279-526: Final solution Parties The Nazi term Gleichschaltung ( German pronunciation: [ˈɡlaɪçʃaltʊŋ] ), roughly " coordination ", was the process of Nazification by which Adolf Hitler —leader of the Nazi Party in Germany —successively established a system of totalitarian control and coordination over all aspects of German society "from the economy and trade associations to
558-753: A meeting of the Nazi Party (the Reichsleiter ) and of regional party leaders (the Gauleiter ). The day after Hitler's speech, on 13 December 1941, Joseph Goebbels wrote in his diary: With respect of the Jewish Question, the Führer has decided to make a clean sweep. He prophesied to the Jews that if they again brought about a world war, they would see their annihilation in it. That wasn't just
837-564: A monarchist platform and was strongly opposed to the Weimar Republic in domestic affairs and Treaty of Versailles in foreign affairs. Typical of the party's views about Weimar was a 1919 pamphlet by Karl Helfferich entitled "Erzberger Must Go!", which was in equal terms violently anti-democratic, anti-Catholic and anti-Semitic. The target of the pamphlet was Matthias Erzberger of the Zentrum , whom Hellferich called "the puppet of
1116-487: A " völkisch study group" under Wilhelm Kube was set up. Despite Kube's best efforts to work out a compromise, the leading völkisch activists' Wilhelm Henning , Reinhold Wulle and Albrecht von Graefe all resigned from the party in October 1922 when the party's leader Oskar Hergt supported by Otto Hoetzsch and Count Kuno von Westarp made it clear that they wanted no more calls for assassinations, which had caused
1395-644: A boycott of the Scherl newspapers and press owned by Hugenberg while encouraged a strike at the Scherel press.". At a debate at the Berlin Sports Palace between Goebbels and Hugenberg's right-hand man, Otto Schmidt-Hanover, thousands of Nazis showed up to boo Schmidt-Hanover and cheer on Goebbels; who won the debate by being the only one allowed to speak for any length of time. Leopold wrote that; "the DNVP
1674-452: A break with the industrialists who were greatly displeased with Hugenberg's unwillingness to take part in coalition governments. As a result, from 1929 onwards the millionaire Hugenberg spent his own considerable fortune to provide the funding for the DNVP. The dependence of the DNVP on Hugenberg to provide the bulk of the election funds very much strengthened Hugenberg's leadership, making it impossible to challenge. Hugenberg's efforts led to
1953-641: A catch-word. The world war is here and the annihilation of the Jews must be the necessary consequence. Cesarani notes that by 1943, as the military position of the German forces deteriorated, the Nazi leadership became more openly explicit about the Final Solution. In March, Goebbels confided to his diary: "On the Jewish question especially, we are in it so deeply that there is no getting out any longer. And that
2232-550: A common candidate for the presidential elections, and on 17 February 1932 Hitler unilaterally announced in a press release that he was running for president. This action effectively destroyed the Harzburger Front as Hugenberg had not been consulted before-hand. Hugenberg had much difficulty in recruiting a DVNP candidate for the presidential election as Prince Oskar of Prussia, the industrialist Albert Vögler, and General Otto vow Below all declined to run. Theodor Duesterberg
2511-771: A coup by which the Reich government deposed the SPD-dominated Prussian government of Otto Braun , usurping it by making Papen the Reich Commissar of Prussia. Baron von Gayl, the DNVP Interior Minister played a key role in planning the "Rape of Prussia" together with Chancellor von Papen and the Defense Minister General Kurt von Schleicher as part of the move towards authoritarian government by destroying one of
2790-468: A couple's "racial worth" before allowing them to marry or not, and breaking German citizenship into two grades of those allowed to marry and those who would not. In 1926, under its leader Count von Westarp the DNVP took office by joining the coalition government led by Chancellor Wilhelm Marx with the stated aim of pulling German politics towards the right. After the "betrayal" of the Dawes Plan vote,
3069-487: A crushing burden of reparations for the next sixty years (Hugenberg did not mention the fact that the Young Plan was not scheduled to end until 1988 because the plan had greatly reduced annual reparation payments, which was why the payments had been spread out over sixty years). In pushing for the referendum on the Young Plan , Hugenberg was quite consciously seeking to polarize German politics into two extremes, namely
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#17327726671643348-554: A good idea that was unfortunately abandoned, and made it clear that he wanted a return to Katastrophenpolitik . In seeking a vote on the "Freedom Law", Hugenberg was seeking nothing less than to begin the destruction of all of the middle-of-the-road parties in Germany in order to achieve a situation where the only alternatives for German voters would be the "national" parties and the Marxist parties. Hugenberg had initially planned in
3627-530: A hysterical campaign warning his papers' mostly middle-class readers that Marxist SPD and KPD were going to mobilize the millions of unemployed created by the Great Depression to stage a bloody revolution and that only an authoritarian regime willing to use the most drastic means could save Germany. The Comintern 's Third Period , which meant that the Communists spent most of their time attacking
3906-574: A joint assault in Kovno , Wilno , and Lwów). The murders continued uninterrupted. On 12 October 1941, in Stanisławów , some 10,000–12,000 Jewish men, women, and children were shot at the Jewish cemetery by the German uniformed SS-men and Ukrainian Auxiliary Police during the so-called " Bloody Sunday [ de ; uk ] " (de) . The shooters began firing at 12 noon and continued without stopping by taking turns. There were picnic tables set up on
4185-417: A lack of coherence and planning for the future in Jewish policy, even when we would most expect it. The classic instance is the invasion of Poland in 1939, when not even the most elementary consideration had been given to what should happen to Poland's Jews either in the shorter or longer term. Given that Poland was home to the largest Jewish population in the world, and that, in a couple of years, it would house
4464-738: A major public relations problem. Henning, Wulle and Graefe founded the German Völkisch Freedom Party in December 1922. In September 1923, the DVP Chancellor Gustav Stresemann announced the end of "passive resistance" to the occupation of the Ruhr ( Ruhrkampf ) under the grounds that hyperinflation had destroyed the economy and the Ruhrkampf must end in order to save Germany. As a result,
4743-608: A major surge of interest in the National Socialists. Indeed, for many it marked the first time that they ever heard of Hitler, and it led during the winter of 1929–30 to a huge influx of new members into the NSDAP. Hamilton wrote that it was the 1929 referendum, which the National Socialists had treated as a gigantic 5-month-long free political ad (Hugenberg had paid for the entire referendum out of his own pocket) running from July to December 1929 that had enabled them to enter
5022-484: A majority. Fearing that Marx would win the second round (something made the more likely by the fact that the SPD's Otto Braun had dropped out to endorse Marx), Admiral Tirpitz made a dramatic visit to the home of the retired Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg to ask him to run for the second round in order to "save" Germany by gaining the presidency for the right. Tirpitz persuaded Hindenburg to run, and though Hindenburg won
5301-484: A man unafraid, indeed proud to state his belief that Germany should be the world's greatest power. Finally, President Friedrich Ebert applied more pressure by warning the DNVP that if the Dawes Plan were rejected, he would dissolve the Reichstag for early elections, and the party would then face the wrath of angry voters. After much internal fighting between the pro- and anti-Dawes Plan factions, in order to prevent
5580-455: A massive motion of no confidence in the Reichstag . In response to losing the motion von Papen dissolved the Reichstag again. In the elections in fall of 1932 the DNVP made overtures to the NSDAP attempting to reform the Harzburg front. The German historian Hermann Beck wrote that the election in the autumn 1932 was the "absolute nadir" of DNVP-NSDAP relations when Hitler had decided to make
5859-650: A part of Reinhard, and neither was Auschwitz-Birkenau functioning as an extermination center until November 1944 in Polish lands annexed by Hitler and added to Germany proper . The conference at Wannsee gave impetus to the so-called second sweep of the Holocaust by the bullet in the east. Between April and July 1942 in Volhynia , 30,000 Jews were murdered in death pits with the help of dozens of newly formed Ukrainian Schutzmannschaft . Owing to good relations with
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#17327726671646138-426: A party committed to total opposition to the republic it doomed itself to being an opposition party forever. Many of the DNVP's supporters made it clear by 1924 that they were unhappy about supporting a party whose role was purely negative in opposing everything that the government did while refusing to take part in any of the coalition governments. The British historian Sir John Wheeler-Bennett wrote "At no time during
6417-518: A petition in the fall of 1929 objecting to the section of the "Freedom Law" calling for the prosecution of those politicians who supported the Young Plan as "detrimental" to the workings of politics and stated that a victory for the Yes side in the referendum on the Freedom Law "would frustrate all efforts at improving the German situation for the foreseeable future". Hugenberg's leadership brought about
6696-460: A portion would still vote German-National today, were the party not so stupid to trade in anti-Semitism) and even in merchant circles, this way of thinking prevails." Extremely nationalistic and reactionary and originally favouring restoration of the Hohenzollern monarchy, it later supported the creation of an authoritarian state as a substitute. Its supporters came from dedicated nationalists,
6975-603: A prominent German woman—collected a list of terms employed in everyday speech by the Nazis, which he discussed in his book, LTI – Lingua Tertii Imperii , published in English as The Language of the Third Reich . In this work, Klemperer contends that the Nazis made the German language itself a servant to their ideology through its repetitive use, eventually permeating the very "flesh and blood" of its people. For instance, if it
7254-596: A prophet: If the international Jewish financiers in and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, then the result will not be the Bolshevization of the earth, and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe! Raul Hilberg , in his book The Destruction of the European Jews , was the first historian to systematically document and analyse
7533-612: A relatively short period of time. The plans to exterminate all the Jews of Europe were formalized at the Wannsee Conference , held at an SS guesthouse near Berlin, on 20 January 1942. The conference was chaired by Heydrich and attended by 15 senior officials of the Nazi Party and the German government. Most of those attending were representatives of the Interior Ministry , the Foreign Ministry , and
7812-477: A return to monarchy in its manifesto, and participating in centre-right coalition governments on federal and state levels. It broadened its voting base—winning as much as 20.5% in the December 1924 German federal election —and supported the election of Paul von Hindenburg as President of Germany ( Reichspräsident ) in 1925. Under the leadership of the populist media entrepreneur Alfred Hugenberg from 1928,
8091-572: A statement saying Tirpitz as Chancellor would be the end of any effort to improve Franco-German relations while the American and Belgian ambassadors both issued warnings to the German government that Tirpitz as Chancellor would be a source of tension in their relations with Germany. The British Ambassador Lord D'Abernon warned that "If the Germans want to find a closed front hostile to them they cannot do anything better but to make Tirpitz Chancellor of
8370-412: A stunning "lack of realism". The Chancellor Wilhelm Marx rejected all of the DNVP conditions and informed the party that they either vote for or against the Dawes Plan, thereby settling off a bitter factional battle within the DNVP. In addition, Stresemann—who had privately bristled at Admiral Tirpitz's charges that he was conducting a foreign policy of Ohnmachtspolitik (policy of powerlessness) before
8649-465: A time in the mid-1920s to keep Social Democrats out of power. Before its alliance with Nazis, the party sought support of the national liberal German People's Party . Between 1925 and 1928, the party slightly moderated its tone and actively cooperated in successive governments. In the presidential election of 1925 , the DNVP supported Karl Jarres for president, who was defeated in the first round by Zentrum' s Wilhelm Marx , who however failed to gain
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8928-662: A vengeance those DNVP deputies who left to form the Conservative People's Party , whom Hugenberg called Weimar-supporting "Tory democrats" (democrat being a term of abuse for Hugenberg) who he believed practiced a watered down conservatism along the line of the British Conservative Party without any völkisch or monarchist convictions. Hugenberg's vendetta against the Conservatives meant that he focused most of his time on attacking them in
9207-420: A very short period they achieved dominance over the administration in every state. The pattern was in each case similar: pressure on the non-Nazi state governments to place a National Socialist in charge of the police; threatening demonstrations from SA and SS troops in the big cities; the symbolic raising of the swastika banner on town halls; the capitulation with hardly any resistance of the elected governments;
9486-469: Is a good thing. Experience teaches that a movement and a people who have burned their bridges fight with much greater determination and fewer constraints than those that have a chance of retreat." When Himmler addressed senior SS personnel and leading members of the regime in the Posen speeches on 4 October 1943, he used "the fate of the Jews as a sort of blood bond to tie the civil and military leadership to
9765-409: Is an unwritten—never to be written—and yet glorious page in our history. Final solution Parties German National People%27s Party Defunct Defunct The German National People's Party ( German : Deutschnationale Volkspartei , DNVP ) was a national-conservative and monarchist political party in Germany during the Weimar Republic . Before the rise of the Nazi Party , it
10044-604: The Jungmädel (Young Maidens) at age ten and at age fourteen were enrolled in the Bund Deutscher Mädel (League of German Maidens). At eighteen, BDM members generally went to the eastern territory for their Pflichtdienst , or Landjahr , a year of labor on a farm. By 1940, membership in the Hitler Youth numbered some eight million. The German trade union movement had a long history, dating to
