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"The outcome of one man's beliefs": why the Holocaust happened
Why did the Holocaust happen? Sir Richard J Evans explains how Adolf Hitler's delusions led to the mass extermination of six million Jews
80 years ago, early in 1945, what is now generally known as ‘The Holocaust’ – that is, the mass extermination of some six million European Jews – was more or less over. In the years 1941-45, in the midst of the Second World War, Jews all across the continent, in areas conquered or dominated by Nazi Germany, had been rounded up and killed. This was no accidental by-product of the war; it was an organised process, deliberately planned and executed. And it was above all the outcome of one man’s beliefs and delusions: Adolf Hitler. This programme of mass murder on a gargantuan scale was what Hitler and his Nazi Party termed “the final solution of the Jewish problem in Europe”, a problem that was entirely the product of their own warped imagination. In 1944, Polish-Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin coined a new term to describe what happened: ‘genocide’, meaning the destruction of an entire people or nation. Such was indeed the Holocaust, visited not upon the Jews because of their religion, their culture or their social position, but because of their race. Even people who were half- Jewish or quarter-Jewish were targeted by the Nazis. Hitler's beliefs Dismayingly, there have been other genocides since the end of the Second World War. But the Jewish genocide had an extra dimension not shared by any other. Antisemitism was, and remains, fueled by a paranoid conspiracy theory, according to which Jews of every kind were driven by what Hitler called their “racial instinct” to engage in a ceaseless and unrelenting “drive to world domination”. The only way to stop this – in Hitler’s view – was to exterminate them wherever they were to be found. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/04/GettyImages-1278103471-f23880c.jpg" width="769" height="1024" alt="Hitler's claimed in his political manifesto 'Mein Kampf' (first published in 1925), that “the idea came to me that I would liberate Germany, that I would make it great”.(Jim Heimann Collection/Getty Images)" title="Hitler's claimed in his political manifesto 'Mein Kampf' (first published in 1925), that “the idea came to me that I would liberate Germany, that I would make it great”.(Jim Heimann Collection/Getty Images)" /> Hitler conceived this bizarre theory as he searched for an answer to the question of why Germany had been defeated in the First World War. Serving as a soldier on the Western Front, an experience that gave meaning to a life hitherto marked by failure and frustration, he had proudly believed in the victory propaganda pumped out by the German High Command up to the final weeks of the conflict. As he lay recovering in hospital from a poison gas attack at the very end of the war, the only explanation he could grasp for was one held by a tiny minority of far-right German nationalists, according to which Jewish socialists had stabbed the army in the back by undermining morale, above all on the Home Front, and destroying the will to fight. Read more | "We need to understand the Nazis as human beings”: Richard J Evans on the motivations of Hitler’s followers Hitler devoted the rest of his life preparing to re-run the First World War, this time successfully, creating a militaristic dictatorship, building on the removal of what he saw as the Jewish threat at home, and preparing for the new European conflict through rearming and preparing the German people for the struggle. When he came to power in 1933 he almost immediately implemented antisemitic measures. On 7 April he sacked all Jewish public employees except those who had fought for Germany in the First World War. By 1935, laws promulgated at the annual Nazi Party Rally in Nuremberg banned Jews and non-Jews from marrying or having sexual relations and effectively reduced Jews to the status of second-class citizens. German Jews’ rights were further curtailed in the following years, as they were pushed out of the economy by the ‘Aryanization’ of their businesses and jobs. Escalating violence In November 1938, the Nazis mounted a nationwide pogrom – Kristallnacht – in which over a thousand synagogues were burned to the ground, 7,500 Jewish-owned shops were trashed, and 30,000 Jewish men were rounded up on Hitler’s personal orders and sent to concentration camps, from which they were released only on promising to emigrate. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/04/GettyImages-535083324-fb8981e.jpg" width="1024" height="733" alt="Businesses and properties owned by Jews were the target of vicious Nazi mobs during a night of vandalism that is known as 'Kristallnacht'. (Photo by Bettmann/CORBIS/Bettmann Archive)" title="Businesses and properties owned by Jews were the target of vicious Nazi mobs during a night of vandalism that is known as 'Kristallnacht'. (Photo by Bettmann/CORBIS/Bettmann Archive)" /> Jews made up less than one per cent of the German population, and half of these had emigrated by the outbreak of the Second World War, leaving only about a quarter of a million behind. But the German conquest of Poland in 1919 brought 3.5 million Jews under German control, fully 10 per cent of the population. While German Jews were highly acculturated into mainstream German society, most Polish Jews were not; they