hitler essay in english

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Adolf Hitler

By: History.com Editors

Updated: June 29, 2023 | Original: October 29, 2009

Adolf Hitler, the leader of Germany’s Nazi Party , was one of the most powerful and notorious dictators of the 20th century. After serving with the German military in World War I , Hitler capitalized on economic woes, popular discontent and political infighting during the Weimar Republic to rise through the ranks of the Nazi Party.

In a series of ruthless and violent actions—including the Reichstag Fire and the Night of Long Knives—Hitler took absolute power in Germany by 1933. Germany’s invasion of Poland in 1939 led to the outbreak of World War II , and by 1941, Nazi forces had used “blitzkrieg” military tactics to occupy much of Europe. Hitler’s virulent anti-Semitism and obsessive pursuit of Aryan supremacy fueled the murder of some 6 million Jews, along with other victims of the Holocaust . After the tide of war turned against him, Hitler committed suicide in a Berlin bunker in April 1945.

Adolf Hitler was born on April 20, 1889, in Braunau am Inn, a small Austrian town near the Austro-German frontier. After his father, Alois, retired as a state customs official, young Adolf spent most of his childhood in Linz, the capital of Upper Austria.

Not wanting to follow in his father’s footsteps as a civil servant, he began struggling in secondary school and eventually dropped out. Alois died in 1903, and Adolf pursued his dream of being an artist, though he was rejected from Vienna’s Academy of Fine Arts.

After his mother, Klara, died in 1908, Hitler moved to Vienna, where he pieced together a living painting scenery and monuments and selling the images. Lonely, isolated and a voracious reader, Hitler became interested in politics during his years in Vienna, and developed many of the ideas that would shape Nazi ideology.

Military Career of Adolf Hitler

In 1913, Hitler moved to Munich, in the German state of Bavaria. When World War I broke out the following summer, he successfully petitioned the Bavarian king to be allowed to volunteer in a reserve infantry regiment.

Deployed in October 1914 to Belgium, Hitler served throughout the Great War and won two decorations for bravery, including the rare Iron Cross First Class, which he wore to the end of his life.

Hitler was wounded twice during the conflict: He was hit in the leg during the Battle of the Somme in 1916, and temporarily blinded by a British gas attack near Ypres in 1918. A month later, he was recuperating in a hospital at Pasewalk, northeast of Berlin, when news arrived of the armistice and Germany’s defeat in World War I .

Like many Germans, Hitler came to believe the country’s devastating defeat could be attributed not to the Allies, but to insufficiently patriotic “traitors” at home—a myth that would undermine the post-war Weimar Republic and set the stage for Hitler’s rise.

After Hitler returned to Munich in late 1918, he joined the small German Workers’ Party, which aimed to unite the interests of the working class with a strong German nationalism. His skilled oratory and charismatic energy helped propel him in the party’s ranks, and in 1920 he left the army and took charge of its propaganda efforts.

In one of Hitler’s strokes of propaganda genius, the newly renamed National Socialist German Workers Party, or Nazi Party , adopted a version of the swastika—an ancient sacred symbol of Hinduism , Jainism and Buddhism —as its emblem. Printed in a white circle on a red background, Hitler’s swastika would take on terrifying symbolic power in the years to come.

By the end of 1921, Hitler led the growing Nazi Party, capitalizing on widespread discontent with the Weimar Republic and the punishing terms of the Versailles Treaty . Many dissatisfied former army officers in Munich would join the Nazis, notably Ernst Röhm, who recruited the “strong arm” squads—known as the Sturmabteilung (SA)—which Hitler used to protect party meetings and attack opponents.

Beer Hall Putsch 

On the evening of November 8, 1923, members of the SA and others forced their way into a large beer hall where another right-wing leader was addressing the crowd. Wielding a revolver, Hitler proclaimed the beginning of a national revolution and led marchers to the center of Munich, where they got into a gun battle with police.

Hitler fled quickly, but he and other rebel leaders were later arrested. Even though it failed spectacularly, the Beer Hall Putsch established Hitler as a national figure, and (in the eyes of many) a hero of right-wing nationalism.

'Mein Kampf' 

Tried for treason, Hitler was sentenced to five years in prison, but would serve only nine months in the relative comfort of Landsberg Castle. During this period, he began to dictate the book that would become " Mein Kampf " (“My Struggle”), the first volume of which was published in 1925.

In it, Hitler expanded on the nationalistic, anti-Semitic views he had begun to develop in Vienna in his early twenties, and laid out plans for the Germany—and the world—he sought to create when he came to power.

Hitler would finish the second volume of "Mein Kampf" after his release, while relaxing in the mountain village of Berchtesgaden. It sold modestly at first, but with Hitler’s rise it became Germany’s best-selling book after the Bible. By 1940, it had sold some 6 million copies there.

Hitler’s second book, “The Zweites Buch,” was written in 1928 and contained his thoughts on foreign policy. It was not published in his lifetime due to the poor initial sales of “Mein Kampf.” The first English translations of “The Zweites Buch” did not appear until 1962 and was published under the title “Hitler's Secret Book.” 

Obsessed with race and the idea of ethnic “purity,” Hitler saw a natural order that placed the so-called “Aryan race” at the top.

For him, the unity of the Volk (the German people) would find its truest incarnation not in democratic or parliamentary government, but in one supreme leader, or Führer.

" Mein Kampf " also addressed the need for Lebensraum (or living space): In order to fulfill its destiny, Germany should take over lands to the east that were now occupied by “inferior” Slavic peoples—including Austria, the Sudetenland (Czechoslovakia), Poland and Russia.

The Schutzstaffel (SS) 

By the time Hitler left prison, economic recovery had restored some popular support for the Weimar Republic, and support for right-wing causes like Nazism appeared to be waning.

Over the next few years, Hitler laid low and worked on reorganizing and reshaping the Nazi Party. He established the Hitler Youth  to organize youngsters, and created the Schutzstaffel (SS) as a more reliable alternative to the SA.

Members of the SS wore black uniforms and swore a personal oath of loyalty to Hitler. (After 1929, under the leadership of Heinrich Himmler , the SS would develop from a group of some 200 men into a force that would dominate Germany and terrorize the rest of occupied Europe during World War II .)

Hitler spent much of his time at Berchtesgaden during these years, and his half-sister, Angela Raubal, and her two daughters often joined him. After Hitler became infatuated with his beautiful blonde niece, Geli Raubal, his possessive jealousy apparently led her to commit suicide in 1931.

Devastated by the loss, Hitler would consider Geli the only true love affair of his life. He soon began a long relationship with Eva Braun , a shop assistant from Munich, but refused to marry her.

The worldwide Great Depression that began in 1929 again threatened the stability of the Weimar Republic. Determined to achieve political power in order to affect his revolution, Hitler built up Nazi support among German conservatives, including army, business and industrial leaders.

The Third Reich

In 1932, Hitler ran against the war hero Paul von Hindenburg for president, and received 36.8 percent of the vote. With the government in chaos, three successive chancellors failed to maintain control, and in late January 1933 Hindenburg named the 43-year-old Hitler as chancellor, capping the stunning rise of an unlikely leader.

January 30, 1933 marked the birth of the Third Reich, or as the Nazis called it, the “Thousand-Year Reich” (after Hitler’s boast that it would endure for a millennium).

HISTORY Vault: Third Reich: The Rise

Rare and never-before-seen amateur films offer a unique perspective on the rise of Nazi Germany from Germans who experienced it. How were millions of people so vulnerable to fascism?

Reichstag Fire 

Though the Nazis never attained more than 37 percent of the vote at the height of their popularity in 1932, Hitler was able to grab absolute power in Germany largely due to divisions and inaction among the majority who opposed Nazism.

After a devastating fire at Germany’s parliament building, the Reichstag, in February 1933—possibly the work of a Dutch communist, though later evidence suggested Nazis set the  Reichstag fire  themselves—Hitler had an excuse to step up the political oppression and violence against his opponents.

On March 23, the Reichstag passed the Enabling Act, giving full powers to Hitler and celebrating the union of National Socialism with the old German establishment (i.e., Hindenburg ).

That July, the government passed a law stating that the Nazi Party “constitutes the only political party in Germany,” and within months all non-Nazi parties, trade unions and other organizations had ceased to exist.

His autocratic power now secure within Germany, Hitler turned his eyes toward the rest of Europe.

In 1933, Germany was diplomatically isolated, with a weak military and hostile neighbors (France and Poland). In a famous speech in May 1933, Hitler struck a surprisingly conciliatory tone, claiming Germany supported disarmament and peace.

But behind this appeasement strategy, the domination and expansion of the Volk remained Hitler’s overriding aim.

By early the following year, he had withdrawn Germany from the League of Nations and begun to militarize the nation in anticipation of his plans for territorial conquest.

Night of the Long Knives

On June 29, 1934, the infamous Night of the Long Knives , Hitler had Röhm, former Chancellor Kurt von Schleicher and hundreds of other problematic members of his own party murdered, in particular troublesome members of the SA.

When the 86-year-old Hindenburg died on August 2, military leaders agreed to combine the presidency and chancellorship into one position, meaning Hitler would command all the armed forces of the Reich.

Persecution of Jews

On September 15, 1935, passage of the Nuremberg Laws deprived Jews of German citizenship, and barred them from marrying or having relations with persons of “German or related blood.”

Though the Nazis attempted to downplay its persecution of Jews in order to placate the international community during the 1936 Berlin Olympics (in which German-Jewish athletes were not allowed to compete), additional decrees over the next few years disenfranchised Jews and took away their political and civil rights.

In addition to its pervasive anti-Semitism, Hitler’s government also sought to establish the cultural dominance of Nazism by burning books, forcing newspapers out of business, using radio and movies for propaganda purposes and forcing teachers throughout Germany’s educational system to join the party.

Much of the Nazi persecution of Jews and other targets occurred at the hands of the Geheime Staatspolizei (GESTAPO), or Secret State Police, an arm of the SS that expanded during this period.

Outbreak of World War II

In March 1936, against the advice of his generals, Hitler ordered German troops to reoccupy the demilitarized left bank of the Rhine.

Over the next two years, Germany concluded alliances with Italy and Japan, annexed Austria and moved against Czechoslovakia—all essentially without resistance from Great Britain, France or the rest of the international community.

Once he confirmed the alliance with Italy in the so-called “Pact of Steel” in May 1939, Hitler then signed a non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union . On September 1, 1939, Nazi troops invaded Poland, finally prompting Britain and France to declare war on Germany.

Blitzkrieg 

After ordering the occupation of Norway and Denmark in April 1940, Hitler adopted a plan proposed by one of his generals to attack France through the Ardennes Forest. The blitzkrieg (“lightning war”) attack began on May 10; Holland quickly surrendered, followed by Belgium.

German troops made it all the way to the English Channel, forcing British and French forces to evacuate en masse from Dunkirk in late May. On June 22, France was forced to sign an armistice with Germany.

Hitler had hoped to force Britain to seek peace as well, but when that failed he went ahead with his attacks on that country, followed by an invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941.

After the attack on Pearl Harbor that December, the United States declared war on Japan, and Germany’s alliance with Japan demanded that Hitler declare war on the United States as well.

At that point in the conflict, Hitler shifted his central strategy to focus on breaking the alliance of his main opponents (Britain, the United States and the Soviet Union) by forcing one of them to make peace with him.

Concentration Camps

Beginning in 1933, the SS had operated a network of concentration camps, including a notorious camp at Dachau , near Munich, to hold Jews and other targets of the Nazi regime.

After war broke out, the Nazis shifted from expelling Jews from German-controlled territories to exterminating them. Einsatzgruppen, or mobile death squads, executed entire Jewish communities during the Soviet invasion, while the existing concentration-camp network expanded to include death camps like Auschwitz -Birkenau in occupied Poland.

In addition to forced labor and mass execution, certain Jews at Auschwitz were targeted as the subjects of horrific medical experiments carried out by eugenicist Josef Mengele, known as the “Angel of Death.” Mengele’s experiments focused on twins and exposed 3,000 child prisoners to disease, disfigurement and torture under the guise of medical research.

Though the Nazis also imprisoned and killed Catholics, homosexuals, political dissidents, Roma (gypsies) and the disabled, above all they targeted Jews—some 6 million of whom were killed in German-occupied Europe by war’s end.

End of World War II

With defeats at El-Alamein and Stalingrad , as well as the landing of U.S. troops in North Africa by the end of 1942, the tide of the war turned against Germany.

As the conflict continued, Hitler became increasingly unwell, isolated and dependent on medications administered by his personal physician.

Several attempts were made on his life, including one that came close to succeeding in July 1944, when Col. Claus von Stauffenberg planted a bomb that exploded during a conference at Hitler’s headquarters in East Prussia.

Within a few months of the successful Allied invasion of Normandy in June 1944, the Allies had begun liberating cities across Europe. That December, Hitler attempted to direct another offensive through the Ardennes, trying to split British and American forces.

But after January 1945, he holed up in a bunker beneath the Chancellery in Berlin. With Soviet forces closing in, Hitler made plans for a last-ditch resistance before finally abandoning that plan.

How Did Adolf Hitler Die?

At midnight on the night of April 28-29, Hitler married Eva Braun in the Berlin bunker. After dictating his political testament,  Hitler shot himself  in his suite on April 30; Braun took poison. Their bodies were burned according to Hitler’s instructions.

With Soviet troops occupying Berlin, Germany surrendered unconditionally on all fronts on May 7, 1945, bringing the war in Europe to a close.

In the end, Hitler’s planned “Thousand-Year Reich” lasted just over 12 years, but wreaked unfathomable destruction and devastation during that time, forever transforming the history of Germany, Europe and the world.

William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich iWonder – Adolf Hitler: Man and Monster, BBC . The Holocaust : A Learning Site for Students, U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum .

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Adolf Hitler: Early Years, 1889–1913

Adolf hitler.

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Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) was born on April 20, 1889, in the Upper Austrian border town Braunau am Inn, located approximately 65 miles east of Munich and nearly 30 miles north of Salzburg. He was baptized a Catholic.