10323-523: The Junkers (landed nobility) and the Pan-German League who wanted to destroy democracy with no thought to the consequences. The in-fighting over the Dawes Plan together with the related bad feelings within the DNVP's Reichstag delegation led to Oskar Hergt being ousted later in 1924 as the party's leader and his replacement with the interim leader of Johann Friedrich Winckler who in turn
10602-595: The Reichstag election of 20 May 1928 (the party's share of votes fell from 21% in 1924 to 14% in 1928) led to a new outbreak of party in-fighting. The immediate cause of the in-fighting was an article published in July 1928 entitled "Monarchism" (Monarchismus) by Walther Lambach , a board member of the German National Association of Commercial Employees (DHV). In his article, Lambach stated that
10881-576: The Waffen SS , not the Einsatzgruppen . An additional 17,000 Jews perished there in a ghetto uprising crushed a year later with the aid of Belarusian Auxiliary Police . An Israeli historian Dina Porat claimed that the Final Solution, i.e.: "the systematic overall physical extermination of Jewish communities one after the other—began in Lithuania" during the massive German chase after
11160-584: The Anschluss with Austria in 1938, Central Offices for Jewish Emigration were established in Vienna and Berlin to increase Jewish emigration, without covert plans for their forthcoming annihilation. The outbreak of war and the invasion of Poland brought a population of 3.5 million Polish Jews under the control of the Nazi and Soviet security forces , and marked the start of the Holocaust in Poland . In
11439-773: The General Government on 16 December 1941, Governor-General Hans Frank said: "But what will happen to the Jews? Do you believe they will be lodged in settlements in Ostland ? In Berlin, we were told: why all this trouble; we cannot use them in the Ostland or the Reichskommissariat either; liquidate them yourselves!" Two days later, Himmler recorded the outcome of his discussion with Hitler. The result was: " als Partisanen auszurotten " ("exterminate them as partisans"). Israeli historian Yehuda Bauer wrote that
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11718-650: The German resistance to Nazism and took part in the 20 July plot to assassinate Hitler in 1944. The party was formed in December 1918 by a merger of the German Conservative Party and the Free Conservative Party of the old monarchic German Empire . It was joined soon afterward by the most right-wing section of the former National Liberal Party , and most supporters of the dissolved radically nationalist German Fatherland Party ,
11997-594: The Gleichschaltung process did not start until after the Nazi seizure of power at the Reich level at the end of January 1933, the table also presents earlier Nazi Party successes in infiltrating and taking charge of several German state administrations during 1930–1932. In most of these instances, they took the portfolio of the state interior ministries from which they controlled the police, installing Nazi adherents and purging opponents. Most coalition cabinets that
12276-602: The Janowska concentration camp , who were interviewed in the film Janovska Camp at Lvov , among other witnesses, have argued that the Final Solution began in Lwów (Lemberg) in Distrikt Galizien of the General Government during the German advance across Soviet-occupied Poland . Statements and memoirs of survivors emphasize that, when Ukrainian nationalists and ad hoc Ukrainian People's Militia (soon reorganized as
12555-795: The Justice Ministry , including Ministers for the Eastern Territories. At the conference, Heydrich indicated that approximately 11,000,000 Jews in Europe would fall under the provisions of the "Final Solution". This figure included not only Jews residing in Axis-controlled Europe, but also the Jewish populations of the United Kingdom and of neutral nations (Switzerland, Ireland, Sweden, Spain, Portugal, and European Turkey). Eichmann's biographer David Cesarani wrote that Heydrich's main purpose in convening
12834-678: The Kamianets-Podilskyi massacre of 26–28 August 1941 some 23,600 Jews were shot in front of open pits (including 14,000–18,000 people expelled from Hungary). After an incident in Bila Tserkva in which 90 small children left behind had to be shot separately, Blobel requested that Jewish mothers hold them in their arms during mass shootings. Long before the conference at Wannsee, 28,000 Jews were shot by SS and Ukrainian military in Vinnytsia on 22 September 1941, followed by
13113-606: The Kulmhof extermination camp . Victims were misled under the deceptive guise of " Resettlement in the East", organised by SS Commissioners, which was also tried and tested at Chełmno. By the time the European-wide Final Solution was formulated two months later, Heydrich's RSHA had already confirmed the effectiveness of industrial murder by exhaust fumes, and the strength of deception. Construction work on
13392-416: The Law on the Trustees of Labour that decreed an end to collective bargaining. It established Trustees of Labour , who were appointed by Hitler and charged with regulating labor contracts and maintaining labor peace. Since their decisions were legally binding, strikes were effectively outlawed. An all-embracing recreational organization for workers, called Kraft durch Freude ("Strength Through Joy")
13671-415: The Locarno Treaties . By serving in a government that signed Locarno, which recognized Alsace-Lorraine as part of France and voluntarily agreed to accept the demilitarized status of the Rhineland, many party activists charged that Westarp had committed another "betrayal" by serving in a government that accepted the "robbery" of what was claimed to be German land. A result of this anger was that even through
13950-468: The National Liberal Party . The party strongly rejected the republican Weimar Constitution of 1919 and the Treaty of Versailles , which it viewed as a national disgrace, signed by traitors. The party instead aimed at a restoration of monarchy, a repeal of the dictated peace treaty and reacquisition of all lost territories and colonies. During the mid-1920s, the DNVP moderated its profile, accepting republican institutions in practice while still calling for
14229-419: The National Socialist Factory Cell Organization . Leipart and other union leaders were taken into "protective custody" and sent to concentration camps. Violence was inflicted on many and, in the most brutal incident, four union officials were beaten to death in Duisburg . Two days later, other non-SPD-aligned union amalgamations, such as the conservative German National Association of Commercial Employees and
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#173277266716414508-545: The Nazi Party policy statement , Jews and the Romani people were the only "alien people in Europe". In 1936, the Bureau of Romani Affairs in Munich was taken over by Interpol and renamed the Center for Combating the Gypsy Menace. Introduced at the end of 1937, the " final solution of the Gypsy Question " entailed round-ups , expulsions, and incarceration of Romani in concentration camps built at, until this point, Dachau , Buchenwald , Flossenbürg , Mauthausen , Natzweiler , Ravensbruck , Taucha and Westerbork . After
14787-405: The Organisation Consul terrorist group. Faced with a possible ban for encouraging terrorism after the Rathenau assassination and a public backlash over its initially jubilant reaction to Rathenau's murder, the party started to crack down on its extreme völkisch wing, who had been the most vociferous in calling for Rathenau's blood. To stop a total break with its völkisch wing, in September 1922
15066-400: The Reich ". The clash between Stresemann and Tirpitz over the Dawes Plan marked the beginning of a long feud that was to continue until Stresemann's death in 1929. Right from the moment that Admiral Tirpitz was elected to the Reichstag in May 1924, he emerged as Stresemann's most "tenacious adversary" in the Reichstag and presented himself as the unabashed champion of German power politics,
15345-574: The Reichslandbund , the German People's Party and the Stahlhelm paramilitary organisation briefly formed an uneasy alliance known as the Harzburg Front . Attending the Bad Harzburg rally were most of the figures of the German right ranging from General Hans von Seeckt , Heinrich Class , Franz Seldte , General Walther von Lüttwitz , Admiral Adolf von Trotha, the economist Hjalmar Schacht , Crown Prince Wilhelm, Admiral Magnus von Levetzow, Prince Oskar of Prussia, Prince Eitel Friedrich, and on to figures such as Hugenberg and Hitler. The Harzburger Front
15624-429: The Reichstag to have a majority. In the summer of 1929, two prominent DNVP Reichstag deputies Gottfried Treviranus and Hans Schlange-Schöningen resigned from the party's caucus in protest against the "Freedom Law" as Hugenberg's referendum bill was known which they called irresponsible in the extreme. They would be joined shortly afterwards by the former chairman Count Kuno von Westarp and 20 other DNVP MdRs leaving
15903-418: The Reichstag . The Reichsausschuß comprised Hugenberg, Heinrich Class of the Pan-German League , Franz Seldte of Der Stahlehlm and Adolf Hitler of the NSDAP. Hugenberg saw himself as the leader of the Reichsausschuß and believed through the Reichsausschuß he would become the leader of the entire right-wing national bloc and in turn the bloc he intended to create would at last win enough seats in
16182-433: The Reichstag election of 5 March 1933 , violent episodes increased in intensity, with SA stormtroopers ransacking trade union offices, assaulting staff, destroying furniture and equipment, stealing funds and burning documents. By 25 March, union offices in some 45 towns throughout the Reich had been attacked. At this point, the trade unions began to distance themselves from the SPD in an attempt to seek an accommodation with
16461-408: The Reserve Police Battalion 309 arrived in the city and set the Great Synagogue on fire with hundreds of Jewish men locked inside. The burning of the synagogue was followed by a frenzy of murders both inside the homes around the Jewish neighbourhood of Chanajki, and in the city park, lasting until night time. The next day, some 30 wagons of dead bodies were taken to mass graves. As noted by Browning,
16740-536: The Reserve Police Battalion 101 hand-in-hand with the Trawniki men from Ukraine. Auschwitz alone had enough capacity to fulfill the Nazis' remaining extermination needs. Unlike Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, and Lublin-Majdanek , which were built in the occupied General Government territory inhabited by the largest concentrations of Jews, the killing centre at Auschwitz subcamp of Birkenau operated in Polish areas annexed by Nazi Germany directly. The new gas chambers at Bunker I were finished around March 1942 when
17019-466: The Ruhrlade , the inner cabinet of the western coal and steel industry, found him increasingly wrong-headed and impossible to work with. When Hugenberg began to attract the political limelight his characteristic slogan was "solid or mash" ( Block oder Brei ). Those who wanted a broad conservative party able to influence republican politics were the mash, his prescription was dynamic force through principled confrontation. In July 1929, Hugenberg decided that
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#173277266716417298-414: The Soviet demarcation line in 1941, what had been regarded as exceptional in the Greater Germanic Reich became a normal way of operating in the east. The crucial taboo against the murder of women and children was breached not only in Białystok but also in Gargždai in late June. By July, significant numbers of women and children were being murdered behind all front-lines not only by the Germans but also by
17577-404: The Ukrainian Auxiliary Police ) began to murder women and children, rather than only male Jews, the "Final Solution" had begun. Witnesses have said that such murders happened both prior to and during the pogroms reportedly triggered by the NKVD prisoner massacre . The question of whether there was some coordination between the Lithuanian and Ukrainian militias remains open (i.e. collaborating for
17856-437: The Ukrainian People's Militia . Formed officially on 20 August 1941, the Reichskommissariat Ukraine —stretching from prewar east-central Poland to Crimea—had become operational theatre of the Einsatzgruppe C. Within the Soviet Union proper, between 9 July 1941 and 19 September 1941 the city of Zhytomyr was made Judenfrei in three murder operations conducted by German and Ukrainian police in which 10,000 Jews perished. In
18135-422: The Wannsee Conference held near Berlin, and culminated in the Holocaust , which saw the murder of 90% of Polish Jews , and two-thirds of the Jewish population of Europe. The nature and timing of the decisions that led to the Final Solution is an intensely researched and debated aspect of the Holocaust. The program evolved during the first 25 months of war leading to the attempt at "murdering every last Jew in
18414-410: The Young Plan referendum on 22 December 1929. The NSDAP were one of the groups which joined Hugenberg's campaign against the Young Plan, and the resulting wave of publicity brought Adolf Hitler back into the limelight after five years of obscurity following his trial for high treason in 1924. After his trial in 1924, Hitler had been largely ignored; the 1929 edition of the diaries of Lord D'Abernon ,
18693-434: The ghetto uprisings , irrespective of death camps' quota. In two weeks of July 1942, the Słonim Ghetto revolt , crushed with the help of Latvian, Lithuanian, and Ukrainian Schutzmannschaft , cost the lives of 8,000–13,000 Jews. The second largest mass shooting (to that particular date) took place in late October 1942 when the insurgency was suppressed in the Pińsk Ghetto ; over 26,000 men, women and children were shot with
18972-496: The left–right political spectrum , it belonged on the right-wing , and is classified as far-right in its early years and then again from the late 1920s when it moved back rightward. It was formed in late 1918 after Germany's defeat in World War I and the German Revolution of 1918–1919 that toppled the German Empire and the monarchy. It combined the bulk of the German Conservative Party , Free Conservative Party , and German Fatherland Party , with right-wing elements of
19251-435: The " Black Horror on the Rhine " occupied much of the DNVP's time in the early 1920s. Kolb wrote that the DNVP played a major role in the "brutalization of politics" in the Weimar Republic with its relentless denigration of its enemies as "traitors" together with its insistence that murder was a perfectly acceptable procedure for dealing with one's political opponents, who the DNVP claimed did not deserve to live. The climax of
19530-416: The " Jewish-Bolshevik intelligentsia would have to be eliminated" and that the forthcoming war would be a confrontation between two completely opposing cultures. In May 1941, Gestapo leader Heinrich Müller wrote a preamble to the new law limiting the jurisdiction of military courts in prosecuting troops for criminal actions because: "This time, the troops will encounter an especially dangerous element from
19809-417: The "co-ordination" effort was the purging of the civil service, both at the Federal and state level. Top Federal civil servants—the State Secretaries—were largely replaced if they were not sympathetic to the Nazi program, as were the equivalent bureaucrats in the states, but Nazification took place at every level. Civil servants rushed to join the Nazi Party, fearing they would lose their jobs if they did not. At