dressed differently and spoke Yiddish rather than Polish. They had to suffer considerable discrimination at the hands of the government and non-Jewish population. Seizing the opportunity to intensify his antisemitic actions, Hitler sent in death squads of the SS Security Service to round up and dispossess Jews and confine them to specially created ghettos in walled-off areas of cities such as Warsaw and Lodz, where they rapidly became malnourished and sick. This process was conducted with considerable violence and brutality. Both the SS and regular German troops treated the Jews with a special degree of sadism, seeking to degrade and humiliate them in countless different ways. Mass murder The Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941 ratcheted the violence up a further level, as Hitler regarded Bolshevism as a Jewish creation, a view that lacked any foundation in reality. He sent in six armed and motorised SS Security Service death squads behind the army as it entered eastern Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, Russia and the former Baltic states, their task to create more ghettos where Jews living in the area were to be confined and to kill Jewish political commissars. At the same time, however, the death squads, aided by police auxiliaries and local, anti-Soviet and antisemitic militias, began killing Jewish men indiscriminately, moving on to slaughter Jewish women and children as well. Altogether 1.5 million Jews were shot into pits which they often had to dig for themselves. The violence and brutality were almost inconceivable. The stress on the SS troops – many of whom had nervous breakdowns or began drinking heavily – prompted Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS and leader of the murder operation, to take advantage of public disquiet in Germany regarding the gassing and murder of mentally ill and handicapped non-Jewish Germans. He transferred the gassing teams to the newly conquered East to set up their facilities, in a bid to make the killing process less directly personal. The death camps Over the autumn and winter of 1941, 42 camps were set up in the occupied East for the sole purpose of killing Jews. The first one, at Chelmno, began operating on 8 December 1941 by packing prisoners into sealed compartments in the back of vans into which the vehicle’s exhaust was pumped, causing death by asphyxiation. By the spring of 1942, other camps, at Treblinka, Sobibór and Belzec had been set up with stationary gas facilities using the same process. At the same time, a mass killing facility was established at the Auschwitz concentration camp, near Cracow, where hydrogen cyanide insecticide known as Zyklon-B was employed. Altogether 1.1 million victims died at Auschwitz, including more than 900,000 Jews. Initially the gas chambers were used to kill inmates of the Jewish ghettos in the East. In the spring and summer of 1942, Jews in other parts of Europe under Nazi control – already subject to severe restrictions – were rounded up and deported to the East, usually in unheated cattle trucks. In the summer of 1944, when the Nazis took over Hungary, a further 440,000 Jews were sent to Auschwitz, while the German takeover of Northern Italy following the country’s capitulation set off a further wave of deportations, including small communities of Jews living in Italian-ruled Greek islands such as Rhodes. The killing did not cease until the Allied victory over Germany in May 1945. Read more | How the holocaust began This programme of mass murder owed its inspiration above all to Adolf Hitler, as we know from a variety of sources including his own writings; the diaries of his close confidant and propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels; the appointments diary and phone log of SS chief Heinrich Himmler and many more. The co-ordination of the killings was achieved in particular by the Wannsee Conference – planned in November 1942, but not held until January 1942 – at which top representatives from a variety of German ministries and institutions agreed under the chairmanship of the head of the SS Security Service, Reinhard Heydrich, on an overall programme. As German forces swept across Europe from 1939 to 1943, they put or confirmed in power antisemitic politicians and parties who in many cases pursued their own policies of discrimination and murder against the Jews under their control. The Romanian dictator Ion Antonescu was one of these; the killing of some 400,000 Romanian Jews was carried out with such brutality that even the SS killing squad operating in the vicinity was moved to protest. German client states, from Vichy France to Croatia and Slovakia, also engaged in mass murder, often accompanied by actions of sickening sadism. But without the spectacular German military victories from 1939 onwards, which gave Hitler the confidence to implement his ‘final solution’, they would not have felt so emboldened to put their own murderous antisemitism into practice. Beyond this, hundreds of thousands of Germans, officials, generals, SS officers and many others, motivated by antisemitism or persuaded by the antisemitic conspiracy theories pumped out by Goebbels’s Propaganda Ministry and its newspapers, films and documentaries, assisted in the mass murder in myriad ways, from drawing up railway timetables for the transport to organising the construction of gassing facilities. Few of them indeed were brought to justice after the war ended.
