Germany, 1890–1945: Democracy and Dictatorship

How this unit works

This is your Paper 1 Section A period study (option 1A/B): 40 marks, about 60 minutes, six questions, no SPaG marks. Questions 1–3 are built on two short written interpretations and carry 16 of the 40 marks — and this option generates unusually rich interpretation material, because almost everything in it is argued over: whether the Kaiser's Germany was modernising or dangerously unreformed, whether Weimar was ever viable, why Germans voted Nazi, and how far ordinary Germans supported the regime. The question methods live in the Exam Skills section; this unit supplies the knowledge.

Contested ground: the four debates

These are the debates most likely to generate the printed interpretations in Questions 1–3. Watch for them as you read; the Interpretation workbench at the end develops each.

Timeline: the dates you must place

Learn the order before the detail — the sections below explain each event. A date earns AO1 marks only when it is attached to why the event mattered.

Part one — the growth and collapse of democracy, 1890–1929

Part two — Depression, collapse and dictatorship, 1929–1934

Part three — living under the Nazis, 1933–1945

Key people

Parties and organisations

Key vocabulary

The technical terms this option rewards — used throughout the unit without re-definition.

Chapter 1 — Germany and the growth of democracy, 1890–1929

Forty years in which Germany became the strongest industrial power in Europe, lost a world war, overthrew its monarchy, built the most democratic constitution on the continent — and then very nearly destroyed it. Two threads run through the chapter: a structural problem inherited from 1871 (a modern economy and mass electorate governed by a constitution that gave parliament almost no control), and what happened when that structure collapsed in 1918 and Germans had to build a democracy amid defeat, revolution, a hated treaty and economic catastrophe. Both threads are evidence that Nazism grew from problems older than the Depression.

1.1 A constitution with a hole in it

Germany was unified in 1871 by Prussia, through three successful wars rather than by popular movement — and Bismarck's constitution protected Prussian and monarchical power while giving the appearance of representative government.

• The Kaiser held real power. Head of state, supreme commander; he appointed and dismissed the Chancellor, who answered to him and not to parliament; he controlled foreign policy and could dissolve the Reichstag. The army reported to him through a military cabinet that bypassed civilian ministers entirely.
• The Reichstag looked democratic and was not powerful. Elected by universal male suffrage over 25 by secret ballot — a wider franchise than Britain's at the time. It could pass or reject legislation and approve the budget (real leverage over spending) — but it could not appoint or dismiss a government, control the army, or initiate policy. A Chancellor who lost its confidence simply carried on.
• The Bundesrat protected Prussia. Prussia held 17 of its 58 votes — and only 14 were needed to veto constitutional change. Prussia held about three-fifths of the Empire's population, and its own parliament used a three-class franchise weighted by tax paid, guaranteeing conservative control.
• Wilhelm II made the fault worse. Kaiser from 1888 at twenty-nine, he dismissed Bismarck in 1890 — the one man who had made the system work. He believed in personal rule, was impulsive and easily flattered, appointed Chancellors who would not challenge him — and nothing could restrain him.

1.2 An industrial giant

Growth was extraordinarily fast. Coal output roughly tripled between 1890 and 1913; Germany overtook Britain in steel around 1900 and by 1913 produced well over twice as much. In the newer industries the lead was greater: Siemens and AEG dominated electrical engineering, and BASF, Bayer and Hoechst controlled the great majority of world chemical dyestuffs. German science and technical education were the best in the world. Population rose from about 41 million (1871) to roughly 68 million (1913) and moved into towns — the urban share rose from about a third to around three-fifths by 1910, and Berlin passed two million.

Society changed with it — a large industrial working class concentrated where organisation was easy; a prosperous middle class of managers and professionals; and the Junkers retaining a grip on the officer corps and senior civil service that their declining economic weight no longer justified. Prussian militarism was social as well as military: officers outranked civilians socially, and the Zabern affair of 1913 made the point unmistakably — after officers in Alsace detained civilians without legal authority, the Reichstag passed a vote of no confidence in the Chancellor, and nothing happened, because the army answered to the Kaiser.

1.3 Socialism, social reform and the state's response

The SPD grew into the largest party in Europe. Restricted under Bismarck's anti-socialist laws (1878–1890), it grew rapidly once they lapsed: from about 1.4 million votes in 1890 to roughly 4.25 million votes — about 35 per cent — and 110 seats in 1912, the largest party in the Reichstag, with linked trade unions of around 2.5 million members by 1913. What it actually wanted was disputed within it: the Erfurt Programme of 1891 was Marxist in theory, but in practice the party was a reforming, electoral, law-abiding organisation with newspapers, choirs and libraries — and a revisionist wing argued openly for change through elections. That tension between revolutionary language and reformist practice matters enormously in 1918–19, when the party found itself in power and had to choose (see 1.5, 1.6).

Social reform was the state's counter-strategy. Bismarck built a pioneering welfare system precisely to detach workers from socialism: sickness insurance 1883, accident insurance 1884, old-age and disability pensions 1889 — the first such national schemes anywhere. Under Wilhelm the programme continued: the Industrial Code of 1891 restricted Sunday working and child labour, and the Reich Insurance Code of 1911 consolidated and extended provision. It did not work as intended: workers accepted the insurance and voted SPD anyway, because the reforms improved lives materially without addressing the political grievance — a party with a third of the vote could not enter government. That is the structural problem of 1.1, seen from below.

