Jews represented everything the Nazis found repugnant: finance capitalism (controlled, the Nazis believed, by powerful Jewish financiers), international communism (Karl Marx was a German Jew, and the leadership of the German Communist Party was heavily Jewish), and modernist cultural movements like psychoanalysis and swing music. “Mankind has grown great in eternal war,” Hitler wrote. “Either victory of the Aryan, or annihilation of the Aryan and the victory of the Jew.” The young Hitler saw history as a process of racial struggle, with the strongest race-the Aryan race-ultimately prevailing by force of arms. “There are only two possibilities,” he told a Munich audience in 1922. Hitler blamed the Weimar Republic’s weakness on the influence of Germany’s Jewish and communist minorities, who he claimed were trying to take over the country. The ultimate aim of the Nazi Party was to seize power through Germany’s parliamentary system, install Hitler as dictator, and create a community of racially pure Germans loyal to their führer, who would lead them in a campaign of racial cleansing and world conquest. In the new Germany, all citizens would unselfishly serve the state, or Volk democracy would be abolished and individual rights sacrificed for the good of the führer state. This New Order was distinguished by an authoritarian political system based on a leadership structure in which authority flowed downward from a supreme national leader. Hitler, a mesmerizing public speaker, addressed political meetings in Munich calling for a new German order to replace what he saw as an incompetent and inefficient democratic regime. Consumers needed a wheelbarrow to carry enough paper money to buy a loaf of bread. By September 1923, four billion German marks had the equal value of one American dollar. Paying the crushing reparations destabilized the economy, producing ruinous, runaway inflation. “We shall squeeze the German lemon until the pips squeak!” explained one British official. The German army was radically downsized and the nation forbidden to have submarines or an air force. Germany also had to give up its prized overseas colonies and surrender valued parcels of home territory to France and Poland. He and other patriotic Germans were outraged and humiliated by the harsh terms of the Treaty of Versailles, which the Allies compelled the new German government, the Weimar Republic, to accept along with an obligation to pay $33 billion in war reparations. Hitler rose to power through the Nazi Party, an organization he forged after returning as a wounded veteran from the annihilating trench warfare of World War I. How were Hitler and the Nazis possible? How did such odious characters take and hold power in a country that was a world pacesetter in literature, art, architecture, and science, a nation that had a democratic government and a free press in the 1920s? He had the active support of the powerful German officer class and of millions of everyday citizens who voted for the National Socialist German Workers’ (Nazi) Party and hailed him as a national savior in gigantic stadium rallies. Hitler had supreme authority as führer (leader or guide), but could not have risen to power or committed such atrocities on his own. During the course of the war, Nazi military forces rounded up and executed 11 million victims they deemed inferior or undesirable-“life unworthy of life”-among them Jews, Slavs, homosexuals, and Jehovah’s Witnesses. His invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, triggered the European phase of World War II. Upon achieving power, Hitler smashed the nation’s democratic institutions and transformed Germany into a war state intent on conquering Europe for the benefit of the so-called Aryan race. He ruled absolutely until his death by suicide in April 1945. Adolf Hitler (ApApril 30, 1945) was appointed chancellor of Germany in 1933 following a series of electoral victories by the Nazi Party.
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