Rise of Hitler
From World History Wiki
How did the rise of Hitler impact the lives of the Jews in Germany?
>== Summary: == Once Hitler got a little power he wanted to take out any other race other than white, which the Jews. Hitler wanted to control the Jews every move. Hitler took their freedom and told the Jews what to read and write. He even tried to take their religious beliefs, he said Christianity is weak. So Hitler wanted all the Jews to change their belief. He later on put all them in concentration camps, because a young Jew in Paris. The young Jewish boy cause a lot of trouble for the Jews in Germany. The night of November 7,1938 Hitler had the Nazi to attack the Jews. They called that night the "Night of Broken Glass." Before Hitler even got control over Germany he wrote his rules and beliefs in prison. And when he got out those same rules he use to turn rebuild a new Germany. Hilter believed that Germans should be under a "master race."
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The Weimar Republic
As World War I drew to a close, Germany tottered on the brink of chaos. Under the threat of a socialist revolution, the kaiser abdicated. Moderate leaders signed the armistice and later, under protest, the Versailles treaty. In 1919, German leaders drafted a constitution in the city of Weimar. It created a democratic government known as the Weimar Republic. The constitution set up a parliamentary system led by a chancellor, or prime minister. It gave women the vote and included a bill of rights.
Struggles of the Republic
The republic faced severe problems from the start. Politically, it was weak because Germany, like France, had many small parties. The chancellor had to form coalitions that easily fell apart. The government, led by moderate democratic socialists, came under constant fire from both the left and right. Communists demanded radical changes like those Lenin had brought to Russia. Conservatives including the old Junker nobility, military officers, and wealthy bourgeoisie attacked the government as too liberal and weak. They longed for another strong leader like Bismarck or the kaiser. Germans of all classes blamd the Weimar Republic for the hated Versailles treaty, with its war-guilt clause and heavy reparations. In their bitterness, they looked for scapegoats. Many blamed Germans Jews for economic and political problems.
Inflation
Economic disaster fed unrest. In 1923, when Germany fell behind in reparations payments, France occupied the coal-rich Ruhr Valley. Ruhr Germans turned to passive resistance, refusing to work. To suppory them, the government printed huge quantities of paper money. This move set off inflation that spiraled out of control. The German mark became almost worthless. An item that cost 100 marks in July 1922 cost 944,000 marks by August 1923. A loaf of bread cost ten of thousands of marks. Runaway inflation spread misery and despair. Salaries rose by billions of marks, but they still could not keep up with skyrocketing prices. Many middle-class families saw their savings wiped out.
Recovery and Collapse
With help from the western powers, the government did bring inflation under control. In 1924, the United States gained British and French approval for a plan to reduce German reparations payments. Under the Dawes Plan, France withdrew its forces from the Ruhr, and American loans helped the German economy recover. Germany began to prosper. Then, the Great Depression hit, reviving memories of the miseries of 1923. Germans turned to an energetic leader, Adolf Hitler, who promised to slove the economic crisis and restore German's former greatness.
Adolf Hitler
Hitler was born in Austria in 1889. When he was 18, he went to Vienna, hoping to enter art school, but he was turned down. Vienna was then the capital of the multinational Hapsburg Empire. Austrian Germans made up just one of many ethnic groups. Yet they felt superior to Jews, Serbs, Poles, and other groups. While living in Vienna, Hitler developed the fanatical antisemitism that would later play a major role in his rise to power. Hitler later moved to Germany and fought in the German army during World War I. Like many ex-soliders, he despised the Weimar government which he perceived as weak and ineffectual. In 1919, he joined a small group of right-wing extremists. Within a year, he was the unquestioned leader of the National Socialists German Workers, or Nazi, party. Like Mussolini, Hitler organized his supporters into fighting squads. Nazi Storm Troopers battled in streets against their political enemies.
