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Between January 1933 and August 1934, Hitler transformed Germany from a fragile democracy into a one-party dictatorship, and between 1939 and 1945 that dictatorship plunged the continent into total war and carried out the systematic murder of six million European Jews. For a breadth study of the making, division and reunification of Germany, the Nazi years represent the most extreme point on every theme the course tracks: the changing nature of government reaches its destructive apogee in the Führerstaat, an executive answerable to no one and to no law; national identity is redefined in racial terms and fused with conquest and genocide; and the search for stability collapses utterly into a war of annihilation that ends with Germany's total defeat, occupation and division. The period must be studied with analytical precision and moral seriousness in equal measure — explaining the catastrophe without ever endorsing it, and representing the scale and character of Nazi crimes accurately and without minimisation.
This lesson traces the consolidation of power through the "legal revolution" of 1933–34, the nature of the Nazi state (the debate between a monolithic dictatorship and a chaotic "polycracy"), the interplay of terror and consent, the racial state and the escalation from persecution to genocide, and the course of the Second World War to its catastrophic end. Throughout, the analytical task is to develop the breadth themes and to prepare the ground for the second half of the course: the Nazi catastrophe is the reason the post-war "German question" was answered through division, occupation and the conscious construction of a "militant democracy" designed never to allow a repetition. The central question is double-edged: how was the dictatorship consolidated so rapidly, and how did a regime of designated enemies escalate into a state that pursued systematic mass murder?
By the end of this lesson you will be able to:
This lesson belongs to Edexcel 9HI0 Paper 3, Option 37.2: "Germany, 1871–1990: united, divided and reunited", combining themes in breadth across the whole period with aspects in depth studied closely. In our teaching sequence it carries the breadth themes to their most extreme point and prepares the transition to the divided-Germany half of the course; it also feeds the depth aspects concerning the consolidation of the dictatorship, the nature of the Nazi state, and the racial state and the Holocaust.
Because Paper 3 rewards command of change over the long term, keep asking how the Nazi catastrophe shaped the post-1945 answer to the "German question". (For the precise assessment weightings and question wording, consult the official Edexcel specification and sample assessment materials rather than any paraphrase.)
When Hitler was appointed Chancellor on 30 January 1933, he led a cabinet in which Nazis held only three of eleven posts. Within eighteen months every institution capable of restraining him had been neutralised — not by a coup but through a "legal revolution" of decrees and statutes that lent a veneer of legitimacy reassuring to conservatives, the civil service, the judiciary and the army.
The decisive sequence unfolded rapidly. On the night of 27 February 1933 the Reichstag building burned; a young Dutch council communist, Marinus van der Lubbe, was arrested at the scene. Whatever the truth of the fire's origin, the regime exploited it ruthlessly. The Reichstag Fire Decree (28 February 1933), issued under Article 48 and signed by President Hindenburg, suspended civil liberties indefinitely, permitted detention without warrant ("protective custody"), and allowed the Reich to override the state governments. It was never repealed, and provided the permanent legal basis for the police state — arguably more important than the Enabling Act that followed. In the ensuing atmosphere the regime arrested thousands of Communists and Social Democrats, yet in the election of 5 March 1933 the Nazis still won only 43.9 per cent of the vote, a majority only in coalition with the conservative DNVP. Free elections were never held again.
The Enabling Act (23 March 1933) gave the cabinet power to enact laws, including laws deviating from the constitution, without the Reichstag or the President. As a constitutional amendment it required a two-thirds majority, engineered by voiding the KPD's 81 seats and intimidating others; the Centre Party voted in favour after worthless assurances about the Catholic Church, and only the SPD, whose chairman Otto Wels delivered a courageous defence of democracy, voted against. The Act passed 444 votes to 94. Martin Broszat argued that the Reichstag effectively "committed suicide" — democratic institutions using their own legal mechanisms to destroy democracy.
