Titans of History

Hitler’s opportunity came with the arrival of the Great Depression. In subsequent elections, as the economy deteriorated, the Nazi Party increased its vote, becoming the largest party in the Reichstag (German Parliament) in July 1932, a position confirmed by elections in November. On January 30, 1933 Hitler was sworn in as chancellor.

After the burning down of the Reichstag in February 1933, Hitler suspended civil liberties and passed an enabling act, which allowed him to rule as dictator. Opposition was crushed. Hitler even turned the repression inwards: the Night of the Long Knives in June 1934 saw the murder of Röhm and the SA leadership by the SS (Schutzstaffel or Protection Squad). Two months later Hitler, backed by henchmen such as Hermann Goering and Joseph Goebbels, achieved absolute civil and military power when he became Führer (leader) and head of state.

The Nazis initiated an economic recovery, reducing unemployment and introducing ambitious new schemes such as the building of the brand-new autobahn (motorway) network. Many of Hitler’s erstwhile opponents were prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt. Yet the economic miracle was largely achieved via a huge rearmament drive, in violation of the Treaty of Versailles—the first phase in Hitler’s broader determination to launch a deliberately barbaric European and racial war.

In March 1936 Hitler reoccupied the demilitarized zone in the Rhineland. He carefully noted the response of the international community—nothing. This encouraged him. In March 1938 he annexed Austria; in September he secured the German-speaking Sudeten area of Czechoslovakia; and in March 1939 he occupied the remainder of Czechoslovakia. In each instance, he experienced little resistance from the other European powers. He had fulfilled his core pledge: Versailles had been reduced to nothing more than a “scrap of paper.”

Hitler signed the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact with the Soviet dictator Josef Stalin which partitioned eastern Europe between these two brutal tyrants. In September 1939 Hitler conquered Poland, a move that triggered British and French declarations of war. But in the spring of 1940 the German armies turned west, conquering Norway, Denmark, the Low Countries and France in a lightning campaign. In 1941 both Yugoslavia and Greece fell, and only Britain remained undefeated. Hitler now dominated his barbaric continental empire and appeared impregnable.

In June 1941, Hitler launched a surprise attack on Stalinist Russia in Operation Barbarossa, the largest and most brutal conflict in human history in which 26 million Soviets alone died. He moved east to command his greatest enterprise from military headquarters in eastern Poland (the Wolf’s Lair). German forces won a series of astonishing victories at the start of the Barbarossa campaign, almost taking Moscow, the Soviet capital, and capturing some 6 million prisoners.

Meanwhile another even more horrific project was gathering steam within Nazi-occupied Europe. Mein Kampf had spoken darkly of Hitler’s intentions toward the Jews, and the Nuremberg Laws of 1935–6, which deprived Jews of their civil rights in Germany, had hinted at worse to come. As the war clouds gathered toward the end of the decade there were more ominous signs: Kristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass) in November 1938 had brought a wave of attacks on Jewish homes and properties across Germany.

Hitler was initially content to enslave and starve the Slavs and drive the Jews out of German lands; they were interned in ghettos and concentration camps across occupied Poland. But he now ordered a policy of extermination, using Einsatzgruppen (task forces) to shoot a million Jews. Barbarossa served as the trigger and excuse for the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question.” Under Hitler’s orders to SS Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler, Jews were dispatched to extermination camps to be slaughtered in gas chambers on an industrial scale. The Holocaust, as it became known, claimed 6 million Jewish lives, as well as the lives of many more minorities hated by the Nazis, including Gypsies, Slavs and homosexuals. It remains a crime of unparalleled magnitude.