This paper traces the historical trajectory from World War I's aftermath through Hitler's consolidation of totalitarian control and the Holocaust. It analyzes how postwar hardship, the Treaty of Versailles, economic instability, and weak democratic institutions enabled the Nazi Party's rise. The paper then documents Hitler's early life, his emergence as a propagandist and party leader, his seizure of emergency powers, and his systematic implementation of racial persecution. Finally, it details the construction of concentration camps and death camps, the mechanics of mass genocide using gas chambers, medical experiments on prisoners, and the ultimate toll of nearly twelve million lives lost—including one-third of the world's Jewish population.
The First World War, or the Great War, left lasting effects on the entire world, particularly Germany. During the war, the German people faced many hardships and had to sacrifice much for the war effort. The gaps between social classes widened as the working class faced a food shortage and a lower standard of living overall. In the winter between 1916 and 1917, over 700,000 Germans perished due to starvation and disease (Dwork 35).
The chancellor of Germany, Bethmann Hollweg, saw the problems and promised political reform in 1917. However, his promise caused political unease. The military held the dominant position and the chancellor was forced to resign in July 1917. The military imposed stricter regulations on all of Germany, such as restricting the right to assemble and banning all anti-war material (Bulow).
By 1918, Germany's ability to win the Great War had vanished, partly because of the United States' entrance into the war. The Allied powers, led by United States President Woodrow Wilson, demanded that Germany be transformed into a democracy. In November 1918, the Kaiser was abdicated to Holland, and the Weimar Republic was born (Landau 88).
The victors of World War I met at Versailles to create a treaty. The Treaty of Versailles placed the blame for the war on Germany, ordering the German government to pay reparations to Britain and France for the cost of the war. In addition to those terms, it placed severe restrictions on Germany's military. The army was reduced to merely 100,000 soldiers and restricted from possessing a variety of weapons. The air force was eliminated, as were naval submarines. The navy was limited to a small number of battleships and cruisers (Levin 23).
Despite the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, the Weimar Republic signed it regardless. However, the majority of Germany rejected the idea that they were to blame for the war and were outraged at the idea of paying reparations. Germany's economy was severely weakened by the war and would struggle to pay any reparations. The most drastic of the treaty's terms was the loss of territory for Germany. The overall size of the country was reduced by almost 15 percent, and it was stripped of all its colonies. The signing of this treaty enraged most of Germany, and the Weimar Republic took considerable heat for doing so (Landau 90–91).
The Weimar Republic also faced internal problems on top of disapproval from the country itself. The Workers' Councils Congress pushed for further reforms of the government, but the Social Democratic Party rejected their notions. Many uprisings from extremist groups attempting to seize power caused further disturbances within the government. Economic instability led to further disapproval of the Weimar Republic. Severe inflation led the currency of Germany to become nearly worthless. A redistribution of wealth enacted by the government caused those with savings to lose nearly everything (Landau 92–93). All of these factors led to nationalist opposition to the government and created determination to bring it down.
One of the parties created in opposition to the Weimar Republic was the National Socialist German Workers' Party, or Nazi Party (Landau 95). However, in 1919, it numbered only a few dozen members and had no real political ideas. But many middle-class citizens in Germany admired the Nazis' opposition to the National Democratic Party. As the interest and popularity of the party grew, so did its membership. Members came in the form of middle-class professionals, middle-class workers, and farmers. The Nazis projected an image of the young and the strong and were in opposition to the establishment currently in place. In the German elections of 1930, they received almost 6.5 million votes, placing them second in popularity only to the Social Democratic Party (Landau 100). The leader of the Nazi Party was a fiery individual named Adolf Hitler.
Adolf Hitler was born on April 20, 1889, in a small Austrian town called Braunau. He was the son of a customs official and lived in moderate means. He attended elementary school and achieved exceptional marks. However, as he moved on to college preparatory school, he became rebellious and dropped out. His rebellious nature led him to not conform to society and seek a regular job. He began to paint and dreamed of fame as an artist. He moved to Vienna in 1907 in hopes of attending the prestigious Academy of Fine Arts. Hitler failed to gain admission to this school and sank into depression. He attempted to escape military service from Austria in 1913 and fled to Germany. He was caught by German police and returned to Austria, where he took a physical examination for the army and failed. However, a year later, he returned to Germany and enlisted in the German army, where he became a corporal.