The rise of the Nazis and the importance of heeding warnings
“The idea that there’s a widespread movement to learn from history or to understand it meaningfully is false.” Laurence Rees explains to Danny Bird how studying the history of the Nazi regime yields warnings – but that frighteningly few people are interested in learning from the past
Danny Bird: The subtitle of your book is ‘Twelve Warnings from History’. What prompted you to write this now? Laurence Rees: My interest has always been in mentalities: why people think the way they do, how they justify their actions, and what makes them believe they are right. This focus has shaped my career much more than, say, an interest in military history. Though I respect such pursuits, my background in documentary journalism has always pushed me toward understanding people’s decisions: why do people think what they do? I’ve been fascinated by these questions since the 1990s. Over time I began delving deeper into psychology and neuroscience to better understand mentalities, particularly those of the Nazis. This new exploration wasn’t driven by a sense that the world needed my book; rather, it grew from a broader interest in the human condition. That condition remains relevant regardless of current events. My 1997 BBC documentary The Nazis: A Warning from History drew on the German philosopher Karl Jaspers’ injunction: “That which has happened is a warning.” I’ve always been intrigued by the idea of history as a source of warnings, not lessons. Lessons suggest rigid rules – such as the claim that Winston Churchill’s opposition to Adolf Hitler proves that appeasement is always wrong. Yet Churchill appeased Stalin, so are there in fact occasions where appeasement is permissible? Read more | Did appeasement cause the Second World War? Warnings, however, are clearer. They function like a doctor’s advice that if you keep smoking, you’re more likely to develop lung cancer. It’s not a certainty, but it’s a valuable caution. This approach has guided my study of history – seeking warnings that can illuminate the human condition and help us navigate the present. When trying to understand the mentality of past eras, are eyewitness testimonies more helpful than archive research? I wouldn’t say that one approach is necessarily more valuable than the other. Having started in television, I always wanted to make history documentaries. I never aspired to be an academic historian but was inspired by shows such as The World at War [1973]. In documentary-making, there’s a clear divide between talking to people who experienced events first-hand and dealing with the more distant past. That divide fascinates me. I’ve always been particularly interested in talking to people with direct connections to history. One of the first films I made, many years ago, was about Rasputin. After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, we were the first foreigners to visit his home village in western Siberia. There we met two incredibly old women who had known Rasputin as a young man. One of them vividly described him as a nightmare – always drunk. That kind of personal connection brings history to life in a way other sources can’t. The Second World War holds a particular resonance for me. My father was in the RAF, and my uncle, whom I never met, was killed while serving on a convoy ship sunk by a U-boat. This gave me a visceral connection to that period. Over the years, I’ve talked to people who met Hitler, survivors of Auschwitz, and others with direct links to pivotal moments in history. That immediacy and connection makes the subject deeply compelling for me. Though I wouldn’t claim that oral history is more important than other sources, it’s the excitement of those personal connections that drove me to dedicate 35 years to this work. But ultimately, as a historian, you’ve got to be sceptical about every source, haven’t you? In the book, you recount a conversation with a former member of the Waffen-SS in the early 1990s. Can you tell us more? While researching a documentary in Austria, I met someone who had served in the Waffen-SS and remained committed to the Nazi regime. It was my first encounter with someone like that – and it was extraordinary. After the war, he had become a senior executive at a German car company; he was retired when we met but still sharp and articulate. When we discussed the war, he expressed shocking views: lamenting that Britain and Germany hadn’t teamed up to rule the world, blaming Winston Churchill for the conflict, praising the Third Reich as a “golden era”, and describing the Jews murdered during the Holocaust as a problem that had to be dealt with “one way or the other”. His perspective was a complete fantasy – a revisionist view of history. What struck me was the duality: here was a successful businessman who seemed outwardly ordinary but still held such abhorrent beliefs. It challenged my assumptions about what a former committed Nazi might be like. He wasn’t monstrous in appearance or demeanour, yet his views were chilling. That encounter began a journey towards understanding how someone could maintain these beliefs even long after the war and the full exposure of its crimes. Do you see parallels between the Nazi regime’s use of manipulation and entertainment as tools of power and that of present-day political