You are viewing a free preview of this lesson.
Subscribe to unlock all 10 lessons in this course and every other course on LearningBro.
By 1939 the Nazi regime had reordered German life around two intertwined obsessions: the pursuit of living space and racial empire in the east, and the persecution of those it defined as enemies of the racial community, above all the Jews. This lesson traces how those obsessions found their terrible fulfilment in the years of war. It examines the escalation of racial policy from legal discrimination through organised violence to systematic, state-directed mass murder; the course of the war from the spectacular victories of the Blitzkrieg to the ruin of 1945; the belated and never-complete mobilisation of the German economy for total war; and the enduring question of why Germany was defeated. War and genocide were not separate stories but two faces of a single project of racial conquest, and the lesson treats them together for exactly that reason.
The gravity of the subject imposes a particular discipline. The murder of approximately six million European Jews is the defining crime of the regime and one of the central events of modern history; it must be treated with full seriousness, its scale represented accurately and its reality never minimised. The historian's task here is analysis and explanation, not the narration of atrocity for its own sake. The same discipline applies to the war: the strongest analysis resists the easy hindsight that reads the outcome back into the beginning, and distinguishes the point at which Germany ceased to win from the point at which its defeat became certain.
The organising question is therefore how far the war and the genocide are best understood as the logical culmination of Nazi ideology, and how the historian should weigh ideology against circumstance in explaining both the descent into systematic murder and the defeat of Germany. As throughout this unit, the evidence can be marshalled in more than one direction, and the strongest analysis holds ideology and circumstance together rather than reducing one to the other.
By the end of this lesson you will be able to:
This lesson belongs to OCR H505 Unit Y221 (Non-British period study): Democracy and Dictatorships in Germany 1919–1963, and covers Nazi racial policy, the Holocaust, and the war and defeat of Germany. Within our own teaching sequence we deliberately fuse racial policy and the war into a single study of "the ideology fulfilled", because the genocide and the conflict were causally entwined — the transition to systematic murder was bound up with the invasion of the Soviet Union — and treating them together clarifies the material better than separating them; this reflects our own pedagogical judgement rather than a transcription of the specification's ordering. (Refer to the official OCR specification for exact wording.)
Y221 is a period study assessed on AO1 only, examined by a two-part question: a shorter part (a) (around ten marks) requiring a comparative "greater importance" judgement, and a longer part (b) (around twenty marks) demanding a sustained analytical essay with a substantiated overall judgement. There is no source enquiry and no interpretations component in this unit. The second-order concepts to foreground here are causation (the relationship between long-term ideology and the specific circumstances that turned hatred into murder, and defeat into certainty), change and continuity (how the war radicalised policy already in train), and significance (which factors mattered most in the descent to genocide and in the defeat). For this lesson that means being able to compare, say, the relative importance of ideology and the war in the origins of the Final Solution (a part (a) comparison), or to argue how far Germany's defeat was inevitable (a part (b) essay).
Nazi racial policy did not arise from nothing; it welded together several strands of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century thought, distorting and radicalising ideas that had a wider currency into a murderous worldview centred on the Jews. Understanding these roots is essential to explaining how persecution could be presented to many Germans as legitimate.
| Tradition | Contribution to Nazi racial thought |
|---|---|
| Social Darwinism | A view of human life as a perpetual struggle between races for survival and dominance |
| Eugenics | The pseudo-scientific belief in 'racial improvement' through selective breeding and the elimination of the 'unfit' |
| Racial antisemitism | Older religious anti-Judaism recast in racial terms, defining Jews not by faith but by 'blood' |
| Völkisch nationalism | The glorification of the German Volk, 'blood and soil', and an organic, racially pure national community |
The decisive and most dangerous element was the recasting of antisemitism in racial rather than religious terms. By defining Jewishness as an immutable matter of descent, Nazi ideology closed off the traditional escape of conversion and made the 'Jewish question' insoluble by any means short of removal. Fused with social Darwinism, this produced the lethal notion of a racial struggle in which the Jews figured as an existential enemy of the German Volk — a fantasy that, as the regime radicalised, would be used to justify first exclusion, then expulsion, and finally extermination. It is important to stress from the outset that there was no straight line from 1933 to the death camps; the escalation ran through distinct phases, in each of which ideology interacted with circumstance, above all the circumstance of war.