20088-569: The "lawless" method of a general strike to defeat the putsch than it did the putsch itself, which was portrayed as an understandable, if extreme response to the existence of the republic. The outcome of the Erzberger-Helfferich libel trial encouraged the DNVP to engage in a campaign of vituperative and vitriolic attacks on leaders of the Weimar Coalition who supported the republic, usually accompanied with calls for
20367-596: The "liberation of Germany" (i.e. doing away with the Treaty of Versailles), restoring the monarchy under the Hohenzollern family, a return to the policy of pre-1914 navalism in order to make Germany a world power, a "strong state" to combat the Great Depression and a "moral rebirth of our people" by the "deepening of Christian awareness". On 11 October 1931, the DNVP, the NSDAP, the Pan-German League,
20646-544: The "national" camp opposed to the Young Plan and everyone else, believing that such a polarization would work for his own benefit. Hugenberg saw compromise and negotiation as so much weakness that led to DNVP's poor showing in the elections of May 1928 and believed that the best chances for the DNVP to come to power was by creating a political climate where no compromise and negotiation was possible by seeking to divide Germany into two diametrically opposed blocs with no middle ground in between. Hugenberg did not actually expect to win
20925-610: The "sequence of steps in a destruction process is thus determined". If a bureaucracy is motivated "to inflict maximum damage upon a group of people", it is "inevitable that a bureaucracy—no matter how decentralized its apparatus or how unplanned its activities—should push its victims through these stages", culminating in their annihilation. In his monograph, The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939 – March 1942 , Christopher Browning argues that Nazi policy toward
21204-457: The "we-consciousness" of the collective Volk, but the mandates of Nazi "coordination" remained: pay homage to the Führer, expel all foreigners, sacrifice for the German people, and welcome future challenges. While greater German social and economic unity was produced through the Gleichschaltung initiatives of the regime, it was at the expense of individuality and to the social detriment of any nonconformist; and worse—it contributed to and reinforced
21483-468: The 1930 election, sending the Stahlhelm in to disturb speeches by Westarp and spent little time defending the DNVP against the attacks of the NSDAP. During the 1930 election, the DNVP issued a statement proclaiming that there were no important differences between them and the NSDAP on the "Jewish Question", arguing that the few differences that did exist concerned a small number of the "radical demands of
21762-651: The 29 September massacre of 33,771 Jews at Babi Yar . In Dnipropetrovsk , on 13 October 1941 some 10,000–15,000 Jews were shot. In Chernihiv , 10,000 Jews were murdered and only 260 Jews were spared. In mid-October, during the Krivoy-Rog massacre of 4,000–5,000 Soviet Jews the entire Ukrainian auxiliary police force actively participated. In the first days of January 1942 in Kharkiv , 12,000 Jews were murdered, but smaller massacres continued in this period on daily basis in countless other locations. In August 1942 in
22041-624: The Allies once Germany won the war. Erzberger sued Helfferich for libel over his statement that Erzberger was "dishonestly combining political activity with his own financial interests". Amid much media attention the libel trial ended on 12 March 1920 with the judge ruling that some of Helfferich's statements were true while fining Helfferich a nominal sum for technical libel for the statements that he declared that Helfferich lacked sufficient evidence to back up with. The German historian Eberhard Kolb wrote none of Helfferich's claims were true, and that
22320-668: The Allies to exiting the Rhineland in June 1930 (which was five years earlier than what Versailles had called for) was irrelevant to Hugenberg. He argued that a properly patriotic government would not pay any reparations at all and would force the Allies to leave the Rhineland at once. As such, Hugenberg drafted "A Bill against the Enslavement of the German People" which declared acceptance of the Young Plan to be high treason under
22599-655: The Allies—asked the German embassies in London, Paris, and Washington to inquire of their respective host governments what would be their reaction to Tirpitz becoming Chancellor. The very negative international response that the prospect of Tirpitz as the Chancellor generated was then leaked by Stresemann to various Reichstag deputies as a way of showing how absurd the DNVP was in demanding that Tirpitz being appointed Chancellor, and how isolated Germany would be with Tirpitz as
22878-496: The British ambassador to Germany 1920–26 had a footnote that read: "He [Hitler] was finally released after six months and bound over for the rest of his sentence, thereafter fading into oblivion". At the various campaign rallies against the Young Plan in the autumn of 1929, the charismatic Hitler easily out-shone the stuffy Hugenberg, who as one of his aides Reinhold Quaatz wrote in his diary had "no political sex appeal". Hugenberg
23157-484: The DNVP MdRs voted for the Dawes Plan while the other half voted against. The final vote was 49 DNVP MdRs for acceptance vs. 48 MdRs against. The support of the pro-Dawes Plan DNVP MdRs was just enough to get the Dawes Plan ratified by the Reichstag . The passage of the Dawes Plan produced much turmoil in the Reichstag with considerable cheering and jeering. One of the anti-Dawes Plan DNVP deputies, Alfred Hugenberg
23436-522: The DNVP and the NSDAP were prepared to co-operate with the Communists when it suited their purposes as in the case of the Prussian referendum. Hugenberg argued that Prussian referendum was necessary to force out the Braun government whom he accused of responsibility for "the decline in the German economy, the bad state of the finances and the chaos in governance". On 9 August 1931 when the Prussian referendum
23715-576: The DNVP co-operated with the Nazis, joining forces in the Harzburg Front of 1931, forming coalition governments in some states and finally supporting Hitler's appointment as Chancellor of Germany ( Reichskanzler ) in January 1933. Initially, the DNVP had a number of ministers in Hitler's government, but the party quickly lost influence and eventually dissolved itself in June 1933, giving way to
23994-482: The DNVP found itself joining forces with the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) in denouncing the end of the Ruhrkampf as treason and as a cowardly surrender to "a half-sated irreconcilable France". The DNVP announced that if they were in charge that they would continue the Ruhrkampf regardless of the economic costs and misery. At a party conference in early April 1924, the DNVP had come out clearly against
24273-580: The DNVP had promised to vote against the Dawes Plan when it came up for ratification in the Reichstag on the grounds that Germany should not have to pay any reparations at all, resulting in many of the economic lobbying groups that donated to the party such as the Landbund , the Reich Association of German Industry (RDI) and the Chamber of Industry and Commerce threatening to cease donating to
24552-567: The DNVP ministers had served in the Cabinet that had signed Locarno, the party's MdRs voted against ratifying Locarno in the Reichstag , and the DNVP walked out of the government in protest at Locarno. Another problem for the DNVP was the 1926 referendum , in which the Communists proposed to confiscate without compensation all of the property belonging to the former Imperial and royal families of Germany and give it to small farmers, homeless people and those living on war pensions. The DNVP leadership
24831-540: The DNVP parliamentary delegations. When the National Assembly convened to write the new constitution for Germany on 6 February 1919, the DNVP's chief contribution to the debates was a lengthy defence of the former Emperor Wilhelm II by Clemens von Delbrück , and a series of long speeches by other DNVP deputies defending Germany's actions in the July Crisis of 1914, the ideology of Pan-Germanism and
25110-492: The DNVP the main target in the election. The National Socialist newspaper Der Angriff in an editorial written by Joseph Goebbels called for a "Reckoning with the Hugenzwerg " (a portmanteau of Hugenberg and "pygmy"), and dismissively commented that Hugenberg must be a magician since there was no other way that he could hope to "turn an insignificant heap of reactionaries" into a mass movement. DNVP election meetings were
25389-646: The DNVP's Reichstag delegation and with his finger pointing clearly at Helfferich, shouted "The enemy is on the right! Here are those who drip poison into the wounds of the German people!". Wirth, who was shaken by the murder of his friend Rathenau, pushed through the Reichstag the Law for the Protection of the Republic on 21 July 1922. It increased the penalties for conspiring to political assassination and allowed
25668-504: The DNVP's leading economic expert, had published two detailed critiques in Die Kreuzzeitung that purported to prove that the Dawes Plan existed only to "enslave" Germany by allowing the Allies to take control of and exploit the German economy forever. The spring 1924 campaign was largely led and organized by charismatic, media savvy Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz who was presented as the "savior" type figure, able to rally together
25947-500: The Dawes Plan loan required the Reich government to amend the constitution to put up the Reichsbahn as collateral, which required a two-thirds majority in the Reichstag . At first, the DNVP tried to avoid an internal split caused by the up-coming Dawes Plan vote by insisting upon several conditions in exchange for voting for the Dawes Plan such as the appointment of Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz as Chancellor, firing Stresemann as
26226-540: The Enabling Act twice, though this was a foregone conclusion with all other parties banned. Final solution Parties Final solution The Final Solution ( German : die Endlösung , pronounced [diː ˈʔɛntˌløːzʊŋ] ) or the Final Solution to the Jewish Question ( German : Endlösung der Judenfrage , pronounced [ˈɛntˌløːzʊŋ deːɐ̯ ˈjuːdn̩ˌfʁaːɡə] )
26505-411: The Final Solution was officially launched at Belzec. Until mid June, 20,000 Silesian Jews were murdered there using Zyklon B . In July 1942, Bunker II became operational. In August, another 10,000–13,000 Polish Jews from Silesia were murdered, along with 16,000 French Jews declared 'stateless', and 7,700 Jews from Slovakia. The infamous 'Gate of Death' at Auschwitz II for the incoming freight trains
26784-477: The French colony, but the plan was abandoned for logistical reasons, mainly a naval blockade . There were also preliminary plans to deport Jews to Palestine and Siberia . Raul Hilberg wrote that, in 1941, in the first phase of the mass-murder of Jews, the mobile killing units began to pursue their victims across occupied eastern territories; in the second phase, stretching across all of German-occupied Europe,
27063-401: The German grasp" took shape during a five-week period, from 18 September to 25 October 1941. During this time, the sites of the first extermination camps were selected, different methods of murder were tested, Jewish emigration was forbidden, and 11 transports departed for Łódź as a temporary holding station. Of this period, Browning writes, "The vision of the Final Solution had crystallised in
27342-551: The German grasp". Christopher Browning , a historian specializing in the Holocaust, wrote that most historians agree that the Final Solution cannot be attributed to a single decision made at one particular point in time. "It is generally accepted the decision-making process was prolonged and incremental." In 1940, following the Fall of France , Adolf Eichmann devised the Madagascar Plan to move Europe's Jewish population to
27621-580: The German people the belief in and therefore the will to victory" [By "July action" Helfereich was referring to the Reichstag Peace Resolution of July 1917, which Erzberger played a major role in writing]. Helfferich especially hated Erzberger for making a speech in July 1919 that blamed him for the bad shape of German budget, with Erzberger noting during the war Helfferich had decided not to raise taxes, and instead ran up colossal debts which he planned to pay off by imposing reparations on
27900-471: The German top echelon's newfound intent to pursue Hitler's new anti-Semitic plan to eradicate, rather than expel, Jews. Hitler's earlier ideas about forcible removal of Jews from the German-controlled territories to achieve Lebensraum were abandoned after the failure of the air campaign against Britain , initiating a naval blockade of Germany. Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler became
28179-518: The German-occupied zone of Poland, Jews were forced into hundreds of makeshift ghettos , pending other arrangements. In April 1941, the German agriculture and interior ministries designated the SS as an authorized applier of Zyklon B , which meant they were able to use it without any further training or governmental oversight. The launch of Operation Barbarossa in June 1941 coincided with
28458-557: The Holocaust was submitted at Nuremberg . The Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union codenamed Operation Barbarossa , which commenced on 22 June 1941, set in motion a " war of annihilation " which quickly opened the door to the systematic mass murder of European Jews. For Hitler, Bolshevism was merely "the most recent and most nefarious manifestation of the eternal Jewish threat". On 3 March 1941, Wehrmacht Joint Operations Staff Chief Alfred Jodl repeated Hitler's declaration that
28737-509: The House of Hohenzollern while his party was participating in a republican government. An especially difficult case for Westarp came in 1927 when it became time to renew the Law for the Protection of the Republic, a law passed in 1922 in the aftermath of Rathenau's assassination, and which was clearly aimed at the DNVP for its incitement of murder at the time. Section V of the law had implicitly banned
29016-522: The Hugenberg press's anti-Marxist campaign were not the DNVP as intended, but rather the National Socialists who were able to portray themselves as the most effective anti-Marxist fighting force. The DNVP was declining rapidly as many workers and peasants began to support the more populist and less aristocratic NSDAP while upper-class and middle-class DNVP voters supported the NSDAP as the "party of order" best able to crush Marxism. Hugenberg pursued with
29295-441: The Jewish people" as such. We were faced with the question: what about the women and children?–I have decided on a solution to this problem. I did not consider myself justified to exterminate the men only—in other words, to kill them or have them killed while allowing the avengers, in the form of their children, to grow up in the midst of our sons and grandsons. The difficult decision had to be made to have this people disappear from
29574-603: The Jewish victims were sent on death trains to centralized extermination camps built for the purpose of systematic murder of Jews. The term "Final Solution" was a euphemism used by the Nazis to refer to their plan for the annihilation of the Jewish people . Some historians argue that the usual tendency of the German leadership was to be extremely guarded when discussing the Final Solution. For example, Mark Roseman wrote that euphemisms were "their normal mode of communicating about murder". However, Jeffrey Herf has argued that