His father, Alois Hitler (1837–1903), was a mid-level customs official. Born out of wedlock to Maria Anna Schickelgruber in 1837, Alois Schickelgruber had changed his name in 1876 to Hitler, the Christian name of the man who married his mother five years after his birth.

Alois Hitler's illegitimacy would cause speculation as early as the 1920s—and still present in popular culture today—that Hitler's grandfather was Jewish. Credible evidence to support the notion of Hitler's Jewish descent has never turned up. The two most likely candidates to have been Hitler's grandfather are the man who married his grandmother and that man's brother.

In 1898, the Hitler family moved to Linz, the capital of Upper Austria. Hitler wanted a career in the visual arts. He fought bitterly with his father, who wanted him to enter the Habsburg civil service. After his father's death, Hitler eventually persuaded his mother, Klara Hitler, née Pölzl, to permit him to pursue his dream of becoming an artist. As Klara was dying of breast cancer in the autumn of 1907, Hitler took the entrance exam to the Vienna Academy of the Arts. He failed to gain acceptance. In early 1908, some weeks after Klara's death in December 1907, Hitler moved to Vienna, ostensibly in the hope of renewing efforts to enter the Academy of Arts.

Hitler lived in Vienna between February 1908 and May 1913. He had grown up in a middle-class family, with relatively few contacts with Jewish people, in a region of the Habsburg state in which many German nationalists had been disappointed that the German Empire founded in 1871 had not included the German-speaking regions of the Habsburg Monarchy. Yet the legacy of the Vienna years is not as clear as Hitler depicted it in his political autobiography. His impoverishment and residence in homeless shelters began only a year after his arrival and after he had frittered away a generous inheritance left by his parents and rejected all arguments of surviving relatives and family friends that he embark upon a career in the civil service.

By the end of 1909, Hitler knew real poverty as his sources of income dried up. That winter, however, helped briefly by a last gift from his aunt, he began to paint watercolor scenes of Vienna for a business partner. He made enough to live on until he left for Munich in 1913.

It is likely that Hitler experienced, and possibly also shared, the general antisemitism common among middle-class German nationalists. Nevertheless, he had personal and business relationships with Jews in Vienna. He was also, at times, dependent in part on Jews for his living. While this may have been a cause for discretion about his actual feelings about Jews, it was not until after World War I that Hitler can be demonstrated to have adopted an “antisemitic” ideology.

Influences upon Hitler in Vienna

Hitler was genuinely influenced in Vienna by two political movements. The first was the German racist nationalism propagated by the Upper Austrian Pan-German politician Georg von Schönerer. The second key influence was that of Karl Lueger, Mayor of Vienna from 1897 to his death in 1910.

Lueger was still in power when Hitler arrived in Vienna. Lueger promoted an antisemitism that was more practical and organizational than ideological. Nevertheless, it reinforced anti-Jewish stereotypes and cast Jews as enemies of the German middle and lower classes. Unlike Schönerer, who was more comfortable with the elitist nationalism of the student fraternities, Lueger was comfortable with big city crowds and knew how to channel their protest into political gain. Hitler drew his ideology in large part from Schönerer, but his strategy and tactics from Lueger.

Hitler moved to Munich, Germany, in May 1913. He did so to avoid arrest for evading his military service obligation to Habsburg Austria. He financed his move with the last installment of his inheritance from his father. In Munich, he continued to drift. He supported himself on his watercolors and sketches until the outbreak of World War I gave his life direction and a cause to which he could commit himself totally.

Series: Adolf Hitler

Adolf Hitler: Key Dates

Making a Leader

Adolf Hitler and World War I: 1913–1919

Adolf Hitler: 1919-1924

Adolf hitler: 1924-1930.

Adolf Hitler: 1930-1933

The July 20, 1944, Plot to Assassinate Adolf Hitler

Critical thinking questions.

• What political and social trends and attitudes may have influenced Hitler at this time?
• What personal pressures and motivations may have influenced Hitler at this time?

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The Rise of Hitler to Power Essay

Introduction, the weimar republic, anti-semitism, reference list.

Adolf Hitler rose to power as the chancellor of Germany in 1933 through a legal election and formed a coalition government of the NSDAO-DNVP Party. Many issues in Hitler’s life and manipulations behind the curtains preceded this event.

Hitler and the Nazi party rose to power propelled by various factors that were in play in Germany since the end of World War I. The weak Weimar Republic and Hitler’s anti-Semitism campaigns and obsession were some of the factors that favored Hitler’s rise to power and generally the Nazi beliefs (Bloxham and Kushner 2005: 54).

Every public endorsement that Hitler received was an approval for his hidden Nazi ideals of dictatorship and Semitism regardless of whether the Germans were aware or not.

Hitler’s pathway to power was rather long and coupled with challenges but he was not ready to let go; he held on to accomplish his deeply rooted obsessions and beliefs; actually, vote for Hitler was a vote for the Holocaust.

Hitler joined the German Worker’s Party in the year 1919 as its fifth member. His oratory talent and anti-Semitism values quickly popularized him and by 1920, he was already the head of propaganda.

The party later changed its name to Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartel (NSDPA) and formed paramilitary groups in the name of security men or gymnastics and sports division.

It was this paramilitary formed by Hitler that would cause unrest later to tarnish the name of the communists leading to distrust of communism by the Germans and on the other hand rise of popularity of the Nazi (Burleigh 1997: 78).

A turning point of Hitler took place when he led the Beer Hall Putsch, in a failed coup de tat and the government later imprisoned him on accusations of treason. The resulting trial earned him a lot of publicity, he used the occasion to attack the Weimar republic, and later while in prison, he rethought his approach to get into power.

The military defeat and German revolution in November 1918 after the First World War saw the formation of Weimar republic.The military government handed over power to the civilian government and later on revolutions in form of mutinies, violent uprisings and declaration of independence occurred until early 1919.

Then there was formation of constituent assembly and promulgated of new constitution, which included the infamous article 48. None of the many political parties could gain a majority vote to form government and therefore many small parties formed a coalition government.

What followed were a short period of political stability mainly because of the coalition government in place and the later the signing of the Treaty of Versailles in June 1919. Many factors caused the rise of the Nazi party to power.

The most notable factor was his ability to take advantage of Germany’s poor leadership, economical and political instability.

The Weimar’s Republic collapse under pressure due to hyperinflation and civil unrest was the result of Hitler’s ability to manipulate the German media and public while at the same time taking advantage of the country’s poor leadership (Schleunes 1990: 295).

The period between 1921 and 1922, Germany was struggling with economic instability due to high inflation and hyperinflation rates prior to the absolute collapse of the German currency. The German mark became almost useless resulting into instability-fuelled unrest in many sectors of the economy. To counter the effects, the government printed huge amounts of paper money.

Germany had to sign the unforgiving treaty of Versailles, which the Weimar Republic was responsible for and was later to become the ‘noose around Germany’s neck’, a situation that caused “feelings of distrust, fear, resentment, and insecurity towards the Weimar Republic” (Bartov 2000: 54).

Hitler built on these volatile emotions and offered the option of a secure and promising leadership of the extremist Nazi party as opposed to the weak and unstable coalition government of the Weimar republic. Dippel notes, “Hitler’s ability to build upon people’s disappointed view of the hatred of the treaty of Versailles was one of the major reason for the Nazi party’s and Hitler’s rise to power” (1996: 220).

The Treaty of Versailles introduced the German population to a period of economic insatiability and caused an escalation of hard economic standards. The opportunistic appearance of an extremist group that promised better options than the prevailing situation presented a temptation to the vulnerable Germans to accept it (Dippel 1996: 219).

During the period of hyperinflation, unemployment rose sharply and children were largely malnourished. The value of people’s savings spiraled downwards leading to low living standards and reduction in people buying power.

People became desperate and started a frantic search for a better alternative to the Weimar Government. Germany in a state of disillusionment became a prey to the convincing promises of Hitler. Hitler promised full employment and security in form of a strong central government.

The Weimar republic also faced political challenges from both left-wingers and right-wingers. The communists wanted radical changes like those one implemented in Russia while the conservatives thought that the Weimar government was too weak and liberal.

The Germans longed for a leader with the leadership qualities of Bismark especially with the disillusionment of the Weimar republic. They blamed the government for the hated Versailles treaty and they all came out to look for a scapegoat to their overwhelming challenges (Thalmann and Feinermann 1990: 133).

In their bid to look for scapegoats, many Germans led by Hitler and Nazi party blamed the German Jews for their economic and political problems.

Hitler made a failed attempt to seize power through a coup de tat that led to his arrest and imprisonment. In prison, he wrote a book that was later to become the guide to Nazism known as Mein Kampf (My Struggle).

The book reflected Hitler’s obsessions to nationalism, racism, and anti-Semitism and he insisted that Germans belonged to a superior race of Aryans meaning light-skinned Europeans. According to Hitler, the greatest enemies of the Aryans were the Jews and therefore the Germans should eliminate them at all costs since they were the genesis of all their misfortunes.

These views on Semitism could trace its genesis in history from which it Historians suspect that Hitler’s ideas were rooted. In this view, Christians persecuted Jews mainly because of their difference in beliefs.

Nationalism in the 19 th century caused the society to view Jews as ethnic outsiders while Hitler viewed Jews not as members of a religion but as a unique race (Longerich 2006: 105). Consequently, he blamed the German’s defeat on a conspiracy of Marxists, Jews, corruption of politicians and businesspersons.

Hitler urged the Germans on the need to unite into a great nation so that the slaves and other inferior races could bow to their needs (Bergen 2003: 30). He further advocated for removal and elimination of the Jews from the face of the earth to create enough space for ‘great nation’.

He spread propaganda that for Germany to unite into one great nation it required a strong leader one he believed to be destined to become.

These Semitism views contributed to the sudden change of fortunes for the Nazi party and Hitler because the conditions were appropriate. The Germans were desperate for some hope in the midst of frustrating times due to the failure of the Weimar republic and rising communism (Stone 2004: 17).

They involuntarily yielded to the more appealing Nazism values especially with the promises of destroying communism and improved living standards.

However, in accepting the Nazi party and Hitler, the Germans were giving in to Semitism, which was deeply rooted in the core values of Nazism, and Hitler had clearly outlined them in the Mein Kampf, which laid out his ideas and future policies.

Hitler’s well timed and precise way of “introducing the secure option of Nazism at an appropriate time and taking advantage of a disjointed Weimar republic that faced unprecedented challenges” (Cohn-Sherbok 1999: 12) was one of the many reasons that underscored Hitler’s fame.

He promised a strong and united German nation very timely when the German nation had suffered a dent to their pride and union due to the defeat in the First World War. Hitler’s promise of a strong and powerful nation began to look very appealing causing a large proportion of Germans, who were in disillusionment, to divert their support the Nazi Party (Gordon 1987: 67).

Hitler’s opportunistic approach and perfectly timed cunning speeches as well as his manipulation of certain circumstance were significant reasons for the rise of Nazism and Hitler in Germany.

During the Great depression and release from prison, Hitler introduced large-scale propaganda and at the same time manipulated the media with his ideas. This led to the Nazi supporter’s increase of detests against their opposition and many Germans believed in the cunning lies of Hitler (Kaplan 1999: 45).

He managed to spread lies against the communist society and a case in point is when a communist supporter set the Reichstag building ablaze in one of the civil unrests in Germany, supposedly.

This event caused the communism society to loose popularity and allowed Hitler to activate the enabling act when he came to power. The act marked a turning point in the success of Hitler’s dictatorship and Historians accredit it as the foundation of the Nazi rule.

The communists later realized that the Nazis were responsible for the act at Reichstag building and the act meant to provoke hatred between the communists and Nazi supporters.

Hitler had a very charming personality that made him very easy to get along with people. His likable character and oratory skills enabled him to put forward the strong sense of authority that the Weimar Republic lacked.

This, in combination with other factors, made him very appealing to the desperate Germans, making them believe in the Nazi ideals like Semitism and supporting the Nazi party while concurrently fueling hatred of the ruling Weimar Republic.

Hitler’s ability to manipulate circumstances and situation in the favor of himself and his Nazi Party was reason for their success to rise to power. Hitler waited patiently to take hold of the realms of power before unleashing his full force of dictatorship and hatred for the Jews, which led to the holocaust. It is therefore just to state that every Hitler’s vote was a vote for the holocaust.

Bartov, O., ed., The Holocaust: origins, implementation, aftermath , Routledge, London/New York, 2000.

Bergen, D. L., War & Genocide: a concise history of the Holocaust , 2 nd ed., Rowman & Littlefield, 2003.

Bloxham, D. & T. Kushner, The Holocaust. Critical historical approaches , Manchester University Press, Manchester, 2005.

Burleigh, M., Ethics and Extermination. Reflections on Nazi Genocide, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1997.

Cohn-Sherbok, D., Understanding the Holocaust , Cassell. London/New York, 1999.

Dippel, J. H., Bound upon a Wheel of Fire. Why so many German Jews made the tragic decision to remain in Nazi Germany , Basic Books, New York, 1996.

Gordon, A. S., Hitler, Germans and the ‘Jewish Question’ , Blackwell, Oxford, 1987.

Kaplan, M., Between dignity and despair: Jewish life in Nazi Germany , New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Longerich, P., The Unwritten Order. Hitler’s Role in the Final Solution, Tempus, The Mill, GLS, 2006.

Schleunes, K. A., The Twisted Road to Auschwitz. Nazi Policy towards German Jews, 1933-9, University of Illinois Press, Urbana, 1990.

Stone, D., Histories of the Holocaust , Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2004.

Thalmann, R. & E. Feinermann, Crystal night, 9-10 November 1938 , Thames and Hudson, London, 1990.

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IvyPanda. (2021, August 6). The Rise of Hitler to Power. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-rise-of-hitler-to-power/

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Bibliography

IvyPanda . "The Rise of Hitler to Power." August 6, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-rise-of-hitler-to-power/.