After the conclusion of the war and Germany's loss, Hitler had developed many prejudices, mainly against Jews. His search for employment after the war led him to become a political officer. In 1919, he attended a meeting of the Nazi Party and became a very popular member. He became known as the most impressive speaker and a master propagandist. His speeches and propaganda brought popularity to the newly formed Nazi Party. By 1921, their members numbered almost 6,000. In April 1921, Hitler became the head of the party when he was named Führer (Landau 95). By 1923, the Nazi Party encompassed 56,000 members and had many more supporters. The popularity of his party and the inspiration of Mussolini's "March on Rome" led Hitler to stage a "March on Berlin" to take over the government in Munich. However, his revolt was a failure, and Hitler was convicted of treason and sent to jail (Dwork 62).
In prison, he honed his political strategies and tactics. He authored a book outlining his plans and beliefs entitled Mein Kampf (Landau 95). Upon his release, he reformed the party with the core being a group of his loyal followers. In the 1920s, progress in the party was slowed by the prosperity of the decade. However, when economic depression struck the world, the party quickly regained interest and support. In the 1930 national election in Germany, the Nazi Party received almost 6.5 million votes. Their representation in Germany's Parliament leaped from 12 seats to 107 seats. In Germany's presidential election in 1932, Hitler placed second to Paul von Hindenburg, a war hero. But in 1933, Hindenburg called Hitler to the position of chancellor to head a government of conservative Germans, Nazis, and a variety of other independent parties (Landau 100).
Many Nazis were in powerful positions throughout Germany's government. These ties to prominent positions practically gave Hitler the true power of the government (Landau 96–101). He persuaded the president to give him emergency powers suspending the German constitution (Landau 121–122). A fire in the Reichstag building destroyed all of Hitler's political rivals and put him in control. In 1934, he gained the German army's support by executing a number of his leading storm troopers, the SA, which was made up of nearly 3 million of his followers. The storm troopers caused disruption in the country, and some support of Hitler was held back by their actions. Their main objective was terrorizing Jews, but their actions had become unpredictable and out of control. He discovered an SA plot against him and sent his personal bodyguards, the SS, to crush the SA and its leaders to gain support of the German military and ease tensions in the Nazi Party. The dying president congratulated Hitler on crushing the SA, and the German generals swore allegiance to him (Dwork 77–78).
In 1934, Hindenburg passed away, clearing the way for Hitler to take over Germany completely. He became Führer of Germany and the commander in chief of the military (Dwork 80). His master propagandist, Joseph Goebbels, and Heinrich Himmler's system of police cleared the way for totalitarian rule. A rally in Nuremberg showed the complete support of the Nazis as millions gathered to salute the Nazi Party and the Führer (Dwork 93). After Hitler gained complete and uncontested control of Germany, he began to prepare the country for war and for racial domination (Dwork 65).
His first step towards racial domination came with his rise to power. The Nazi Party issued an order that all "non-Aryans" were to be retired from German civil service. Although the order did not seem significant at the time, it sparked what would become the Holocaust (Levin 60).
The Nazi agenda of racial purity began to become visible to the public following Hitler's seizure of control. Although the main target was Jews, whom Hitler blamed for the loss of World War I, many other groups were targeted, such as Gypsies and homosexuals. In the years following the beginning of Hitler's rule, Jews were systematically stripped of their civil rights, their property, and their jobs. Jewish people were forced to wear patches identifying them as Jewish. Their businesses had signs identifying them as Jewish and discouraged consumers from buying their goods or using their services. Their businesses were ransacked and robbed. Their places of worship were destroyed and desecrated. Men were pummeled, and women were beaten and raped. Many Jews fled the country, yet millions of others were herded into filthy ghettos that served as holding pens. The country as a whole developed a prejudice against Jews, and there was very little resistance to the movement (Levin 103–132).
