NCERT Class 9 History Chapter 3: Nazism and the Rise of Hitler YouTube Lecture Handouts

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NCERT Class 9 History Chapter 3: Nazism and the Rise of Hitler

  • 1945 – Helmuth (parents discussing something in serious tones – allies will do to us what we did to crippled and Jews) and his father shot himself. He didn՚t eat at home for 9 years fearing that his mother will poison him.
  • His father was Nazi & supporter of Hitler

Hitler

  • Determined to make Germany a mighty power
  • Ambition to conquer Europe
  • Killed Jews
  • Nazism – structure of ideas and politics

In May 1945, Germany surrendered to the Allies (UK and France – later joined by USSR and USA) . Anticipating what was coming, Hitler, his propaganda minister Goebbels and his entire family committed suicide collectively in his Berlin bunker in April.

At the end of the war, International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg was set up to prosecute Nazi war criminals for Crimes against Peace, for War Crimes and Crimes against Humanity (moral and ethical questions)

Genocidal War – under shadow of 2nd world war – mass murder - 6 million Jews, 200,000 Gypsies, 1 million Polish civilians, 70,000 Germans who were considered mentally and physically disabled – by gassing them in killing centers like Auschwitz

Birth of Weimar Republic

  • 1st world war – Germany & Austria versus England, France and Russia
  • Europe was drained of its resources
  • Germany made initial gain over France and Russia
  • Later USA entered in 1917
  • Germany and Central Powers defeated in 1918
  • Defeat of Germany & abdication of emperor – gave opportunity to recast German polity
  • National assembly met at Weimar – established democratic constitution with federal structure
  • Deputies elected to German Parliament or Reichstag – based on equal vote by all adults including women
  • Couldn՚t remain long
Illustration: Birth of Weimar Republic
  • Peace treaty at Versailles – harsh and humiliating
  • Germany
  • Lost overseas colonies
  • 1⟋10th population
  • 13% territories
  • 75% iron
  • 26% coal to France, Poland, Denmark and Lithuania
  • Demilitarized to weaken power
  • Germany was responsible for war and damages to Allied Powers
  • Pay compensation of 6 billion pounds
  • Allies occupied Rhineland by 1920՚s
  • Many Germans held Weimar Republic responsible for defeat & disgrace

Impact of War

  • Europe turned from creditor to debitor
  • Weimar republic was financially crippled and forced to pay compensation
  • Socialists, Catholics and Democrats ( ‘November criminals’ ) supported Weimar Republic - became easy targets of attack in the conservative nationalist circles
  • Soldiers were above civilians
  • Men were aggressive, strong and masculine

Political Radicalism and Economic Crisis

  • Weimar republic coincided with birth of the Spartacist League on the pattern of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia
  • Soviet of workers and sailors were established
  • Demands for Soviet-style governance
  • Weimar Republic crushed uprising with the help of a war veteran organization called Free Corps.
  • Anguished Spartacists later founded the Communist Party of Germany
  • Political radicalization as heightened by economic crisis of 1923
  • Germany fought war in loans and paid reparations in gold which depleted the gold reserves
  • Germany refused to pay and French occupied Ruhr area
  • Germany started printing paper notes – value of currency Mark declined & price of goods soared - hyperinflation (April – 1US $ = 24,000 marks & in December – 2 trillion)

Dawes Plan

  • Released financial burden on Germans
  • America intervened

Depression

  • 1924 - 28 – years of stability
  • 1929 – Wall Street Exchange collapsed (fall in prices) – in 1 day around 13 million shares were sold – start of economic depression
  • 1929 - 32 – national income of USA halved
  • Factories shutdown, farmers were hit, export fell and speculators took money off the market
  • 1932 – Industrial production of Germany reduced to 40% of 1929 – lost jobs, paid reduced wages, unemployment at 6 million
    • Criminal activities increased
    • Savings of old age lost as current lost its value
    • Fear of proletarianisation (impoverished to level of working class) , an anxiety of being reduced to ranks of the working class, or worse still & unemployed
    • Peasantry couldn՚t fill stomach