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• Nazi Germany Structure and Policies
• Hitler’s Speech in Reaction to the Treaty of Versailles
• The Coming of the Third Reich
• World War I and Its Aftermath
• Communism and Nazism
• Review of Colin Powell: My American Journey
• The Life of Imam al-Bukhari
• Analysis of Christopher Columbus Voyage
• Hitler’s Rise to Power
• The Two Lives of Charlemagne

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How American Racism Influenced Hitler

By Alex Ross

“History teaches, but has no pupils,” the Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci wrote. That line comes to mind when I browse in the history section of a bookstore. An adage in publishing is that you can never go wrong with books about Lincoln, Hitler, and dogs; an alternative version names golfing, Nazis, and cats. In Germany, it’s said that the only surefire magazine covers are ones that feature Hitler or sex. Whatever the formula, Hitler and Nazism prop up the publishing business: hundreds of titles appear each year, and the total number runs well into the tens of thousands. On store shelves, they stare out at you by the dozens, their spines steeped in the black-white-and-red of the Nazi flag, their titles barking in Gothic type, their covers studded with swastikas. The back catalogue includes “I Was Hitler’s Pilot,” “I Was Hitler’s Chauffeur,” “I Was Hitler’s Doctor,” “Hitler, My Neighbor,” “Hitler Was My Friend,” “He Was My Chief,” and “Hitler Is No Fool.” Books have been written about Hitler’s youth, his years in Vienna and Munich, his service in the First World War, his assumption of power, his library, his taste in art, his love of film, his relations with women, and his predilections in interior design (“Hitler at Home”).

Why do these books pile up in such unreadable numbers? This may seem a perverse question. The Holocaust is the greatest crime in history, one that people remain desperate to understand. Germany’s plunge from the heights of civilization to the depths of barbarism is an everlasting shock. Still, these swastika covers trade all too frankly on Hitler’s undeniable flair for graphic design. (The Nazi flag was apparently his creation—finalized after “innumerable attempts,” according to “ Mein Kampf .”) Susan Sontag, in her 1975 essay “ Fascinating Fascism ,” declared that the appeal of Nazi iconography had become erotic, not only in S & M circles but also in the wider culture. It was, Sontag wrote, a “response to an oppressive freedom of choice in sex (and, possibly, in other matters), to an unbearable degree of individuality.” Neo-Nazi movements have almost certainly fed on the perpetuation of Hitler’s negative mystique.

Americans have an especially insatiable appetite for Nazi-themed books, films, television shows, documentaries, video games, and comic books. Stories of the Second World War console us with memories of the days before Vietnam, Cambodia, and Iraq, when the United States was the world’s good-hearted superpower, riding to the rescue of a Europe paralyzed by totalitarianism and appeasement. Yet an eerie continuity became visible in the postwar years, as German scientists were imported to America and began working for their former enemies; the resulting technologies of mass destruction exceeded Hitler’s darkest imaginings. The Nazis idolized many aspects of American society: the cult of sport, Hollywood production values, the mythology of the frontier. From boyhood on, Hitler devoured the Westerns of the popular German novelist Karl May . In 1928, Hitler remarked, approvingly, that white settlers in America had “gunned down the millions of redskins to a few hundred thousand.” When he spoke of Lebensraum , the German drive for “living space” in Eastern Europe, he often had America in mind.

Among recent books on Nazism, the one that may prove most disquieting for American readers is James Q. Whitman’s “ Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law ” (Princeton). On the cover, the inevitable swastika is flanked by two red stars. Whitman methodically explores how the Nazis took inspiration from American racism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He notes that, in “Mein Kampf,” Hitler praises America as the one state that has made progress toward a primarily racial conception of citizenship, by “excluding certain races from naturalization.” Whitman writes that the discussion of such influences is almost taboo, because the crimes of the Third Reich are commonly defined as “the nefandum , the unspeakable descent into what we often call ‘radical evil.’ ” But the kind of genocidal hatred that erupted in Germany had been seen before and has been seen since. Only by stripping away its national regalia and comprehending its essential human form do we have any hope of vanquishing it.

The vast literature on Hitler and Nazism keeps circling around a few enduring questions. The first is biographical: How did an Austrian watercolor painter turned military orderly emerge as a far-right German rabble-rouser after the First World War? The second is sociopolitical: How did a civilized society come to embrace Hitler’s extreme ideas? The third has to do with the intersection of man and regime: To what extent was Hitler in control of the apparatus of the Third Reich? All these questions point to the central enigma of the Holocaust, which has variously been interpreted as a premeditated action and as a barbaric improvisation. In our current age of unapologetic racism and resurgent authoritarianism, the mechanics of Hitler’s rise are a particularly pressing matter. For dismantlers of democracy, there is no better exemplar.

Since 1945, the historiography of Nazism has undergone several broad transformations, reflecting political pressures both within Germany and abroad. In the early Cold War period, the emergence of West Germany as a bulwark against the Soviet menace tended to discourage a closer interrogation of German cultural values. The first big postwar biography of Hitler, by the British historian Alan Bullock, published in 1952, depicted him as a charlatan, a manipulator, an “opportunist entirely without principle.” German thinkers often skirted the issue of Hitler, preferring systemic explanations. Hannah Arendt’s “ The Origins of Totalitarianism ” suggested that dictatorial energies draw on the loneliness of the modern subject.

In the sixties and seventies, as Cold War Realpolitik receded and the full horror of the Holocaust sank in, many historians adopted what is known as the Sonderweg thesis—the idea that Germany had followed a “special path” in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, different from that of other Western nations. In this reading, the Germany of the Wilhelmine period had failed to develop along healthy liberal-democratic lines; the inability to modernize politically prepared the ground for Nazism. In Germany, left-oriented scholars like Hans Mommsen used this concept to call for a greater sense of collective responsibility; to focus on Hitler was an evasion, the argument went, implying that Nazism was something that he did to us . Mommsen outlined a “cumulative radicalization” of the Nazi state in which Hitler functioned as a “weak dictator,” ceding policy-making to competing bureaucratic agencies. Abroad, the Sonderweg theory took on a punitive edge, indicting all of German history and culture. William Manchester’s 1968 book, “ The Arms of Krupp ,” ends with a lurid image of “the first grim Aryan savage crouched in his garment of coarse skins, his crude javelin poised, tense and alert, cloaked by night and fog, ready; waiting; and waiting.”

The Sonderweg argument was attacked on multiple fronts. In what became known as the Historikerstreit (“Historians’ Dispute”), right-wing scholars in Germany proposed that the nation end its ritual self-flagellation: they reframed Nazism as a reaction to Bolshevism and recast the Holocaust as one genocide among many. Joachim Fest, who had published the first big German-language biography of Hitler, also stood apart from the Sonderweg school. By portraying the Führer as an all-dominating, quasi-demonic figure, Fest effectively placed less blame on the Weimar Republic conservatives who put Hitler in office. More dubious readings presented Hitlerism as an experiment that modernized Germany and then went awry. Such ideas have lost ground in Germany, at least for now: in mainstream discourse there, it is axiomatic to accept responsibility for the Nazi terror.

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Outside Germany, many critiques of the Sonderweg thesis came from the left. The British scholars Geoff Eley and David Blackbourn, in their 1984 book “ The Peculiarities of German History ,” questioned the “tyranny of hindsight”—the lordly perspective that reduces a complex, contingent sequence of events to an irreversible progression. In the allegedly backward Kaiserreich, Eley and Blackbourn saw various liberalizing forces in motion: housing reform, public-health initiatives, an emboldened press. It was a society riddled with anti-Semitism, yet it witnessed no upheaval on the scale of the Dreyfus Affair or the Tiszaeszlár blood-libel affair in Hungary. Eley and Blackbourn also questioned whether élitist, imperialist Britain should be held up as the modern paragon. The Sonderweg narrative could become an exculpatory fairy tale for other nations: we may make mistakes, but we will never be as bad as the Germans.

Ian Kershaw’s monumental two-volume biography (1998-2000) found a plausible middle ground between “strong” and “weak” images of Hitler in power. With his nocturnal schedule, his dislike of paperwork, and his aversion to dialogue, Hitler was an eccentric executive, to say the least. To make sense of a dictatorship in which the dictator was intermittently absent, Kershaw expounded the concept of “working towards the Führer”: when explicit direction from Hitler was lacking, Nazi functionaries guessed at what he wanted, and often further radicalized his policies. Even as debates about the nature of Hitler’s leadership go back and forth, scholars largely agree that his ideology was more or less fixed from the mid-twenties onward. His two abiding obsessions were violent anti-Semitism and Lebensraum . As early as 1921, he spoke of confining Jews to concentration camps, and in 1923 he contemplated—and, for the moment, rejected—the idea of killing the entire Jewish population. The Holocaust was the result of a hideous syllogism: if Germany were to expand into the East, where millions of Jews lived, those Jews would have to vanish, because Germans could not coexist with them.

People have been trying to fathom Hitler’s psyche for nearly a century. Ron Rosenbaum, in his 1998 book “ Explaining Hitler ,” gives a tour of the more outré theories. It has been suggested, variously, that the key to understanding Hitler is the fact that he had an abusive father; that he was too close to his mother; that he had a Jewish grandfather; that he had encephalitis; that he contracted syphilis from a Jewish prostitute; that he blamed a Jewish doctor for his mother’s death; that he was missing a testicle; that he underwent a wayward hypnosis treatment; that he was gay; that he harbored coprophilic fantasies about his niece; that he was addled by drugs; or—a personal favorite—that his anti-Semitism was triggered by briefly attending school with Ludwig Wittgenstein, in Linz. At the root of this speculative mania is what Rosenbaum calls the “lost safe-deposit box” mentality: with sufficient sleuthing, the mystery can be solved in one Sherlockian stroke.

Academic historians, by contrast, often portray Hitler as a cipher, a nobody. Kershaw has called him a “man without qualities.” Volker Ullrich, a German author and journalist long associated with the weekly Die Zeit , felt the need for a biography that paid more heed to Hitler’s private life. The first volume, “ Hitler: Ascent 1889–1939 ,” was published by Knopf in 2016, in a fluid translation by Jefferson Chase. Ullrich’s Hitler is no tyrant-sorcerer who leads an innocent Germany astray; he is a chameleon, acutely conscious of the image he projects. “The putative void was part of Hitler’s persona, a means of concealing his personal life and presenting himself as a politician who completely identified with his role as leader,” Ullrich writes. Hitler could pose as a cultured gentleman at Munich salons, as a pistol-waving thug at the beer hall, and as a bohemian in the company of singers and actors. He had an exceptional memory that allowed him to assume an air of superficial mastery. His certitude faltered, however, in the presence of women: Ullrich depicts Hitler’s love life as a series of largely unfulfilled fixations. It goes without saying that he was an extreme narcissist lacking in empathy. Much has been made of his love of dogs, but he was cruel to them.

From adolescence onward, Hitler was a dreamer and a loner. Averse to joining groups, much less leading them, he immersed himself in books, music, and art. His ambition to become a painter was hampered by a limited technique and by a telling want of feeling for human figures. When he moved to Vienna, in 1908, he slipped toward the social margins, residing briefly in a homeless shelter and then in a men’s home. In Munich, where he moved in 1913, he eked out a living as an artist and otherwise spent his days in museums and his nights at the opera. He was steeped in Wagner, though he had little apparent grasp of the composer’s psychological intricacies and ambiguities. A sharp portrait of the young Hitler can be found in Thomas Mann’s startling essay “Bruder Hitler,” the English version of which appeared in Esquire in 1939, under the title “ That Man Is My Brother .” Aligning Hitler’s experience with his own, Mann wrote of a “basic arrogance, the basic feeling of being too good for any reasonable, honorable activity—based on what? A vague notion of being reserved for something else, something quite indeterminate, which, if it were named, would cause people to break out laughing.”

The claims of “Mein Kampf” notwithstanding, there is no clear evidence that Hitler harbored strongly anti-Semitic views in his youth or in early adulthood. Indeed, he seems to have had friendly relations with several Jews in Vienna and Munich. This does not mean that he was free of commonplace anti-Jewish prejudice. Certainly, he was a fervent German nationalist. When the First World War commenced, in 1914, he volunteered for the German Army, and acquitted himself well as a soldier. For most of the war, he served as a dispatch runner for his regiment’s commanders. The first trace of a swing to the right comes in a letter from 1915, in which Hitler expressed the hope that the war would bring an end to Germany’s “inner internationalism.”

The historian Thomas Weber, who recounted Hitler’s soldier years in the 2010 book “ Hitler’s First War ,” has now written “ Becoming Hitler: The Making of a Nazi ” (Basic), a study of the postwar metamorphosis. Significantly, Hitler remained in the Army after the Armistice; disgruntled nationalist soldiers tended to join paramilitary groups. Because the Social Democratic parties were dominant at the founding of the Weimar Republic, Hitler was representing a leftist government. He even served the short-lived Bavarian Soviet Republic. It is doubtful, though, that he had active sympathies for the left; he probably stayed in the Army because, as Weber writes, it “provided a raison d’être for his existence.” As late as his thirtieth birthday, in April, 1919, there was no sign of the Führer-to-be.

The unprecedented anarchy of postwar Bavaria helps explain what happened next. Street killings were routine; politicians were assassinated on an almost weekly basis. The left was blamed for the chaos, and anti-Semitism escalated for the same reason: several prominent leaders of the left were Jewish. Then came the Treaty of Versailles, which was signed in June, 1919. Robert Gerwarth, in “ The Vanquished: Why the First World War Failed to End ” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), emphasizes the whiplash effect that the treaty had on the defeated Central Powers. As Gerwarth writes, German and Austrian politicians believed that they had “broken with the autocratic traditions of the past, thus fulfilling the key criteria of Wilson’s Fourteen Points for a ‘just peace.’ ” The harshness of the terms of Versailles belied that idealistic rhetoric.

The day after Germany ratified the treaty, Hitler began attending Army propaganda classes aimed at repressing revolutionary tendencies. These infused him with hard-core anti-capitalist and anti-Semitic ideas. The officer in charge of the program was a tragic figure named Karl Mayr, who later forsook the right wing for the left; he died in Buchenwald, in 1945. Mayr described Hitler as a “tired stray dog looking for a master.” Having noticed Hitler’s gift for public speaking, Mayr installed him as a lecturer and sent him out to observe political activities in Munich. In September, 1919, Hitler came across the German Workers’ Party, a tiny fringe faction. He spoke up at one of its meetings and joined its ranks. Within a few months, he had become the leading orator of the group, which was renamed the National Socialist German Workers’ Party.

