Nazi-controlled Reichstag transferred all legislative powers to Hitler, who had become Chancellor of Germany less than two months earlier. This meant the end of parliamentary government for the duration of the Third Reich.

“Final Solution” refers to the Nazi’s plan to murder all of the Jewish people in Europe. The phrase itself appears scattered throughout Nazi documents and communications early in World War II, but in January 1942, at the Wansee Conference, Reinhard Heydrich formalized the phrase and confirmed it as a major SS objective in the East.

The German Foreign Office, headed by Joachim von Ribbentrop, conducted all diplomatic negotiations on behalf of the Fuehrer. It is significant in The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich because Shirer made extensive use of captured Foreign Office records to help reconstruct his narrative of events.

Under Heinrich Himmler, the Gestapo operated as the Nazi secret police, terrorizing the people of both Germany and the occupied countries.

A group of aristocratic and “young intellectual idealists” who despised Hitler, the Kreisau Circle “was not a conspiratorial body but a discussion group” (1015). In The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, the Kreisau Circle helps to illustrate the patience and general inactivity of Germany’s anti-Hitlerites. Notwithstanding their harmlessness, nearly all members of the Kreisau Circle were executed following the July 20, 1944, attempt on Hitler’s life.

In his autobiography Mein Kampf (1925), and in dozens of public utterances, Hitler promised to build a racially-pure empire of German-speaking peoples and then provide them with Lebensraum, or “living space,” at the expense of Jewish people, Polish people, Slavic people, and other Eastern Europeans whom Hitler regarded as racially inferior. Germany’s wars against Poland and the Soviet Union, for instance, originated in this quest for Lebensraum.

The Luftwaffe was the German Air Force. Commanded by Hermann Goering, the Luftwaffe inflicted terror bombing on cities such as Warsaw in 1939 and Rotterdam in 1940. In the Battle of Britain, however, the Luftwaffe failed to destroy the British Royal Air Force, a pretext for the planned invasion of Britain. Despite Goering’s boasts to the contrary, the Luftwaffe never proved decisive in a major campaign or engagement.

Nazi ideology rested on the belief that human beings are divided into “races,” and that Germans constituted the “master race.” This single assertion served as justification for all the terror the Nazis inflicted on the people of Europe, including the Holocaust.

Hitler’s 1925 autobiography and political testament, Mein Kampf became nothing less than the blueprint for the Third Reich. In the book, Hitler explains both his racial ideas and his determination to secure Lebensraum for the German-speaking peoples of Europe. No one who read Mein Kampf could have been surprised by Hitler’s behavior once he came to power in 1933.

On September 30, 1938, with Hitler threatening a military assault on Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland, statesmen from the major powers of Europe, including Germany, gathered in Munich for a peace conference. It was, many believed, an eleventh-hour attempt to avert a European war. The resulting Munich Agreement ceded Hitler the Sudetenland in exchange for nothing more than the promise that he would seek no more territory. British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, architect of the Munich Agreement, believed that he had preserved peace. Hitler, meanwhile, had no intention of honoring the agreement. In March 1939, the Nazi dictator occupied the remainder of Czechoslovakia.

National Socialism was the ideology of Hitler and the Nazi Party (National Socialist German Workers’ Party). As a set of guiding principles, national socialism amounted to a confused and contradictory muddle. Many early Nazis, for instance, including Goebbels, were drawn to the party because of its emphasis on socialism. Hitler, however, used socialism only as a way to attract the working classes to the party, for he was most interested in German nationalism and the idea of German racial “superiority.”

On August 23, 1939, Germany and the Soviet Union signed a nonaggression pact that allowed Hitler to invade Poland without fear of Soviet intervention. In fact, the Nazi-Soviet Pact included a secret protocol by which the two dictators, Hitler and Stalin, agreed to divide Eastern Europe between themselves. The pact also lulled Stalin into complacency, which allowed Hitler to achieve total surprise when his forces attacked the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941.

The phrase “November criminals” refers to a myth, widely believed in Germany, that the Germans had not lost World War I on the battlefield but in fact had been betrayed by shadowy figures inside Germany itself—Jews, Communists, politicians of the Weimar Republic. When it came time to provide the German people with scapegoats for their miseries, the Nazis made effective use of this myth.