movements? Yes – all over the place. But in the book I’m careful not to say: “This is what X, Y or Z is doing.” That’s deliberate. The examples I use, including Mao and Stalin, are historical figures whom you can clearly examine. I did this for two reasons. First, I’m writing a history book occasionally informed by psychology, not a modern political treatise. I’ve spent years trying to understand the Second World War and the Nazis, and I’m still learning. Who am I to claim expertise on current political situations or to draw exact parallels? Second, I believe it’s more powerful if readers make those connections themselves. In my experience with films and books, it’s more profound when someone reads something and thinks: “This reminds me of X or Y.” Some readers have told me that the book made them think differently about modern events. That’s more impactful than me spelling it out for them. My goal was to provide a framework – a set of templates – to help people think critically about the world today. Your book contains a chilling chapter on how the Nazis targeted young people. What made young minds particularly susceptible to Nazi ideology? I’ve loved working on this book, particularly because of what I’ve learned about neuroscience. One highlight was interviewing Professor Robert Sapolsky from Stanford – someone I’ve admired for years. His undergraduate lectures on neuroscience, available online, are brilliant, and I highly recommend them. Sapolsky shared a fascinating insight that I hadn’t considered before: targeting individuals under the age of 25 is enormously effective – something that dictators have understood well. This is because of how the brain develops, specifically the prefrontal cortex – the part responsible for impulse control and long-term reasoning. Until around the age of 25, this area isn’t fully developed, which explains why younger people are more prone to risk-taking, idealism and even fanaticism. Sapolsky illustrated this using the example of explaining social nuances to a young child – for instance, asking them to pretend to be surprised about receiving a duplicate gift they already own. The subtleties are often too complex for the young brain to compute. This immaturity in the prefrontal cortex also explains why younger people are more easily drawn to highly emotive causes, whether positive or destructive. As Sapolsky puts it, those under 25 are in the ideal period of life for fostering fanaticism. It’s when individuals are most likely to become either fascists or saints. This developmental window has been historically exploited by regimes ranging from the Nazis to Mao’s during the Cultural Revolution, which relied heavily on student fervour. How crucial was the support of the wider German population to the Nazi regime? As early as 1933, Goebbels called for the “mobilisation of the mind”. By this, he meant influencing the majority of Germans who hadn’t voted for the Nazis. Even in the highly pressurised 1933 election, after Hitler became chancellor, a majority of Germans did not vote for them. It was only later, under the pressure of plebiscites and Nazi rule, that large numbers began voting in favour. Goebbels understood the importance of winning over those who hadn’t supported the Nazis, and worked to do so. After setbacks such as Stalingrad in 1943 and Mussolini’s downfall in Italy, terror came to the forefront, and Goebbels noted approvingly in his diary how Himmler executed deserters and those who spoke out against the regime. But terror had limited success, and Goebbels believed it was less effective than fostering the Volksgemeinschaft, or ‘people’s community’ – the idea that everyone was united in a shared national purpose as defined by the Nazis. Following Germany’s defeat in 1945, how did the leading Nazis attempt to rationalise the regime’s crimes – and their own part in them? The responses of individual Nazis to their actions varied. Some accepted responsibility, while others denied or deflected blame. A common excuse was ignorance: many claimed that they were unaware of the atrocities, believing that Auschwitz was merely a camp or that Jews were being sent east to work. Another approach was deflection, akin to modern ‘whataboutism’. When confronted with the Holocaust they voiced a series of blatantly false equivalences, such as the firebombing of Hamburg or colonial injustices, dismissing the charges as ‘victor’s justice’. This allowed them to label the Allies as hypocrites, reinforcing a belief in their victimhood. This sense of hypocrisy was rooted in three key events that took place in 1938. First, Germany’s annexation of Austria in March led to widespread persecution of Austrian Jews. Then, in November, Kristallnacht escalated antisemitic violence, including the destruction of synagogues, mass arrests and killings. In between those events, in July, the Évian Conference exposed the international community’s indifference. Convened by US president Franklin D Roosevelt to address the Jewish refugee crisis, it was largely symbolic, with countries offering little action. Hitler’s reaction was to lambast democratic nations as hypocrites. He offered to help Jews leave Germany if other nations agreed to take them – but no country accepted his offer. This deepened Nazi contempt for the west, seeing it as morally duplicitous. Psychological