Defects under Weimar Republic

  • Proportional representation - made achieving a majority by any one party a near impossible task, leading to a rule by coalitions.
  • Article 48 - President the powers to impose emergency, suspend civil rights and rule by decree

Within its short life, the Weimar Republic saw twenty different cabinets lasting on an average 239 days, and a liberal use of Article 48

Hitler՚s Rise to Power

  • Born in 1889 – Austria
  • Youth in poverty
  • Powerful speaker
  • Build strong nation
  • Undo injustice of Treaty of Versailles
  • Restore dignity of German people
  • Weed out foreign influence & resist foreign conspiracies
  • Significance of rituals and mass mobilization
  • Massive rallies and demonstrations
  • Red banners with Swastika, Nazi salute
  • Enrolled for army, became a corporal and earned medal for bravery
    • 1919: Joined German Worker՚s Party
    • Renamed it as National Socialist German Worker՚s Party (Nazi Party) – converted Germany to totalitarian state
    • 1923: Planned to seize Bavaria, march to Berlin and capture power – failed, arrested and tried for treason
    • Couldn՚t mobilize support till 1930՚s
    • During Great Depression – Nazism became a mass movement
    • After 1929 – banks collapsed, workers lost job, middle class threatened
    • 1928 – got 2.6% vote in Reichstag – German Parliament
    • By 1932 – became largest party with 37% votes

Destruction of Power

  • 1933 - President Hindenburg offered Chancellorship, the highest position in the cabinet of ministers, to Hitler.
  • Hitler tried to dismantle democratic rule
  • Fire broke in German parliament in February - Fire Decree of 28 February 1933 indefinitely suspended civic rights like freedom of speech, press and assembly
  • Concentration camp – A camp where people were isolated and detained without due process of law. Typically, it was surrounded by electrified barbed wire fences – for communists
  • On 3 March 1933 - Enabling Act was passed, it established dictatorship in Germany. It gave Hitler all powers to sideline Parliament and rule by decree. All political parties and trade unions were banned except Nazis
  • Regular police in green uniform
  • SA or the Storm Troopers included the Gestapo (secret state police) , SS (protection squads) , criminal police and Security Service (SD)

Reconstruction

  • Hitler gave economic recovery to economist Hjalmar Schacht who aimed at full production and full employment through a state-funded work-creation program – produced superhighways and cars Volkswagen.
  • Pulled out of the League of Nations in 1933
  • Reoccupied the Rhineland in 1936
  • Integrated Austria and Germany in 1938 under the slogan, One people, One empire, and One leader.
  • Took over Czechoslovakia
  • Hitler choose war as option to reach out economic crisis – resources to be accumulated by expansion of territory
  • In September 1939, Germany invaded Poland. This started a war with France and England.
  • In September 1940, Tripartite Pact was signed between Germany, Italy and Japan, strengthening Hitler՚s claim to international power.
  • Puppet regimes, supportive of Nazi Germany, were installed in a large part of Europe
  • By the end of 1940, Hitler was at the pinnacle of his power.
Illustration: Reconstruction
  • Attacked Soviet Union in 1941 – Soviet army defeated Germany at Stalingrad. Soviet Red Army reached till heart of Berlin
  • USA resisted involvement in war due to huge losses incurred in WWI. But Japan was expanding to east by occupying French Indo-China and US naval bases in Pacific.
  • Japan extended support to Hitler & bombed Pearl Harbor, USA – entering in WW-II (ended in 1945 with defeat of Hitler and nuclear bomb on Hiroshima)

Nazi Views

  • No equality only racial hierarchy
  • Nordic German Aryans were at top and Jews at lowest rank (idea borrowed from Charles Darwin – evolution and natural selection; Herbert Spencer – survival of fittest)
  • Strongest race would survive and weakest would perish
  • Aryans – finest race, pure, strong and would dominate the world
  • Lebensraum or living space – new territories to be acquired for settlement – enhance area and enable new settlers
  • Poland became the laboratory for experimentation