If Hitler’s radicalization occurred as rapidly as this—and not all historians agree that it did—the progression bears an unsettling resemblance to stories that we now read routinely in the news, of harmless-seeming, cat-loving suburbanites who watch white-nationalist videos on YouTube and then join a neo-Nazi group on Facebook. But Hitler’s embrace of belligerent nationalism and murderous anti-Semitism is not in itself historically significant; what mattered was his gift for injecting that rhetoric into mainstream discourse. Peter Longerich’s “ Hitler: Biographie ,” a thirteen-hundred-page tome that appeared in Germany in 2015, gives a potent picture of Hitler’s skills as a speaker, organizer, and propagandist. Even those who found his words repulsive were mesmerized by him. He would begin quietly, almost haltingly, testing out his audience and creating suspense. He amused the crowd with sardonic asides and actorly impersonations. The musical structure was one of crescendo toward triumphant rage. Longerich writes, “It was this eccentric style, almost pitiable, unhinged, obviously not well trained, at the same time ecstatically over-the-top, that evidently conveyed to his audience the idea of uniqueness and authenticity.”

Above all, Hitler knew how to project himself through the mass media, honing his messages so that they would penetrate the white noise of politics. He fostered the production of catchy graphics, posters, and slogans; in time, he mastered radio and film. Meanwhile, squads of Brown Shirts brutalized and murdered opponents, heightening the very disorder that Hitler had proposed to cure. His most adroit feat came after the failed Beer Hall Putsch, in 1923, which should have ended his political career. At the trial that followed, Hitler polished his personal narrative, that of a simple soldier who had heard the call of destiny. In prison, he wrote the first part of “Mein Kampf,” in which he completed the construction of his world view.

To many liberal-minded Germans of the twenties, Hitler was a scary but ludicrous figure who did not seem to represent a serious threat. The Weimar Republic stabilized somewhat in the middle of the decade, and the Nazi share of the vote languished in the low single-digit figures. The economic misery of the late twenties and early thirties provided another opportunity, which Hitler seized. Benjamin Carter Hett deftly summarizes this dismal period in “ The Death of Democracy: Hitler’s Rise to Power and the Downfall of the Weimar Republic ” (Henry Holt). Conservatives made the gargantuan mistake of seeing Hitler as a useful tool for rousing the populace. They also undermined parliamentary democracy, flouted regional governments, and otherwise set the stage for the Nazi state. The left, meanwhile, was divided against itself. At Stalin’s urging, many Communists viewed the Social Democrats, not the Nazis, as the real enemy—the “social fascists.” The media got caught up in pop-culture distractions; traditional liberal newspapers were losing circulation. Valiant journalists like Konrad Heiden tried to correct the barrage of Nazi propaganda but found the effort futile, because, as Heiden wrote, “the refutation would be heard, perhaps believed, and definitely forgotten again.”

Hett refrains from poking the reader with too many obvious contemporary parallels, but he knew what he was doing when he left the word “German” out of his title. On the book’s final page, he lays his cards on the table: “Thinking about the end of Weimar democracy in this way—as the result of a large protest movement colliding with complex patterns of elite self-interest, in a culture increasingly prone to aggressive mythmaking and irrationality—strips away the exotic and foreign look of swastika banners and goose-stepping Stormtroopers. Suddenly, the whole thing looks close and familiar.” Yes, it does.

What set Hitler apart from most authoritarian figures in history was his conception of himself as an artist-genius who used politics as his métier. It is a mistake to call him a failed artist; for him, politics and war were a continuation of art by other means. This is the focus of Wolfram Pyta’s “ Hitler: Der Künstler als Politiker und Feldherr ” (“The Artist as Politician and Commander”), one of the most striking recent additions to the literature. Although the aestheticizing of politics is hardly a new topic—Walter Benjamin discussed it in the nineteen-thirties, as did Mann—Pyta pursues the theme at magisterial length, showing how Hitler debased the Romantic cult of genius to incarnate himself as a transcendent leader hovering above the fray. Goebbels’s propaganda harped on this motif; his diaries imply that he believed it. “Adolf Hitler, I love you because you are both great and simple,” he wrote.

The true artist does not compromise. Defying skeptics and mockers, he imagines the impossible. Such is the tenor of Hitler’s infamous “prophecy” of the destruction of the European Jews, in 1939: “I have often been a prophet, and have generally been laughed at. . . . I believe that the formerly resounding laughter of Jewry in Germany has now choked up in its throat. Today, I want to be a prophet again—if the international Jewish financiers inside 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.” Scholars have long debated when the decision to carry out the Final Solution was made. Most now believe that the Holocaust was an escalating series of actions, driven by pressure both from above and from below. Yet no order was really necessary. Hitler’s “prophecy” was itself an oblique command. In the summer of 1941, as hundreds of thousands of Jews and Slavs were being killed during the invasion of the Soviet Union, Goebbels recalled Hitler remarking that the prophecy was being fulfilled in an “almost uncanny” fashion. This is the language of a connoisseur admiring a masterpiece. Such intellectual atrocities led Theodor W. Adorno to declare that, after Auschwitz, to write poetry is barbaric.

Hitler and Goebbels were the first relativizers of the Holocaust, the first purveyors of false equivalence. “Concentration camps were not invented in Germany,” Hitler said in 1941. “It is the English who are their inventors, using this institution to gradually break the backs of other nations.” The British had operated camps in South Africa, the Nazis pointed out. Party propagandists similarly highlighted the sufferings of Native Americans and Stalin’s slaughter in the Soviet Union. In 1943, Goebbels triumphantly broadcast news of the Katyn Forest massacre, in the course of which the Soviet secret police killed more than twenty thousand Poles. (Goebbels wanted to show footage of the mass graves, but generals overruled him.) Nazi sympathizers carry on this project today, alternately denying the Holocaust and explaining it away.

The magnitude of the abomination almost forbids that it be mentioned in the same breath as any other horror. Yet the Holocaust has unavoidable international dimensions—lines of influence, circles of complicity, moments of congruence. Hitler’s “scientific anti-Semitism,” as he called it, echoed the French racial theorist Arthur de Gobineau and anti-Semitic intellectuals who normalized venomous language during the Dreyfus Affair. The British Empire was Hitler’s ideal image of a master race in dominant repose. “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” a Russian forgery from around 1900, fuelled the Nazis’ paranoia. The Armenian genocide of 1915-16 encouraged the belief that the world community would care little about the fate of the Jews. Just before the outbreak of the Second World War, Hitler spoke of the planned mass murder of Poles and asked, “Who, after all, is today speaking about the destruction of the Armenians?” The Nazis found collaborators in almost every country that they invaded. In one Lithuanian town, a crowd cheered while a local man clubbed dozens of Jewish people to death. He then stood atop the corpses and played the Lithuanian anthem on an accordion. German soldiers looked on, taking photographs.

The mass killings by Stalin and Hitler existed in an almost symbiotic relationship, the one giving license to the other, in remorseless cycles of revenge. Large-scale deportations of Jews from the countries of the Third Reich followed upon Stalin’s deportation of the Volga Germans. Reinhard Heydrich, one of the chief planners of the Holocaust, thought that, once the Soviet Union had been defeated, the Jews of Europe could be left to die in the Gulag. The most dangerous claim made by right-wing historians during the Historikerstreit was that Nazi terror was a response to Bolshevik terror, and was therefore to some degree excusable. One can, however, keep the entire monstrous landscape in view without minimizing the culpability of perpetrators on either side. This was the achievement of Timothy Snyder’s profoundly disturbing 2010 book, “ Bloodlands ,” which seems to fix cameras in spots across Eastern Europe, recording wave upon wave of slaughter.

As for Hitler and America, the issue goes beyond such obvious suspects as Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh. Whitman’s “Hitler’s American Model,” with its comparative analysis of American and Nazi race law, joins such previous studies as Carroll Kakel’s “ The American West and the Nazi East ,” a side-by-side discussion of Manifest Destiny and Lebensraum; and Stefan Kühl’s “ The Nazi Connection ,” which describes the impact of the American eugenics movement on Nazi thinking. This literature is provocative in tone and, at times, tendentious, but it engages in a necessary act of self-examination, of a kind that modern Germany has exemplified.

The Nazis were not wrong to cite American precedents. Enslavement of African-Americans was written into the U.S. Constitution. Thomas Jefferson spoke of the need to “eliminate” or “extirpate” Native Americans. In 1856, an Oregonian settler wrote, “Extermination, however unchristianlike it may appear, seems to be the only resort left for the protection of life and property.” General Philip Sheridan spoke of “annihilation, obliteration, and complete destruction.” To be sure, others promoted more peaceful—albeit still repressive—policies. The historian Edward B. Westermann, in “ Hitler’s Ostkrieg and the Indian Wars ” (Oklahoma), concludes that, because federal policy never officially mandated the “physical annihilation of the Native populations on racial grounds or characteristics,” this was not a genocide on the order of the Shoah. The fact remains that between 1500 and 1900 the Native population of U.S. territories dropped from many millions to around two hundred thousand.

America’s knack for maintaining an air of robust innocence in the wake of mass death struck Hitler as an example to be emulated. He made frequent mention of the American West in the early months of the Soviet invasion. The Volga would be “our Mississippi,” he said. “Europe—and not America—will be the land of unlimited possibilities.” Poland, Belarus, and Ukraine would be populated by pioneer farmer-soldier families. Autobahns would cut through fields of grain. The present occupants of those lands—tens of millions of them—would be starved to death. At the same time, and with no sense of contradiction, the Nazis partook of a long-standing German romanticization of Native Americans. One of Goebbels’s less propitious schemes was to confer honorary Aryan status on Native American tribes, in the hope that they would rise up against their oppressors.

Jim Crow laws in the American South served as a precedent in a stricter legal sense. Scholars have long been aware that Hitler’s regime expressed admiration for American race law, but they have tended to see this as a public-relations strategy—an “everybody does it” justification for Nazi policies. Whitman, however, points out that if these comparisons had been intended solely for a foreign audience they would not have been buried in hefty tomes in Fraktur type. “Race Law in the United States,” a 1936 study by the German lawyer Heinrich Krieger, attempts to sort out inconsistencies in the legal status of nonwhite Americans. Krieger concludes that the entire apparatus is hopelessly opaque, concealing racist aims behind contorted justifications. Why not simply say what one means? This was a major difference between American and German racism.

American eugenicists made no secret of their racist objectives, and their views were prevalent enough that F. Scott Fitzgerald featured them in “ The Great Gatsby .” (The cloddish Tom Buchanan, having evidently read Lothrop Stoddard’s 1920 tract “ The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy ,” says, “The idea is if we don’t look out the white race will be—will be utterly submerged.”) California’s sterilization program directly inspired the Nazi sterilization law of 1934. There are also sinister, if mostly coincidental, similarities between American and German technologies of death. In 1924, the first execution by gas chamber took place, in Nevada. In a history of the American gas chamber, Scott Christianson states that the fumigating agent Zyklon-B, which was licensed to American Cyanamid by the German company I. G. Farben, was considered as a lethal agent but found to be impractical. Zyklon-B was, however, used to disinfect immigrants as they crossed the border at El Paso—a practice that did not go unnoticed by Gerhard Peters, the chemist who supplied a modified version of Zyklon-B to Auschwitz. Later, American gas chambers were outfitted with a chute down which poison pellets were dropped. Earl Liston, the inventor of the device, explained, “Pulling a lever to kill a man is hard work. Pouring acid down a tube is easier on the nerves, more like watering flowers.” Much the same method was introduced at Auschwitz, to relieve stress on S.S. guards.

When Hitler praised American restrictions on naturalization, he had in mind the Immigration Act of 1924, which imposed national quotas and barred most Asian people altogether. For Nazi observers, this was evidence that America was evolving in the right direction, despite its specious rhetoric about equality. The Immigration Act, too, played a facilitating role in the Holocaust, because the quotas prevented thousands of Jews, including Anne Frank and her family, from reaching America. In 1938, President Roosevelt called for an international conference on the plight of European refugees; this was held in Évian-les-Bains, France, but no substantive change resulted. The German Foreign Office, in a sardonic reply, found it “astounding” that other countries would decry Germany’s treatment of Jews and then decline to admit them.

Hundreds of thousands of Americans died fighting Nazi Germany. Still, bigotry toward Jews persisted, even toward Holocaust survivors. General George Patton criticized do-gooders who “believe that the Displaced person is a human being, which he is not, and this applies particularly to the Jews who are lower than animals.” Leading Nazi scientists had it better. Brian Crim’s “ Our Germans: Project Paperclip and the National Security State ” (Johns Hopkins) reviews the shady history of Wernher von Braun and his colleagues from the V-2 program. When Braun was captured, in 1945, he realized that the Soviets would become the next archenemy of the American military-industrial complex, and cannily promoted the idea of a high-tech weapons program to ward off the Bolshevik menace. He was able to reconstitute most of his operation Stateside, minus the slave labor. Records were airbrushed; de-Nazification procedures were bypassed (they were considered “demoralizing”); immigration was expedited. J. Edgar Hoover became concerned that Jewish obstructionists in the State Department were asking too many questions about the scientists’ backgrounds. Senator Styles Bridges proposed that the State Department needed a “first-class cyanide fumigating job.”

These chilling points of contact are little more than footnotes to the history of Nazism. But they tell us rather more about modern America. Like a colored dye coursing through the bloodstream, they expose vulnerabilities in the national consciousness. The spread of white-supremacist propaganda on the Internet is the latest chapter. As Zeynep Tufekci recently observed , in the Times , YouTube is a superb vehicle for the circulation of such content, its algorithms guiding users toward ever more inflammatory material. She writes, “Given its billion or so users, YouTube may be one of the most powerful radicalizing instruments of the 21st century.” When I did a search for “Hitler” on YouTube the other day, I was first shown a video labelled “Best Hitler Documentary in color !”—the British production “ Hitler in Color .” A pro-Hitler remark was featured atop the comments, and soon, thanks to Autoplay, I was viewing contributions from such users as CelticAngloPress and SoldatdesReiches.