research shows that hypocrisy is often more reviled than outright dishonesty. And the Nazis invoked this global hypocrisy to justify their actions. After the war, many former Nazis clung to this narrative, framing themselves as victims of a hypocritical world order. That sentiment was also linked to colonialism. Nazis pointed to Britain and argued: “You condemn us for wanting an empire while refusing to relinquish your own.” That sense of double standards became a coping mechanism, allowing many to rationalise their complicity or continue justifying their actions long after the war ended. It allowed former Nazis to deflect responsibility and maintain a belief in their innocence despite the overwhelming evidence of their atrocities.. Did Allied prosecutors analyse the psychological motives behind Nazi leaders’ actions and attempt to define a distinct ‘Nazi personality type’? Yes. [During the Nuremberg Trials] psychologists conducted Rorschach tests [using inkblots] with former Nazis. What stood out was how differently various psychologists interpreted the results. One concluded that the subjects were murderous SS ‘robots’, aligning with a view that some found comforting. Another disagreed, arguing that they were simply a collection of individuals, and couldn’t be defined by such a reductive label. Recent literature emphasises that, though culture shapes us as individuals, there’s a vast range of personalities and behaviours within any group. It’s overly simplistic to attribute robotic tendencies to human beings. Returning to Karl Jaspers’ warning to posterity, do you think that each new generation is truly capable of grasping this idea – especially as the Second World War recedes further into the distant past? No, I don’t believe they are. Someone once asked me if I was pleased with the impact of my work on The Nazis: A Warning from History. I thought: are you kidding? Hardly anyone seems to take these warnings seriously. We have a massive problem in that most people in the UK stop studying history in their mid-teens. This creates a fundamentally historically illiterate population. Before I produced the documentary series Auschwitz: The Nazis and ‘The Final Solution’ in 2005, we conducted a poll. It revealed that most people didn’t even know what the word ‘Auschwitz’ meant, let alone hold a view on it. The idea that there’s a widespread movement to learn from history or to understand it meaningfully is false. Only small numbers of people engage with it seriously. I’ve enjoyed doing this work, but I honestly don’t know if it’s done much good. I wish it were otherwise. Even when people engage with history, it’s often misrepresented – like the focus on Churchill standing against Hitler, while overlooking his willingness to forge an alliance with Stalin. During one interview I gave, someone said they felt more depressed after talking to me. I could only apologise! Does focusing so much on Nazi Germany as a cautionary tale risk reducing it to a cliché, oversimplifying the complexities of how a society descended into authoritarianism and atrocities? Yes – but the risk is in not studying it, because that is what leads to oversimplification. Don’t you find that in life, as in history, it’s easier to hold firm views about things before knowing much about them? Years ago I interviewed Professor Akira Iriye, a Harvard expert in Japanese diplomatic history, for a Second World War educational website. I asked him about the value of studying that period, and he said that one worthwhile outcome would be to help politicians avoid making false comparisons. Not understanding history risks reducing it to clichés, such as ‘murderous Nazi robots’. For example, someone once dismissively said to me that the Nazis’ atrocities were the result of how they had been swaddled as babies. Do you think interrogating the unique context that shaped the mentality of a time and place are key when studying the past? I believe the most important line I wrote in the book is also the simplest: we must accept that we are creatures of a particular time and place. This may seem self-evident but, in my experience, it’s not. Many people say things like: “If I had been German, I would have stood up and spoken out.” This assumption shows a lack of understanding of a fundamental truth: our thoughts and actions are deeply shaped by our context – the time and place in which we live. The same applies to people of the past. To truly understand their actions, we must first understand their world. I once met someone who rejected this notion. When I mentioned the Aztecs and their belief in human sacrifice as essential for ensuring rainfall, he claimed he’d have started the equivalent of Aztec Amnesty International, advocating for human rights. I couldn’t definitively say that he wouldn’t have done it, but it seems unlikely. If you were raised in early 15th-century Mesoamerica, you would almost certainly have accepted human sacrifice as necessary. Recognising this helps us grasp the profound influence of culture and context on human behaviour. This article was first published in the February 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
The final years of the war | HistoryExtra Academy video lecture
In the last episode of our Academy on Nazi Germany, Laurence Rees explores the final years of the Second World War, and offers his thoughts on what this period can tell us about the nature of the Nazi regime