29853-473: The Jews shot in Surazh were women and children of all ages. In late August 1941 the Einsatzgruppen murdered 23,600 Jews in the Kamianets-Podilskyi massacre . A month later, the largest mass shooting of Soviet Jews took place on 29–30 September in the ravine of Babi Yar , near Kyiv , where more than 33,000 Jewish people of all ages were systematically machine-gunned. In mid-October 1941, HSSPF South, under
30132-575: The Jews was radicalized twice: in September 1939, when the invasion of Poland implied policies of mass expulsion and massive loss of Jewish lives; and in spring 1941, when preparation for Operation Barbarossa involved the planning of mass execution, mass expulsion, and starvation—to dwarf what had happened in Jewish Poland. Browning believes that the "Final Solution as it is now understood—the systematic attempt to murder every last Jew within
30411-402: The Jews!". The Dawes Plan vote brought to the surface the conflict between the party's pragmatic wing most closely associated with industrial interests and farmers from the western part of Germany who were prepared to work inside the system within certain limits if only to safeguard their own interests versus those who were mostly closely associated with the rural areas of East Elbia, especially
30690-415: The Jews", and called openly for his assassination to avenge his "crimes" such as signing the armistice ending World War I. Helfferich wrote that Erzberger's career was "a sordid mixing of political activity with his own pecuniary advantage... at the crucial moment of the war, acting for his Habsburg-Bourbon patrons, he cowardly attacked German policy from the rear with his July action, and thereby destroyed in
30969-562: The Lutheran clergy, the Bildungsbürgertum (the upper middle-class), university professors, and Gymnasium (high schools for these destined to go to university) teachers supported the DNVP until 1930, the party had a cultural influence on German life far beyond what its share of the vote would suggest. Because so many university professors and Gymnasium teachers supported the DNVP, everyone who went to university in Germany under
31248-523: The May elections was a result of the party running on a platform of restoring the monarchy, a goal that most Germans were simply not interested in. Lambach's article with its call for the DNVP to transform itself into a party of conservative republicans set off a storm, with the party's core monarchist supporters successfully pressuring Westarp to expel Lambach. Led by Alfred Hugenberg , the enraged monarchists then turned their sights on Westarp himself, claiming he
31527-716: The NSDAP and the DNVP MdRs walked out of the Reichstag on 11 February 1931 to protest the high-handed ways of the Brüning government. During the summer of 1931, the DNVP, the NSDAP and the KPD all joined forces in campaigning for a yes vote in the Prussian referendum, which led the liberal Berliner Morgenpost newspaper to write of an alliance of "the swastika and the Soviet star" who were engaging in Katastrophenpolitik . Despite their vehemently expressed anti-communism both
31806-648: The NSDAP" which were "hardly important since in practice they cannot be implemented". Despite the bitterness caused by the 1930 election, in February 1931 Hugenberg met with Hitler to discuss common co-operation on a referendum for early elections in Prussia that were intended to defeat the government of the Social Democrat Otto Braun , and thereby allow a NSDAP/DNVP coalition to win the resulting elections. As part of their efforts to co-operate,
32085-480: The NSDAP's 2.6% of the vote in 1928). This marked the NSDAP's electoral breakthrough to the mainstream. Since the NSDAP did very well in areas that had traditionally voted for the DNVP like East Prussia and Pomerania , the German historian Martin Broszat wrote that would strongly suggest that most of the DNVP voters had deserted their old party for the NSDAP. Broszat argued that what happened between 1929 and 1932
32364-497: The Nazi Party, the civil service, industry, and the Wehrmacht armed forces—but their cooperation is viewed as "so complete that we may truly speak of their fusion into a machinery of destruction". For Hilberg, the key stages in the destruction process were: definition and registration of the Jews; expropriation of property; concentration into ghettoes and camps; and, finally, annihilation. Hilberg gives an estimate of 5.1 million as
32643-488: The Nazi cause". Today, I am going to refer quite frankly to a very grave chapter. We can mention it now among ourselves quite openly and yet we shall never talk about it in public. I'm referring to the evacuation of the Jews, the extermination of the Jewish people. Most of you will know what it's like to see 100 corpses side by side or 500 corpses or 1,000 of them. To have coped with this and—except for cases of human weakness—to have remained decent, that has made us tough. This
32922-489: The Nazi leadership decided that the European Jews should be exterminated. The controversy is commonly described as the functionalism versus intentionalism debate which began in the 1960s, and subsided thirty years later. In the 1990s, the attention of mainstream historians moved away from the question of top executive orders triggering the Holocaust and focused on factors that were overlooked earlier, such as personal initiative and ingenuity of countless functionaries in charge of
33201-405: The Nazi project to murder every Jew in Europe. The book was initially published in 1961, and issued in an enlarged version in 1985. Hilberg's analysis of the steps that led to the destruction of European Jews revealed that it was "an administrative process carried out by bureaucrats in a network of offices spanning a continent". Hilberg divides this bureaucracy into four components or hierarchies:
33480-534: The Nazis . Gleichschaltung is a compound word that comes from the German words gleich (same) and schaltung (circuit) and was derived from an electrical engineering term meaning that all switches are put on the same circuit so that all can be activated by throwing a single master switch. Its first use is credited to Reich Justice Minister Franz Gürtner . It has been variously translated as "coordination", "Nazification of state and society", "synchronization", and "bringing into line". English texts often use
33759-466: The Nazis came to power at the end of January 1933, there was some sentiment for a general strike by SPD politicians and trade unionists, but the national leadership was wary of such an action in the face of the worst unemployment crisis the nation had experienced. Though there were some sporadic isolated incidents, no general policy of resistance was undertaken. The Nazis embarked on a policy of violence and intimidation against all their opponents, including
34038-645: The Nazis formed were with the participation of their conservative nationalist ally, the German National People's Party (DNVP). The "Law Against the Founding of New Parties" (14 July 1933) banned all parties except the Nazi Party. The DNVP members of the remaining coalition cabinets eventually either joined the Party or were replaced by Nazis, resulting in one-party government in all the Länder . One of
34317-483: The Nazis were surprised. The most highly organized and powerful trade union movement in Europe offered no resistance and disappeared virtually overnight. In its place, the German Labor Front ( German : Deutsche Arbeitsfront or DAF), a Nazi Party organization led by Ley, was established on 10 May. Its goal was coordination of the entire labor force under Nazi leadership. On 19 May, the government enacted
34596-483: The Nazis' single-party dictatorship with the majority of its former members joining the Nazi Party. The Nazis allowed the remaining former DNVP members in the Reichstag, the civil service, and the police to continue with their jobs and left the rest of the party membership generally in peace. During the Second World War , several prominent former DNVP members, such as Carl Friedrich Goerdeler , were involved in
34875-547: The Order Police varied between locations, but for Police Battalion 309 participating in the first mass murder of 5,500 Polish Jews in the Soviet-controlled Białystok (a Polish provincial capital ), Major Weiss explained to his officers that Barbarossa is a war of annihilation against Bolshevism, and that his battalions would proceed ruthlessly against all Jews, regardless of age or sex. After crossing
35154-415: The Pan-German League was going to serve in the provisional government, though he backed out later on 13 March 1920 on the grounds that the putsch was "hopeless". Within the party's leadership, Count Kuno von Westarp was in favour of supporting the putsch while Oskar Hergt was opposed. After the putsch failed, the DNVP issued a statement that condemned the government far more harshly for resorting to
35433-585: The Pan-German League, the Colonial League and the Navy League. The women in the DNVP tended to be most concerned with wiping out "trash and dirt" which was their term for pornography and prostitution, and was seen as especially threatening to women. The Israeli historian Yehuda Bauer called the DNVP "...the party of the traditional, often radical anti-Semitic elites...." The writer Kurt Tucholsky wrote in 1924 that "Even in Jewish circles (of which
35712-546: The Plan while the other half had voted against meant the DNVP made only very modest gains in the second 1924 election. The outcome of the second 1924 election together with the appointment of the nonpartisan Hans Luther as Chancellor in early 1925 allowed Count von Westarp to persuade the DNVP to join Luther's government. While it sought the ultimate demise of Weimar Republic, it participated in its politics and ruling government for
35991-620: The Red Army across the Reichskommissariat Ostland . The subject of the Holocaust in Lithuania has been analysed by Konrad Kweit from USHMM who wrote: "Lithuanian Jews were among the first victims of the Holocaust [beyond the eastern borders of occupied Poland]. The Germans carried out the mass executions [...] signaling the beginning of the 'Final Solution'." About 80,000 Jews were murdered in Lithuania by October (including in formerly Polish Wilno ) and about 175,000 by
36270-679: The Reformation. Protestant spirit must remain strong in our Fatherland." The Anti-Catholic character of the DNVP is traced back to the tradition of Kulturkampf , under which Otto von Bismarck "associated the meaning of being German with Protestantism". Catholicism was portrayed as un-German and associated with foreign and "papist" influence. As such, DNVP focused solely on Protestant voters while marginalising and attacking Roman Catholics - Richard Steigmann-Gall remarks that in Weimar Germany, "the narrative of national identity in Germany
36549-539: The Rhineland (the so-called " Black Horror on the Rhine "), claiming that African and Asian men were genetically programmed to rape white women with DNVP politician Käthe Schirmacher stating in a speech: "The lust of white, yellow and black Frenchmen for German women leads to daily violence!" Schirmacher wrote in her diary in 1919 that: "The only thing uniting us with Poland is our common hatred of Juda". It favoured
36828-514: The SPD-affiliated trade unions. In an effort to safeguard his organization and its members, Leipart declared the ADBG politically "neutral" within weeks of the Nazis coming to power. Meanwhile, Party leaders convinced conservative elements among the police, the judiciary, prison administrators and civil servants that suppression of the labor movement was justified. Following the Nazi gains in
37107-489: The Social Democrats as "social fascists" was not reported by the Hugenberg press, which instead portrayed the KPD and the SPD as working together for a revolution. The Hugenberg papers argued that only the DNVP could save Germany from revolution, and that democracy and civil liberties were major impediments to battling the supposed Marxist revolution that was just on the verge of happening. The major beneficiaries of
37386-450: The Treaty of Versailles. In fact, the parties of the "Grand Coalition" were in favor of a gradualist, step-by-step approach of doing away with Versailles by negotiation instead of the confrontational Katastrophenpolitik (catastrophe politics) of the early 1920s that led to the disastrous Ruhrkampf and hyper-inflation of 1923, a nuance that did not interest Hugenberg in the slightest. Hugenberg for his part regarded Katastrophenpolitik as
37665-836: The Ukrainian Hilfsverwaltung , these auxiliary battalions were deployed by the SS also in Russia Center, Russia South, and in Byelorussia; each with about 500 soldiers divided into three companies. They participated in the extermination of 150,000 Volhynian Jews alone, or 98 percent of the Jewish inhabitants of the entire region. In July 1942 the Completion of the Final Solution in the General Government territory which included Distrikt Galizien ,
37944-540: The United States on 11 December 1941, "meant that holding European Jews hostage to deter the US from entering the conflict was now pointless". Cesarani concludes, the Holocaust "was rooted in anti-Semitism, but it was shaped by war". The fact that the Nazis were, ultimately, so successful in murdering between five and six million Jews was not due to the efficiency of Nazi Germany or the clarity of their policies. "Rather,
38223-714: The Wannsee Conference Protocol) was found by the Allies in March 1947; it was too late to serve as evidence during the first Nuremberg Trial , but was used by prosecutor General Telford Taylor in the subsequent Nuremberg Trials . After the end of World War II, surviving archival documents provided a clear record of the Final Solution policies and actions of Nazi Germany. They included the Wannsee Conference Protocol, which documented
38502-410: The Weimar Republic did they make a single constructive contribution to the government of the country". At the same time, there was another equally influential fraction within the DNVP who took it for granted that it was only a matter of time before the republic disintegrated, and that the best thing to do was to maintain the current course of total opposition to the republic, secure in knowing that all of
38781-402: The Weimar System". At the meetings to work out a policy platform for the Harzburger Front, the German historian Karl Dietrich Bracher wrote that Hugenberg made concessions to his partners in the front "with the indulgence born of assured arrogance that is fed by the certainty of being in command". The DNVP hoped to control the NSDAP through this coalition and to curb the Nazis' extremism, but
39060-413: The Weimar republic was exposed in some way to Deutsch-National influence. More women than men voted for the DNVP, and despite the party's traditionalist values, women were very active in the DNVP. The women in the DNVP came mostly from the evangelical Protestant church leagues, associations representing housewives who had become politically active during World War I and women who been active in groups like
39339-465: The aid of Belarusian Auxiliary Police before the ghetto's closure. During the suppression of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (the largest single revolt by Jews during World War II), 13,000 Jews were killed in action before May 1943. Numerous other uprisings were quelled without impacting the pre-planned Nazi deportations actions. About two-thirds of the overall number of victims of the Final Solution were murdered before February 1943, which included