In 1990, Vanity Fair reported that Donald Trump once kept a book of Hitler’s speeches by his bed. When Trump was asked about it, he said, “If I had these speeches, and I am not saying that I do, I would never read them.” Since Trump entered politics, he has repeatedly been compared to Hitler, not least by neo-Nazis. Although some resemblances can be found—at times, Trump appears to be emulating Hitler’s strategy of cultivating rivalries among those under him, and his rallies are cathartic rituals of racism, xenophobia, and self-regard—the differences are obvious and stark. For one thing, Hitler had more discipline. What is worth pondering is how a demagogue of Hitler’s malign skill might more effectively exploit flaws in American democracy. He would certainly have at his disposal craven right-wing politicians who are worthy heirs to Hindenburg, Brüning, Papen, and Schleicher. He would also have millions of citizens who acquiesce in inconceivably potent networks of corporate surveillance and control.

The artist-politician of the future will not bask in the antique aura of Wagner and Nietzsche. He is more likely to take inspiration from the newly minted myths of popular culture. The archetype of the ordinary kid who discovers that he has extraordinary powers is a familiar one from comic books and superhero movies, which play on the adolescent feeling that something is profoundly wrong with the world and that a magic weapon might banish the spell. With one stroke, the inconspicuous outsider assumes a position of supremacy, on a battlefield of pure good against pure evil. For most people, such stories remain fantasy, a means of embellishing everyday life. One day, though, a ruthless dreamer, a loner who has a “vague notion of being reserved for something else,” may attempt to turn metaphor into reality. He might be out there now, cloaked by the blue light of a computer screen, ready, waiting. ♦