Racial State Established

Physically eliminated all those who were not desirable

Even impure Germans had no right to exist

Euthanasia Program – German physically or mentally unfit were condemned to death

Inferior clans – Jews (killer of Christ and usurers) , Gypsies, Blacks, Russian and Poles

Jews – barred from owning land, only trade and do moneylending, lived in ghettos

From 1933 to 1938 the Nazis terrorized, pauperized and segregated the Jews, compelling them to leave the country

Nuremberg Laws of citizenship of September 1935:

Only Persons of German or related blood would henceforth be German citizens enjoying the protection of the German empire.

Marriages between Jews and Germans were forbidden.

Extramarital relations between Jews and Germans became a crime.

Jews were forbidden to fly the national flag.

Other legal measures included:

Boycott of Jewish businesses

Expulsion from government services

Forced selling and confiscation of their properties

1938 – remembered as night of broken glass

From 1939 - 1945 they aimed at concentrating them in certain areas and eventually killing them in gas chambers in Poland

Ghettoization (hunger, starvation and deprivation) – All Jews to wear yellow Star of David

After 1941 – Annihilation – Jews brought to death factories by goods trains

In Poland and elsewhere in the east, most notably Belzek, Auschwitz, Sobibor, Treblinka, Chelmno and Majdanek, they were charred in gas chambers. Mass killings took place within minutes with scientific precision.

NW Poland – annexed by Germany (Poles forced to leave to other parts as General Government or destination for undesirables)

Polish children similar to Aryans were examined by race experts – if passed would live with German families else would go to orphanage

Youth in Nazi Germany

  • Schools cleansed and purified under Nazis
  • Jew teachers were dismissed
  • German and Jews children were separated
  • Good German got Nazi schooling – textbooks were written and racial science was common, stereotypes against Jews were given, sports aimed to nurture violence and aggression
  • Educate in spirit of National Socialism
  • 10 years old – enter Jungvolk (Nazi youth Group)
  • 14 years old – boys joined Hitler Youth (worship war, glorify aggression and violence, condemn democracy, and hate Jews, communists, Gypsies)
  • 18 years – join Labour Service, serve Armed forces & enter Nazi organization
  • 1922- Youth League was formed (after 4 years called Hitler Youth)
  • While boys were taught to be aggressive, masculine and steel hearted, girls were told that they had to become good mothers and rear pure-blooded Aryan children. Girls had to maintain the purity of the race, distance from Jews, look after children and teach Nazi sentiments
  • To encourage women to produce many children, Honor Crosses were awarded. A bronze cross was given for four children, silver for six and gold for eight or more.

Propaganda

  • Nazis never used the words ‘kill’ or ‘murder’ in their official communications.
  • Mass killings were termed special treatment, final solution (for the Jews) , euthanasia (for the disabled) , selection and disinfections.
  • ‘Evacuation’ meant deporting people to gas chambers
  • Gas chambers were known as ‘disinfection-areas’ , and looked like bathrooms equipped with fake showerheads.
  • Socialists and liberals were represented as weak and degenerate.
  • Orthodox Jews were stereotyped and marked – shown as flowing beard wearing Kaftan (in reality hard to differentiate from German Jews)
  • Charlotte Beradt book “Third Reich of Dreams” - describes how Jews themselves began believing in the Nazi stereotypes about them. They dreamt of their hooked noses, black hair and eyes, Jewish looks and body movements. Jews died many deaths even before they reached the gas chamber.
  • Nazi killing operations called as Holocaust - when the war seemed lost, the Nazi leadership distributed petrol to its functionaries to destroy all incriminating evidence available in offices.
  • “These are a tribute to those who resisted it, an embarrassing reminder to those who collaborated, and a warning to those who watched in silence.”

Manishika