Theodor Eicke.. Eicke was the man that assassinated Ernst Roehm in his jail cell in the 'Night of the Long Knives'. Eicke was the first inspector of the concentration camps and he influenced the concentration guards with his attitude of "inflexible harshness". He was the commander of the SS Totenkopf Division. He said, "It is the duty of every SS man to identify himself body and soul with the cause. Every order must be sacred to him and he must carry out even the most difficult and hardest of them without hesitation".
VIDEO: NAZI GERMANY IN COLOR
THE ANTI-JEWISH NAZIS
At the beginning of the 19th centuty there was a considerable amount of anti-Semitism in Europe. This was reflected in the speeches and writings of Adolf Hitler. In the 25 point programme drawn up by Hitler and Anton Drexler in 1920 for the National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP) it stated that "Citizenship is to be determined by race; no Jew to be a German."
In Mein Kampf Hitler argued that the German (he wrongly described them as the Aryan race) was superior to all others. He went on to say that Aryan superiority was being threatened particularly by the Jewish race who, he argued, were lazy and had contributed little to world civilization. (Hitler ignored the fact that some of his favourite composers and musicians were Jewish). He claimed that the "Jewish youth lies in wait for hours on end satanically glaring at and spying on the unconscious girl whom he plans to seduce, adulterating her blood with the ultimate idea of bastardizing the white race which they hate and thus lowering its cultural and political level so that the Jew might dominate."
According to Adolf Hitler, Jews were responsible for everything he did not like, including modern art, pornography and prostitution. Hitler also alleged that the Jews had been responsible for losing the First World War. Hitler also claimed that Jews, who were only about 1% of the population, were slowly taking over the country. They were doing this by controlling the largest political party in Germany, the German Social Democrat Party, many of the leading companies and several of the country's newspapers. The fact that Jews had achieved prominent positions in a democratic society was, according to Hitler, an argument against democracy: "a hundred blockheads do not equal one man in wisdom."
Hitler believed that the Jews were involved with Communists in a joint conspiracy to take over the world. Like Henry Ford, Hitler claimed that 75% of all Communists were Jews. Hitler argued that the combination of Jews and Marxists had already been successful in Russia and now threatened the rest of Europe. He argued that the communist revolution was an act of revenge that attempted to disguise the inferiority of the Jews.
Once in power Hitler was quick to express anti-Semitic ideas. Based on his readings of how blacks were denied civil rights in the southern states in America, Hitler attempted to make life so unpleasant for Jews in Germany that they would emigrate. The campaign started on 1st April, 1933, when a one-day boycott of Jewish-owned shops took place. Members of the Sturm Abteilung (SA) picketed the shops to ensure the boycott was successful.
The hostility of towards Jews increased in Germany. This was reflected in the decision by many shops and restaurants not to serve the Jewish population. Placards saying "Jews not admitted" and "Jews enter this place at their own risk" began to appear all over Germany. In some parts of the country Jews were banned from public parks, swimming-pools and public transport.
Germans were also encouraged not to use Jewish doctors and lawyers. Jewish civil servants, teachers and those employed by the mass media were sacked. Members of the SA put pressure on people not to buy goods produced by Jewish companies. For example, the Ullstein Press, the largest publisher of newspapers, books and magazines in Germany, was forced to sell the company to the NSDAP in 1934 after the actions of the SA had made it impossible for them to make a profit.
Many Jewish people now left the country. This included a large number of scientists including Albert Einstein, Edward Teller, Otto Frisch, Felix Bloch, Eugene Wigner, Leo Szilard, Lise Meitner, Otto Meyerhof, and Fritz Haber. Most of these scientists went to live in Britain and the United States and later played an important role in developing technology that was used against Nazi Germany in the Second World War.
The number of Jews emigrating increased after the passing of the Nuremberg Laws on Citizenship and Race in 1935. Under this new law Jews could no longer be citizens of Germany. It was also made illegal for Jews to marry Aryans.