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Essay: Adolf Hitler

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Adolf Hitler was born on April 20, 1889 in Braunau am Inn, Austria. His parents were Alois Hitler and Klara Polzl. Adolf was the fourth child out of six. Three years after he was born, the family relocated from Austria to Germany. Typically, Adolf Hitler and his father did not agree; the fine arts fascinated Adolf, but his father disapproved of it. Adolf Hitler was profoundly affected by the death of his younger brother, Edmund. Adolf Hitler also displayed a curiosity in German nationalism at a young age. His mother permitted him to quit school two years following his father’s death in 1903. After he abandoned school, he moved to Vienna. Adolf was an aspiring watercolor painter in Vienna. He applied two times to the Academy of Fine Arts and was rejected both times. Hitler served in the German military during World War I. Although Adolf was an Austrian citizen, he was still authorized to serve in the German army. He received the Iron Cross First Class and the Black Wound Badge after World War I. Adolf Hitler did not take likeness to the fact that the Germans had capitulated in 1918 during the First World War. Adolf Hitler began to adopt various anti-Semitic, nationalist, and anti-Marxist ideas whilst being an associate of the German Worker’s Party. While being involved with the German Worker’s Party, Adolf Hitler created the notorious swastika. Adolf Hitler started to compose speeches opposed to the Treaty of Versailles, Jews, and additional groups. An abundant amount of the history of Germany is revolved around Hitler and the Nazi Party, but it is not the respectable kind of history. The Nazi Party was primarily designated as the “German Workers’ Party” which was established via Anton Drexter and Karl Harrer. The party was to support nationalism in Germany; they additionally believed the Treaty of Versailles was a liability to Germany. The war could have been resolved without the treaty, but the party was not on the radar of anyone until Hitler joined it. He was an extremely charismatic man, and he brought numerous new members in with his speeches. The Jews were the reason the war was lost, or at least this is what Hitler said. Since the Jews were only an insignificant part of the population, this gained him several supporters. Quickly the party was renamed the “Nationalist Socialist German Workers’ Party”. This name is frequently abbreviated to the Nazi Party. As time went by, Hitler got more admired and more popular, and as he got recognized, so did the Nazi Party. The country was in a fragile state and needed a dependable leader like they assumed Hitler was, and he acquired leadership of the Nazi party in July of 1921. This party was everything Hitler needed to grab the publics’ attention, and he began ascending the political ladder very quickly. The Nazi Party tried to achieve power of Germany resulting in Hitler getting five years in prison; this is where he composed his autobiography. In elections for leadership over Germany, the Nazi Party didn’t do extremely well, and their greatest percent of the ballots was 37.3%. The reason that the Nazis had considerably supplementary dominance was because of their muscle power, but they didn’t have as many supporters as certain other parties might have had. Instead of coming to power by the right technique, they forced their way to the top. Hitler had constantly been a little different, but nobody would have ever supposed it would lead to what transpires in the conclusion. When Hitler and the Nazi party gained power over Germany on January 30th, 1933, they didn’t have complete control, but he would obtain it by March. The speed at which he gained control over the entire country was impractical. Hitler’s military training assisted him a lot in the campaigning process, and his communication with the public won over much of the population. His conventions for his campaign were more like military processions than anything else because they were prearranged, coordinated, and proficient. When he communicated to the citizens, he spoke with passion and authority in every sentence. One of the main significant part of his party was the SA; also identified as the Stormtroopers. They were an assembly of men, usually discharged from the military, that functioned to protect Hitler. Instead of doing just this, they seemed to disrupt many of the other parties’ gatherings, but there was nothing the other parties could do about it. They were being attacked by Hitler and the Stormtroopers, but they were far stronger than additional parties. For instance, Hitler was sent to prison for his part in a mob occurrence on additional political subject in September of 1921. Germany, being in such a weak state, needed a strong, dependable leader, and they understood was Hitler. The Stormtroopers were just a single fragment of Hitler’s party that disrupted the harmony, but it was probably the ultimate one. The SA were comparable to a gang of individuals that terrorized additional political parties and inhabitants. They started out as predominantly veterans, but quickly there were more and more ferocious thugs in the assortment with them. Hitler was trying to accomplish being chancellor by intimidating several of the other parties, and I suppose it operated somewhat. The single reason Hitler gained control over the country was because of the Jews, and without them, he would have never been chancellor. After the war, the people of Germany desired somebody to blame for the devastation of their country. Instead of accusing themselves, they listened to Hitler and blamed the Jews, but in honesty, the Jews had nothing to do with it. They were the minority of the population, and they received the blame. When the Nazis came to power, the Holocaust started along with the downfall and the introduction to the most fatal battle in human history. The word Holocaust originally meant sacrificial offers burned on an altar, but since 1945, the term has taken on a horrific new meaning. The Holocaust entailed the genocide of 6 million Jews and other minority groups by the German Nazis throughout the Second World War. The Nazi ruler Adolf Hitler saw Jews as racially inferior and a threat to the German purity, although his reasoning and roots of his ideas are unclear. One of the leading causes of World War II is the Holocaust. After centuries of anti-Judaism which led to anti-Semitism, the Holocaust officially started when Adolf Hitler came to power as chancellor of Germany on January 30, 1933. The first of the concentration camps opened in Dachau in March 1933. Within four months, an estimated 27,000 people were held in custody in the camps. Many concentrations camps were built and followed therefore after, with a total of 20,000 German camps established. By this time, Jews comprised one percent of the overall German population. Throughout the following six years, the Nazis began controlling and rejecting non-Aryans from civil service, disbanding Jewish owned businesses and organizations. A set of rules called the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, established Jews and German blood and forbade marriage between the two. The Jews then became targets and objectives for persecution. This climaxed in Kristallnacht in November 1938, where Jewish buildings were ransacked and demolished. After Germany invaded Poland in 1939, ghettos were established in numerous Polish cities. The ghettos integrated the Jews and effectively imprisoned them. The living circumstances in the restricted ghettos were atrocious, and illness, hunger and congestion killed the majority. The Germans expelled Jews from all over Europe to these ghettos. Meanwhile, opening in the autumn of 1939, Nazi officials chose approximately 70,000 Germans institutionalized with mental illness or debilities to be gassed to death in the Euthanasia Program. After important German spiritual leaders protested, Hitler ended the program in August 1941. Killings of the disabled persisted in secrecy, and by only four years around 275,000 people deemed handicapped had been exterminated. In retrospection, the Euthanasia Program operated as a pilot for the Holocaust. Beginning in 1941, all Jews in German territory were distinguished with a yellow star badge. As more Jews were deported to camps, experimentations with mass destruction had been continuing at the concentration camp of Auschwitz, near Krakow. The first of the mass gassings began near Lublin at the camp of Belzec. Gassing processes by vans and chambers became popular after the Einsatzgruppe members made complaints of agony after shooting large numbers of women and children, plus it was cheaper. These mobile killings entities, Einsatzgruppen, gassed mostly Jews, Roma, and the mentally ill. Zyklon B is infamous for its use in the gas chambers at Auschwitz and other camps. At Auschwitz only, more than 2 million people were slaughtered, and as many as 12,000 Jews were killed daily. The majority of the world was affected by World War II, especially the West. The war began September 1, 1939, and the concluding date from World War II was September 2, 1945. During these years an overwhelming multitude of actions happened in the West. Throughout the duration of the war, the world was divided between the axis powers, which were Germany, Italy, and Japan. Many nations fought against the axis power such as, Lebanon, San Marino, Belgium, Egypt, Liberia, Saudi Arabia, Bolivia, El Salvador, Luxembourg, South Africa, Brazil, Ethiopia, Mexico, Soviet Union, Canada, France, Mongolian People\’s Republic, Syria, Chile, Great Britain, and the Netherlands. Whilst these nations fought against the axis powers a plethora of events were occurring in the Middle East during World War II. Egypt, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine all had a role during this duration of time and were all affected by the events that the war brought about. Although there was much fighting in other parts of the world, the Middle East countries during World War II were busy being pro axis or neutral. This meant that the countries were either coinciding with the axis powers or they had been taken over by a higher power. For example, Egypt was pro axis before the war, but became neutral due to King Farouk conceding to British command over Egypt’s government. Like Egypt, Iraq was pro axis, and their pro axis sentiment was tied to anti-British. This did not sit well with the British and they invaded Iraq and occupied it until 1947. Since the British were occupying Iraq, their army could station and transit troops through Iraq, which was an exceptionally, outstanding advantage to have during the war. Syria, on the other hand, was governed by the Vichy forces after the fall of France. Once France became free, Syria and Lebanon were supposed to be free too, due to an arrangement that had been made. It was hard to accomplish freeing Syria and Lebanon. The power to carry off such a reoccupation was difficult for France, so the independence of Syria and Lebanon was not recognized till the end of the war. Meanwhile in Palestine, Jews were arriving in waves in the hope of fleeing the Nazis. Military organizations such as Haganah, IZL, and Stern Gang were very active in the region. Illegal immigrations of Jews into Palestine were often carried out with these military organizations’ assistance. Immigration restrictions on the White Paper of 1939 were violated due to the wave of Jews arriving illegally in Palestine. The move of the Jews paved the way for the creation of Israel. Palestine was then set up to become a battlefield due to the immigration of the Jews. Not only were places in the Middle East being occupied, but locations around the region of the West began to be occupied by Germans. Austria, Poland, France, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, Luxembourg, Belgium, and parts of the Soviet Union were only a few of the places in the West occupied by the Germans during World War II. The occupation of these countries was a horrid time, but the liberation and end of these occupations was an occasion that would be forever remembered in history to come. On March 12, 1938, Austria became the first nation that was annexed by Nazi Germany. Austrian Nazis conspired several times to capture the Austrian government and connect with Nazi Germany. Austria’s Chancellor Kurt von Schuschnigg met with Adolf Hitler with hopes of confirming Austria’s independence, but returned with Austrian Nazis added to his cabinet. Schuschnigg called for a vote on annexation, but before anything could take place, Schuschnigg gave in to the pressure and resigned shortly after. He pleaded for his country not to resist any German advances into the country. The following day, German troops accompanied by Hitler entered Austria. Hitler allotted a Nazi government to rule and the annexation was proclaimed. Austria continued as a federal state of Germany until the conclusion of the War; the Allies declared the Anschluss void and reinstated Austria. By the summer of the same year of annexation, the Mauthausen camp was established, it was the main Nazi camp in the country. The Germans entitled the camp a category III camp, representing the harsh regimen and punishment. Thousands of prisoners were worked to death because of the harsh punishments including forced labor work like carrying heavy solid stone slabs up 186 steps near the camp. On November 1938, Kristallnacht or Night of Broken Glass, began when synagogues in the capital were destroyed and burned. Jewish buildings and businesses were ravaged and vandalized, and then the Jews were taken to the Dachau or Buchenwald camps. The reaction external to Germany on Kristallnacht was astonishment and outrage, making a storm of negative publicity in tabloids and among radio reporters that attended to isolate Hitler\’s Germany from the civilized nations and deteriorate any pro-Nazi attitudes in those countries. Following Kristallnacht, the United States withdrew its ambassador permanently. Another of the countries mentioned that was occupied by Germany was Poland. Poland had many difficulties withstanding their country because so many of their neighboring countries had succumbed to war. With their weak economy, Poland was unable to protect their country from invaders. Germany and the Soviet Union had a non-aggression treaty towards each other, but the countries became divided in 1939. After this happened, Germany attacked the Soviet Union during the summer of 1941 in order to become the sole occupier of Poland. Many people want to blame Germany for their cruelty towards the Polish Jews and other citizens, but the Soviet Union also was involved in abusing the citizens of Poland, who they were occupying over at this time. Although many Jews were killed in concentration camps, there were also many casualties that resulted from the horrible mentality of the Germans and Soviets. About 5.7 million Polish citizens were killed by the German occupiers, and only one hundred and fifty thousand Polish were murdered by the Soviet Union during their few years as occupiers. Clearly, the Germans were extremely more abusive than the Soviets, but any death is worthy of punishment. The Polish showed their resistance by organizing uprisings and riots to show their imprisoners that they were tired of being abused emotionally and physically. These uprisings include the ones in Warsaw where both the Ghetto citizens and the non-Jewish people rose up against their oppressors. The uprising of the Warsaw Ghetto began on April 19, 1943 when the inhabitants refused to obey their orders, and in retaliation, police commander SS-Brigadeführer Jürgen Stroop ordered the burning of the entire Ghetto. The last German troops were expelled from Poland thanks to the Red Army in March 1945, weeks before the final allied victory over Europe. France was another area occupied by Nazi Germany. The end of their occupation would not come until the summer of 1944. France was liberated by the successful allied operations called Overlord and Dragoon. Czechoslovakia was another country that became occupied by Germany in World War II, but the country was actually handed over to Germany peacefully. The Munich Pact was signed by, Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, French Premier Edouard Daladier, and British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain. The Munich Pact was an agreement that handed over a portion of Czechoslovakia that contained voluminous amounts of German speakers, and this section of Czechoslovakia is what the German military began occupying in 1938. In March of 1938, the complete and total conquest of Czechoslovakia became Hitler’s next ambition. During late March, Czechoslovakia succumbed to German occupation because they were weak after the annexation of the German part of the country called the Sudetenland. The Germans rule would come to an end following the March 1945 Rhine Rivers crossing that precipitated the U.S. Army’s involvement with Czechoslovakia. Finally, the Czechoslovakians were freed after six long years of occupation in April of 1945. In 1938, France joined Great Britain in an attempt to appease Nazi aggression. France signed the Munich Pact and helped give Germany “permission” to invade the Sudeten territories of Czechoslovakia. It was soon clear that this attempt at appeasement failed. After Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, France declared war. France\’s war against Germany did not last long. On June 22, 1940, France surrendered to Germany. France was occupied by the Germans until 1944. June 6 of that year was D-day. A massive Allied force invaded the beaches of Normandy. D-Day, also referred to as “The Invasion of Normandy”, is considered by some to be the turning point of the twentieth century. D-Day occurred on June 6, 1944 when troops of mostly American, British, and Canadian origin landed on the beaches of Normandy, France. Originally, D-Day was set for June 5, but had to be postponed because of inclement weather. In the military, the phrase “D-Day” simply represents a day of which an operation or combat attack is intended to transpire; however, the most acclaimed D-Day would be the Invasion of Normandy. The Allied troops landed on the beaches of Normandy with the intent of liberating France and the rest of northwest Europe from German occupation. There were 156,000 soldiers who landed on the coastline, but by the end of the invasion ten thousand soldiers were either killed, wounded, or declared missing. D-Day was and continues to be the largest amphibious assault in all of history-virtually flooding the coast of Normandy with ships. An amphibious assault is an offensive military operation using naval ships to deliver the troops to the hostile shore or landing beach. The codename for this invasion of France was “Operation Overlord”. The overall commander for this operation was American General Dwight Eisenhower. Fifty miles of coastline in Normandy, France were used for this assault with the coastline on which the soldiers landed divided into five sections. The code names for these sectors of coastline were: Omaha Beach, Utah Beach, Sword Beach, Juno Beach, and Gold Beach. Many lives were lost on these beaches, over three thousand fatalities at Omaha beach alone. Operation Overlord ended on August 19, 1944 when the Allies crossed the River Seine. In total, 425,000 troops, Allied and German were either killed, wounded, or missing by the end of D-day invasion. Another country that became occupied by Germans was Denmark. Denmark was conquered by Germany on April 9, 1940, although Hitler was not interested in the country itself but more so for control and its air bases for future attacks on Norway. Also, Denmark was to be together with Germany to prevent an Allied invasion. Denmark was relatively easy to take over and was not a challenge, considering the soldiers’ defense lasting only a few hours and then quickly surrendered. Denmark’s government negotiated with the German invasion forces on easy terms. Because the Danish were easy to cooperate with and Germany\’s absence of interest in Denmark, the occupation went quite serenely at first. The administration stayed in office and government remained mainly in Danish hands, although the police were obliged to accommodate with the Germans. Although Denmark’s population was obviously against the occupation, there was a need to handle the condition in a pragmatic manner. This era, branded the “politics of cooperation”, continued until 1943. One of the great successes out of the peaceful collaboration was that the Danish Jews were not mistreated or wronged throughout this time. By 1943, Denmark had become dissatisfied with the Germans and turned to strikes. The Germans in response tried to impose the death penalty but failed when the Danish government refused. On August 28, the cooperation between the two countries ended, and by October all the Jews were to be deported. This was ultimately prevented when the Jewish populations were transported to Sweden, where they were safe. When the statement of freedom was broadcasted on the radio on May 4, 1945, people everywhere assembled into the streets waving their countries’ flags. Denmark was liberated by the British forces by the following day, but shortly after, the island of Bornholm was occupied by the Russian Army and not liberated until 1946. Austria was occupied by Soviet and American forces during April and May 1945. The Holocaust lasted until 1945, where liberations of the camps slowly removed Hitler from authority. By the culmination of the War, there were an estimated 50,000 to 100,000 survivors who lived in occupied Europe. Since many survivors saw it impossible to return home, the Allies powers created what is present day Israel as a permanent homeland for Jewish survivors in 1948. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republic, or U.S.S.R. for short, became involved in World War II when it was invaded by Nazi Germany on June 22,1941. Ironically, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany had signed a peace agreement in 1939 promising to avoid conflict. In this pact, called the German-Soviet Nonagression Pact, they agreed to not attack each other when World War II began and for the next ten years. Articles have stated that the reason Soviet leader Joseph Stalin signed the Nonagression Pact was to keep his nation on peaceful terms with Germany, and in addition, give his country time to make its military larger and more powerful. Adolf Hitler signed this pact for the Germans because he wanted to assure that the Germans could invade Poland unopposed. The pact was broken in June of 1941 when Nazi forces invaded the Soviet Union. This secret military offensive, known by the codename Operation Barbarossa, covered a distance of two thousand miles. The Germans had a strong, reliable, and vast army for this invasion and they were extremely confident they could defeat the Soviets with ease. However, they were proven wrong. The inability of the Germans to defeat the Soviet Union in this invasion marked a critical juncture in World War II, as the Soviet triumph weakened the German military effort and rallied the Allies. In July of 1942, the Soviet Union was yet again invaded by Nazi Germany in the Battle of Stalingrad. The Russians were determined to defend the city of Stalingrad because it served as a vital industrial and transportation center. This battle stopped the German advancement into the Soviet Union, and was a catalyst that turned the tide of the war in favor of the Allied forces. This battle was one of the bloodiest in Russian history, and is regarded as one of that country’s greatest military victories. Belgium was also an additional country that became occupied by Nazi Germany. With all the suffering that transpired in World War I, King Leopold III and the citizens of Belgium desired to be left out of World War II. Belgium was unbiased until the Germans captured their country. On May 10, 1940, Belgium was imprisoned by the Nazis. The citizens of Belgium resisted confinement; they were inexorably defeated. The Jews began to be persecuted in Belgium due to the invasion of Germans. Belgium was captured to be a location for the Germans to operate. Since Belgium borders France, Germany assumed that being situated in Belgium would provide an improved opportunity to invade. Saboteurs destroyed major railways that led from Germany to France. Belgium had a colony in the Congo of Africa where it had access to masses of uranium. Belgium gave a quantity of this uranium to the United States for the manufacturing of an atomic bomb. In 1944, Belgium was liberated from the Germans. The imprisonment by the Germans traumatized Belgium as a country along with the residents. Germany halted exports of coke to the Luxembourg steel industry which made Luxembourg slightly hostile. Although Luxembourg was impartial, the country was captured by the Nazis on May 10, 1940. Germany captured Luxembourg to have an additional base to maneuver off of; this would enable a better opportunity to attack France. The royal family and the government evacuated to Canada, so Gustav Simon took control over the government in Luxembourg. He ridded the Luxembourg citizens of anything that was French. Citizens were informed to not use French greetings any longer. People were not permitted to wear French berets. Several Jews were extradited to Spain and France, but those countries rejected them too. Other Jews were relocated to concentration camps. The Germans cleared all Jews out of Luxembourg. The additional non-Jewish citizens went about their daily existence. They sustained their routines and anticipated every day to be liberated. Luxembourg was liberated on September 10, 1944. The citizens and the country were overwhelmed by the Germans capture and interrogation. Switzerland was a neutral nation for both World War I and World War II. This allowed them to concern themselves with protecting their own country and inhabitants, while also serving as a neutral territory. Several historians claim that Switzerland remains prodigious because they allowed their country to be a safe haven for refugees, but in truth, the Swiss government laid out many restrictions towards the refugees and a countless amount were turned away. A person could not find refuge in Switzerland unless they were under personal threat because of their political activities; refugees could not enter Switzerland if they were escaping discrimination over their race, religion, or ethnicity, but eventually, Switzerland gave 300,000 refugees access to their designated refugee areas. They accepted about 27,000 Jews, and this act saved numerous lives. It seems much happened in the West during World War II. The Middle East had a wide assortment of conflicts and the end of many occupations in the West took place. In Egypt, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine, many exploits occurred. The end of occupations in countries inhabiting the West had a lot of fighting, killing, and freedoms. Without everything that occurred in the West, history today would be forever changed. Hitler became chairman of the German Worker’s Party in 1921. Adolf Hitler and a Nazi paramilitary organization stormed a communal conference in a beer hall announcing that a novel government was emergent. In conclusion of his actions, Hitler was apprehended afterwards and placed in a penitentiary for a year where he composed the earliest volume of his book, Mein Kampf. This book illustrates Hitler’s strategies to convert Germany into a one race nation. In 1932, Hitler competed for presidency two times. He lost both times to Paul von Hindenburg. After coming in second place, Hitler was designated chancellor. By the uprisings, Hitler and his organization had performed, the other parties were completely intimidated, and on July 14, 1933, Hitler’s Nazi Party was the only officially permitted political party in Germany. An original decree was established stating that the presidential powers were now coalesced with the chancellor powers, so when Hindenburg died, Hitler obtained unmitigated power. The Night of the Long Knives occurred on June 30, 1934 which was the assassination of people that Hitler considered would be a threat in the future. Adolf Hitler endorsed anti-smoking campaigns. He believed in eating healthy; people’s bodies should remain unpolluted. He did not imbibe alcohol or consume meat. Adolf commenced segregating people by constructing innovative regulations where Jews could not marry non-Jews. Persecutions and exterminations transpired throughout the Holocaust if an individual happened to be Jewish, Polish, a communist, a homosexual, a Jehovah’s Witness, or a trade unionist. There are rumors about Hitler’s religion. Some people state he had Jewish or African background. One of the stories was that his father was the illegitimate child of a woman that was a maid for a wealthy Jewish man. In 1939, Germans attempted the blitzkrieg against Poland first. They corroborated it would succeed; then it was executed on Belgium, the Netherlands, and France in 1940. The residents in Germany during World War II had grocery allowances. With the provisions being rationed, various people had more victuals during rationing than they had previously. There was a scarcity of petroleum in Germany. People were permitted to utilize warm water twice a week to manage the quantity of fuel depleted. Soap was an additional article that was limited; furthermore, there was no toilet paper. The black market thrived during World War II, since denizens were exchanging regulated merchandise. In September 1940, children were advised to evacuate Berlin, but the majority did not vacate. Germans wanted women to have more children, so the population could proliferate. Additionally, Germans exhorted women to labor more, but the Germans were ineffective. After World War II, the nation and the populace of Germany were devastated. It took an extensive period for Germany to recuperate from the downfall of the nation. Hitler did not only ensue devastation upon the regions that were occupied by German forces. He has done many horrifying things to countries that were never taken over by his army. One of the wickedest things Hitler accomplished was the bombing of London, but there are many other things as well. Not only did he plunge a bomb down on London, he dropped thousands of them, and the first penetration was on September 7, 1940 when about 350 German bombers appeared above London being accompanied by 650 fighters. This bombing alone devastated London, but there was far worse to come in the future. In the first attack alone, over 450 inhabitants were slaughtered and 1,300 were sincerely injured, and while London was still picking up the pieces from the night before, Hitler and his men struck again. They did the same precise thing every single night for two whole months, and the people of London assumed it would never end. On December 29, nineteen churches were demolished; furthermore, this was a Sunday. Overall, around 30,000 bombs were dropped on London, and the first thirty days 6,000 people were killed. This overwhelmed London for a long time, but the occurrences ultimately ceased in May of 1941. Now London had to pick up what was left of their population or attempt to, but it would prove to take an extremely extensive period to get to where they were. Hitler supposed that defeating London from the air would devastate them, but they awaited patiently for it to stop and took it as it. Hitler did some horrifying things to many countries and their inhabitants, and some people blame it on his childhood. Evil was inside of him the day he was born, and the day he killed himself. The North African Campaign began in June of 1940, the campaign lasted for three years, ending during May of 1943. When the North African Campaign commenced, The Axis and Allied powers were fighting nonstop, back and forth in northern Africa. The region that is considered to be North Africa included Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, Sudan, Libya, Morocco, and parts of the Sahara Desert. The North African Campaign was comprised of three phases, the Western Desert Campaign, Operation Torch, and the Tunisia Campaign. The Western Desert Campaign was the opening conflict. The Axis and Allied powers fought during this campaign in the countries of Libya and Egypt. This battle was launched when Italian General Rodolfo Graziani invaded Egypt. The Western Campaign was consisted of constant battling between the Axis powers and the Allied powers. The next phase following the Western Campaign was Operation Torch. Operation Torch involved the British and United States military forces launching an amphibious maneuver in French North Africa. The French retained control over two territories, Algeria and Morocco. These territories were the location for the landing of this operation. This battle had the code name “Torch”, this name was the result of many long arguments between the American and British strategists. These planners struggled to make a decision about the future course of action for the Allies. These arguments were ultimately settled by President Franklin Roosevelt with the decision to invade North Africa. President Roosevelt worked together with British Prime Minister Winston Church Hill during this operation. Torch’s impact was important to the outcome of the war and was later recognized as one of the most significant strategic decision the Allied leaders would make. The next phase of the North African Campaign was the Tunisia Campaign. The Allies began this assault with another amphibious landing in eastern Tunisia in January, 1943. The German General, Erwin Rommel was cut off from his supply bases by the Americans and the British during his attempt to stall them with his defensive operations. The Axis powers were outgunned and outnumbered. The Allies made steady advances by forcing the Axis troops into a pocket along the northern Tunisian coast. The Allies captured the last remaining Axis port and six days after this occurred the Axis army surrendered. This left 267,000 German and Italian soldiers as prisoners of war. During the entire North African Campaign, 220,00 British and American soldiers were lost, while the German and Italians suffered 620,000 casualties. This Allied victory was critically important to the course of this War. The win in North Africa removed the Axis threat to middle eastern oil fields and also their threat to the British supply lines into Asia and Africa. The reign of Nazi Germany must have certainly felt like an eternity to the groups of people who were negatively affected by its power, but the power and control that the Nazis had accumulated did eventually wean. There were many factors to the fall of Nazi Germany, including attacks made against Germany as the government was growing weaker and the death of Hitler. The Battle of Berlin was the last major offensive of World War II leading up to Hitler’s suicide. During the Battle of Berlin, which began on April 16, 1945 and ended on May 2, 1945, Hitler assimilated himself into an underground bunker that was fifty feet below the Nazi headquarters in Berlin. The Red Army fought forces containing the German Army for control of the capital city of Nazi Germany. He married Eva Braun, whilst inside the bunker, on April 29, 1945. Multiple families of important Nazi officials joined the couple in the bunker. One of the families elected to have their children killed by cyanide. Hitler instigated the testing of cyanide pills on the family dog and its puppies. Both the doctor and Hitler desired that the pills would not fail if needed to commit suicide. When Hitler inquired the opinion of the doctor on the proper way to commit suicide, the doctor advocated a cyanide pill and gunshot at the same time. On April 30, 1945, after Soviet troops overcame the street-to-street combat in Berlin Hitler nad Braun committed suicide in the bunker. Eyewitness accounts claim that only one gunshot was heard from the room where Hitler and Eva planned to kill themselves in. A few minutes after the shot was heard, a few people, who were living in the bunker at this time, decided to open the door and see if Hitler and his wife were dead. There were no pictures taken at the site of Hitler and Eva’s death. Historians must believe the written accounts of spectators because there is no real evidence of Hitler’s death. Witnesses claimed to have seen Hitler, with his head on a table, holding a gun in his hand, and Eva sitting in a chair facing Hitler with a cyanide pill coursing through her body. Adolf and Eva Hitler were known as dead throughout the world, but their companions in the bunker seized their bodies and burned them upon request by Hitler. The Russians were ordered to find the body of Hitler in order to be sure he was dead, but the bodies were not discovered until May of 1945. From the 4th through the 8th of May, most of the remaining German armed forces in Europe surrendered which led to the end of World War II. The surrender document was signed on the 7th of May, 1945 in a Reims, France schoolhouse, which was being used as General Dwight Eisenhower’s temporary headquarters. The document was signed by Alfred Jodl, who was representing Admiral Doenitz at the meeting. The document was required to be printed out in the following four different languages: English, French, German, and Russian. Copies of the document had to be sent to London, Paris, and Moscow for approval. Press attended the meeting and took many pictures and took note of things that were said. It was noted that after Alfred Jodl signed the document, he addressed the crowd in the room and said, “I want to say a word. With this signature the German people and the German armed forces are for better or worse delivered into the victor’s hands. In this war, which has lasted more than five years, they both have achieved and suffered more than perhaps any other people in the world. In this hour I can only express the hope that the victor will treat them with generosity.” No one in the crowd had a response, and most of the Germans quietly left the room. After World War II in Europe was over, the impression that the war left on many of the Europeans who were affected by it remained intact, and the horrifying aftermath was a reminder of how hard life really was during the war. 54 million people as a result of the Holocaust. Another 60 million were uprooted from their homes. There were 11 million displaced persons, and there were more civilians killed than troops. 100,000 Jewish people were left to roam, and many of them travelled back to their home country. “Hitlerism” still lingered throughout Europe, and West Germany and East Germany were separated. The Nuremberg Trials were a series of 13 trials in Nuremberg, Germany. Starting on November 20, 1945 and ending on October 1, 1946. These trials were brought about so that the Nazi war criminals would face justice and be punished for the crimes they have committed against humanity. The defendants included Nazi Party officers, lawyers, and doctors. They were indicted on crimes against humanity and peace. Since Hitler was an important political leader, he had multiple decoys to insure his safety, but this can cause problems when looking for the real body of Hitler. Many historians believe that Hitler escaped Germany and fled to Argentina. There is a large Nazi presence in the small villages of Argentina. There are photographs were the Nazi flag can be seen being flown at many small schools. The Nazi Youth was a big organization, and it held a large manifestation in South Ameri