The second-largest city in Bavaria, Nuremberg played a major role in the history of the Third Reich. In addition to hosting the many dark and frenzied Nazi Party rallies that so often horrified the civilized world, Nuremberg lent its name to the 1935 “race laws” that stripped Jews of German citizenship and criminalized the “racial” mixture of German and Jewish people. Finally, after World War II, the Allies conducted war crimes trials at Nuremberg.

Code name for the June 22, 1941, German surprise attack on the Soviet Union, Operation Barbarossa was the largest invasion in human history.

Code name for the planned German invasion of the British Isles, Operation Sea Lion never materialized thanks in large part to the German defeat in the Battle of Britain. Hitler first postponed Operation Sea Lion and then canceled it altogether.

On May 22, 1939, Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy agreed to a military alliance known as the “Pact of Steel.” Although Italy’s armed forces would add little to Germany’s future successes, the alliance seems to have emboldened Hitler, for on the very next day he informed his commanders that there would be war in Poland and that Germany, in all likelihood, would have to confront France and especially Britain in the near future.

A phony tribunal that served the purposes of the SS and Gestapo, the People’s Court convicted thousands of Germans accused of various political crimes against the Nazi regime.

Headed by Goebbels, the Propaganda Ministry controlled and manipulated every source of information in the Nazi regime, from newspaper and radio to art galleries and feature films. Goebbels ensured that the German people were bombarded daily by the National Socialist message.

Located in East Prussia, Rastenburg served as the site of Hitler’s headquarters on the Eastern Front. It was there, on July 20, 1944, that Klaus von Stauffenberg made his ill-fated assassination attempt on Hitler.

On February 27, 1933, less than a month after Hitler became Chancellor of Germany, a fire engulfed the Reichstag—the German Parliament building. Nazis blamed their political enemies, the Communists, but in fact it was the Nazis who planned and executed the arson so they would have an excuse to suppress political dissent.

A group of working-class street rowdies, the SA served as the Nazi Party’s terror-and-intimidation arm in the 1920s and early 1930s. For instance, in 1921 the SA attacked a meeting of Bavarian moderates led by a man named Ballerstedt. The attack resulted in jail time for Hitler, who declared that it was worth the sentence because “[w]e got what we wanted. Ballerstedt did not speak” (43). The SA continued in this fashion until its leaders were executed in the Blood Purge of June 30, 1934.

The SS began as Hitler’s personal bodyguard. During the Third Reich, under the ruthless Heinrich Himmler, the SS recruited thousands of fanatical Nazis and became the hub of all Nazi terror-related activity. Reinhard Heydrich’s feared Security Service (SD) fell under the SS umbrella, as did the Gestapo. Special SS detachments known as Einsatzgruppen carried out mass executions in the East. The SS also administered the Holocaust’s death camps.

A major Soviet city on the Volga River, Stalingrad was the scene of the German Army’s worst defeat in World War II. On February 2, 1943, after a months-long campaign and hundreds of thousands of casualties, the German Sixth Army surrendered. Hitler had ordered that the starving German troops stand and fight to the last man, but 91,000 German prisoners-of-war escaped with their lives, sending the Fuehrer into a rage. On a strategic level, Stalingrad signaled the end of the German advance in the Soviet Union.

In 1938, Hitler threatened to invade the Sudetenland, a region in western Czechoslovakia that was home to a majority of German-speaking residents, and incorporate it into the Third Reich. Fearing a broader European war, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, in an infamous act of appeasement, orchestrated the September 1938 Munich Agreement, which surrendered the Sudetenland to the Nazis.

The swastika was the symbol of the Nazi Party. A hooked cross (“Hakenkreuz”), the swastika appeared in black against a circular white backdrop in the middle of a red banner or flag. It is an ancient symbol, found in ruins across the globe. Hitler personally adopted it for the Nazi Party in 1920.

Hitler regarded Nazi Germany as the third German empire, or Reich. The first two had thrived under Charlemagne and Bismarck, respectively. Hitler intended the Third Reich to last for a thousand years. It lasted only 12 (1933-1945).

Code name for the anti-Hitler conspirators’ plans to overthrow the Nazi regime, “Valkyrie” involved both the assassination of the Fuehrer and the subsequent seizure of power in Berlin. These plans failed on July 20, 1944, when an explosion injured but did not kill Hitler, and when the conspirators failed to act swiftly in Berlin.