39618-401: The antisemitic Christian Social Party and German Völkisch Party . Thus, the party united most of the formerly fragmented conservative spectrum of the Empire. The process that led to the DNVP began on 22 November 1918 when an ad appeared in a number of Berlin newspapers calling for a new right-wing party for "which we suggest the name of German National People's Party". The founding of the DNVP
39897-427: The aristocracy, parts of the middle class and big business. The DNVP had little appeal to Catholics and almost its entire support came from Protestant areas. The Lutheran character of the party was stressed early on, with DNVP making direct appeals to Lutheran voters. Party campaigners also made anti-Catholic appeals – a DNVP political leaftlet in Berlin read: "No Romish intrigues are going to rob us of our heritage of
40176-409: The assassination of the "traitors", which was to be DNVP's main contribution to politics for next several years. The DNVP was well known for outrageous, often childish antics such as mailing a dead dog to the French Ambassador to protest against paying reparations to France and for launching a campaign of mailing parcels containing human excrement to Social Democratic leaders. The campaign against
40455-495: The bail-out. A month later in September 1924 the general Land association passed a resolution calling on Hergt to resign within a month if he could not form a government; as he failed to do this forced him to resign in October 1924. Initially, the change of leadership made little difference. In its platform for the Reichstag election of 7 December 1924 , the party declared the following: ″Our party remains as it was: monarchist and völkisch , Christian and social. Our goals remain
40734-552: The beginning of July 1941, and requested that, "as a matter of principle, any Jew" behind the German-Soviet frontier was to be "regarded as a partisan". His new orders gave the SS and police leaders full authority for the mass-murder behind the front lines. By August 1941, all Jewish men, women, and children were shot. In the second phase of annihilation, the Jewish inhabitants of central, western, and south-eastern Europe were transported by Holocaust trains to camps with newly built gassing facilities. Raul Hilberg wrote: "In essence,
41013-437: The best way of regaining popularity was to use the section of the Weimar constitution that allowed upon collecting a certain number of signatures a referendum to be held, in this case on the Young Plan . Hugenberg successfully collected enough signatures to initiate a referendum on his Freedom Law which called for cancelling the Young Plan together with all reparations. The fact that the Young Plan reduced reparations and committed
41292-407: The blame for the current problems would rest with the parties of the Weimar coalition who were willing to assume the burdens of office. In the summer of 1924, these tensions came out in the open with a vigorous display of party in-fighting over the question of whether the DNVP's MdRs (German MdR: Mitglied des Reichstags —Member of the Reichstag ) should vote for the Dawes Plan or not. Initially,
41571-512: The bodies faster. The size of the Sonderkommando was nearly quadrupled in preparation for the Special Operation Hungary ( Sonderaktion Ungarn ). In May 1944, Auschwitz-Birkenau became the site of one of the two largest mass murder operations in modern history, after the Großaktion Warschau deportations of the Warsaw Ghetto inmates to Treblinka in 1942. It is estimated that until July 1944 approximately 320,000 Hungarian Jews were gassed at Birkenau in less than eight weeks. The entire operation
41850-442: The campaign against the leaders of the Weimar Coalition occurred in February 1922 when Walther Rathenau became Foreign Minister, which led the DNVP to launch an especially vicious anti-Semitic campaign against Rathenau claiming that "German honour" had been sullied by the appointment of "the international Jew" Rathenau as Foreign Minister, which could only be avenged with Rathenau's assassination. In an article by Wilhelm Henning , it
42129-409: The catastrophic rate of killing was due to German persistence ... and the duration of the murderous campaigns. This last factor was largely a consequence of allied military failure." The entry of the U.S. into the War is also crucial to the time-frame proposed by Christian Gerlach , who argued in his 1997 thesis that the Final Solution decision was announced on 12 December 1941, when Hitler addressed
42408-447: The chief architect of a new plan, which came to be called The Final Solution to the Jewish question . On 31 July 1941, Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring wrote to Reinhard Heydrich (Himmler's deputy and chief of the RSHA ), authorising him to make the "necessary preparations" for a "total solution of the Jewish question" and coordinate with all affected organizations. Göring also instructed Heydrich to submit concrete proposals for
42687-528: The civilian population, and therefore, have the right and obligation to secure themselves." Himmler and Heydrich assembled a force of about 3,000 men from Security Police , Gestapo , Kripo , SD , and the Waffen-SS , as the so-called "special commandos of the security forces" known as the Einsatzgruppen , to eliminate both communists and Jews in occupied territories. These forces were supported by 21 battalions of Orpo Reserve Police under Kurt Daluege , adding up to 11,000 men. The explicit orders given to
42966-415: The co-operation of various German state agencies in the SS-led Holocaust, as well as some 3,000 tons of original German records captured by Allied armies, including the Einsatzgruppen reports , which documented the progress of the mobile killing units assigned, among other tasks, to murder Jewish civilians during the attack on the Soviet Union in 1941. The evidential proof which documented the mechanism of
43245-417: The coming of the Great Depression in 1929. By late 1927, it was clear that the increases in agrarian tariffs that the DNVP ministers had forced through had made no impact on the continuing economic decline in the countryside, and as result a mood of palpable anger and resentment had set in the countryside of northern Germany with many DNVP voters damning their own party. The political repercussion of rural rage
43524-402: The command of Friedrich Jeckeln , had reported the indiscriminate murder of more than 100,000 people. By the end of December 1941, before the Wannsee Conference, over 439,800 Jewish people had been murdered, and the Final Solution policy in the east became common knowledge within the SS. Entire regions were reported " free of Jews " by the Einsatzgruppen . Addressing his district governors in
43803-412: The conference was to assert his authority over the various agencies dealing with Jewish issues. "The simplest, most decisive way that Heydrich could ensure the smooth flow of deportations" to death camps, according to Cesarani, "was by asserting his total control over the fate of the Jews in the Reich and the east" under the single authority of the RSHA . A copy of the minutes of this meeting (later called
44082-409: The construction of the Autobahn . It was the largest of the many organizations established by the Nazis and a propaganda success. Workers were also brought in line with the party through activities such as the Reichsberufswettkampf , a national vocational competition. Many unemployed people were also drafted into the Reich Labour Service where they were given uniforms and tools and put to work;
44361-650: The deadliest phase of the Final Solution. More Jews were murdered at Treblinka than at any other Nazi extermination camp apart from Auschwitz . By the time the mass killings of Operation Reinhard ended in 1943, roughly two million Jews in German-occupied Poland had been murdered. The total number of people murdered in 1942 in Lublin/Majdanek , Bełżec , Sobibór , and Treblinka was 1,274,166 by Germany's own estimation , not counting Auschwitz II Birkenau nor Kulmhof . Their bodies were buried in mass graves initially. Both Treblinka and Bełżec were equipped with powerful crawler excavators from Polish construction sites in
44640-420: The decision to adopt unrestricted submarine warfare in 1917. None of these had anything to do with the task at hand, namely to write a new constitution. The DNVP made no contribution to the drafting of the new constitution. In June 1919, the Reichstag had to ratify the Treaty of Versailles in the face of a warning from the Allies that World War I would resume if it was not ratified. The DNVP made certain that
44919-640: The disappearance of unemployed people from the streets contributed to the perception that the Nazis were improving the economic conditions of Germany. Historian Claudia Koonz explains that the word Gleichschaltung stems from the arena of electricity , where it refers to converting power from alternating current to direct current , which is called " rectification " in English; the word Gleichschaltung translates literally as "phasing". Used in its socio-political sense, Gleichschaltung has no equivalent in any other language. The Nazis also used other similar terms, such as Ausschaltung , which constituted
45198-542: The earth. On 19 October 1943, five days after the prisoner revolt in Sobibór , Operation Reinhard was terminated by Odilo Globocnik on behalf of Himmler. The camps responsible for the murder of nearly 2,700,000 Jews were soon closed. Bełżec, Sobibór, and Treblinka were dismantled and ploughed over before spring. The operation was followed by the single largest German massacre of Jews in the entire war carried out on 3 November 1943; with approximately 43,000 prisoners shot one-by-one simultaneously in three nearby locations by
45477-407: The election as a non-party candidate, the DNVP strongly supported the Field Marshal. General Otto von Feldmann of the DNVP worked very closely with Hindenburg during the 1925 election as Hindenburg's "political agent". Despite the move to the center at the level of high politics, at the grass-roots of the party the opposite direction prevailed. Starting in 1924, the DNVP's newsletter for women (which
45756-448: The electoral appeal of the party. According to historian Larry Eugene Jones , the DNVP expressed "deeply ingrained anti-Catholic sentiments", and party officials went as far as proclaiming that DNVP was "bound to Protestant structures" and "did not stand for Catholic interests." German Catholics overwhelmingly refused to participate in the 1929 German referendum , displaying their disapproval of Hugenberg and his party. The Catholic clergy
46035-399: The emergency decree of 28 February provided no justification since there was plainly no need for defence from any 'communist acts of violence endangering the state'. The only such acts were those of the Nazis themselves. The following table presents an overview of the process of Gleichschaltung as it was applied to the Nazification of the German Länder governments. While, strictly speaking,
46314-472: The end of 1941 according to official reports . Within one week from the start of Operation Barbarossa , Heydrich issued an order to his Einsatzgruppen for the on-the-spot execution of all Bolsheviks, interpreted by the SS to mean all Jews. One of the first indiscriminate massacres of men, women, and children in Reichskommissariat Ukraine took the lives of over 4,000 Polish Jews in occupied Łuck on 2–4 July 1941, murdered by Einsatzkommando 4a assisted by
46593-452: The end, virtually the only non-Nazi associations left were the army and the Churches with their lay organizations. For example, in 1934, the government founded the Deutscher Reichsbund für Leibesübungen , later the Nationalsozialistischer Reichsbund für Leibesübungen , as the official sports governing body. All other German sport associations gradually lost their freedom and were coopted into it. Besides sports, another more important part of
46872-405: The entire nation to both win the election and then restore Germany back as a great power. The ineffectual Hergt had chosen to stay on the sidelines in order to improve his party's chances. Unusually for a DNVP politician, Tirpitz based his campaign in Munich as part of an effort to win Catholic support. In the Reichstag election of 4 May 1924 , the DNVP posted its best showing yet, winning 19% of
47151-417: The experience and personnel from earlier population resettlement programmes—especially the HSSPF and Adolf Eichmann 's RSHA for "Jewish affairs and evacuations". Peter Longerich argues that the search for a finite date on which the Nazis embarked upon the extermination of the Jews is futile, in his book Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews (2011). Longerich writes: "We should abandon
47430-407: The extermination camps, this is remarkable." Whereas Browning places the Nazi plan to exterminate the Jews in the context of the Wehrmacht victories on the Eastern front, Cesarani argues that the German subsequent realisation that there would be no swift victory over the Soviet Union "scuppered the last territorial 'solution' still on the table: expulsion to Siberia". Germany's declaration of war on
47709-442: The first killing centre at Bełżec in occupied Poland began in October 1941, three months before the Wannsee Conference. The new facility was operational by March the following year. By mid-1942, two more death camps had been built on Polish lands: Sobibór operational by May 1942, and Treblinka operational in July. From July 1942, the mass murder of Polish and foreign Jews took place at Treblinka as part of Operation Reinhard ,
47988-425: The foreign minister and the removal of Otto Braun as Prussian minister-president together with the rest of the Social Democrats from the Prussian government. The British historian Edgar Feuchtwanger commented that the demand that the Anglophobic Admiral von Tirpitz be appointed Chancellor at a time when the British government was applying heavy pressure on France to reduce reparations on Germany showed that DNVP had
48267-494: The former Emperor Wilhelm II from returning to Germany, an aspect of the law that greatly offended the DNVP at the time. By 1927, many of the DNVP's supporters, especially the Junkers had concluded the restoration of the monarchy was not possible, and so successfully pressured Westarp into voting for a renewal of the law rather than see the DNVP walk out of the government and thereby lose a chance for higher tariffs on agricultural imports. Westarp attempted to justify his support of
48546-408: The foundation for a strong German state. For that reason we resist the undermining, un-German spirit in all forms, whether it stems from Jewish or other circles. We are emphatically opposed to the prevalence of Judaism in the government and public life, which has emerged ever more ominously since the revolution. The flow of foreigners across our borders is to be prohibited. The same platform called for
48825-453: The fraction of the DNVP mostly closely associated with the Pan-German League had started a major effort to take over the party's grass-roots to prevent another "betrayal", a slow, but steady process that would ultimately prove the undoing of Count von Westarp. During its time in the government, the DNVP made a major push for higher tariffs on agricultural products from abroad, which pleased the party's powerful rural wing, but came to grief over