1.4 The domestic importance of the Navy Laws

The specification asks for the domestic importance of the Navy Laws — the fleet's consequences inside Germany, not the naval race with Britain. Under Admiral Tirpitz, the Navy Law of 1898 authorised nineteen battleships; the Second Navy Law of 1900 roughly doubled the target, with further laws in 1906, 1908 and 1912.

• First purpose: uniting the government's supporters (Sammlungspolitik, the politics of rallying together). Heavy industry got enormous contracts, nationalists were enthused, and the Navy League reached around one million members — one of the largest political organisations in the country.
• Second purpose: appealing across class lines. The navy was modern, technical and national — unlike the visibly Junker-dominated army — offering a patriotism that middle-class and even working-class Germans could feel part of, intended to draw support away from socialism.
• But it created a financial trap. Direct income taxes belonged to the states, so the Reich relied on indirect taxes; naval building was extremely expensive and needed Reichstag approval — so the government repeatedly had to bargain with the parliament it was designed to bypass. Debt rose steeply, and in 1913 conservatives had to accept a one-off wealth tax — a genuine parliamentary victory.

1.5 The war that broke the monarchy

Unity first. In August 1914 the parties agreed a political truce — the Burgfrieden — and the SPD voted for war credits, a decision that stunned socialists across Europe. For a moment the divisions of 1.1 seemed dissolved.

Then the blockade. The British naval blockade cut Germany off from imported food and fertiliser, and German agriculture — short of labour and horses, both gone to the front — could not compensate. Bread was rationed from January 1915; the winter of 1916–17 became the “turnip winter” after the potato harvest failed and turnips, normally animal fodder, were substituted. Rations fell far below need, and deaths from malnutrition and from diseases the undernourished could not survive rose sharply. Civilian deaths attributable to the blockade are contested — present them as a range of several hundred thousand, and say the figure is disputed.

• The economy broke. The war was financed by borrowing and war bonds, not taxation, on the assumption a defeated enemy would pay. The money supply ballooned and the mark had lost roughly half its value by 1918. This is the beginning of the inflation that became catastrophic in 1923 — hyperinflation was not simply caused by reparations (see 1.7).
• Industry was militarised. The Hindenburg Programme (1916) demanded huge armaments increases; the Auxiliary Service Law (December 1916) made all men 17–60 liable for compulsory war work. From August 1916 Hindenburg and Ludendorff effectively directed the country — a military dictatorship in all but name.
• Politics fractured. The USPD split from the SPD in April 1917 over the war, taking the Spartacus League of Liebknecht and Luxemburg; around 200,000 Berlin workers struck in April 1917, and over a million across Germany in January 1918. The Reichstag's Peace Resolution (July 1917) was ignored.

The end came very fast. In late September 1918, with the front collapsing, Ludendorff himself told the government an armistice was needed immediately. In October 1918 the constitution was hastily reformed to make the Chancellor answerable to the Reichstag — a “revolution from above” designed partly to get better terms and partly to shift responsibility for defeat onto civilian politicians. On 29 October sailors at Kiel refused orders for a final, suicidal-looking operation; the mutiny spread and workers' and soldiers' councils formed across Germany. On 9 November the Kaiser's abdication was announced, Scheidemann proclaimed a republic from a Reichstag window, and Ebert became Chancellor. The armistice was signed on 11 November — by a civilian delegation.

1.6 The Republic's constitution and its first crises, 1919–1923

The constitution was adopted at Weimar on 11 August 1919 (Berlin being too disturbed). Its strengths were real: votes for every man and woman over twenty — more democratic than Britain or France at the time; proportional representation so seats matched votes; a Bill of Rights guaranteeing free speech, religious freedom and equality before the law. On paper, the most democratic constitution in Europe. Its weaknesses were structural: PR with a very low threshold meant no party ever won a majority — around twenty coalition governments in fourteen years, averaging roughly eight months each; Article 48 let the President rule by emergency decree, a route later used to bypass parliament altogether (see 2.1); and the judiciary, civil service and army were left unreformed — the Republic was administered and defended by men who had served the Empire and largely wanted it back.

Versailles as a German domestic problem. Signed 28 June 1919. The terms: about 13 per cent of territory and a tenth of the population lost — Alsace-Lorraine to France, land to Poland including the Polish Corridor cutting off East Prussia, Danzig under League administration, all colonies; the army capped at 100,000 men with no conscription, tanks, aircraft or submarines; the Rhineland demilitarised and occupied for fifteen years; union with Austria forbidden; Article 231 assigning war guilt, and on that basis reparations fixed in 1921 at 132 billion gold marks. Germany was not allowed to negotiate — hence Diktat — and Scheidemann resigned rather than sign. Every mainstream party opposed the Treaty, so any government that cooperated with it could be called treasonable. Combined with the Dolchstoss myth, Versailles turned the Republic's own existence into a grievance.