The pressure on Jews to leave Germany intensified. Hitler, Joseph Goebbels and Reinhard Heydrich organized a new programme designed to encourage Jews to emigrate. Crystal Night took place on 9th-10th November, 1938. Presented as a spontaneous reaction of the German people to the news that a German diplomat had been murdered by a young Jewish refugee in Paris, the whole event was in fact organized by the NSDAP.
During Crystal Night over 7,500 Jewish shops were destroyed and 400 synagogues were burnt down. Ninety-one Jews were killed and an estimated 20,000 were sent to concentration camps. Up until this time these camps had been mainly for political prisoners. The only people who were punished for the crimes committed on Crystal Night were members of the Sturm Abteilung (SA) who had raped Jewish women (they had broken the Nuremberg Laws on sexual intercourse between Aryans and Jews).
After Crystal Night the numbers of Jews wishing to leave Germany increased dramatically. It has been calculated that between 1933 and 1939, approximately half the Jewish population of Germany (250,000) left the country. This included several Jewish scientists who were to play an important role in the fight against fascism during the war. A higher number of Jews would have left but anti-Semitism was not restricted to Germany and many countries were reluctant to take them.
Bernhard Rust, minister of education, also purged the universities of Jews. Over a thousand people lost their jobs. Rust justified his actions by claiming that: "We must have a new Aryan generation at the universities, or else we will lose the future."
By the end of 1941 over 500,000 Jews in Poland and Russia had been killed by the Schutz Staffeinel (SS). At the Wannsee Conference held in January 1942, Reinhard Heydrich, Heinrich Muller, Adolf Eichmann and Roland Friesler discussed what became known as the Final Solution. It was eventually decided to make the extermination of the Jews a systematically organized operation. After this date extermination camps were established in the east that had the capacity to kill large numbers including Belzec (15,000 a day), Sobibor (20,000), Treblinka (25,000) and Majdanek (25,000).
It has been estimated that between 1942 and 1945 a total of 18 million were sent to extermination camps. Of these, historians have estimated that between five and eleven million were killed.
Source: Spartacus
"I must admit that this gassing had a calming effect on me, I was always horrified of executions by firing squads. Now, I was relieved to think that we would be spared all these bloodbaths."
Rudolf Hoess..
Rudolf Hoess was responsible for the death of over one million people in his concentration camp. He was caught in March 1946, gave evidence at Nuremberg and was then handed over to Poland for trial. While awaiting trial he wrote his memoirs. He was executed at Auschwitz, the very site he commanded, and allowed others to die in.
VIDEO: NAZI GERMANY 1939 IN COLOR
CAUSES OF RISE OF NAZISM IN GERMANY
After the defeat in the First World War, Germany became a democracy. Social Democrats and Liberal parties formed the new government. The enormous costs of the war caused rampant inflation. Unemployment rose to over five million. Large parts of the population lived in fear of falling back into 19th-century poverty. Nationalist parties and the newly founded National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP) blamed the democratic constitution, the parties supporting the new republic and the unjust provisions of the peace treaty of Versailles for the chaos. But above all it was "the Jew" who is was blamed: "The German worker was being ruined by "Jewish Capital" and threatened by "Jewish Bolshevism" that wanted to turn him into a slave."
"It is time something must be done. Whoever acts will probably go down in German history as a traitor. Yet if he fails to act, he will be a traitor to his own conscience".
Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg..
Claus von Stauffenberg was a key figure in the plot on Hitler's life on 20th of July 1944 and paid with his life for his part in the attempt.
VIDEO: NAZI PERSECUTION AND TERROR IN COLOR
Klara Hitler (Hitler's mother) died in 1907 at the age of 46 from malignant breast cancer. Adolf was 18-years-old at the time and was devastated by the loss of his mother. Klara was operated on and had a breast removed, but it was too late. Interestingly, the doctor who examined her was a Jewish man by the name of Eduard Bloch.