Hitler's plans had long been in place, and the efforts of Nazi Germany showed it. By the end of 1933, there were approximately 50 concentration camps throughout Germany. These camps were originally used to place certain people in protective custody. The people placed in such custody were Jews, Gypsies, Jehovah's Witnesses, the mentally ill, homosexuals, and anyone opposed to the Nazi regime (Dwork 86). At first, the camps were under the control of the Gestapo, Hitler's police force led by Heinrich Himmler. However, in 1934, Hitler ordered all camps to be controlled by his personal security and elite group, the SS. These camps were set up for different purposes, such as labor, medical experiments, and later in Hitler's rule, death. The camps were set up around railroad lines for easy transportation of the victims (Dwork 303–304).
The transportation to the camps showed a taste of what was to come in the early camps. The train trips were marked by starvation, disease, and cruelty by the officers. If prisoners did not obey orders, they were beaten, shot, or placed into solitary confinement (Dwork 102–103).
The camps were very unsanitary and inhumane. There was one bathroom for each four hundred prisoners. Disease spread among the prisoners, mainly in the form of typhus. Many prisoners died of starvation, disease, and beatings. If any prisoner attempted to escape or managed to do so, the entire group that the prisoner was associated with was shot (Dwork 35). In 1937, nearly 7,000 people were in concentration camps. By 1938, 10,000 more were sent. These concentration camps led to the creation of death camps in which nearly 12 million lives were taken.
Hitler's "Final Solution" came about in January 1941. In a meeting with his top officials called the Wannsee Conference, he decided that Jews were to be eliminated in order to pursue his goal of a perfect Aryan race (Landau 167–168). Six death camps were erected to carry out Hitler's plan: Auschwitz-Birkenau, Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek, Sobibor, and Treblinka (Bulow).
In the beginning of the death camps, methods such as lethal injection and mass shootings were used. However, mass gassings were soon employed to murder the prisoners. The first gas chamber was built as an experiment at Auschwitz. On September 3, 1941, 250 prisoners and 600 Soviet prisoners of war were placed into a gas chamber. A rat poison known as Zyklon B was administered, killing them all. After this successful experiment, four more large gas chambers were built in Auschwitz. These new chambers included large ovens to burn the bodies (Levin 314–315).
There were many forms of torture at the camps. Some methods were whipping, starvation, and exposure to the elements. Prisoners would be forced to stand naked in the snow until they succumbed to the cold. Guards would routinely beat the prisoners or shoot them if they did not follow orders (Dwork 359–360).
As they arrived at the death camps, those who would be laborers were sent to one side, and those who would be sent to the gas chambers were sent to the other. Those sent to the gas chambers were told that they would be disinfected and entered a large room with shower heads. After the doors were closed, the Zyklon B gas was administered, and after approximately 10 minutes of terrible suffering, the victims died. The bodies were then transported to crematoriums where they were burned. About 900 people were gassed at a time, and nearly 2,500 victims were killed in 30 minutes. However, it took nearly a day to burn 2,000 bodies (Levin 314–316).
Some prisoners were selected for medical experiments. Doctors performed horrible experiments on prisoners such as testing new drugs, amputating limbs to see the effects, and exposing them to cold and low pressures to observe the results. Victims were drowned, given experimental surgeries, and had organs and limbs removed. They were then dissected to see the results. The most famous of all Nazi doctors was Josef Mengele. He performed experiments on twins and dissected them. He administered chemicals to men, women, and children, causing them horrible pain, sterilization, or death. Most prisoners subjected to medical experiments died and were dissected (Landau 187–188).
Throughout this systematic killing, the Jews and other victims were tricked into thinking there was hope. Music played as they arrived. Guards would tell them to keep hope as they were transported to the death camps. Even the gas chambers were surrounded by nice landscaping with gardens. The victims of Hitler were quite unaware of the fate that awaited them (Dwork 359).
"Liberation, survivors' testimony, and historical remembrance"
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