Mein Kampf
In 1923, as you have read, Hitler made a failed attempt to seize power in Munich. He was arrested, tried, and found guilty of treason. While in prison, Hitler wrote Mein Kampf (My Struggle). It would later become the basic book of Nazi goals and ideology. Mein Kampf reflected Hitler's obsessions extreme nationalism, rasism, and antisemitism. Germans, he said, belonged to a superior master race of Aryans, or light-skinned Europeans, whose greatest enemies were the Jews. Hitler viewed the Jews not as members of a religion but as a seperate race. (He defined a Jew as anyone with one Jewish grandparent.) Echoing a familiar right-wing theme, he claimed that Germany had not lost the war but had been betrayed by a conspiracy of Marxists, Jews, corrupt politicians, and business leaders. In his pecipe for revival, Hitler urged Germans everywhere to unite into one great nation. Germany must expand, he said, to gain Lebensraum, or living space, for its people. Slavs and other inferior races must bow to Aryan needs. To achieve its greatness, Germany needed a strong leader, or Fuhrer. Hitler was determined to become that leader.
The Road to Power
After serving less than a year, Hitler left prison. He soon renewed his table-thumping speeches. He found enthusiastic followers among veterans and lower-middle-class Germans who felt frustrated about their future. The Great Depression played into Hitler's hands. As unemployment rose, Nazi membership grew to almost a million. Hitler's program appealed to workers, the lower middle classes, small-town Germans, and business people alike. He promised to end reparations, create jobs, and defy the Versailles treaty by rearming Germany. With the government paralyzed by divisions, both Nazis and Communists won more seats in Reichstag, or lower house of legislature. Fearing the growth of communist political power, conservative politicans turned to Hitler. Although they despised him, they believed they could control him. Thus, with conservative support, Hitler was elected chancellor in 1933 through legal, democratic means under the Weimar consitution. Within a year, Hitler was master of Germany. He suspended civil rights, destroyed the socialists and Communists, and disbanded other political parties. germany became a one-party state. Nazi flags, with their black swastikas, waved across the country. Like Stalin in Russia, Hitler purged his own party, brutally executing Nazis he felt were disloyal. Nazis learned that Hitler, the Fuhrer, demanded unquestioning obedience.
Hitler's Third Reich
Once in power, Hitler moved to bulid a new Germany. Like Mussolini, Hitler appealed to nationalism by recalling past glories. Germany's First Reich, or empire, was the medieval Holy Roman Empire. The Second Reich was the empire forged by Bismarck in 1871. Under Hitler's new Third Reich, he boasted, the German master race would dominate Europe for 1,000 years. Hitler soon repudiated, or rejected, the Treaty of Versailles. He began scheming to unite Germany and Austria. "Today Germany belongs to us," sang young Nazis. "Tomorrow the world."
A Totalitarian State
To achieve his goals, Hitler organized an efficient but brutal system of terror, repression, and totalitarian rule. Nazis controlled all areas of Germans life from government to religion to education. Elite, black-uniformed SS troops enforced the Fuhrer's will. His serect, police, the Gestapo, rooted out opposition. Few Germans saw or worried about this terror apparatus taking shape. Instead, they cheered Hitler's accomplishments in ending unemployment and recviving German power.
Economic Policy
To combat the Great Depression, Hitler launched large public works programs (as did Britian and the United States). Tens of thousands of people were put to work building highways and housing or replanting forests. Hitler also began a crash program to rearm Germany, in violation of the Versailles treaty. Demand for military hardware stimulated business and helped eliminate unemployment. Like Mussolini, Hitler preserved capitalism but brought big business and labor under government control. Few objected to this loss of freedom because their standard of living rose.
Social Policy
Like the Fascists in Italy and the Communists in the Soviet Union, the Nazis indoctrinated young people with their ideology. In passionate speeches, the Fuhrer spewed his message of racism. He urged young Germans to destroyed their so-called enemies without mercy: "Extremes must be fought by extremes. Against the infection of [Marxism], against Jews pestilence, we must hold aloft a flaming ideal. And if others speak of the World and Humanity, we must say the Fatherland and only fatherland!" -Adolf Hitler,My New Order On hikes and camps, the "Hitler Youth" pledged absolute loyalty to Germany and undertook physical fitness programs to prepare for war. Like Fascists in Italy, Nazis sought to limit women's roles. Women were to birthrate, Nazis offered "pure blooded Aryan" women rewards for having more children. Still, Hitler's goal to keep women in the home and outof the work force applied mainly to the privileged. As German industry expanded, women factory workers were needed.