Political unrest came from every direction:

• From the left — the Spartacist uprising, January 1919. A communist attempt to overthrow the new government in Berlin. Defence Minister Noske crushed it with the Freikorps; Liebknecht and Luxemburg were murdered in custody on 15 January. A Bavarian soviet republic was destroyed the same way. The KPD never forgave the SPD for using right-wing paramilitaries against workers — the two parties never cooperated again.
• From the right — the Kapp Putsch, March 1920. Freikorps units facing disbandment marched on Berlin under Wolfgang Kapp. The army refused to fire on them — “troops do not fire on troops” — and the government fled. The putsch was defeated not by the state but by a general strike of some twelve million workers that shut Berlin down in four days. Almost none of the plotters was seriously punished.
• From assassins. Several hundred political murders 1919–22, overwhelmingly by the right and punished far more lightly than the left's. Erzberger (who signed the armistice) was murdered in 1921; Rathenau, the Jewish Foreign Minister, in June 1922.
• From Munich — the Putsch of 8–9 November 1923. At the height of the hyperinflation, Hitler and the small NSDAP, with Ludendorff's prestige, tried to seize power in Bavaria and march on Berlin. Police stopped around two thousand marchers; 16 Nazis and 4 policemen were killed. Hitler got five years and served about nine months at Landsberg, where he wrote Mein Kampf. The lenient sentence tells you a great deal about the sympathies of Weimar's judges.

1.7 Reparations, the Ruhr and hyperinflation

The chain, link by link. Germany's capacity to pay the 132 billion gold marks (fixed 1921, payable partly in goods) was genuinely reduced by territorial losses and wartime debt; German governments argued the sum was unpayable, French governments believed Germany was deliberately defaulting. Both were partly right. In late 1922 Germany fell behind on timber and coal deliveries — and in January 1923 French and Belgian troops occupied the Ruhr, Germany's industrial heartland, to extract payment directly. The government called for passive resistance: Ruhr workers struck and refused to cooperate; the occupiers responded with arrests, expulsions and some shootings. The policy was popular, briefly uniting Germans across politics — and it was ruinous, because the government paid the strikers' wages by printing money while the country's most productive region produced nothing.

Hyperinflation. Inflation had been building since 1914 (see 1.5); in 1923 it became something else. The mark, about 4.2 to the US dollar in 1914, stood at roughly 7,000 in January 1923, around 4.6 million by August, and about 4.2 trillion by November. Wages were paid twice a day and spent immediately; banknotes were carried in wheelbarrows and burned as fuel because money was cheaper than firewood.

The rescue. Stresemann became Chancellor in August 1923 and made two unpopular, necessary decisions: he called off passive resistance in September, accepting the humiliation, and backed currency reform. In November 1923 the Rentenmark — notionally backed by German land and property, at 1 Rentenmark = 1 trillion old marks — was introduced. It worked because people believed it would; the Reichsmark replaced it in 1924.

1.8 The Stresemann era, 1924–1929

The specification asks for “the extent of recovery” — a two-sided question that must be answered as one. Stresemann was Chancellor for only months in 1923 but Foreign Minister until his death on 3 October 1929; his strategy was fulfilment — comply with the Treaty to demonstrate its terms were unworkable, and obtain revision by negotiation.

• Dawes Plan, 1924 — reparations rescheduled (reduced at first, rising over five years), the Reichsbank reorganised, and a large American loan of 800 million marks; French and Belgian troops left the Ruhr. The total owed was not reduced — nationalists denounced the plan for accepting the principle.
• Locarno, 1925 — Germany voluntarily accepted its western frontiers and Rhineland demilitarisation, guaranteed by Britain and Italy; the eastern frontiers were deliberately left open — a point the German right ignored and Stresemann emphasised in private.
• League of Nations, 1926 — Germany joined with a permanent Council seat; Stresemann shared the Nobel Peace Prize.
• Young Plan, 1929 — the total cut from 132 to about 112 billion gold marks, payments spread to 1988, Allied supervision ended, Rhineland evacuation brought forward to 1930. The nationalist campaign against it — a referendum organised by Hugenberg and supported by Hitler — won only about 14 per cent, but it gave Hitler access to Hugenberg's national newspaper chain and respectability as an ally of established conservatives.

The economy recovered — with limits. Industrial production regained its 1913 level by 1928; real wages rose substantially; housing and welfare expanded. But unemployment never fell below about 1.3 million, agriculture was depressed from the mid-1920s, and the recovery rested on perhaps 25 billion marks of largely short-term American loans — much of it repayable at short notice and used for long-term projects. Stresemann himself warned that Germany was “dancing on a volcano”. Politics stabilised — with limits. Extremist parties shrank dramatically — in 1928 the Nazis won 12 seats and 2.6 per cent — yet in 1925 the Republic elected as President Hindenburg, a monarchist field marshal of seventy-seven who had run the wartime dictatorship: a man who held the office correctly but never believed in the system he headed.