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Home — Essay Samples — History — Adolf Hitler — World War II and Adolf Hitler

World War Ii and Adolf Hitler

• Categories: Adolf Hitler Fascism in World War II

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Published: Mar 1, 2019

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Fact Check: The Truth About Hitler's Condition That Made Him Pass Gas a Lot

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Adolf Hitler had a digestive disorder that caused him to fart often.

For years, a rumor has circulated that Adolf Hitler had a digestive condition that made him pass gas often. The claim has appeared on Reddit for at least 13 years , and a post in early 2024 included details about the medical treatment he followed:

TIL Theodor Morell, Adolf Hitler’s quack personal physician, prescribed him cocaine eye drops, heavy doses of oxycodone, and amphetamines, sometimes up to 20 times a day. To combat Hitler’s excessive flatulence, he prescribed “Doktor Koster’s Antigas Pills”, a mixture of atropine and strychnine by u/Chemical-Elk-1299 in todayilearned

This post was upvoted 29,000 times and had received 1,500 comments, as of this writing. The rumor also spread on X (formerly Twitter) starting in 2011  ( archived ), and repeatedly in the years since then.

This claim is true. In a secret file made public in 2009 in England, one of Hitler's aides wrote that he had appalling table manners. The document also made a reference to his digestive disorder .

Other scholarly sources have referred to his gastrointestinal problems, including a 2005 article from The Journal of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh, which said it seemed to have been a lifelong condition:

By his own account, since childhood he had suffered recurrent attacks of abdominal colic alternating with diarrhoea and constipation, and what he described as "gas, clearly related to episodes of stress or crisis". The clinical features suggest spastic colon or irritable bowel syndrome but no such terms appear in records.

Hitler was also a hypochondriac, obsessed with the idea that he might die young. Because of this, he took his personal doctor everywhere he went. The doctor, Theodor Morell, reportedly used unorthodox treatments that most likely affected Hitler's mood and his ability to think rationally, especially toward the end of World War II. This has led some historians to theorize that the condition and ensuing treatment accelerated the demise of Nazi Germany, according to Daven Hiskey of the YouTube channel  Highlight History .

The treatment consisted in part of tablets of Mutaflor , a medicine that still exists today. The tablets are "enteric coated," which means they dissolve only once they reach the intestine, and they contain a "non-pathogenic strain of E. coli." Morell also administered pills made of atropine and strychnine known as  Dr. Koster's Antigaspills .

He also gave Hitler cocaine eye and nasal drops, daily injections of methamphetamines, opioids, glucose, testosterone, estradiol (which mimics the female hormone estrogen) and steroids. The journal  article includes a full list of medications Hitler received while he was in the care of Morell.

In the secret file found and published in 2009, the aide also mentioned Hitler's poor dietary habits. Quoting the aide, an article in The Daily Mail reported:

Hitler ate prodigious amounts of cake (this cake eating was responsible for a slight digestive disorder and the addition of a bay window to his already not too fortunate figure).

The dossier was supposed to have been destroyed soon after Hitler died.

'Adolf Hitler Had Poor Table Manners and Suffered Flatulence'. The Telegraph , 17 Feb. 2009, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/4678840/Adolf-Hitler-had-poor-table-manners-and-suffered-flatulence.html .

Doyle, D. 'Hitler's Medical Care'. The Journal of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh , no. 35, 2005, pp. 75–82, https://antville.org/static/sites/infam/files/hitlers_medical_care.pdf .

Beckers, Milan, et al. 'Berlin Bowel Bothers: Might Adolf Hitler's Gut Problems Have Been Parkinson-Related?' European Neurology , vol. 86, no. 3, July 2023, pp. 222–27. Silverchair , https://doi.org/10.1159/000530166 .

Highlight History. How Hitler's Flatulence Defeated Nazi Germany . 2023. YouTube , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Gt6fHJ4Vw0 .

Preskar, Peter. 'Adolf Hitler Farted Like a Horse'. Medium , 5 May 2021, https://short-history.com/adolf-hitler-farting-b7e27477971b .

Salkeld, Luke. 'Hitler Had Shocking Table Manners, Gorged on Cake and Suffered Flatulence, Reveals Never-before-Seen Profile'. Mail Online , 17 Feb. 2009, https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1147744/Hitler-shocking-table-manners-gorged-cake-suffered-flatulence-reveals-seen-profile.html .

Zhang, Lisai, et al. 'Meteorism'. StatPearls , StatPearls Publishing, 2024. PubMed , http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK430851/ .

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The Postcolonial and(in/with/vs) The Popular

Please visit our journal's CFP page, for the full entry:  https://www.refractionsajournalofpostcolonialculturalcriticism.com/curre...

In Popular Postcolonialisms: Discourses of Empire and Popular Culture , Nadia Atia and Kate Houlden parse the tensions, and compatibilities, between the broad, encompassing fields of “the postcolonial” and “the popular.” “In the present moment,” they observe, “postcolonial studies is undergoing a crisis in the status and direction of the discipline, which is reflected in the proliferation of labels such as ‘global fiction’ and ‘world literature’” (2)--formations, seemingly, ushering "the postcolonial" and "the popular" into relation. Yet, “postcolonial studies, with its roots and politics in the radical challenge to colonial and neocolonial power, has tended to overlook popular forms, often defined as low or middle-brow and commonly viewed as antithetical to resistance” (2). Given postcolonialism’s innate interest in class, intersectionality and the multiple axis of oppression and resilience, this overlooking, Atia and Houlden suggest, invites reconsideration.

For this third issue of Refractions , we echo Atia and Houlden’s query–“What is the place of the ‘popular’ in the postcolonial paradigm?” (3)–and look for responses in the field of popular culture. We draw inspiration from TV shows that appeared between 2020 and 2024, such as, but not limited to, Bridgerton (2020), Reservation Dogs (2021), Dealoch (2023) and True Detective (2024). One of the major critiques of Bridgeton has been that the show is ‘shallow’; the reviews from popular platforms such as Vox  and Robert Ebert  both associate ‘shallow’ with Bridgerton. Through this issue, we hope to theorize ‘shallowness’ and ‘the popular’. Does popularity and its associated ‘lightweightedness’’ discount their value as a site of analysis? Is it possible to leverage the lightweightedness to go beyond the insignificance associated with the popular? Since the popular is linked to mass consumption, while we concede that the popular might reflect the majoritarian perspective, we are interested in investigating how the popular can serve as a site to recount marginalized stories . In addition to narratives, in this issue, we hope to be attentive towards the representation of spaces and places enabled by this popular turn in the postcolonial. Consider, for example, the TV show Deadloch which parodies a police procedural while drawing attention to settler politics in Tasmania. The fourth season of True Detective does similar work, with its location in Alaska, weaving Indigenous elements into a police procedural, and thus illuminating the various jurisdictions, histories, and ways of knowing, vying for space within the show. To this end, we are looking for submissions that situate the popular in a field of power relations. Submissions could respond (but are certainly not limited) to the following prompts.

The links between the need for representation and the popular turn in the postcolonial

“The popular” as a manifestation of capitalist logics, profiting from the need for representation and marginalized stories

Explorations of identities and historical inheritance, and their treatment in popular media

The return to genre in the popular turn in the postcolonial (for example, the return of the western genre, in recent years, and the popularity of the sci-fi alien invasion narrative)

Narrative techniques emerging through the overlaps of the popular and the postcolonial

Modes of representation enabled by the popular turn in the postcolonial/postcolonial turn in the popular

The relationship between the popular and spatial representation- which spaces are chosen to be represented and why? What does it say about the turn to ‘non-conventional spaces’ in contemporary TV? 

We are looking for submissions that approach these questions through unconventional formats. Send us your zines, collages, and short write-ups. In the spirit of the popular, and its emphasis on accessibility and wider audiences, we also welcome shorter, non academic and semi-academic pieces. For standard written submissions, please check our “ Submission Guidelines ” page ( https://www.refractionsajournalofpostcolonialculturalcriticism.com/submi... ). Please send your submissions to [email protected] by 15 July 2024. 

36 Hours in Munich

By A.J. Goldmann April 18, 2024

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By A.J. Goldmann Photographs by Laetitia Vancon

A.J. Goldmann has written about European arts and culture for nearly two decades. He currently divides his time between Munich and Berlin.

Munich is giving Berlin, its longtime cultural rival, a run for its money. Shedding its reputation as the conservative Bavarian capital, Munich is emerging as a younger, laid-back hub that’s balancing tradition and innovation in unusual ways. Look to the Schlachthofviertel, a rapidly evolving cultural district centered around an active slaughterhouse (yes, really) that’s sprung to life with nightclubs and bars (including one in a decommissioned ship) and a beautiful new home for the Volkstheater , one of the city’s main playhouses. Head to the Isarphilharmonie , an ultra-modern new concert hall, to hear some of Munich's top musical ensembles, including the splendid Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra , which turns 75 this year. And if you’re visiting in the summer, don’t miss the Munich Opera Festival , which is nearing its 150th birthday.

