Though the Nazis attempted to downplay its persecution of Jews in order to placate the international community during the 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 March , 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.
After ordering the occupation of Norway and Denmark in April , Hitler adopted a plan proposed by one of his generals to attack France through the Ardennes Forest. 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 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. Beginning in , 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. With defeats at El-Alamein and Stalingrad, as well as the landing of U. 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 , when Col. Within a few months of the successful Allied invasion of Normandy in June , 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 , 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.
After dictating his political testament, Hitler shot himself in his suite on April 30; Braun took poison. With Soviet troops occupying Berlin, Germany surrendered unconditionally on all fronts on May 7, , bringing the war in Europe to a close. William L. Holocaust Memorial Museum. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! Subscribe for fascinating stories connecting the past to the present.
The instability created in Europe by the First World War set the stage for another international conflict—World War II—which broke out two decades later and would prove even more devastating. Rising to power in an economically and politically unstable Germany, Adolf Since , the word has taken on a new and horrible meaning: the ideological and systematic state-sponsored Incredibly, earlier on that same day, Hitler had met with Poland's ambassador and signed a treaty assuring that Germany would respect Poland's territorial rights.
Foreign Minister Constantin von Neurath was there, along with Colonel Friedrich Hossbach, Hitler's military adjutant, who took the complete minutes of the meeting which has come to be known as the Hossbach Conference or Hossbach Memorandum. Hitler began the four-hour-long meeting by asking each of the men to swear an oath of secrecy. He then informed them that in the event of his untimely death the following exposition should be regarded as his last will and testament. He started the exposition by explaining his theory of Lebensraum, stating that Germany had "a tightly packed racial core" and that the Germans were entitled to "greater living space than in the case of other peoples.
He pointed out two major obstacles; "two hate-inspired antagonists, Britain and France, to whom a German colossus in the center of Europe was a thorn in the flesh Hitler wanted to resolve the Lebensraum issue by to at the very latest to guard against military obsolescence, the aging of the Nazi leadership, and, "it was while the rest of the world was still preparing its defenses that we were obliged to take the offensive.
Although Hitler's ultimate goal was to acquire Lebensraum in the East, namely Russia, he focused the entire conference on his first objectives, the seizure of Austria and Czechoslovakia to protect Germany's eastern and southern flanks. Hitler outlined three strategies to achieve this, each one designed to capitalize on the military and political weaknesses of France and Britain.
In the first scenario, Hitler would wait until when rearmament was complete and France and Britain would be heavily outgunned. In the second, he would act sooner by keeping a close eye on France's internal political problems, waiting for a chance to strike at Czechoslovakia in the event that France was weakened by a major crisis such as a civil war.
In the third, he would strike as early as at both Austria and Czechoslovakia if France got bogged down in a military conflict with some other country, such as Germany's new ally, Fascist Italy. Hitler's casual acceptance of the immense risks of starting a large-scale war in Europe shocked those in attendance, especially Blomberg and Fritsch who, according to Hossbach's notes, "repeatedly emphasized the necessity that Britain and France must not appear in the roles of our enemies.
They were not objecting on any moral grounds to Hitler's war plans but merely out of practical consideration. Germany, in their opinion, was far from being ready for war, and even by would not be adequately armed.
Hugh Trevor-Roper has argued that Hitler had a long term plan - a programme of colonisation of Eastern Europe and a war of conquest in the West. This Stufenplan , step-by-step policy, led to war.
Probably the most convincing argument is that Hitler had consistency of aims, but was also an opportunist that was flexible in his strategy. There were three stages to his foreign policy. Rearmament created jobs in the armaments industry pushing the idea of 'guns before butter'.
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