1.9 Weimar culture

Freedom produced an extraordinary decade. The constitution abolished censorship, and the result was one of the most creative periods in modern European history. The Bauhaus (founded by Walter Gropius at Weimar in 1919, moved to Dessau 1925) united art, craft and industrial design and influenced architecture worldwide. New Objectivity painters — Otto Dix, George Grosz — produced savage images of war veterans, profiteers and city life. German cinema led the world: The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1920), Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927), and The Blue Angel (1930), which made Marlene Dietrich a star. Brecht's The Threepenny Opera (1928) was a huge success; Berlin cabaret was famous for satire, sexual frankness and jazz; Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front (1929) sold in enormous numbers. Women voted from 1919 and sat in the Reichstag; the “New Woman” of Berlin — employed, independent, visible — became a cultural symbol, though she described a minority in the big cities rather than most German women.

The reaction was fierce and political. To conservatives, nationalists, churches and much of small-town Germany, all this was moral collapse: decadent, un-German, “cultural Bolshevism” — and, in the antisemitic argument the Nazis pushed hardest, the work of Jewish artists corrupting the nation. Berlin was portrayed as a foreign city inside Germany. Nazi propaganda promised to sweep it all away — and after 1933 it did (see 3.6).

Chapter 2 — Depression, collapse and dictatorship, 1929–1934

In May 1928 the Nazi Party won twelve seats and less than three per cent. In August 1934 Hitler was head of state, head of government and commander of an army sworn to him personally, with every other party abolished. Four stages explain the transformation: the economic catastrophe that made a mass Nazi vote possible, the reasons Germans cast it, the political manoeuvring that put Hitler in office without an electoral majority, and the eighteen months in which he dismantled the Republic from inside its own laws.

2.1 The Depression in Germany

The mechanism. The Wall Street Crash of October 1929 destroyed American confidence, and American banks recalled the short-term loans on which German recovery rested (see 1.8). Germany was the most heavily exposed borrower in Europe: credit vanished, banks and businesses that had borrowed short to invest long could not refinance, and the collapse fed on itself. Industrial production fell by roughly two-fifths between 1929 and 1932; around 50,000 businesses failed; a banking crisis in July 1931 closed the banking system for days; agriculture was devastated.

What it meant. Benefit ran out and dropped to means-tested relief; whole industrial districts had a majority of adult men out of work; malnutrition and suicide rose; school-leavers entered a labour market with nothing in it — one reason both Nazis and Communists recruited so heavily among the young. The middle classes suffered too — and for a generation that had already lost its savings in 1923, this was the second catastrophe in a decade.

Government made it worse. Brüning (Chancellor from March 1930, with no majority) cut spending, public-sector wages and benefits and raised taxes to balance the budget — deepening a slump caused by collapsing demand. He was nicknamed the “Hunger Chancellor”; his reasoning was partly to prove Germany could not pay reparations, but the cost fell on people with nothing left. And democracy stopped functioning before Hitler abolished it: Brüning governed by Article 48 decree. The Reichstag met 94 times in 1930, 41 in 1931, 13 in 1932, while decrees rose from 5 to 44 to 66. By 1932 Germany was already governed without parliament — by a Chancellor appointed by the President and dependent on his signature. That is the constitutional weakness of 1.6 becoming fatal.

2.2 Why Germans voted Nazi

This is the interpretation battleground of the whole unit — the section to know best. The task is to explain who voted Nazi and why, not to assert that people were desperate.

Two things stand out: the Nazis became the largest party in July 1932 — and their vote then fell in November by about two million votes and 34 seats. And the Communist vote rose throughout, which frightened property-owners more with every election. In the April 1932 presidential election, Hindenburg beat Hitler by about 53 to 37 per cent.

The message was tailored by audience — the Nazis' great innovation was campaigning differently to different groups while keeping the same core themes:

• Farmers, crushed by debt and prices: protection, debt relief, and a special place as the source of German blood and soil. Rural Protestant Germany produced some of the highest Nazi votes anywhere.
• The Mittelstand: protection from department stores above and Marxism below — the group that lost its savings in 1923 and its livelihood after 1929 voted Nazi in disproportionate numbers.
• The unemployed: work — and the SA offered food, a uniform, a bed and comradeship. Yet many unemployed workers voted Communist instead; the industrial working class was the group the Nazis penetrated least.
• Industrialists and landowners: the destruction of communism and the unions. Business funding grew in 1932 but is often overstated — the party ran largely on subscriptions, meeting fees and small donations.
• The young: action, purpose and a future — the membership was strikingly young. Nationalists: tear up Versailles, restore the army, make Germany great again.

The SA (founded 1921, led by Röhm from 1931, around 400,000 members by 1932 — larger than the Treaty-permitted army) did two jobs: spectacle — uniformed columns, bands, flags, protected meetings and broken opposition meetings, suggesting energy and inevitability — and intimidation: street battles with the Communist Red Front, hundreds killed, and a message to the frightened middle classes that only the Nazis could impose order — strengthened by the fact that the Nazis were causing much of the disorder. Hitler's appeal: an exceptional, obsessively rehearsed speaker who understood that mass audiences respond to conviction and repetition; Goebbels ran a propaganda operation of unprecedented sophistication — the “Hitler over Germany” aeroplane tours, films, records, rallies, posters built for emotion — presenting Hitler as the Führer, a leader above party embodying the nation, precisely the appeal of a man promising to end squabbling coalitions.