View Green Video on the source website
The Holocaust | HistoryExtra Academy video lecture
In the fifth episode of our Academy series on Nazi Germany, Laurence Rees gives an expert overview of the Holocaust – from Nazi antisemitism to the horrors of the death camps
The outbreak of war | HistoryExtra Academy video lecture
In the fourth episode of our Academy course on Nazi Germany, Laurence Rees explores the first 20 months of World War Two – from the invasion of Poland, to war in the East
The rise of the Nazi party | HistoryExtra Academy video lecture
In the first episode of our Academy course on Nazi Germany, Laurence Rees charts the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party – from the party’s inauspicious origins to Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor of Germany, on 30 January 1933
In the first episode of our Academy course on Nazi Germany, Laurence Rees charts the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party – from the party’s inauspicious origins to Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor of Germany, on 30 January 1933 View Green Video on the source website
The road to power | HistoryExtra Academy video lecture
In the third episode of our Academy course on Nazi Germany, Laurence Rees gives a brief overview of how and why Hitler led Germany into the Second World War
Nazis in the 1930s | HistoryExtra Academy video lecture
In the second episode of our Academy course on Nazi Germany, Laurence Rees explains how the Nazis governed Germany from that moment up until the outbreak of war in September 1939
Timeline: the rise and fall of the Third Reich
Historian Roger Moorhouse charts the rise and fall of Nazi Germany, from the end of the First World War to the Third Reich's collapse in 1945
1918-1919: The end of the First World War and the birth of the Weimar Republic 9 November 1918: The German monarchy collapses as Kaiser Wilhelm II abdicates and a new republic is established under the leadership of Friedrich Ebert, leader of the Social Democratic Party (SPD). 11 November 1918: Germany signs an armistice, effectively ending World War I. January 1919: The constitution of the new German republic is drafted, establishing a democratic parliamentary system, under a presidency. However, the new republic faces immediate challenges from extremist movements on both the left and right-wings, and due to unrest in Berlin, the constituent assembly for the new republic was held in the city of Weimar – thereby giving it its name. HistoryExtra Academy | Nazi Germany This six-part video course covers everything you need to know about Nazi Germany, guided by historian, author and broadcaster Laurence Rees Find out more 1919-1923: The Weimar Republic and economic instability January 1919: The German Workers' Party (DAP), is established in Munich by railway worker Anton Drexler. It would be the precursor to the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP), later known as the Nazi Party. June 1919: The Treaty of Versailles is signed, officially ending the war. It imposes harsh terms on Germany, including reparations, territorial losses and a controversial “war guilt” clause, fostering widespread resentment among the German populace. September 1919: Adolf Hitler joins the DAP after attending a party meeting. February 1920: Under Hitler’s growing influence, the NSDAP presents its manifesto – the “25-Point Program” - which includes demands for the abolition of the Treaty of Versailles, the expansion of Germany’s territory, and the establishment of an authoritarian regime. July 1921: Hitler assumes leadership of the NSDAP, becoming its most prominent figure. Autumn 1923: Hyperinflation, resulting from the printing of money to finance the war, begins to seriously undermine the German economy, leading to widespread poverty and social unrest. The Weimar Republic struggles to manage these economic challenges, and extremists on both right and left, including the Nazi Party, gain increasing political traction. 8-9 November, 1923: The Beer Hall Putsch, led by Hitler and other Nazi leaders, attempts to overthrow the Weimar government. The coup fails, twenty people are killed, and Hitler is arrested and arraigned for high treason. 1924-1929: The rise of Hitler and the Nazi Party February/March 1924: Hitler's trial takes place in Munich. He seizes the moment and uses it as an opportunity to spread his message. As a result, he emerges for the first time as a national political figure. He was sentenced to five years imprisonment. 1924: While in prison, in Landsberg, Hitler writes Mein Kampf, in which he outlines his ideological views, including the need for German expansion (Lebensraum) and the superiority of the Aryan race. December 1924: Thanks to a sympathetic prison administration, Hitler is released from prison after less than 9 months. With that, the Nazi Party begins to rebuild its political influence. 1925: Thanks to economic restructuring and political stabilisation, the Weimar Republic begins to flourish. The extremist parties lose their support. 