49104-402: The general description provided by historian Jane Caplan, who characterized the term as "the coordination of German institutions into a cohesive, Nazified whole." The Nazis were able to put Gleichschaltung into effect due to multiple legal measures enacted by the Reich government during the 20 months following 30 January 1933, when Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany . When Hitler
49383-401: The government to ban organizations that attempted to undermine the constitutionally established republican form of government. Only the DNVP, the Communists and the Bavarian People's Party (BVP) voted against the law, with every other party voting for it. Wirth would have liked to use the new law to ban the DNVP, but was unable to do so because no links could be established between the DNVP and
49662-410: The government, and chose not to run in 1928, claiming very publicly that the DNVP needed more aggressive leaders than Westarp. The man Tirpitz chose to continue his work of winning Bavaria for the DNVP, General Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck did not have the same mass appeal and in 1928, the DNVP won only half the vote in Bavaria that it managed to do in December 1924. The disastrous showing at the polls in
49941-416: The grounds that Germany should not have to pay any reparations, and that those ministers who signed the Young Plan on behalf of the Reich government and those who voted for the Young Plan in the Reichstag should be prosecuted for high treason. Hugenberg made much of the fact that Young Plan was not scheduled to end until 1988, which he portrayed in stark terms as forcing generations of Germans to live under
50220-521: The ideas and prejudices of the Nazis. From March to July 1933 and continuing afterward, the Nazi Party systematically eliminated or co-opted non-Nazi organizations that could potentially influence people. Those critical of Hitler and the Nazis were suppressed, intimidated, or murdered. Every national voluntary association, and every local club, was brought under Nazi control, from industrial and agricultural pressure groups to sports associations, football clubs, male voice choirs, women's organizations—in short,
50499-436: The implementation of the new projected goal. Broadly speaking, the extermination of Jews was carried out in two major operations. With the onset of Operation Barbarossa , mobile killing units of the SS , the Einsatzgruppen , and Order Police battalions were dispatched to the occupied Soviet Union for the express purpose of murdering all Jews. During the early stages of the invasion, Himmler himself visited Białystok at
50778-409: The imposition of a Reich Commissar under the pretext of restoring order … Despite the semblance of legality, the usurpation of the powers of the Länder by the Reich was a plain breach of the Constitution. Force and pressure by the Nazi organizations themselves – political blackmail – had been solely responsible for creating the 'unrest' that had prompted the alleged restorations of 'order'. The terms of
51057-439: The keynote speech, in which he stated "Our new party, in which friendly right-wing parties have united, has no past and rejects any responsibility for the past. We have a present, and God willing, a good future", to which the delegates shouted "But without the Jews!" The task of writing out a common platform acceptable to all fell to a committee headed by Ulrich von Hassell . Reflecting a strong anti-Semitic orientation, right from
51336-560: The killers of the occupied USSR moved to the victims, whereas outside this arena, the victims were brought to the killers. The two operations constitute an evolution not only chronologically, but also in complexity." Massacres of about one million Jews occurred before plans for the Final Solution were fully implemented in 1942, but it was only with the decision to annihilate the entire Jewish population that extermination camps such as Auschwitz II Birkenau and Treblinka were fitted with permanent gas chambers to murder large numbers of Jews in
51615-449: The killing fields. No written evidence of Hitler ordering the Final Solution has ever been found to serve as a "smoking gun", and therefore, this one particular question remains unanswered. Hitler made numerous predictions regarding the Holocaust of the Jews of Europe prior to the beginning of World War II. During a speech given on 30 January 1939 , on the sixth anniversary of his accession to power, Hitler said: Today I will once more be
51894-487: The lands of a conquered USSR". For Longerich, to see mass-murder as the Final Solution was an acknowledgement by the Nazi leadership that there would not be a German military victory over the USSR in the near future. David Cesarani emphasises the improvised, haphazard nature of Nazi policies in response to changing war time conditions in his overview, Final Solution: The Fate of the European Jews 1933–49 (2016). "Cesarani provides telling examples", wrote Mark Roseman , "of
52173-443: The large death factory at Treblinka for the destruction of the Warsaw Jews, and the addition of a gas chamber to the concentration camp at Auschwitz for the murder of the Jews of Silesia". Longerich suggests that it "was only in the summer of 1942, that mass killing was finally understood as the realization of the Final Solution, rather than as an extensively violent preliminary to some later program of slave labor and deportation to
52452-482: The largest number of murders in the Final Solution, as bringing together three separate developments within Nazi Germany : the concentration camps which had been established in Germany since 1933; an expansion of the gassing technology of the Nazi euthanasia programme to provide a murder technique of greater efficiency and psychological detachment; and the creation of "factories of death" to be fed endless streams of victims by mass uprooting and deportation that utilized
52731-416: The late 19th century there had been tension on the German right between traditional conservatives and the more radical populist völkisch elements, saying: "Even the German National People's Party, itself with many fascistic characteristics, could only uneasily accommodate the new strength of the populist forces on the radical Right". At the founding convention in December 1918, Siegfried von Kardorff gave
53010-423: The law he had once opposed by arguing that it was really aimed at the Communists while at the same time claiming the DNVP was opposed in principle to the Law for the Protection of the Republic. A further problem for the DNVP was the rise of rural rage in the late 1920s. By 1927, though Germany itself was overall very prosperous, a steep economic decline had begun in rural areas, which was only to greatly worsen with
53289-450: The leader. In an editorial, the New York World wrote "To any German who wishes his country to enjoy the benefit of an international loan, it must be sufficiently obvious that the mere mention of the bearded hero of the submarine offensive is madness pure and simple" while The Daily Telegraph of London wrote in a leader (editorial) that the prospect of Tirpitz becoming Chancellor was "a masterpiece of folly". The French government issued
53568-489: The liberal Hirsch-Dunckersche Gewerkvereine [ de ] , placed themselves under the Action Committee for the Protection of German Labor, headed by Robert Ley , the Stabschef (chief of staff) of the Nazi Party organization. The last remaining union umbrella agency, the Christian-oriented Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund (1919–1933) [ de ] was absorbed at the end of June. Throughout this process, there were no strikes, no demonstrations and no protests. Even
53847-508: The local Ukrainian and Lithuanian auxiliary forces . On 29 July 1941, at a meeting of SS officers in Vileyka (Polish Wilejka , now Belarus), the Einsatzgruppen had been given a dressing-down for their low execution figures . Heydrich himself issued an order to include the Jewish women and children in all subsequent shooting operations. Accordingly, by the end of July the entire Jewish population of Vileyka, men, women and children, were murdered. Around 12 August, no less than two-thirds of
54126-402: The local level, mayors and councils were terrorized by Nazi stormtroopers of the SA and SS into resigning or following orders to replace officials and workers at local public institutions who were Jewish or belonged to other political parties. The Gleichschaltung also included the formation of various organizations with compulsory membership for segments of the population, particularly
54405-461: The local offices "...tended to accept hard-line propaganda literally, but the interest groups which filled the party's coffers insisted on coalition and compromise. Parliamentary leaders schooled in rationalizing varied principles followed the dictates of lobbyists in the Reichstag , but then reverted to an ideological approach when on the stump...Radicals exploited the divergence of principle and practice. Had party leaders instructed their electorate in
54684-573: The main phase of the extermination programme in the West launched by Eichmann on 11 June 1942 from Berlin. The Holocaust trains run by the Deutsche Reichsbahn and several other national railway systems delivered condemned Jewish captives from as far as Belgium, Bulgaria, France, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Moravia, Netherlands, Romania, Slovakia, and even Scandinavia. The cremation of exhumed corpses to destroy any evidence left behind began in early spring and continued throughout summer. The nearly completed clandestine programme of murdering all deportees
54963-490: The media, culture and education". Although the Weimar Constitution remained nominally in effect until Germany's surrender following World War II , near total Nazification had been secured by the 1935 resolutions approved during the Nuremberg Rally , when the symbols of the Nazi Party and the state were fused (see Flag of Nazi Germany ) and German Jews were deprived of their citizenship (see Nuremberg Laws ). The tenets of Gleichschaltung also applied to territories occupied by
55242-410: The mid-nineteenth-century. At the time of the Weimar Republic , its largest grouping was the General German Trade Union Federation (ADGB). This was an umbrella organization that was formed in July 1919 and was originally composed of 52 unions with about 8 million workers. It was generally affiliated with the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and was on the left of the political spectrum. In March 1920, it
55521-448: The minds of the Nazi leadership, and was being turned into reality." This was the peak of Nazi victories against the Soviet Army on the Eastern Front , and, according to Browning, the stunning series of German victories led to both an expectation that the war would soon be won, and the planning of the final destruction of the " Jewish-Bolshevik enemy". Browning describes the creation of the extermination camps, which were responsible for
55800-565: The most critical steps towards Gleichschaltung of German society was the introduction of the "Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda" under Joseph Goebbels in March 1933 and the subsequent steps taken by the Propaganda Ministry to assume complete control of the press and all means of social communication. This included oversight of newspapers, magazines, films, books, public meetings and ceremonies, foreign press relations, theater, art and music, radio, and television. To this end, Goebbels said: [T]he secret of propaganda [is to] permeate
56079-414: The murders were led by a commander "who correctly intuited and anticipated the wishes of his Führer " without direct orders. For reasons unknown, the number of victims in the official report by Major Weis was cut in half. The next mass-shooting of Polish Jews within the newly formed Reichskommissariat Ostland took place in two days of 5–7 August in occupied Pińsk , where over 12,000 Jews were murdered by
56358-413: The neo-paganism of one of its members, Alfred Rosenberg, and urged voters to choose the DNVP. At the same time, the NSDAP ridiculed the DNVP as the party of monarchist reactionaries without a clue as to how to deal with the Great Depression and who cared only for the rich. On 20 July 1932, during the run-up to the Reichstag election of 31 June, the von Papen government carried out the Preußenschlag ,
56637-406: The notion that it is historically meaningful to try to filter the wealth of available historical material and pick out a single decision" that led to the Holocaust. Timothy Snyder writes that Longerich "grants the significance of Greiser's murder of Jews by gas at Chełmno in December 1941", but also detects a significant moment of escalation in spring 1942, which includes "the construction of
56916-407: The other parties in the Reichstag were going to vote for the treaty, and then voted against it. The DNVP was secure in the knowledge that its vote would not cause the resumption of the war while the odium of Versailles would be borne by the other parties. Afterwards, the DNVP started a racist campaign against the presence of Senegalese and Vietnamese troops serving in the French army of occupation in
57195-492: The outcome of the libel case was due to a conservative judge who disliked democracy. The judge's bias could be seen in that the judge went out of his way in his ruling to praise Helfferich for his "patriotic motives" in attacking Erzberger. In the run-up to the Kapp Putsch of March 1920, the DNVP leaders were informed by Wolfgang Kapp in February 1920 that a putsch to overthrow the government would soon occur, and asked for their support. Kapp received an equivocal answer, but
57474-401: The pact only served to strengthen the NSDAP by giving it access to funding and political respectability while obscuring the DNVP's own less extreme platform. The Harzburger Front proved to be a failure, and by the end of 1931 the National Socialists were increasingly lashing out against their nominal allies. In February 1932 over the course of long talks, the DNVP and the NSDAP failed to agree on
57753-484: The part of the unions were to prove futile, as the Nazis had already begun to plot a complete takeover of the trade union movement, as demonstrated by Goebbels' diary entry of 17 April: On 1 May we shall arrange May Day as a grandiose demonstration of the German people's will. On 2 May the trade union offices will be occupied. Coordination in this area too. There might possibly be a row for a few days, but then they will belong to us. We must make no allowances anymore. … Once
58032-441: The parties of the Weimar coalition did not have a two-thirds majority in the Reichstag , it was clear that the DNVP would have to vote for the Dawes Plan to have it ratified. The American banks had demanded as one of the conditions of the loan that the Reich government put up the state-owned Deutsche Reichsbahn railroad as collateral , but the 1919 constitution stated the Reichsbahn could not be used as collateral. Thus to receive
58311-405: The party forever if its MdRs voted against the Dawes Plan. The Dawes Plan was a crucial element in the international attempt to stabilise the German economy after hyper-inflation had destroyed the German economy in 1923, and the economic lobbying groups that supported the DNVP were appalled at the party's intention to reject the Dawes Plan, and thereby risk a return to the economic chaos of 1923. As