2.3 The failure of Weimar democracy and Hitler's appointment

Hitler was not elected Chancellor. He was appointed — by a President who disliked him, on the advice of politicians who believed they could use him. The dead end first: after July 1932 the Nazis and Communists together held over half the Reichstag, so a pro-Republic majority was arithmetically impossible. And the two working-class parties would not cooperate: the KPD, following the Communist International, denounced the SPD as “social fascists” and treated them as the main enemy, while the SPD remembered 1919. Together they outnumbered the Nazis. Apart, they had nothing.

• Brüning dismissed, May 1932, having lost Hindenburg's confidence.
• Papen (June–November 1932) — a conservative aristocrat with almost no parliamentary support, heading the “cabinet of barons”. Two fateful decisions: he lifted the ban on the SA, unleashing renewed street violence, and in July 1932 he deposed the SPD-led government of Prussia by decree — destroying the Republic's largest democratic stronghold and demonstrating that constitutional government could simply be set aside.
• Schleicher (December 1932 – January 1933) — the general who had manoeuvred both predecessors into and out of office tried to split the Nazis by offering the vice-chancellorship to Gregor Strasser. The attempt failed; Strasser resigned from the party.
• The deal. Papen, resentful at being replaced, negotiated with Hitler: Hitler as Chancellor, Papen as Vice-Chancellor, only three Nazis in a cabinet of twelve (Hitler, Frick, Göring). Papen's calculation: the conservatives would have Hitler boxed in — within two months, he said, they would have pushed him into a corner until he squeaked.
• Hindenburg — who had called Hitler the “Bohemian corporal” and refused him in 1932 — was moved by Papen's assurances, lobbying of his son Oskar and state secretary Meissner, the argument that the alternative was instability or civil war, and his own preference for authoritarian government of the right. On 30 January 1933 he appointed Hitler Chancellor.

2.4 From Chancellor to dictator, 1933

In January 1933 Hitler led a coalition and could be dismissed by the President at any moment. By July, Germany was a one-party state. The sequence is the answer:

1. The Reichstag Fire, 27 February 1933. The parliament building burned; a young Dutch communist, van der Lubbe, was found at the scene and executed. Whether he acted alone remains contested — what is certain is the use made of it. The next day the Decree for the Protection of People and State suspended free speech, assembly, association, the press and privacy of post and telephone, and allowed detention without trial. Around 4,000 Communists were arrested within days. The decree was never repealed — it was the legal basis of the police state for twelve years.
2. The election of 5 March 1933 — fought with the state's resources, the SA on the streets and the KPD suppressed — gave the Nazis 43.9 per cent and 288 seats. Even then, no majority; only the DNVP's 52 seats supplied one.
3. The Enabling Act, 23 March 1933 — the decisive measure: the government could make laws without the Reichstag, without the President, and in departure from the constitution, for four years. The required two-thirds majority was obtained by excluding the 81 arrested or hiding KPD deputies, surrounding and lining the chamber with armed SA men, and persuading the Centre Party to vote in favour with assurances about the Catholic Church. It passed 444 to 94 — the 94 were the Social Democrats, who voted against knowing the cost. From that moment Hitler could legislate alone.
4. Gleichschaltung — “coordination” — followed within four months: Reich governors imposed on the states (March 1933; state parliaments abolished January 1934); the civil service purged of opponents and Jewish officials (7 April 1933); trade unions abolished 2 May 1933 — the day after a Nazi-organised workers' holiday — and replaced by the DAF under Ley, with no right to strike; the SPD banned 22 June, the other parties dissolved themselves, and the Law against the Formation of New Parties (14 July 1933) made Germany a one-party state; the churches were addressed by agreement — the Concordat, July 1933 (see 3.4).

2.5 Securing the summit, 1934

The SA problem. By 1934 the SA had grown enormously — figures vary widely; estimates including absorbed organisations run into the millions — and Röhm wanted a “second revolution”: the SA absorbing the professional army as a national militia under his command, and a turn against big business. This alarmed the army (appalled at being swallowed by a street militia), industrialists and conservatives (alarmed by the socialist rhetoric), and Himmler and Göring (who saw a rival to remove). Hitler needed the army — for rearmament, for war, and because when Hindenburg died the army's attitude would decide whether he could take the presidency. The generals' price was the destruction of Röhm's ambitions.

The Night of the Long Knives, 30 June – 2 July 1934. SS units arrested and shot the SA leadership; Röhm, offered suicide, refused and was shot on 1 July. The purge settled other accounts too: Schleicher (murdered with his wife), Gregor Strasser, Kahr (who had blocked the 1923 putsch), and Catholic and conservative figures. The official toll was 85; historians' estimates run considerably higher, some to several hundred — present it as a contested range. The response: none. The Reichstag retrospectively declared the killings lawful; Papen was put under house arrest and removed from office; the army was satisfied; Hindenburg sent a telegram of thanks.

2 August 1934. Hindenburg died. Within hours the offices of President and Chancellor were merged: Führer und Reichskanzler. The same day the entire armed forces swore an oath — not to the constitution or the state, but of personal loyalty to Adolf Hitler. A plebiscite on 19 August recorded about 90 per cent approval, in conditions where opposition was already impossible.

