Nazi Germany

Nazi Germany (aka the Third Reich) is the common English name for Germany between 1933 and 1945 when the country was ruled by Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party. Following his appointment as chancellor in 1933, Hitler and his Nazi government soon assumed dictatorial powers and tried to control and impose Nazi values on all aspects of people’s political, social and working lives, using propaganda and persecution

Archduchess Ileana’s great grandmother, Queen Victoria, whose birth certificate Ileana desperately needed to get hold of (Getty)

Queen Victoria and the Nazis: the strange tale of the search for the royal family’s Aryan origins

Chancellor Adolf Hitler with President Paul von Hindenburg, Berlin, 1 May 1933

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Hitler’s millionaire backers: how Germany’s elite facilitated the rise of the Nazis

Neville Chamberlain holds aloft the famous piece of paper at Heston aerodrome on 30 September 1938. (Picture by Alamy)

Second World War

The Munich crisis: the battle over appeasement

Poles watch the first of the German invasion planes over Warsaw, 1939. (Photo by Hulton-Deutsch Collection/CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images)

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Poland, 1939: World War Two begins

Adolf Hitler watches German troops march in central Poland

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Roger Moorhouse: How Hitler’s diplomatic miscalculation led to WW2

Brendan Simms photographed by Ian Farrell

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Hitler’s war with Anglo-America

A mushroom cloud over Nagasaki, Japan

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WW2 10 of the most important Second World War dates

Firemen tackling a blitz fire at St Paul's Cathedral, London

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The Second World War: a timeline

A portrait of Nazi leader Adolf Hitler

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Why did the Second World War happen?

Brendan Sims, professor of the history of international relations at the University of Cambridge

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Books interview with Brendan Simms: “Hitler didn’t see Germany’s main enemy as Soviet communism, but Anglo-American capitalism”

Jews stand with hands up before German soldiers

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The brutal blitzkrieg: the 1939 invasion of Poland

Greek pottery featuring swastikas

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Q&A How did a Sanskrit symbol become the Nazi swastika?

British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain passes a Nazi honour guard on his arrival in Germany in 1938, accompanied by Joachim von Ribbentrop (right). (Photo by Ann Ronan Pictures/Print Collector/Getty Images)

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9 notable ambassadors in history

The battle of Moscow, 1942. The German invasion of the Soviet Union, launched on 22 June 1941, was the largest military operation in history. (Photo by Art Media/Print Collector/Getty Images)

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Operation Barbarossa: 9 popular myths busted

Aerial view of the outside of Treblinka extermination camp, Germany, 1943. (Photo by Mondadori Portfolio via Getty Images)

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Laurence Rees on the perpetrators of the Holocaust: “What they told us was, at the time, they felt it was the right thing to do”