With dictatorial powers secured, the regime moved to Gleichschaltung ("coordination"), eliminating every independent centre of organisation.
| Action | Date | Detail |
|---|---|---|
| State governments brought into line | March–April 1933 | Reich governors appointed to override the federal states |
| Trade unions abolished | 2 May 1933 | Replaced by the German Labour Front (DAF) under Robert Ley |
| Political parties dissolved | June–July 1933 | SPD banned (22 June); the Law Against the Formation of New Parties (14 July) made the NSDAP the only legal party |
| Civil Service Law | 7 April 1933 | Dismissed "non-Aryans" and political opponents — the first explicitly anti-Semitic national legislation |
| Concordat with the Vatican | 20 July 1933 | Secured international respectability and Catholic acquiescence in exchange for guarantees soon violated |
The consolidation culminated in the Night of the Long Knives (30 June – 2 July 1934), in which the SS murdered Ernst Röhm and the SA leadership — who had demanded a "second revolution" — along with old enemies such as Kurt von Schleicher, securing the army's loyalty and demonstrating that the leader's will now stood above the law. When Hindenburg died on 2 August 1934, Hitler merged the offices of President and Chancellor as Führer und Reichskanzler, and the armed forces swore a personal oath of loyalty not to Germany or the constitution but to Adolf Hitler personally. For the breadth theme of the changing nature of government, this is the terminus of the whole authoritarian trajectory traced from 1871: the executive now answered to no parliament, no law and no office, only to the person of the leader.
The image of the Third Reich as a smoothly functioning totalitarian machine, projected by Nazi propaganda, has been substantially revised. Beneath the appearance of monolithic unity lay a chaotic "polycracy" of overlapping party and state agencies, personal fiefdoms and special commissioners, whose jurisdictions clashed constantly. Hitler governed by a kind of feudal grant of authority, frequently leaving rivals to fight out their differences and intervening only erratically. Far from being a sign of weakness, historians increasingly argue, this institutional Darwinism was functional to the regime: it concentrated ultimate arbitration in Hitler's person and drove the cumulative radicalisation of policy.
The concept of charismatic authority, borrowed by Ian Kershaw from the sociologist Max Weber, is central to understanding how this system cohered. Hitler's legitimacy rested not on constitutional office but on the popular faith in him as a heroic, redemptive leader — the "Hitler myth" that propaganda assiduously cultivated. This charismatic bond detached Hitler personally from the regime's failures, which were blamed on subordinates ("if only the Führer knew"), while crediting him with its successes. It also meant that, in the absence of clear orders, ambitious officials sought to divine and pre-empt the leader's wishes — "working towards the Führer", in Kershaw's phrase — generating initiatives "from below" that pushed policy in ever more radical directions. The regime's dynamism was inseparable from its disorder.
The regime rested on a combination of coercion and genuine popular approval, and the historiography of the last forty years has shifted emphasis from the former towards the latter. The Gestapo was surprisingly small — around 32,000 personnel for a population of 66 million — and, as Robert Gellately showed, relied heavily on voluntary denunciations from ordinary citizens who used it to settle private scores. The SS under Heinrich Himmler became the regime's ideological vanguard and controller of the police and camp system; the first concentration camp, Dachau, opened in March 1933. Yet consent was widespread where the regime appeared to deliver: unemployment fell sharply (from around 6 million in 1932 to under 1 million by 1937, though the recovery rested on rearmament, deficit financing and statistical manipulation, as Adam Tooze argues), and foreign-policy triumphs — the remilitarisation of the Rhineland (1936), the Anschluss with Austria and the annexation of the Sudetenland (1938) — restored national pride. Detlev Peukert, drawing on the secret reports of the exiled SPD, mapped a spectrum of behaviour from enthusiasm through "non-conformity" to outright opposition, arguing that everyday life under Nazism was characterised by selective accommodation rather than total mobilisation. For the breadth theme of national identity, the regime's projection of a racially defined "people's community" (Volksgemeinschaft) — inclusive of "Aryan" Germans, murderous towards those it defined as alien — marks the most radical and catastrophic redefinition of German nationhood in the whole period.