58590-435: The party from splitting in two, it was announced that the vote on the Dawes Plan would be a free vote with no party discipline and accordingly DNVP MdRs would vote on the Dawes Plan as they saw fit. The vote on the Dawes Plan on 29 August 1924 was described as "one of the most dramatically moving votes ever experienced by the German Reichstag , since the final result remained uncertain until the very last minute". About half of
58869-400: The party in December 1929 to form the more moderate Conservative People's Party . The DNVP rebels objected in particular to the part of the "Freedom Law" which called for the prosecution of President Paul von Hindenburg on charges of high treason for fulfilling his constitutional obligation by signing the Young Plan into law after it been passed by the Reichstag . The rebels also objected to
59148-401: The party moved to the far-right and reclaimed its reactionary nationalist and anti-republican rhetoric and changed its strategy to mass mobilisation, plebiscites, and support of authoritarian rule by the president instead of work by parliamentary means. At the same time, it lost many votes to Adolf Hitler 's rising Nazi Party. Several prominent Nazis began their careers in the DNVP. After 1929,
59427-417: The party's grass-roots ever since the Dawes Plan vote of 1924, and who wanted a return to the politics of the early 1920s. Hugenberg and Heinrich Class , the League's leader had been friends since the 1890s, and Hugenberg was a founding member of the League. Reflecting this background, Hugenberg proved himself to be a consistent champion of German imperialism , and one of the major themes of his time as leader
59706-425: The party's grass-roots, especially the more hardline fraction that disapproved of participation in the government while all the time insisting that he was staying faithful to the party's original platform of relentless opposition to the republic, which made him look both insincere and unprincipled. This was particularly the case because Westarp continued to maintain that he was a monarchist utterly committed to restoring
59985-440: The party's leaders did not inform the government a putsch was being planned. During the Kapp Putsch of March 1920, the DNVP took an ambiguous stance, reflecting a strong sympathy for the aims of the putsch without coming entirely in support out of the fear that the putsch might fail. One of the DNVP leaders, Gottfried Traub served as "Minister of Church and Cultural Affairs" in Kapp's provisional government while Paul Bang of
60264-400: The person it aims to grasp, without his even noticing that he is being permeated. Of course propaganda has a purpose, but the purpose must be concealed with such cleverness and virtuosity that the person on whom this purpose is to be carried out doesn't notice it at all. This was also the purpose of "co-ordination": to ensure that every aspect of the lives of German citizens was permeated with
60543-420: The political mainstream just as the Great Depression was beginning. Hugenberg had wanted to keep the Reichsausschuß going even after the failure of the Freedom Law referendum, but the Reichsausschuß dissolved in the spring of 1930 when the National Socialists walked out of it. When Hugenberg was forced in April 1930 to temporarily vote for the "presidential government" of Chancellor Heinrich Brüning that he
60822-473: The presence of only a few German SS men over 5,000 Jews were massacred in Polish Zofjówka by the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police leading to the town's complete sweep from existence. Historians find it difficult to determine precisely when the first concerted effort at annihilation of all Jews began in the last weeks of June 1941 during Operation Barbarossa. Dr. Samuel Drix ( Witness to Annihilation ), Jochaim Schoenfeld ( Holocaust Memoirs ), and several survivors of
61101-417: The proposed restructuring of Germany's reparations payments known as the Dawes Plan , which the DNVP denounced as the "second Versailles". Part of the restructuring was an 800 million Reichsmark loan provided primarily by a consortium of Wall Street banks led by the House of Morgan that would help stabilize the currency after the hyper-inflation of 1923 that had all but destroyed the economy. Helfferich,
61380-442: The prosecution of the entire Cabinet for endorsing the Young Plan and all of the MdRs for voting to ratify the plan, which the rebel faction called the height of demagogy. In the first 15 months of being led by the abrasive Hugenberg the DNVP was to lose 43 out of its 78 MdRs. Many Ruhr industrialists who normally supported the DNVP such as Abraham Frowein , Clemens Lammers , Carl Friedrich von Siemens , and Paul Silverberg signed
61659-419: The realities of politics, the DVNP might have evolved into the dynamic conservative party that some Reichstag delegates belateldly envisioned." In October 1928, Hugenberg, leader of the party's hardliner wing, became chairman. Hugenberg returned the party to a course of fundamental opposition against the Republic with a greater emphasis on nationalism and reluctant co-operation with the Nazi Party . Hugenberg
61938-403: The referendum on the Young Plan, but rather the referendum was intended to be in the modern parlance a wedge issue that would polarize politics and create a situation where one would either be for or against the "national" camp. The American historian John Leopold wrote that "Hugenberg debated political issues in terms of a simplistic, philosophic disjunction—a man was either for the nation or he
62217-422: The regime. On 28 April, the ADGB agreed to move toward unification with the conservative Christian and the bourgeois liberal trade union groups, to form a single national labor organization in the new Nazi state. Leipart also supported the announcement by Goebbels that May Day would be celebrated as a public holiday for the first time, a long-sought goal of the labor movement. However, any efforts at reconciliation on
62496-456: The remark is probably as close as historians will ever get to a definitive order from Hitler for the genocide carried out during the Holocaust. Within two years, the total number of shooting victims in the east had risen to between 618,000 and 800,000 Jews. Several scholars have suggested that the Final Solution began in the newly formed district of Bezirk Bialystok . The German army took over Białystok within days. On Friday, 27 June 1941,
62775-537: The removal or "switching off" of anyone who stained or soiled the German nation. This seemingly clinical terminology captured both the mechanical and biological meaning for members of German society; as one German citizen visiting London explained, "It means the same stream will flow through the ethnic body politic [ Volkskörper ]." Former University of Dresden professor of romance languages, Viktor Klemperer —dismissed from his post for being Jewish in 1935 and who only survived his time in Germany due to being married to
63054-401: The restoration of the monarchy was no longer possible and that for almost all Germans under the age of thirty the DNVP's incessant talk of bringing back the monarchy was irrelevant at best and downright offputting at worse. Lambach wrote that for conservative Germans President Hindenburg had long since replaced the former Kaiser as the object of their affections and that the DNVP's poor showing in
63333-497: The role of euphemisms in Nazi propaganda has been exaggerated, and in fact Nazi leaders often made direct threats against Jews. For example, during his speech of 30 January 1939 , Hitler threatened " the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe ". From gaining power in January 1933 until the outbreak of war in September 1939, the Nazi persecution of the Jews in Germany was focused on intimidation, expropriating their money and property, and encouraging them to emigrate. According to
63612-420: The same as our name: German and national. Our colours remain black, white and red: our resolution is firmer than ever: to create a Germany free of Jewish control and French domination, free from parliamentary intrigue and the populist rule of big capital". Those parties that had voted against the Dawes Plan lost seats while that had voted for the Dawes Plan gained seats, which as half the DNVP caucus had voted for
63891-424: The seeking of Lebensraum , and the violent mass destruction of human life deemed somehow less valuable by the National Socialist government of Germany. The Gleichschaltung measures were used to give the Nazi regime the appearance of legality. Thousands of decrees, including many of the Gleichschaltung laws, were based explicitly on the Reichstag Fire Decree, and hence on Article 48. The Reichstag renewed
64170-452: The side with bottles of vodka and sandwiches for those who needed to rest from the deafening noise of gunfire. It was the single largest massacre of Polish Jews in Generalgouvernement prior to mass gassings of Aktion Reinhard , which commenced at Bełżec in March 1942. Notably, the extermination operations in Chełmno had begun on 8 December 1941, one-and-a-half months before Wannsee, but Chełmno—located in Reichsgau Wartheland —was not
64449-411: The social and racial exclusion of anyone deemed an enemy by National Socialist doctrine. The Nazi Gleichschaltung or "synchronization" of German society—along with a series of Nazi legislation—was part and parcel to Jewish economic disenfranchisement, the violence against political opposition, the creation of concentration camps, the Nuremberg Laws, the establishment of a racial Volksgemeinschaft ,
64728-494: The start Jews were banned from joining the DNVP. In the elections on 19 January 1919 for the National Assembly that was to write the new constitution, the DNVP produced a pamphlet entitled "The Jews—Germany's vampires!" Generally hostile towards the republican Weimar constitution , the DNVP spent most of the inter-war period in opposition. Of the 19 cabinets between 1919 and 1932, the DNVP took part in only two governments and their total period in office over this 13-year period
65007-410: The strongest pillars of democracy in Germany. In this way, the DNVP finally achieved its long sought goal of removing the Braun government. In the Reichstag election of 31 July 1932 , the DNVP posted its worst result ever, winning only 5.9% of the vote while the NSDAP won 37%. On 12 September 1932 the DNVP and the DVP were the only parties to vote for the von Papen government when it was defeated on
65286-423: The targets of Nazi stink bombs and heckling while the DNVP politician Countess Helene von Watter was threatened with a beating by Nazis. Another DNVP politician (Theodor Duesterberg) was heckled with shouts of "Jew boy!" while Baron Axel von Freytagh-Loringhoven of the DNVP was accused of high treason for having allegedly fought against Germany as an Imperial Russian Army officer in World War I. Goebbels organized
65565-493: The total number of Jews murdered. He breaks this figure down into three categories: Ghettoization and general privation: over 800,000; open-air shootings: over 1,300,000; extermination camps: up to 3,000,000. With respect to the "functionalism versus intentionalism" debate about a master plan for the Final Solution, or the lack thereof, Hilberg posits what has been described as "a kind of structural determinism". Hilberg argues that "a destruction process has an inherent pattern" and
65844-447: The trade unions are in our hands the other parties and organizations will not be able to hold out for much longer. Accordingly, 1 May 1933 was declared the Day of National Labor, a day of parades, speeches and propaganda displays to celebrate the unity of the German labor movement with the nation, featuring SA military bands, swastika flags and fireworks. It culminated with a huge rally and speech by Hitler at Berlin Tempelhof Airport that
66123-488: The untranslated German word to convey its unique historical meaning. In their seminal work on National Socialist vernacular, Nazi-Deutsch/Nazi-German: An English Lexicon of the Language of the Third Reich , historians Robert Michael and Karin Doerr define Gleichschaltung as: "Consolidation. All of the German Volk's social, political, and cultural organizations to be controlled and run according to Nazi ideology and policy. All opposition to be eliminated." This accords with
66402-445: The vicinity, capable of most digging tasks without disrupting surfaces. Although other methods of extermination, such as the cyanic poison Zyklon B , were already being used at other Nazi killing centres such as Auschwitz, the Aktion Reinhard camps used lethal exhaust gases from captured tank engines. The Holocaust by bullets (as opposed to the Holocaust by gas ) went on in the territory of occupied Poland in conjunction with
66681-401: The von Papen government was to dissolve the Reichstag two years into its mandate. In a speech on 26 June 1932, Hugenberg designated the Nazis as now being an opponent of the national front . One of the DNVP's members, Count Ewald von Kleist-Schmenzin wrote a pamphlet for the election entitled Der Nationalsozialismus – eine Gefahr ("National Socialism—A Menace") that attacked the NSDAP for
66960-600: The vote compared to 30% of the vote won by Hitler while Hindenburg won 49.6% of the vote. In June 1932, the DNVP became the only significant party to support Franz von Papen in his short tenure as Chancellor . Hugenberg wanted to join von Papen's government, but was vetoed by President von Hindenburg who disliked Hugenberg. However, the two DNVP men who did serve in von Papen's government, namely Baron Wilhelm von Gayl as Interior minister and Franz Gürtner as Justice Minister, where both were noted for their hostility to democracy and support for authoritarianism. The first act of
67239-404: The vote. A major problem for the DNVP throughout its entire existence was the tension caused between its tendency towards a policy of total opposition to the Weimar Republic and pressure from many of its supporters for the DNVP to participate in the government. Since the DNVP was unlikely to win the majority of the seats in the Reichstag on account of the proportional representation system, as
67518-433: The whole fabric of associational life was Nazified. Rival, politically oriented clubs or societies were merged into a single Nazi body. Existing leaders of voluntary associations were either unceremoniously ousted, or knuckled under of their own accord. Many organizations expelled leftish or liberal members and declared their allegiance to the new state and its institutions. The whole process ... went on all over Germany. ... By
67797-487: The winter of 1928–29 to use as his wedge issue a plan for constitutional reform, but dropped it in favor of a referendum on the Young Plan when he discovered that the idea of constitutional reform was too abstract for most people, and that portraying the Young Plan as a monstrous form of financial "slavery" for our "children's children" was much more visceral, emotional and effective way of appealing to public opinion. The Canadian historian Richard Hamilton wrote that Freedom Law
68076-419: The youth of Germany. Boys first served as apprentices in the Pimpfen (cubs), beginning at the age of six, and at age ten, entered the Deutsches Jungvolk (Young German Boys) and served there until joining the Hitler Youth proper at age fourteen. Boys remained there until age eighteen, at which time they entered into the Arbeitsdienst (Labor Service) and the armed forces . Girls became part of
