History of Germany

3 Sections (Nazi Times, Berlin Wall, Post-Germany)

Nazi Times
An unintended effect of the anti-Young Plan campaign was to give
widespread public exposure to Hitler, who used his access to the Hugenberg-
owned press empire and to its weekly movie newsreels to give himself and his
Nazi movement national publicity. An additional assist to Hitler’s career came
on October 29, 1929, with the stock market crash on Wall Street, an event that
signaled the onset of what quickly became a worldwide depression. 

German indebtedness to these investors had by 1929 reached nearly 15 billion

marks. Prices on the German stock exchanges fell drastically during the last
month of the year. Business failures multiplied. Early in 1930 Germany’s second
largest insurance firm collapsed. Unemployment rose to three million during the
course of the year. By the winter of 1932 it reached six million. Germany’s
industry was working at no more than 50 percent of its capacity, and the volume
of German foreign trade fell by two-thirds between 1929 and 1932.

Hitler’s record as a war veteran lent authority to the hyper nationalism he

expressed in racist terms. His identification of the Jew as the enemy
responsible for all of Germany’s ills, be it the defeat of 1918, the Treaty of
Versailles, the reparations, the inflation, or now the depression, seemed
plausible to many eager to find a scapegoat. The power of Hitler’s appeal was
reflected in the party’s growing membership lists—from 170,000 members in
1929 to 1,378,000 in 1932—and in the swelling ranks of the Nazi
Party’s paramilitary SA (Sturmabteilung), the infamous storm troopers.
The Nazi revolution

When Hitler finally became chancellor, on January 30, 1933, it was not on
the crest of a wave of popular support but as the result of backroom
political intrigue by Schleicher, Papen, and the president’s son, Oskar von
Hindenburg. Only Hitler, they believed, could bring together a coalition
with Hugenberg’s DNVP and possibly the Centre Party that could
command a majority in the Reichstag.

The Nazis professed an ideology, national socialism, that purported to

champion the common man, whom they portrayed as a victim in a world
controlled by Jews. Anti-Semitism and notions of German racial
superiority were at the core of this ideology, which, in its particulars, was
also a catalog of resentments that had accumulated in German society
since November 1918. Heading the list were the humiliations associated
with Versailles, but not far behind were resentments of big business, big
banks, big department stores, and big labour, as well as resentments of
the divisiveness and inefficiencies that political parties seemed to foster

For the Nazis, to exclude Jews from the Volksgemeinschaft was as

important as attracting the German working classes to it, in order to undo
the long-standing alienation of the largely socialist-minded German
worker from the nationalist consensus. 

. World War II
World War II is appropriately called “Hitler’s war.” Germany was so extraordinarily
successful in the first two years that Hitler came close to realizing his aim of
establishing hegemony in Europe.
Hitler determined that he could take Britain out of the war with air power.
German bombers began their attack in August 1940, but the British
proved intractable. The vaunted German air force (Luftwaffe) failed to
bring Britain to its knees partly because of the strength of the British air
force, partly because the German air force was ill-equipped for the task,
and partly because the British were able to read German code
(see Ultra). Yet Hitler had been so confident of a quick victory that, even
before the attack began, he had ordered his military planners to draw up
plans for an invasion of the Soviet Union. The date he had set for that
invasion was May 15, 1941.

The rollback of German forces continued inexorably during 1944. On June

6 the Allies in the west launched their invasion of France across
the English Channel. In the east the Soviet army was advancing along the
entire 2,500-mile front. By the end of the year, it stood poised on the
eastern frontiers of prewar Germany. In the west, British and American
troops stood ready to attack across the western borders.

Fate did not again intervene on Hitler’s behalf. In mid-January of 1945 he

withdrew underground into his bunker in Berlin where he remained until
his suicide on April 30. By that time Soviet soldiers were streaming into
Berlin. All that remained of the Reich was a narrow wedge of territory
running southward from Berlin into Austria.
Berlin Wall, German Berliner Mauer, barrier that
surrounded West Berlin and prevented access to it from East
Berlin and adjacent areas of East Germany during the period from 1961 to
1989. In the years between 1949 and 1961, about 2.5 million East
Germans had fled from East to West Germany, including steadily rising
numbers of skilled workers, professionals, and intellectuals. Their loss
threatened to destroy the economic viability of the East German state. In
response, East Germany built a barrier to close off East Germans’ access
to West Berlin and hence West Germany. That barrier, the Berlin Wall,
was first erected on the night of August 12–13, 1961, as the result of a
decree passed on August 12 by the East German Volkskammer (“Peoples’
Chamber”). The original wall, built of barbed wire and cinder blocks, was
subsequently replaced by a series of concrete walls (up to 15 feet [5
metres] high) that were topped with barbed wire and guarded with
watchtowers, gun emplacements, and mines. By the 1980s that system of
walls, electrified fences, and fortifications extended 28 miles (45 km)
through Berlin, dividing the two parts of the city, and extended a further
75 miles (120 km) around West Berlin, separating it from the rest of East
Germany.

The Berlin Wall came to symbolize the Cold War’s division of East from
West Germany and of eastern from western Europe. About 5,000 East
Germans managed to cross the Berlin Wall (by various means) and reach
West Berlin safely, while another 5,000 were captured by East German
authorities in the attempt and 191 more were killed during the actual
crossing of the wall.