Kristallnacht was called the 'Night of Broken Glass' because so the destruction of so much property involved a lot of broken glass. It also marked an intensification in the Nazi perseuction of the Jews that culminated in the Holocaust. Nov. 9 & 10, 1938. The attack started on the night of the 9th and continued during the next day. Nazi Stormtroopers terrorized Jewish men, women and children. About 25,000 Jewish men were rounded up and sent all over Germany for torture, slave labour, brutal treatment and often death from the SS. 91 people were murdered, 7,500 Jewish businesses were destroyed, 267 synogogues burned, and probably hundreds of people injured.
When Hermann Goering became Prussian Minister of the Interior in 1933, he detached the espionage and political units of the Prussian State Police and he put Nazis in charge. It was known as Department 1A, which later came to be called the Gestapo (Geheime Staatspolizei). (Later this term came to be widely used in a looser sense to denote the entire Nazi terror apparatus).
The Swastika is a very old sacred symbol from near-prehistoric times and referred to in Germany as the Hakenkreuz. There is no evidence that Hitler ever used the word “Swastika”. It was traditionally a sign of good fortune and well-being, its name is derived from the Sanskrit 'su' meaning 'well' and 'asti' meaning 'being'. For thousands of years the Swastika symbol given courage, hope and security to millions. It predates all former known religions and it is well-known in Hindu and Buddhist cultures and used by the Aryan nomads of India in the Second Millennium B.C. Unfortunately, Nazism has turned the Swastika into a hate symbol. Hitler displayed the symbol on a red background 'to win over the worker' and it had an hypnotic effect on all those who supported the Nazi movement. In his book Mein Kampf, Hitler wrote "In the red we see the social idea of the movement, in the white, the Nationalist idea and in the Hakenkreuz the vision of the struggle for the victory of the Aryan man."
THE THIRD REICH
This was the name for the Nazi period of government from January 1933 to May 1945. The official name was "Deutsches Reich" or (only from 1943 on) "Grossdeutsches Reich".
* The First Reich (or 'Empire') was the Holy Roman Empire period of the German Nation begun in A.D. 962 when Otto the Great was crowned in Rome. This Empire, of course, did indeed last - more or less intact - for around a thousand years.
* The Second Reich was founded by Otto von Bismarck in 1871 after the defeat of France in the Franco-Prussian War. When the Hohenzollern dynasty collapsed in 1918 with the abdication of Emperor William II, the Second Reich came to its end.
* This was followed by the Weimar Republic proclaimed by the Social Democrats or Labour Party at the end of 1918 and which lasted until 1933.
* In turn, it was followed by Hitler's Third Reich which he regarded as an empire that would also last for a thousand years. On January 30, 1933, President von Hindenburg appointed Adolf Hitler as Chancellor of Germany. (Hitler had adopted the term 'Third Reich' in the early 1920s after the German writer, Arthur Moeller von der Bruck, used it as a title for one of his books)
MEIN KAMPF
The original title of Hitler's 'Mein Kampf' was 'My 4 & 1/2 Year Struggle, against Lies, Stupidity and Cowardice'. The first part was written while he was incarcerated in Landsberg prison after the 1923 Beer-Hall Putsch. His publisher, Max Amann, later changed the title to Mein Kampf (My Struggle). The first volume was published on July 18, 1925. By 1939, the book had sold over 5 million copies, making Hitler a millionaire. Up to 1945, the book had a total printing of just over 10,000,000 copies, outsold only by the Bible. His official salary was 60,000 Marks per annum. In 1934, Hitler declared his income for 1933 as 1,232,355 Marks but the tax on 600,000 of this amount was never paid. Most of this was from royalties from his book. He also received a fraction of a cent for every postage stamp sold bearing his image. Today, the rights to Hitler's 'Mein Kampf' is owned by the Finance Amt Bayern. (Bavarian Finance Office)
THE HORST WESSEL SONG
An early convert to the Nazi party was 19 year old Bielefeld-born Horst Wessel (1907-1930) who gave up his law studies to join the SA (Storm Troopers). Working as a taxi driver and builder's labourer, he soon became a leading orator at SA rallies and leader of Sturmabteilung Unit No. 5. In 1929, he married Erna Jaenicke, an 18 year old prostitute. On the evening of January 14, 1930, a group of communist thugs, led by Jaenicke's former boyfriend and pimp, Albrecht Höhler, called at their lodgings at 62 Grosse Frankfurter Strasse, Berlin, and in a fit of jealous anger Höhler drew a pistol from his pocket and shot Wessel in the mouth. He died five weeks later on February 23. Höhler was arrested and sentenced to a term in prison but when the Nazis came to power in 1933 he was taken from his cell and executed.