68355-458: Was photographed by the SS . In total, between April and November 1944, Auschwitz II received over 585,000 Jews from over a dozen regions as far as Greece, Italy, and France, including 426,000 Jews from Hungary, 67,000 from Łódź , 25,000 from Theresienstadt , and the last 23,000 Jews from the General Government. Auschwitz was liberated by the Red Army on 27 January 1945, when the gassing had already stopped. Historians disagree as to when and how
68634-411: Was 27 months. The party was largely supported by landowners, especially from the agricultural, conservative and Protestant Prussian east ( East Elbia ), and wealthy industrialists, moreover by monarchist academics, pastors, high-ranking government officials, farmers, craftsmen, small traders, nationalist white-collar and blue-collar workers. Because most of the Protestant aristocracy, high civil servants,
68913-474: Was Hugenberg's attempt to create on a more institutional basis the Reichsausschuß of 1929, and under his leadership, thereby form the "national bloc" that he confidently believed would sweep him into power in the near-future. Wheeler-Bennett called the Harzburg rally "the formal declaration of war by the parties of the Right against the Brüning government-a concentration of all the forces of reaction, both past and present, in one great demonstration of hostility to
69192-449: Was a Nazi plan for the genocide of individuals they defined as Jews during World War II . The "Final Solution to the Jewish question " was the official code name for the murder of all Jews within reach, which was not restricted to the European continent. This policy of deliberate and systematic genocide starting across German-occupied Europe was formulated in procedural and geopolitical terms by Nazi leadership in January 1942 at
69471-463: Was a response to the November Revolution of 1918 and the sense of extreme crisis it had engendered amongst the German right, where there were widespread fears that society was on the verge of destruction. As a result of the crisis atmosphere of late 1918, a very wide assortment of different parties came together to form the DNVP. This proved to be as much weakness as a strength as the DNVP had strong fissiparous tendencies throughout its existence, which
69750-418: Was a weak leader who let republican elements into the party. Hugenberg was helped by the fact that only 15% of DVNP voters were party members, and the local party offices were dominated by members of the local aristocracy, retired civil servants from the Wilhelmine era and professional lobbyists, making the membership of the DVNP far more right-wing than its voters. The American historian John Leopold noted that
70029-449: Was against it". This was especially the case because the "Grand Coalition" government of the Social Democratic Chancellor Hermann Müller was composed of the left-wing SPD, the right of center Catholic Zentrum , the liberal DDP and the moderate conservative DVP—in short all of the parties that Hugenberg was seeking to destroy by forcing them to defend the Young Plan, and therefore making it seem they were in favor of paying reparations and
70308-438: Was appointed Reich Chancellor on 30 January 1933, the Nazi Party had control of only five of the seventeen German Länder (states). However, the Nazis acted swiftly to eliminate any potential centers of opposition arising in the remaining states. Immediately following the Reichstag election of 5 March 1933, the central government began in earnest its campaign to take over the state governments that it did not yet control, and within
70587-521: Was attended by over one million people. Many workers, particularly those in state employment, were compelled to participate by threats of dismissal for not attending. The next day, as Goebbels had indicated, the German labor movement was crushed under a wave of unprecedented violence at the hands of SA and SS troops. All SPD-supported trade union offices were occupied, their newspapers and periodicals were discontinued, their banks and credit unions were closed and their assets were confiscated and turned over to
70866-469: Was built of brick and cement mortar in 1943, and the three-track rail spur was added. Until mid-August, 45,000 Thessaloniki Jews were murdered in a mere six months, including over 30,000 Jews from Sosnowiec (Sosnowitz) and Bendzin Ghettos . The spring of 1944 marked the beginning of the last phase of the Final Solution at Birkenau. The new big ramps and sidings were constructed, and two freight elevators were installed inside Crematoria II and III for moving
71145-452: Was claimed Rathenau was somehow involved with the assassination of Count Wilhelm von Mirbach , the German ambassador to the Soviet Union in 1918, and that the fact that Rathenau did not mention Mirbach's assassination during his visit to the Soviet Union in April 1922 being presented as proof that Rathenau had a hand in Mirbach's death. When Rathenau was assassinated on 24 June 1922, the Zentrum Chancellor Joseph Wirth angrily turned towards
71424-470: Was critical of the German Right and was hostile towards the DNVP; the party was openly denounced and attacked by members of the Catholic clergy, such as the Archbishop of Breslau Adolf Bertram or Bishop of Trier Franz Rudolf Bornewasser . German Catholics were also prohibited from joining right-wing paramilitary organizations such as the Young German Order and DNVP-affiliated Stahlhelm , and Catholic bishops barred Catholics and clergymen from sitting in
71703-419: Was explicitly addressed by Heinrich Himmler in his Posen speeches made to the leadership of the Nazi Party on 4 October and during a conference in Posen ( Poznań ) of 6 October 1943 in occupied Poland. Himmler explained why the Nazi leadership found it necessary to murder Jewish women and children along with the Jewish men. The assembled functionaries were told that the Nazi state policy was "the extermination of
71982-409: Was held, the NSDAP, DNVP and the KPD failed in their effort to force an early election in Prussia with yes side winning 37% of the vote. In its September 1931 platform adopted at a convention in Stettin laying out the party's principles, it was stated as follows: Only a strong German nationality that consciously preserves its nature and essence and keeps itself free of foreign influence can provide
72261-413: Was instrumental in calling a general strike that led to the collapse of the right-wing Kapp Putsch that attempted to overthrow the republic. It was led from January 1921 by Theodor Leipart . Following the economic downturn of 1929 , the resulting sharp rise in unemployment caused a large drop-off in membership but, by 1932, it still represented an estimated 3.5 million workers in some 30 unions. When
72540-449: Was needed a "bloc" of like-minded people that would be solid as stone in upholding its values. About Hugenberg, British historian Edgar Feuchtwanger wrote: Hugenberg was an abrasive, stubborn, difficult personality, opinionated and confrontational. His emergence into a central position in right-wing politics had a very divisive effect which in the end benefited only Hitler. Many on the right, from Hindenburg downwards, including members of
72819-446: Was ordered personally by Himmler. He set the initial deadline for 31 December 1942. When the Wehrmacht invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, the area of the General Government was enlarged by the inclusion of regions that had been annexed by the Soviet Union since the 1939 invasion. The murders of Jews from the Łódź Ghetto in the Warthegau district began in early December 1941 with the use of gas vans (approved by Heydrich) at
73098-463: Was otherwise opposed to, in order to prevent the entire rural wing of the DNVP from seceding over the issue of tariffs, Hitler accused Hugenberg of weakness, and terminated the NSDAP's co-operation with the DNVP. Reflecting the changed political dynamics caused by the Young Plan referendum, in the election of 14 September 1930 the DNVP's share of the vote dropped dramatically to 7% while the NSDAP's share rose up equally dramatically to 18% (compared to
73377-416: Was pure demagoguery since rejection of the Young Plan would not mean the end of reparations as Hugenberg claimed, but rather Germany would continue to pay higher reparations under the Dawes Plan. As part of his polarizing gambit, Hugenberg created the Reichsausschuß (committee) for the People's Rebellion Against the Young Plan in the summer of 1929, which was intended to be a sort of counter-parliament to
73656-422: Was recruited as the DNVP presidential candidate more by default as he was the only one willing to run for the DNVP. In the first round of the presidential election on 13 March 1932, the DNVP supported Theodor Duesterberg , and after he withdrew from the race following his dreadful showing, endorsed no candidate for the second round on 10 April 1932. In the first round of the election, Duesterberg won only 6.8% of
73935-413: Was replaced by Count Kuno von Westarp . In the bitter aftermath of the Dawes Plan vote, the influential Land associations of Pomerania , East Prussia and Schleswig-Holstein all passed resolutions attacking Hergt for his "betrayal" of the party's principles by allowing a free vote on the "second Versailles" of the Dawes Plan, instead of imposing party discipline to force the entire caucus to vote against
74214-441: Was rooted in the attitudes and traditions of the nineteenth century. It comprised men of property and education who patronized inferiors while scorning democratic idealism and loathing socialistic egalitarianism. Older men raised in the prewar era of peace and prosperity, the German Nationals identified their superiority as social, intellectual and racial. Hugenberg himself typified their Pan-German idealism and expansionism. Hitler and
74493-429: Was set up under the auspices of the German Labor Front. Hobbies were regimented and all private clubs, whether chess, football, or woodworking, were brought under the control of Strength Through Joy, which also provided vacation trips, skiing, swimming, concerts, and ocean cruises. Some 43 million Germans enjoyed trips via the Strength Through Joy initiative. This effort inspired the idea of Germans acquiring automobiles and
74772-412: Was so enraged by the passage of the Dawes Plan that he screamed on the floor of the Reichstag that those DNVP MdRs who voted for the Dawes Plan should be expelled from the party. The National Socialist MP General Erich Ludendorff shouted at the pro-Dawes Plan DNVP MdRs that "This is a shame for Germany! Ten years ago I won the battle of Tannenberg . Today you have made a Tannenberg victory possible for
75051-433: Was such an inept speaker that he almost never spoke before the Reichstag because his speeches induced laughter amongst those who listened to them. The fact that Admiral Tirpitz of the DNVP appeared alongside and spoke with Hitler at the anti-Young Plan rallies was taken by many of the DNVP voters as a sign that Hitler was now a respectable figure who was rubbing shoulders with war heroes. The referendum of 1929 brought about
75330-428: Was sunny and pleasant, it was described as "Hitler weather", or if you failed to comply with Nazi ideals of racial and social conformity , you were "switched off." When the blatant emphasis on racial hatred of others seemed to reach an impasse in the school system, through radio broadcasts, or on film reels, the overseers of Nazi Gleichschaltung propaganda switched to strategies that focused more on togetherness and
75609-419: Was that the supporters of the radical right-wing DNVP had abandoned it for the even more radical right-wing NSDAP. Hugenberg had decided to use as his next wedge issue to destroy the middle-of-the-road parties that supported the Weimar Republic the theme of anti-Marxism (in the Weimar Republic the term Marxism was to describe both the SPD and the KPD). The media mogul Hugenberg used his vast press empire to wage
75888-543: Was the call for Germany to resume overseas expansion and to regain the lost colonies in Africa. The other theme that he first set out in an article in the autumn of 1928 entitled "Party Bloc or Mush" (Block oder Brei) was that the DNVP should transform from a broad but heterogeneous and divided party of notables (in Hugenberg's words "mush") into a coherent and clear-cut force with a hierarchical leadership ( Führerprinzip ) and mass appeal, stressing plebiscitary action rather than parliamentarianism. Hugenberg declared that what
76167-462: Was the major nationalist party in Weimar Germany. It was an alliance of conservative , nationalist , monarchist, völkisch , and antisemitic elements supported by the Pan-German League . Ideologically, the party was described as subscribing to authoritarian conservatism , German nationalism, monarchism, and from 1931 onwards also to corporatism in economic policy. It held anti-communist , anti-Catholic , and antisemitic views. On
76446-431: Was the product of the various different streams of conservatism that found themselves flowing uneasily together in one party. There was much disagreement about who was to lead the new party, and Oskar Hergt was chosen as leader on 19 December 1918 very much as the compromise candidate, being a little-known civil servant who was thereforth acceptable to all the factions. British historian Ian Kershaw wrote that ever since
76725-529: Was the rise of a number of small parties representing rural voters in northern Germany such as the Agricultural League , German Farmers' Party and the Christian-National Peasants' and Farmers' Party , which all took away traditional DNVP voters, a development that contributed significantly to DNVP's poor showing in the 1928 elections. Finally, Admiral Tirpitz who had done so much for the DNVP's good showing in elections in 1924, had often come into conflict with Westarp over his policy of half-hearted participation in
77004-499: Was totally against the idea of expropriating the property of royalty, but many of its voters, especially small farmers, were not and voted yes on 20 June 1926, a development that strongly suggested that many DNVP voters were starting to feel that the party leadership was not representing them effectively. Westarp's efforts to include the DNVP within the government tied himself and the party in many knots since he had to engage in compromises with his coalition partners that offended much of
77283-434: Was utterly devoid of personal charisma or charm, but he was a successful industrialist and media magnate, a fabulously wealthy man whose talents at devising business strategies which had made him a millionaire many times over were felt to be equally applicable to the arena of politics. Hugenberg was elected leader largely through the support of the faction associated with the Pan-German League who had been steadily taking over
77562-483: Was written entirely by female volunteers) started to vehemently insist that German women only marry a "Nordic man" and raise their children to be racists. From the mid-1920s onwards, the women party activists started to draft plans calling for the end of all "Jewish cultural influence" in Germany, banning Jews from working as teachers and writers, making eugenics into state policy with a new class of bureaucrats to be called "racial guardians" to be created in order to assess
77841-409: Was written in a distinctly Protestant language". The DNVP opposed establishing relations with the Vatican and rejected the Prussian Concordat of 1929, arguing that Germany should not make formal agreements with the Catholic Church. The party refused to court Catholic voters, and Alfred Hugenberg rejected ideas to establish local Catholic committees of the DNVP, even when advised that this may damage
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