Chapter 3 — Living under the Nazis, 1933–1945

What Nazi rule was actually like — at work, at school, in church, in the street and, for those the regime defined as enemies, in the camps. The chapter's controlling question is the fourth debate: how far did Nazi rule rest on consent, and how far on fear? Every section contributes evidence, and the answer is not the same for every group or every year.

3.1 The economy: work, weapons and self-sufficiency

The recovery in employment is the single strongest foundation of the regime's popularity. Registered unemployment fell from about 6 million (January 1933) to 2.7 million (1934), 1.6 million (1936), and effectively full employment by 1939. The policies: public works (the autobahn network from 1933 — around 3,000 km by 1938 — plus housing and land drainage); the Reich Labour Service (RAD), compulsory from June 1935 for men 18–25; conscription from March 1935; and above all rearmament, the largest single employer.

How it was paid for. Schacht (Reichsbank President 1933, Economics Minister 1934) financed rearmament partly through Mefo bills — credit notes issued through a front company, hiding the spending — and his New Plan (September 1934) controlled imports and built bilateral trade deals paying for raw materials in goods. In October 1936 Hitler launched the Four Year Plan under Göring, aiming to be ready for war in four years through autarky: synthetic rubber, oil from coal, and domestic ore through the Hermann Göring Works (1937). Results were mixed — synthetics grew but missed targets, and Germany still depended on imported oil and rubber in 1939. Schacht, who thought it reckless, resigned as Economics Minister in 1937.

What workers actually got. Real wages regained their 1928 level only around 1938, and hours rose from about 43 to 47 a week; consumer goods were scarce (guns before butter). Against that: security, and a state that made a point of valuing labour. The DAF ran Strength Through Joy (KdF) — subsidised holidays, cruises, theatre and sport for millions (the best cruises going disproportionately to the loyal) — and Beauty of Labour, improving factory conditions. The Volkswagen scheme took five marks a week from several hundred thousand savers — and not one civilian car was delivered before the money was diverted to war production.

3.2 The economy and the people at war

Germany was not ready for a long war. Early victories came from short campaigns, and civilian production continued at surprisingly high levels into 1941 — the regime was reluctant to impose hardship on a population whose support it valued. After the failure to defeat the Soviet Union, that changed: Speer became Armaments Minister in February 1942 and reorganised production ruthlessly — armaments output roughly tripled between 1942 and 1944, even under intensifying bombing.

• Rationing from September 1939 — at first comparatively generous, sustained by food seized from occupied Europe; it tightened as the war turned, and by 1944–45 rations in some areas fell below subsistence. Queuing, substitution and the black market became ordinary life.
• Bombing. From 1942 the Allied offensive struck German cities on an unprecedented scale. Hamburg, July 1943: a firestorm killed around 40,000. Dresden, February 1945: the figure now generally accepted is around 25,000 — far lower than the numbers claimed at the time and repeated for decades. Total civilian bombing deaths are contested — commonly estimated between 350,000 and 600,000. Around a fifth of German housing was destroyed; millions were evacuated.
• Refugees. In the last months, as Soviet forces advanced, millions fled west from East Prussia, Silesia and Pomerania in winter; with post-war expulsions the movement involved something in the order of 12 million people (contested), with a very large death toll. By May 1945 the cities were rubble and the population faced famine.

3.3 Women, young people and education

Nazi policy toward women and the young followed directly from racial ideology: if the nation's future depended on the number and quality of “Aryan” Germans, then childbearing and child-rearing were state business. Women were assigned to Kinder, Küche, Kirche — children, kitchen, church: the Law for the Encouragement of Marriage (June 1933) lent couples 1,000 RM if the wife left work, with a quarter cancelled per child (four children cleared it); women were removed from senior civil-service, judicial and medical posts from 1933 and university places restricted; the Mother's Cross (1938) awarded bronze, silver and gold for four, six and eight children; contraception and abortion were restricted for “Aryan” women — and, in a direct inversion, sterilisation and abortion were imposed on those deemed racially or hereditarily undesirable (see 3.5).

Young people. The Hitler Youth took boys 14–18 (the Deutsches Jungvolk from 10), girls joined the Jungmädel then the BDM. Membership rose from about 2.3 million (1933) to roughly 5.4 million (1936) when rival organisations were banned, becoming effectively compulsory from December 1936 and legally so in 1939 — around eight million. Boys' activities: camping, marching, weapons training, fitness and competition, framed by racial ideology. Girls': fitness, domestic skills, childcare and the duty of motherhood — alongside camping and sport that many remembered as genuinely liberating compared with life at home. Education was reshaped: teachers joined the Nazi Teachers' League (the great majority by 1937; Jewish teachers dismissed 1933); biology taught racial theory, history taught Versailles and the stab in the back, geography taught living space, and PE expanded to as much as five periods a week; Mein Kampf became a set text; Jewish children were progressively excluded and barred entirely by 1938. Elite institutions — Napolas, Adolf Hitler Schools, Order Castles — trained the future leadership in obedience, toughness and ideology.