1927: The ban on Hitler making public speeches, which had been in place in most of the country since 1925, is finally lifted. May 1928: In Reichstag (German parliament) elections, the Nazi Party gains only 2.6% of the national vote, confirming Hitler’s position of obscurity on the fringes of German political life. October 1929: The Wall Street Crash triggers the Great Depression, which devastates the global economy, pulling the plug on Germany’s fragile economic recovery. Unemployment rises sharply, leading to widespread discontent with the Weimar Republic and a resurgence of political unrest from both extremes. 1930-1933: The Nazis gain power 1930: The Nazi Party, under Hitler’s leadership, begins to gain significant support, particularly among the working class and rural populations disillusioned with the Weimar Republic’s inability to address the economic crisis. March/April 1932: Hitler runs for president but loses to Paul von Hindenburg, the incumbent. July 1932: The Nazis become the largest party in the Reichstag, with more than 37% of the vote, but they fail to win an outright majority. Autumn 1932: A series of minority governments find themselves unable to govern effectively given the ongoing economic crisis and the political chaos in the Reichstag. January 30, 1933: Hitler is appointed Chancellor of Germany by President Hindenburg, after political manoeuvring and backroom deals among conservative elites, who believe they can control him. 1933-1938: Establishing the totalitarian state 27 February 1933: The Reichstag Fire occurs, and the Nazis use it as a pretext to pass the Reichstag Fire Decree, which suspends civil liberties and allows for the arrest of political opponents. March 23, 1933: The Enabling Act is passed, granting Hitler dictatorial powers. The act allows Hitler to legislate without the Reichstag’s approval, effectively ending democracy in Germany and establishing a one-party state. March 1933: Nazi Germany’s first concentration camp for political opponents is opened, at Dachau, near Munich. The camp, alongside others, is used by the Nazis to consolidate their power by eliminating political rivals, including Communists and Socialists. June 30, 1934: The Night of the Long Knives – a violent purge of the Nazi SA (Sturmabteilung) at the hands of the SS (Schutzstaffel) – further consolidates Hitler’s power and allows him to eliminate all those he considered oppositional. The death toll is estimated at around 150. January 13, 1935: A referendum on the status of the Saarland returns a vote of more than 90% for the province returning to German rule, after 15 years of League of Nations administration. It is another proof of Hitler’s growing popularity. September 15, 1935: The Nuremberg Laws are enacted, stripping Jews of their German citizenship and forbidding mixed marriages. Racial discrimination is enshrined in German law. 7 March 1936: Hitler remilitarizes the Rhineland, violating the Treaty of Versailles, but faces no military response from France or Britain. This bold move boosts his popularity and strengthens his hold on power. August 1936: The Olympic Games are held in Berlin further cementing Hitler’s domestic popularity and enhancing his international prestige. 12 March 1938: The Anschluss, or annexation of Austria, occurs after German forces march, unopposed, into the country. The annexation is confirmed the following month, in a spurious referendum. 30 September 1938: Hitler’s sabre-rattling forces the Munich Agreement, which forces Czechoslovakia to cede the Sudetenland region to Nazi Germany, under the guise of protecting ethnic Germans from persecution. 9-10 November 1938: Kristallnacht (The Night of Broken Glass) occurs, in which Jewish homes, businesses, and synagogues across Germany are violently attacked. Thousands of Jews are arrested, beaten and consigned to the concentration camps, marking a significant escalation of anti-Semitic persecution. 1939: The outbreak of the Second World War 23 August 1939: The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact is signed between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, effectively dividing eastern Europe between the two and ensuring that Germany will not face a two-front war when it invades Poland. 1 September 1939: Germany invades Poland. 3 September 1939: After their ultimatums demanding that Germany halt its invasion of Poland go unanswered, Britain and France declare war on Germany. 1940-1941: The expansion of Nazi Germany April-June 1940: Nazi Germany swiftly conquers Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, and France. The Blitzkrieg tactics—fast-moving mechanized warfare—prove highly effective. 22 June 1941: Operation Barbarossa begins, when Germany invades the Soviet Union. Initially hugely successful, the invasion stalls as the harsh winter sets in and Soviet resistance grows. Autumn 1941: The Einsatzgruppen, mobile killing squads, begin mass executions of Jews and other “undesirable” elements across occupied Eastern Europe. As many as 1.5 million Jews would be killed in this way. 1942-1944: The turning of the tide October-November 1942: The Battle of El Alamein halts the German advance in the Western Desert. 8 November 1942: In Operation Torch, British and American forces land in Algeria and Morocco, marking the beginning of the end of the German campaign in North Africa. February 1943: The Battle of Stalingrad ends, as the German Sixth Army is surrounded and forced to surrender to the Soviets, marking a major turning point in the war in favour of the Allies. May 1943: After mounting losses in the fighting the convoys in the Atlantic, Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz, commander of Germany’s U-boat fleet, withdraws his wolfpacks from the theatre, pending technological updates and reinforcements. He privately confesses that he has lost the Battle of the Atlantic. 