Recommendations

• The Englischer Garten , or the English Garden, Munich’s sprawling and beloved central park, is popular with locals during the warmer months.
• The Lenbachhaus Museum has Germany’s most important collection of works by the artists of Der Blaue Reiter, the influential modern art association founded in 1911 in Munich.
• Bahnwärter Thiel , a hip cultural space in a formerly abandoned lot with graffitied freight containers and old subway cars, has a vibrant techno club at its center.
• The Viktualienmarkt , Munich’s central outdoor greengrocers market, is full of attractively displayed fresh produce and vendors selling street food.
• Munich Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism , a sobering museum built on the former site of Nazi headquarters, traces the ideology and the crimes of the party that was founded in Munich in 1920.
• The grand Nationaltheater is home to the Bayerische Staatsoper , one of Germany’s best opera companies.
• The grassy banks of the Isar , the river that runs through Munich, form an urban oasis where locals (and their dogs) stroll, picnic and even go for a dip in the river.
• The Alte Pinakothek , in Munich’s museum quarter, houses a storied collection of European paintings from the 14th to the 18th centuries in a stately building.
• The Nymphenburg Palace was the former summer residence of Bavaria’s ruling family. The palace’s sweeping and stately gardens rival those of Versailles.
• Alva-Morgaine is a delightfully overstuffed second-hand shop with an unpredictable and ever-changing assortment of elegant and eccentric vintage clothing.
• Der Dantler gives a modern and refined take on Alpine cuisine in an informal atmosphere.
• Drei Mühlen is a bustling neighborhood restaurant where you can find the best deal on weisswurstfrühstück, a traditional Bavarian breakfast of veal sausages and a pretzel.
• Café Zimt und Trallala is a bakery and cafe that makes exquisite breakfast pastries.
• Deutsche Eiche is a gay-friendly restaurant and hotel with a lovely rooftop terrace.
• Alte Utting , a decommissioned ship perched on a railway bridge, is one of the city’s most unusual and most atmospheric places to have a cocktail.
• GötterSpeise is an eye-poppingly colorful cocoa emporium with a creative and delicious assortment of hot chocolate.
• Caspar Plautz , on the Viktualienmarkt, serves baked potatoes with a variety of stuffings.
• Kaffeerösterei Viktualienmarkt , a cafe and roastery in the middle of the market, is your best bet for coffee.
• Lea Zapf , a cafe and patisserie on the Viktualienmarkt, makes decadent cakes and small pastries.
• Eataly , in a cavernous indoor market next to the Viktualienmarkt, is a mecca for gourmet Italian products.
• Café Frischhut makes local doughnuts called schmalznudels and other deep-fried delights.
• Conviva im Blauen Haus , a restaurant attached to the Münchner Kammerspiele, one of the city’s main playhouses, is the place to go for a quick and delicious pre-theater meal.
• The Königlicher Hirschgarten , one of the world’s largest and oldest beer gardens, is a perfect place to enjoy local delicacies and have a pint with thousands of your closest friends.
• Cortiina Hotel is sophisticated and centrally located, within spitting distance of the Hofbräuhaus, Munich’s legendary beer hall, and a few blocks from the opera house. Wooden floors and furniture and stone tiling in the bathroom contribute to the sense of luxurious minimalism. Rooms start at 289 euros, or $307.
• Living Hotel Prinzessin Elisabeth , a block from the Isar River, offers a variety of tastefully furnished rooms and suites. The rooms are spacious and all come equipped with a kitchenette and free drinks in the minibar. Rooms start at €120.
• Hotel Mariandl offers elegant, rather old-fashioned rooms (some with shared bathrooms) with Belle Époque charm. Set on a leafy boulevard close to the central train station, the hotel also has an atmospheric Viennese-style cafe and restaurant, Café am Beethovenplatz. Rooms start at €69.
• For short-term rentals , consider looking in Maxvorstadt and Schwabing, two residential neighborhoods north of the center with more vacation properties than the cramped old town.
• Munich’s public transportation system, MVG , which includes trains , buses and trams , is extensive, efficient and affordable. In central Munich, a single ride costs €3.90, a day pass costs €9.20, and a week pass costs €21.10. On weekends, the system runs all night long. The MVG also offers bike sharing , which can be booked with an app . Uber operates in Germany as a regulated taxi service nearly identical to the city’s other taxi companies. A good local ride-hailing option is IsarFunk . It’s more common (and easier) to order a ride in advance than to hail one on the street.

The Eisbach in the Englischer Garten

Start by getting to know Munich’s beloved central park. From Odeonsplatz, a 19th-century square, stroll to the Hofgarten , a manicured park surrounded with hedges and crowned by an elegant central gazebo. From there, cross into the rambling Englischer Garten , which is larger than New York’s Central Park. Wave to the bathers bobbing up and down in the Eisbach, the freezing man-made river that snakes through the park, and watch the daredevil surfers who ride its waves. You can also stop for an inaugural pint at the beer garden next to the Chinese Tower, a five-story wooden pagoda; take a boat out on the placid Kleinhesseloher See lake; or visit the hilltop Monopteros , a 19th-century replica of a Greek temple that was built for the Bavarian king Ludwig I.

Germany’s culture of commemoration, seen in its willingness to examine the crimes it committed during World War II, make the country unique. The Munich Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism , which opened in 2015 at the site of a former Nazi headquarters, charts the history of Nazism in Munich, the birthplace of the movement. It traces the rise of the party and Adolf Hitler, including his failed but deadly coup, known as the Beer Hall Putsch , in 1923, while also describing the persecution of Munich’s Jewish population, which numbered roughly 12,000 before Hitler’s rise to power, and the city’s postwar reckoning with its Nazi past. The current temporary exhibition (through July 28) examines right-wing terrorism in post-war Germany to the present day, including the 1980 Oktoberfest bombing and the 2016 attack at a Munich shopping mall. (Entry, free.)

Get a taste of modern Bavaria at Der Dantler, one of a new crop of restaurants injecting Alpine cuisine with Asian accents. The restaurant, in the former working-class neighborhood of Giesing, has a casual, hole-in-the-wall vibe; friendly and attentive staff; and, in the evenings, a frequently changing five-course menu (105 euros per person) with ambitious preparations of regional produce. A recent dinner included roasted carrots coated with preserved lemon and a spicy macadamia crunch; and a tender saddle of veal in jus, served with schupfnudeln, or German gnocchi. Vegetarian and pescatarian options available. The wine pairing (currently 56 euros per person) is a great way to get to know the menu’s German and Austrian bottles, including some adventurous natural wines. Reservations required.

The Fischbrunnen (Fish Fountain) on Marienplatz, the central square in Munich’s old town, with the white Altes Rathaus (Old Town Hall) in the distance.

Drei Mühlen

Weisswurstfrühstück is a time-honored German tradition in the south: A pair of boiled veal sausages, eaten with sweet mustard and a chewy pretzel, washed down with beer. It’s the Bavarian breakfast of champions. Try it at Drei Mühlen , a restaurant that gets its sausages from the area’s best-known butcher, Magnus Bauch . Drei Mühlen recently raised its prices, but even so, its weisswurstfrühstück remains an unbeatable deal at €6.55 (which includes a half-liter of Augustiner lager beer). It’s a bustling locals’ hang, especially on weekends, so you might end up sitting at the cramped bar. Reservations recommended. For vegetarians, Café Zimt und Trallala , around the corner, bakes some of the best croissants in the city and not-to-be-missed franzbrötchen, a sticky, flaky, cinnamon-and butter-pastry (€2.80 each).

After you’ve polished off your beer, head to the Isar, the river that flows through Munich. Cross the Wittelsbacherbrücke, a bridge, and walk along the dirt paths on the river’s grassy bank. A bold, decade-long rewilding project , completed in 2011, widened the Isar here, purified its waters and added a series of gravel paths along its banks. Watch (and maybe even join) the courageous swimmers carried by the strong current around the Weideninsel, a small island that emerged during the rewilding. To keep exploring the banks of the Isar, walk south, past the lovingly maintained Rosengarten, whose flowers are just starting to bloom. You will soon reach the Flaucher, a series of pebbled beaches, connected by an elevated walkway, that are popular with both nudists and families who barbecue (they keep to their separate shores).

The years that Freddie Mercury, the lead singer of the rock group Queen, lived in Munich (between 1979 and 1985) made him a local hero and one of the city’s gay icons. Visit some of his haunts around Gärtnerplatz, a circular plaza, like the nearby Deutsche Eiche , nowadays a hotel and restaurant with a stunning rooftop terrace. (He was also a habitué at Pimpernel and Ochsengarten , two still-operating gay bars and nightclubs on the neighboring Müllerstrasse.) Mercury bought an apartment with the Austrian actress Barbara Valentin on Hans-Sachs-Strasse, a quaint street lined with prewar buildings. There, find Alva-Morgaine , a delightful wunderkammer (or cabinet of curiosities) of one-of-a-kind fashion, like 1920s flapper dresses. Around the corner is GötterSpeise , a cocoa emporium with a creative assortment of hot chocolates (€4 to €6).

If the Englischer Garten are the lungs of Munich, then the Viktualienmarkt , one of Europe’s best outdoor food markets, is the city’s stomach. Try the heavenly pressed sandwiches at Luiginos Bio Feinkost , which include a pastrami-Cheddar melt or grilled eggplant, chevre and spinach (from €6.90); or head to Caspar Plautz , a potato merchant that serves stuffed baked spuds (from €7.50 a plate). If the weather is inclement, duck inside the temple-like Eataly directly next door for a slice of focaccia (from about €6). For dessert, try the freshly fried schmalznudels – Bavarian doughnuts — at Café Frischhut (from €3) — or the decadent cakes and pastries at Lea Zapf (from €4). The house-roasted coffee at the Kaffeerösterei Viktualienmarkt might be the best in town.

Der Blaue Reiter, or the Blue Rider , a group of Expressionist artists which coalesced in Munich in 1911, is arguably the city’s greatest contribution to 20th-century art. In boldly colorful works, the Blue Rider artists used modern painting as a conduit to the spiritual. The Lenbachhaus Museum , in the city’s central Kunstareal, or museum quarter, boasts the world’s largest collection of paintings by the group whose members included Wassily Kandinsky, Franz Marc and Paul Klee. The trove exists because of Gabriele Münter , a distinctive and prolific painter who was also Kandinsky’s lover (he eventually left her to move back to Russia). In 1957, when she turned 80, she donated more than 1,000 works by herself, Kandinsky, Marc, Klee and others to the museum. (Entry, €10.)

It’s easy to miss Conviva im Blauen Haus , an unassuming restaurant behind the Münchner Kammerspiele , one of the city’s three publicly funded theaters. The restaurant, with industrial lighting and long wooden tables, doubles as the theater’s canteen and employs people with mental and physical disabilities as cooks and servers. Prompt and attentive service ensures that everyone — actors and audience members alike — gets to the show on time. A recent evening menu featured osso buco on saffron risotto, Iberian pork loin with king oyster mushroom and potato strudel, and sea bream with artichokes and fennel puree, all in the €20 range.

Nationaltheater

Germany is home to more than 80 opera companies and the Bayerische Staatsoper (Bavarian State Opera), which traces its history back more than 350 years, might be the country’s finest. These days, it has a reputation for a varied operatic repertoire, often presented in avant-garde productions. Locals love to get gussied up for performances at the company’s grand main venue, the nearly 2,000-seat Nationaltheater . Germany’s lavish public subsidies mean that there are tickets for every budget, including over 300 standing room tickets for under €20. Upcoming highlights include Romeo Castellucci’s densely symbolic take on Wagner’s “ Tannhäuser ,” a new “ Tosca ,” directed by the Hungarian filmmaker Kornel Mundruczo and the summertime premiere of “ Le Grand Macabre ,” directed by Krzysztof Warlikowski, in honor of the Hungarian composer Gyorgy Ligeti’s centennial.

Alte Utting

Munich still lags behind Berlin when it comes to clubbing, but its nightlife has become much more varied over the past decade. One of the most unusual club venues is Bahnwärter Thiel , a cultural space in the edgy Schlachhofviertel district, just south of the center of town. The large outdoor area contains abandoned subway cars and sea freight containers, one of which contains the Kulturhaus, a club that attracts some of Germany’s best techno D.J.s. (Most concert tickets, €10.) A few blocks away is the Alte Utting , a bar and event space in a decommissioned passenger steam ship perched high above street level on a disused railway bridge.

The statue of Bavaria, the female personification of the southern German state, looks over the expansive Theresienwiese, the site of the annual Oktoberfest beer festival.

Alte Pinakothek

On Sundays, Munich’s state-run museums charge €1 entry to their permanent exhibitions. If you need to choose just one, head to the Alte Pinakothek , one of the world’s finest collections of European paintings, which is housed under the soaring ceiling of an early-19th-century building. Highlights include a richly varied assortment of paintings by Peter Paul Rubens, which looks more stunning than ever after recent improvements to the skylights. More than 200 paintings in the main upper galleries have changed places as part of a recent reorganization that eschews traditional ordering along geographical and chronological lines in favor of a more flexible presentation. If you have time to spare, cross the road to the Pinakothek der Moderne , home to 20th- and 21st-century art. Be warned, though: It will set you back another euro.

Königlicher Hirschgarten

Man does not live by art alone. After you’re done soaking in centuries’ worth of masterpieces, head over to the Königlicher Hirschgarten , one of the world’s largest beer gardens, founded in 1791. Find a spot in the main 7,000-seat area, which is self-service and has long, shared tables and Augustiner lager on tap. Sausages, potato salad and rotisserie chicken are king here, but the steckerlfisch, a whole grilled fish on a stick, is also a local delicacy. (Half-liter beer, €4.20; beer garden food, €3 to €20.) After lunch, stroll through the nearby Nymphenburg Palace , the former summer residence of Bavaria’s ruling family. Explore the 445-acre garden and marvel at the palace’s vast main building, whose 2,000-foot-long facade is larger than that of Versailles (gardens and parks entry, free; ceremonial rooms, €8).

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IMF Working Papers

The power of prices: how fast do commodity markets adjust to shocks.

Author/Editor:

Christian Bogmans ; Andrea Pescatori ; Ivan Petrella ; Ervin Prifti ; Martin Stuermer

Publication Date:

April 16, 2024

Electronic Access:

Free Download . Use the free Adobe Acrobat Reader to view this PDF file

Disclaimer: IMF Working Papers describe research in progress by the author(s) and are published to elicit comments and to encourage debate. The views expressed in IMF Working Papers are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily represent the views of the IMF, its Executive Board, or IMF management.

This paper establishes supply and demand elasticities for a broad set of commodities based on a consistent dataset and identification methodology. We apply granular IV methods to a new cross-country panel dataset of commodity production and consumption from 1960-2021. The results indicate that commodity demand and supply are typically price inelastic. Demand and supply tend to be the most inelastic for minerals, whereas they are most elastic for agricultural commodities. The elasticities of energy commodities fall somewhere in between. Supply and demand become more elastic at longer time horizons for mineral and energy commodities, but not for most agricultural commodities.

Working Paper No. 2024/077

9798400271953/1018-5941

WPIEA2024077

Please address any questions about this title to [email protected]