3.4 The churches

Around two-thirds of Germans were Protestant, a third Catholic, and attendance was high. Christian teaching about the value of every human life sat directly against Nazi racial doctrine, and the churches had international connections the regime could not control. The Catholic settlement: the Concordat (July 1933) guaranteed freedom of worship and Catholic schools in exchange for withdrawal from politics — in practice, the dissolution of the Centre Party. A substantial short-term gain for Hitler; the regime then broke the agreement steadily — closing schools and youth groups, harassing clergy, staging show trials of priests on morality and currency charges. The Protestant strategy: the German Christians sought to fuse Christianity with Nazism — removing the Old Testament as Jewish, presenting Jesus as “Aryan” — and a Reich Church was established in 1933 under Ludwig Müller.

• The Confessing Church. In 1934 the Barmen Declaration asserted that the Church owed obedience to Christ alone, not the state; several thousand pastors followed. Niemöller — a former U-boat commander who had initially welcomed the regime — was arrested in 1937 and held in camps until 1945; Bonhoeffer joined the resistance and was executed in April 1945.
• Catholic protest. Mit brennender Sorge (March 1937) — “With Burning Anxiety” — was smuggled into Germany and read from Catholic pulpits, condemning breaches of the Concordat and racial doctrine. In 1941 Bishop Galen of Münster publicly denounced the killing of disabled people; his sermons circulated widely, the regime dared not make a martyr of a popular bishop in wartime, and the T4 programme was formally halted — though killing continued covertly. This is the clearest case in the whole unit of public protest changing Nazi policy.
• The cost. Resisting clergy were arrested in large numbers — over two thousand clergymen passed through Dachau's dedicated clergy block. But most church leaders and churchgoers took neither extreme: they neither embraced Nazism nor resisted it, seeking instead to protect their own institution and worship.

3.5 Racial policy: from discrimination to mass murder

This section states the facts plainly, without sensationalism and without euphemism — both would misrepresent what happened. The ideology: humanity divided into races of unequal worth; a supposed “Aryan” race superior and entitled to rule; Jews defined not as a religion but as a race working to destroy Germany; Slavs, Roma and others as inferior peoples whose land could be taken — plus eugenics, the doctrine that the state should control who has children. None of these ideas was invented by the Nazis; what was new was a government that made them the organising principle of the state.

The four stages of escalation

1. Exclusion, 1933–35. The boycott of Jewish businesses (1 April 1933) with SA men at shop doors; the Civil Service Law (7 April 1933) removing Jews from government employment, then from law, medicine, teaching and journalism; the Sterilisation Law (July 1933), under which around 360,000–400,000 people were compulsorily sterilised by 1945.
2. Legal exclusion, 1935. The Nuremberg Laws (15 September 1935): the Reich Citizenship Law stripped Jews of citizenship; the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour forbade marriage and relations between Jews and those classed as German. A November 1935 decree defined Jewishness by grandparents — by ancestry, not belief — so people who had never practised Judaism, or never known of Jewish ancestry, were reclassified.
3. Escalation, 1938. After a pause around the 1936 Olympics (antisemitic signs temporarily removed), persecution intensified: property registration, compulsory names Israel and Sara, passports stamped J, doctors and lawyers barred. Kristallnacht (9–10 November 1938): after a German diplomat was shot in Paris, the regime staged a “spontaneous” nationwide attack — several hundred synagogues burned, thousands of businesses and homes wrecked, around 91 Jews reported killed (in reality more), and about 30,000 Jewish men sent to concentration camps. The Jewish community was then fined one billion Reichsmarks for the damage. By 1939 roughly half of Germany's ~500,000 Jews had emigrated, leaving property and often older relatives behind.
4. Killing, 1939–45. From October 1939 the T4 “euthanasia” programme murdered between about 70,000 and 100,000 disabled people; public knowledge and church protest forced its formal halt in 1941 (see 3.4), but killing continued covertly. With the invasions of Poland and the Soviet Union the scale changed entirely: ghettos under deliberate starvation; from June 1941 the Einsatzgruppen shot Jewish communities in mass executions — well over a million people; the Wannsee Conference (20 January 1942) coordinated what the regime called the Final Solution; and purpose-built extermination camps — Chełmno, Bełżec, Sobibór, Treblinka, Majdanek, Auschwitz-Birkenau — murdered people deported from across Europe on arrival or worked them to death.

Approximately six million Jewish people were murdered. This is the Holocaust.

Other victims: Roma and Sinti (estimates of those killed range from 250,000 to 500,000); disabled people; over three million Soviet prisoners of war dead in German captivity; Polish civilians and the Polish elite; political prisoners; Jehovah's Witnesses; and gay men, thousands of whom died in camps. Where figures are estimates they are given as ranges, because the records are incomplete and historians' totals differ.

3.6 Propaganda, censorship and Nazi culture

The machinery. Goebbels became Minister of Propaganda in March 1933 and established the Reich Chamber of Culture in September — membership compulsory for anyone in the arts, press, film, music, theatre or literature. Exclusion meant the end of a career, which made censorship largely self-administering.