Before his murder, Wessel had composed a poem 'Die Fahne Hoch' (Fly the Flag High) which later was changed to 'The Horst Wessel Song' and introduced into Nazi Party ritual. It soon became Nazi Germany's second anthem and played after 'Deutschland Uber Alles' (Germany Before All). In the town of Stralsund, near Stettin, a citizen was sentenced to two weeks in prison for failing to give the Nazi salute and standing with his hands in his pocket while the band was playing the Horst Wessel Song. Wessel was buried in the Nikolaifriedhof cemetery in Berlin but after the war, in common with all other Nazi graves, the headstone was removed in 1955 and his remains were disinterred and cremated.
THE SWASTIKA TREES FOREST
JEWS IN GERMANY
From 1933 onwards, the music of German Jewish composer Mendelssohn was banned. Soon after, all Jews were dismissed from symphony orchestras and from the Opera. Books published by Jewish authors such as Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Maxim Gorky and Heinrich Heine were burned in April, 1934, in front of the University of Berlin. One of the leading newspapers, the 'Vossische Zeitung' was forced out of business because it was owned by the 'House of Ullstein' a Jewish firm. The same thing happened to the German Jewish newspaper, the 'Judische Rundschau'. The Jewish owned 'Berliner Tageblatt was forced to close in 1937. The well known and respected Frankfurter Zeitung was allowed to flourish but its Jewish owners were sacked. On April 7, 1933, a Civil Service Law was passed in Germany. This law banned all persons with a Jewish grandparent from public employment, an action which caused great distress in the Jewish community. By the end of the year around 31,000 of Berlin's Jews were living on charity. (Of the 503,000 Jews living in Germany when Hitler came to power around 319,900 had fled the country by 1939. By the war's end only about 23,000 Jews were living in Germany)
In Germany, the Nazis first came for the communists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist. Then they came for the Catholics, but I didn't speak up because I was a protestant. Then they came for me, and by that time there was no one left to speak for me.
REVEREND MARTIN NIEMOELLER
Contrary to the Marxists, the Nazis did not advocate public ownership of the means of production. They did demand that the government oversee and run the nation’s economy. The issue of legal ownership, they explained, is secondary; what counts is the issue of control. Private citizens, therefore, may continue to hold titles to property—so long as the state reserves to itself the unqualified right to regulate the use of their property.
According to Gestapo records…they had little need to engage in direct spying on the citizens since the citizens themselves were more than willing to do their spying for them.
Jena by this time was a center of antitobacco activism -- mainly through the labors of Karl Astel, director of the new institute [Institute for Tobacco Hazards Research] and president, since the summer of 1939, of the University of Jena. Astel was head of the Thuringia's office of Racial Affairs and a notorious antisemite and racial hygienist (he had joined the Nazi party and the SS in July of 1930) ... Astel was also a militant antismoker and teetolater who once characterized opposition to tobacco as a 'national socialist duty.' On May 1, 1941, he banned smoking in all buildings and classrooms of the University of Jena, and the following spring, as head of Thuringia's Public Health Office, he announced a smoking ban in all regional schools and health offices. Tobacco in his view had to be fought 'cigar by cigar, cigarette by cigarette, and pack by pack' -- hence his notoriety for snatching cigarettes from the mouth of students who dared to violate his Jena University tobacco ban.
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-- Nazi Germany In Color: Part 2
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