A twelve-year dictatorship branded the German Reich anew
Nazi Germany names the German state from 1933 to 1945 under Adolf Hitler and the National Socialist party, officially the German Reich and later Greater German Reich. Appointment as chancellor in 1933 opened a rapid purge of opposition and a 1934 referendum confirming Hitler as sole leader.
The ground was prepared by the chaos after the First World War. Reparations imposed at Versailles in 1919 pushed the government to print money, and hyperinflation brought food riots; when Berlin defaulted in January 1923, French troops occupied the industrial Ruhr. The Nazi Party, founded in 1920, promised to tear down the Weimar Republic, reject Versailles and build a racial national community, while its Brownshirt militia broke up rivals' meetings with fists. After the 1929 Wall Street crash threw millions out of work, the party became the biggest in the Reichstag in 1932, with 230 seats on 37.4 per cent of the vote.
Lacking a majority, Hitler refused any coalition he did not lead, and President Paul von Hindenburg, pressed by politicians and industrialists, reluctantly made him chancellor on 30 January 1933. Opposition was dismantled and Hitler's word became the highest law, though beneath him rival factions competed for power rather than governing as a team. Deficit-financed military spending, motorway building and secret rearmament ended mass unemployment and lifted the regime's popularity, and Austria was absorbed in 1938 along with Czechoslovakia's Sudetenland.
Racism, eugenics, anti-Slavism and above all antisemitism sat at the core of the ideology. Jews, Slavs, Roma, gay people, leftists, Jehovah's Witnesses and many others were imprisoned, deported or killed; schooling stressed racial biology and military fitness, and women's opportunities were narrowed while propaganda built a cult around Hitler.
The invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 brought plans to starve and depopulate Eastern Europe. With Soviet recovery and American entry, Germany had ceded the initiative during 1943, and late the following year its armies stood back at the 1939 frontier. Conquered from both sides, it capitulated in May 1945, Hitler's refusal to concede having multiplied the ruin. The Allies then pursued denazification and tried surviving leaders at Nuremberg. The label Third Reich itself came from a 1923 book by Arthur Moeller van den Bruck that counted the Holy Roman and German Empires as the first two.
Source: Nazi Germany