Persecution proceeded in phases, each more radical than the last. In the regime's early years it took chiefly legal and administrative forms, designed to isolate Jews from German society, strip them of rights and livelihoods, and pressure them to emigrate. The boycott of Jewish businesses of 1 April 1933 and the Civil Service Law of 7 April 1933, which dismissed Jews from the bureaucracy, opened the assault. The Nuremberg Laws of 15 September 1935 stripped Jews of citizenship, reducing them from citizens to mere 'subjects', and criminalised marriage and relations between Jews and 'Aryans'; subsequent decrees defined precisely who counted as a 'Jew' by ancestry, giving the persecution a legal architecture and a pseudo-scientific definition of the victim. From 1937 came 'Aryanisation' — the forced sale and expropriation of Jewish-owned businesses and property.
The persecution turned decisively more violent in November 1938 with the state-organised pogrom known as Kristallnacht (the 'Night of Broken Glass', 9–10 November 1938), in which some 7,500 Jewish businesses were destroyed, around 267 synagogues burned, more than 90 people killed and some 30,000 Jewish men arrested and sent to concentration camps; the Jewish community was then collectively fined one billion Reichsmarks for the damage. Kristallnacht marks an analytically significant threshold, shifting the persecution onto openly violent ground and concentrating authority over the 'Jewish question' increasingly in the hands of the SS and Heydrich's security apparatus, which favoured a more 'systematic' and bureaucratic approach. In the same period the regime launched the T4 'euthanasia' programme (from October 1939), the systematic murder of disabled and mentally ill people judged 'unworthy of life'; some 70,000 victims were killed under the formal programme before public protest, notably the 1941 sermons of Bishop von Galen, forced its official suspension, though killings continued by other means. T4 is of central importance because it served as a precursor to the genocide: it developed the techniques of mass killing by gas and trained personnel who would later be transferred to the death camps.
| Phase | Dates | Character |
|---|---|---|
| Legal discrimination | 1933–1938 | Boycotts, the Civil Service Law, the Nuremberg Laws, 'Aryanisation' — exclusion by law |
| Organised violence and ghettoisation | 1938–1941 | Kristallnacht, the confinement of eastern Jews to ghettos, the T4 programme |
| The Final Solution | 1941–1945 | The Einsatzgruppen shootings, the extermination camps, coordinated at Wannsee |
The outbreak of war in September 1939 transformed the situation, both by removing the constraints of peacetime and by bringing millions more Jews under German control. The conquest of Poland placed the largest Jewish population in Europe within the regime's grasp, and the policy of ghettoisation that followed — the confinement of Jews to sealed, overcrowded districts in cities such as Warsaw and Łódź — subjected them to deliberate deprivation, forced labour and disease. The transition to systematic genocide is bound up with the invasion of the Soviet Union: from June 1941 the mobile killing units (Einsatzgruppen) carried out mass shootings of Jews, Communist officials and others behind the front, murdering in the order of 1.5 million people; the first dedicated extermination camp began operating at Chełmno in December 1941; and the Wannsee Conference of 20 January 1942 brought together senior officials to coordinate the administration and logistics of the 'Final Solution' across Europe. Wannsee did not initiate the genocide — killing was already under way — but coordinated and bureaucratised it. Six extermination camps operated in occupied Poland: Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, Sobibór, Bełżec, Chełmno and Majdanek. Historians estimate that approximately six million Jews were murdered, the largest numbers in occupied Poland (around three million) and the Soviet Union (around one million).
The Jews were the central target of Nazi racial policy but not its only victims. The Sinti and Roma were persecuted on explicitly racial grounds and subjected to deportation and mass murder, with in the order of a quarter of a million killed in the genocide the Roma call the Porajmos. Political opponents — Communists and Social Democrats — had been the first inmates of the camps from 1933; Jehovah's Witnesses who refused the Hitler salute and military service were imprisoned in large numbers; homosexual men, criminalised under a strengthened Paragraph 175, were sent to the camps and marked with the pink triangle; and a wide range of people labelled 'asocial' were swept up alongside them. This breadth of persecution reflects the logic of a worldview that sought to purify the racial community by destroying all it judged alien — yet the historian must hold this breadth together with the recognition that the systematic, continent-wide destruction directed at the Jews remains distinct in its scale, intention and character.