Purging German Culture
Nazis used education as a propaganda tool. School courses and textbooks were rewritten to reflect Nazi racial views. "We teach and learn history," said one Nazi educator, "not to say how things actually happened but to instruct the German people from the past."
The Arts
The Nazi sought to purge, or purify, German culture. They denounced modern art, saying that it was corrupted by Jewish influences. They condemned jazz because of its African roots. Instead, the Nazis glorified old German myths such as those re-created in operas of Richard Wagner. At huge public bonfires, Nazis burned books of which they disapproved. All Quiet on the Western Front was one of the many works that went up in flames. The Nazis viewed Remarque's novel as an insult to the German military.
Nazism and the Churches
Hitler despised Christianity as "weak" and "flabby." He sought to replace religion with racial creed. In an attempt to control the churches, the Nazis combined all Protestant sects into a single state church. They closed Catholic schools and muzzled the Catholic clergy. Although some clergy supported the new regime or remained silent, others courageously denounced Hilter. Martin Niemoller, a Lutheran minister, preached against Nazi policies and was later jail. He later commented: "The Nazis camed first for the Communists. But I wasn't a Communist, so I didn't speak up. Then they came for the Jews, but I wasn't so I didn't speak up....Then they came for the Catholics, but I was a Protestant so I didn't speak up. Then they came for me. By that time, there was no one left to speak up."- Martin Niemoller, quoted in Time magazine
The Campaign Against the Jews Begins
In his fanatical antisemitism, Hitler set out to drive Jews from Germany. In 1935, the Nuremberg Laws placed severe restrictions on Jews. They were prohibited from marrying non-Jews, attending or teaching at German schools or universities, holding government jobs, practicing law or medicine, or publishing books. Nazis beat and robbed Jews and roused mobs to do the same. Many German Jews, including the brillant scientist, Albert Einstein, fled the growing menace and sought refuge in other countries.
Night of Broken Glass
On November 7, 1938, a young Jew, whose parents had been mistreated in Germnay, shot and wounded a German diplomat in Paris. Hitler used the incident as an excuse to stage an attack on all Jews. Kristallnacht, or the "Night of Broken Glass," took place on November 9 and 10. Nazi-led mobs attacked Jewish communities all over Germany, shouting "Revenge for Paris! Down with the Jews!" They smashed windows, looted shops, and burned synagogues. Many Jews were dragged from their homes and beaten in the streets.
Aftermath
World reaction to Kristallnacht was swift and negative. Still, Hitler was unmoved. He even made the Jewish victims pay for the damage. In the years that followed, Hitler's campaign against Jews intensified. Tens of thousands of Jews were sent to concentration camps. Before long, Hitler and his henchman were making even more sinister plans for what they called the "final solution"-the extermination of all Jews.
Anaylsis:
The rise of Hilter impact the Jewish people in Germany because he change their way of living. Hitler did not like the Jews, homosexuals and many other who wasn't blonde hair and blue eyes. Hitler even control their education, he took all their books and burned them. He told the Jews what to read and even watch. While Hitler were in prison he wrote the Mein Kampf, which was a basis book of the Nazi rules. And once Hilter got power he wanted to build a new Germany. While Hitler was trying to build the new Germany, he had to get rid of the ones who don't fit in his image. He wanted to make Germany a better place, but all he was doing was making it worst for the Jews. In 1935, that was the year Hitler wanted to run the Jews out of Germany. He had the Nuremberg Laws to put restictions on the Jews.
Conclusion:
The Rise of Hitler impact the lives of Jews beacuse when Hitler gained power, he slowly start taking their freedom. Also Hitler started to control everything the Jews did in Germany. Hitler didn't want the Jews to become smart, so he stop them from going to school and burned all the books. He told them what to learn. Hitler even tried to take their religion beliefs from them. The in control Hitler got, the more he wanted to conrol the Jews. Jews life started to get worst around November 7, 1938 when a young Jew shot a Germany dipomat. That when Hitler called all his men to attack the Jews. He burned down their homes, looted stores and many even were killed. Things even got worst, because after that he started putting the Jews in concentration camps.
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