• Radio — the most effective instrument. Cheap People's Receivers — deliberately short-range, so foreign stations were hard to pick up — put radios in around 70 per cent of households by 1939, the highest rate in the world; loudspeakers in streets, factories and cafés made major speeches unavoidable. In wartime, listening to foreign broadcasts became a criminal offence with severe penalties.
• Press. An editors' law (October 1933) made editors personally responsible and racially vetted; papers received daily instructions; around 1,600 newspapers closed in two years. The result was a press that looked varied and said the same things.
• Film. Around 1,100 features were made 1933–45 — the great majority entertainment, because Goebbels believed propaganda worked best when the audience was not expecting it. The overt exceptions were powerful: Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will (1935) and Olympia (1938); and viciously antisemitic films such as The Eternal Jew (1940).
• Culture purged. Book burnings on 10 May 1933; the Bauhaus closed; modern artists dismissed; jazz condemned as degenerate. The Degenerate Art exhibition (Munich, 1937) hung modern works badly with mocking captions — and drew around two million visitors, far more than the approved exhibition beside it, a fact worth thinking about. Approved art: heroic peasants, soldiers, mothers, idealised bodies.
• Spectacle. The Nuremberg rallies, choreographed by Speer with his “cathedral of light”; the 1936 Berlin Olympics, a managed international display — undercut when Jesse Owens won four gold medals.

3.7 The police state: the SS, the Gestapo and the courts

The SS — transformed by Himmler (head from 1929) from Hitler's bodyguard into the regime's central institution, growing to around 250,000 by 1939. Rewarded for the Night of the Long Knives with independence, it absorbed the police, ran the camps through its Death's Head units, developed the Waffen-SS, and operated enterprises on camp labour. Recruits proved “Aryan” ancestry — the SS understood itself as a racial elite. The Gestapo — created by Göring in Prussia in 1933, taken over by Himmler in 1934 with Heydrich in operational command — could arrest without warrant, interrogate without limit, and impose “protective custody”: imprisonment without trial, charge or appeal. From 1939 the agencies were consolidated in the Reich Security Main Office under Heydrich.

The camps. Dachau opened in March 1933 for political prisoners, and a network followed — holding political opponents, “asocials”, repeat offenders, Jehovah's Witnesses, gay men and, increasingly, Jews, indefinitely and without charge. The system expanded enormously in wartime into forced labour (3.2) and, in occupied Poland, extermination (3.5). The courts: judges joined a Nazi association and interpreted law “in the spirit of the regime”; Special Courts handled political offences without juries; the People's Court (established 1934) became notorious under Freisler from 1942 — humiliating defendants and issuing death sentences in the thousands.

3.8 Opposition and resistance

Organise opposition by type — the different kinds faced different obstacles and achieved different things.

• Political opposition was destroyed first and never recovered: the KPD and SPD banned in 1933, leaders imprisoned, exiled or killed. Underground cells produced leaflets; the exiled SPD's SOPADE reports remain among the best evidence of what Germans actually thought. But the Gestapo penetrated the networks repeatedly.
• The Edelweiss Pirates — mainly working-class teenagers in Cologne and Düsseldorf who rejected the Hitler Youth: their own badges and clothes, independent hikes, parodies of Nazi songs, fights with HJ patrols. In wartime some sheltered deserters and distributed Allied leaflets. In November 1944 thirteen members were publicly hanged in Cologne, several of them teenagers.
• The Swing Youth — largely middle-class young people in Hamburg and other cities who listened to American and British jazz and swing, danced in condemned styles and adopted English phrases. Cultural rather than political protest — but the regime treated it as racial and national defiance; several hundred were arrested, some sent to camps.
• The White Rose — a small Munich University group: Hans and Sophie Scholl, Christoph Probst, Professor Kurt Huber. Six leaflets, 1942–43, condemning the regime's crimes — including the murder of Jews — in explicit moral terms and calling for passive resistance. Caught leafleting on 18 February 1943, tried before the People's Court, executed on 22 February — four days after arrest. They achieved nothing tangible, and are remembered for what they demonstrate: moral clarity was possible in the middle of a dictatorship.
• Church opposition (see 3.4): Niemöller, Bonhoeffer — and Galen's 1941 sermons, the one clear case of protest changing Nazi policy.
• The July 1944 bomb plot. As defeat became certain, army officers and conservative officials — motives mixing moral revulsion with the calculation that only a new government could get acceptable terms — moved against Hitler. On 20 July 1944 Stauffenberg placed a briefcase bomb at Hitler's headquarters and launched Operation Valkyrie. The briefcase had been moved behind a heavy table support; Hitler survived with minor injuries and the coup collapsed within hours. Stauffenberg was shot that night; around 5,000 people were executed in the aftermath, many after Freisler show trials, and Rommel was compelled to kill himself.

Pulling it together, 1890–1945

Change over time

Judgement bank: frames for likely essays

Interpretation workbench: the four debates

Questions 1–3 draw two written interpretations from these debates — 16 of the 40 marks. For each: both positions, and what each omits, which is the material a top-band answer uses.

Quick self-test

Cover the answers and check yourself. Each answer names the section where the full evidence lives.