The central analytical question about the genocide is how it came about — and the answer turns on the relationship between long-held ideology and the specific circumstances of the war. Intentionalist historians hold that the genocide was the realisation of a long-held intention: Hitler's antisemitism, expressed as early as Mein Kampf, amounted to a warrant for genocide, and the murder of the Jews was always the goal, awaiting only the opportunity that war provided. Functionalist (or structuralist) historians argue by contrast that there was no single early decision or master plan; the genocide evolved through 'cumulative radicalisation', as rival agencies in the polycratic state, competing to solve a self-imposed 'Jewish question' under the pressures of war and occupation in the east, escalated step by step from expulsion to murder. Between these poles stands a widely accepted synthesis, which holds that Hitler's ideology set the framework and the goal while the specific path to genocide was shaped by circumstance — the radicalising war, the conquest of vast Jewish populations in the east — and by officials 'working towards the Führer'.
| Approach | Core argument (paraphrased) |
|---|---|
| Intentionalist | The genocide was long intended; Mein Kampf was in effect a warrant for genocide awaiting opportunity |
| Functionalist | No single decision; genocide evolved through cumulative radicalisation in the polycratic state |
| Synthesis | Ideology set the goal and framework; circumstance and 'working towards the Führer' shaped the path |
The most careful reconstruction of the decision-making locates the crystallisation of policy into systematic murder in the months of 1941, when the euphoria of apparent victory over the Soviet Union, the practical 'problem' of the millions of Jews now under German control, and the initiatives of local and regional authorities competing to fulfil the leader's presumed wishes converged to transform ghettoisation and shooting into a programme of total extermination. This moderate functionalism does not minimise Hitler's role or the centrality of ideology; it locates the decision in a specific moment and shows how ideology and circumstance interacted to produce it. A second, related debate concerns the motivation of the perpetrators: one influential study of a reserve police battalion that carried out mass shootings in occupied Poland concluded that the perpetrators were not, for the most part, exceptional fanatics but ordinary men driven by peer conformity, deference to authority, the brutalising routine of their task and careerism — a disturbing conclusion that locates the capacity for such crimes uncomfortably close to ordinary human psychology. An opposed thesis held that the perpetrators were driven by a peculiarly German 'eliminationist antisemitism'; the scholarly consensus has largely judged that thesis too monocausal and too essentialist about German national character, unable to account for non-German collaborators or the variation in perpetrators' conduct. The persuasive position is that the genocide requires explanation at several levels at once — the ideology and authority of Hitler, the radicalising dynamics of the war and the polycratic state, and the mixture of conviction, conformity and circumstance that turned ordinary people into perpetrators — and that no single factor can bear the weight of explanation alone.
The war can usefully be divided into three phases: the period of spectacular Blitzkrieg victories; the turning point on the Eastern Front; and the long retreat to defeat. Blitzkrieg ('lightning war') combined tanks, motorised infantry and close air support to achieve swift, decisive victories, and in 1939–41 it seemed to vindicate the new methods of warfare.
| Campaign | Date | Result |
|---|---|---|
| Poland | September 1939 | Conquered in around five weeks, partitioned with the USSR under the Nazi–Soviet Pact |
| France and the Low Countries | May–June 1940 | France defeated in six weeks, a stunning reversal of 1914–18 |
| Battle of Britain | July–October 1940 | Germany's first failure: air superiority over Britain was not achieved and invasion was postponed |
| Operation Barbarossa | From 22 June 1941 | The invasion of the USSR; spectacular early advances that ultimately failed |
| Stalingrad | August 1942 – February 1943 | The German 6th Army encircled and destroyed; the decisive turning point in the east |
The Battle of Britain was the first check to German expansion and the first failure of the Blitzkrieg method against an opponent protected by the sea and possessed of radar and a resilient air force. But the most consequential decision of the war was Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union launched on 22 June 1941 — the supreme expression of Nazi ideology, the war for Lebensraum and racial empire in the east. The initial advances were spectacular, but the campaign failed, for reasons that repay analysis: the vast distances and the inadequacy of German logistics; the unexpected resilience and immense reserves of the Soviet Union; the onset of the Russian winter for which German forces were unprepared; Hitler's increasing interference in operational decisions; and a fundamental underestimation of Soviet capacity to absorb losses and relocate industry beyond the Urals. The decisive turning point came at Stalingrad, where the German 6th Army was encircled and forced to surrender in February 1943 with Axis casualties of more than 800,000, shattering the myth of German invincibility. From 1943 Germany was on the defensive on every front: the failure at Kursk in July 1943 ended its last major eastern offensive; the D-Day landings of 6 June 1944 opened the long-feared second front in the west; and the fall of Berlin in April 1945, with Hitler's suicide on 30 April, preceded the unconditional surrender of 8 May 1945.
Subscribe to continue reading
Get full access to this lesson and all 10 lessons in this course.