The regime was, at its ideological core, a racial state, and its persecution of Germany's Jews escalated in stages from legal discrimination towards genocide. This escalation must be traced with precision and represented without minimisation.
| Phase | Period | Key developments |
|---|---|---|
| Legal discrimination | 1933–38 | Boycott of Jewish businesses (1933); the Nuremberg Laws (1935) stripped Jews of citizenship and prohibited intermarriage |
| Violence and forced emigration | 1938–39 | The Reichspogromnacht ("Kristallnacht", 9–10 November 1938) saw synagogues destroyed and around 30,000 Jewish men sent to concentration camps |
| Ghettoisation | 1939–41 | After the conquest of Poland, Jews were confined to overcrowded ghettos (Warsaw, Łódź) under conditions of starvation and disease |
| Mass shootings | 1941 | Following the invasion of the USSR, the Einsatzgruppen murdered approximately 1.5 million Jews by shooting in the occupied Soviet territories |
| Systematic, industrialised murder | 1942–45 | The Wannsee Conference (20 January 1942) coordinated the "Final Solution"; dedicated killing centres (Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, Sobibór, Bełżec, Chełmno, Majdanek) were used to murder Jews deported from across occupied Europe |
The Holocaust — the systematic, state-sponsored murder of approximately six million European Jews between 1941 and 1945 — was carried out alongside the murder of millions of other victims: Roma and Sinti, disabled people (the "euthanasia" T4 programme murdered an estimated 70,000–100,000 disabled people in 1939–41 and served as a precursor), Slavic civilians, Soviet prisoners of war, and political and religious opponents. Its overall scale is established beyond serious historical doubt through perpetrator records, demographic analysis and survivor testimony, and must never be minimised. The invasion of the USSR in June 1941, conceived and conducted as a war of annihilation (Vernichtungskrieg), was the decisive radicalising context: the ideological framing of the conflict as a struggle against "Judeo-Bolshevism", the criminal orders, the deliberate starvation of Soviet prisoners, and the operations of the Einsatzgruppen brought millions more Jews under German control, normalised mass killing, and created the conditions in which continent-wide extermination became operationally and psychologically conceivable.
A central and morally weighty historical question concerns the breadth of complicity. Christopher Browning's Ordinary Men examined a unit of middle-aged German policemen — many not committed Nazis — who took part in mass shootings, arguing that conformity, deference to authority and gradual brutalisation, rather than fanatical ideology or coercion, best explain their participation; significantly, those who asked to be excused were generally permitted to step aside. Daniel Goldhagen's contrary thesis, that a peculiarly German "eliminationist anti-Semitism" had prepared ordinary Germans to become willing killers, attracted enormous attention but was widely criticised for essentialising German culture and neglecting comparative evidence. The debate turns on the interpretation of the same documentary base, and is a model of how historians reason about responsibility.
The war passed through three phases. In the first (1939–41), the German armed forces achieved a sequence of rapid victories through combined-arms "lightning war" — Poland (September 1939), Denmark and Norway (April 1940), France and the Low Countries (May–June 1940) — though the Battle of Britain (1940) denied the Luftwaffe air superiority and postponed invasion indefinitely. Operation Barbarossa (22 June 1941), the invasion of the USSR, was the decisive strategic gamble. The turning points came in 1942–43: Stalingrad (the Sixth Army's surrender, February 1943) shattered the myth of German invincibility on the Eastern Front; El Alamein (October–November 1942) turned the tide in North Africa; and Kursk (July 1943) ended Germany's capacity for strategic offensives in the East. In the final phase (1943–45), Allied strategic bombing devastated German cities, D-Day (6 June 1944) opened the second front, the July Plot (20 July 1944) — Stauffenberg's failed attempt on Hitler's life — removed the last realistic prospect of internal overthrow and unleashed savage reprisals, and the Red Army pushed relentlessly westward. Hitler's suicide (30 April 1945) was followed by unconditional surrender on 8 May 1945.
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