9 July 1943: In Operation Husky, the Allies launch a successful invasion of Sicily, further weakening Germany’s military position and leading, later than month, to the fall of Hitler’s ally, Italian dictator Benito Mussolini. 24 July 1943: The Allied bombing of Hamburg – Operation Gomorrah – begins. The heaviest aerial assault of the war to date, it will culminate in some 37,000 dead and a profound blow to German domestic morale. July-August 1943: The Battle of Kursk deals a crushing blow to German ambition on the Eastern Front. German land forces would never regain the initiative. 6 June 1944: D-Day sees Allied forces land in Normandy, which will begin the liberation of France and Western Europe. 20 July 1944: Operation Valkyrie, an assassination attempt on Hitler, is carried out by German officers, led by Colonel Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg. The plot’s failure leads to a harsh internal crackdown on suspected conspirators. 25 August 1944: Allied forces liberate Paris 1945: The fall of the Third Reich January 1945: The failure of the German Ardennes Offensive – the “Battle of the Bulge” – exhausts what remains of German reserves. 13-15 February 1945: The bombing of Dresden results in around 25,000 dead. 19 April 1945: Soviet victory in the Battle of the Seelow Heights, east of Berlin, opens the way to the German capital. 24 April 1945: Soviet forces complete the encirclement of Berlin. 25 April 1945: Advancing American and Soviet forces meet at Torgau on the Elbe, effectively cutting what remained of Hitler’s Germany in half. 30 April 1945: Hitler commits suicide in his bunker in Berlin as Soviet forces close in on the centre of the city. 2 May 1945: Berlin surrenders to the Soviets. 7-8 May 1945: Germany officially surrenders to the Allies – at Reims, on 7 May, and at Karlshorst, Berlin, the following day – thus marking the end of the war in Europe. 1945-1946: The Nuremberg Trials 20 November 1945: The Nuremberg Trials open, to prosecute key Nazi leaders for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and crimes against peace. 16 October 1946: Ten of the twelve high-ranking Nazis that were sentenced to death at Nuremberg are executed.. The two exceptions are Martin Bormann – who was sentenced in absentia (and was already dead) – and Hermann Göring, who committed suicide in his cell the night before.
Why did Hitler choose the swastika as a Nazi symbol?
By the early 1920s, the swastika, an ancient religious symbol, had been adopted by Adolf Hitler to represent the German Reich. How did it become the symbol of the Nazi party?
The swastika is today synonymous with Adolf Hitler's Nazi regime; a red and black symbol of the Second World War. But this hasn't always been the case – the swastika existed as a symbol long before it was adopted by the Nazis, and the symbol's story is longer and more complex than you might expect. So how and why did the Nazis use the swastika, and what is the ancient origin of the symbol made infamous by Hitler? Why did Hitler choose the swastika? When Adolf Hitler began his rise to power and looked for a symbol to encapsulate his movement, the Nazi Party and a strong future for Germany, the swastika became the clear choice. German antiquarian Heinrich Schliemann had grown obsessed with finding Troy, the lost city of Greek mythology, and in 1868 he set out with his copy of The Iliad to search the Mediterranean. Schliemann's search led him to the mysterious mound of Hisarlik on the Aegean coast of Turkey. There, during the 1870s, Schliemann unearthed layers of civilisations dating back thousands of years, and declared the oldest to be Troy. The city of legend had been found – although it turned out to be a different layer than the one Schliemann thought – as well as a cache of jewellery, bronze, silver and gold. Yet in the ancient ruins he made another fateful discovery: some 1,800 depictions of a symbol that resembled a cross with bent arms: the swastika. News of Schliemann’s sensational excavations spread far and wide, quickly followed by the swastika, which became a ubiquitous sign, visible throughout Europe and North America. At the same time, however, the swastika’s long history saw it become a favourite of German nationalists, who subscribed to a warped theory that they had descended from an ancient ‘master race’ known as the Aryans. This belief persisted into the 20th century, growing more pernicious until it appealed to Adolf Hitler, the leader of the burgeoning Nazi Party. Hitler understood the power of an image and knew it would give the Nazi ideals an historic foundation. He could not adequately reconcile his view of Germany’s Christian history with the religion’s historical Jewish connections – essentially, that Christ was himself Jewish – so the idea that Germans descended from a white master race with a tried and tested symbol had great appeal. Read more | How did the Nazi party rise to power in Germany in 1933? And what were Hitler’s motivations? And so the swastika, or hakenkreuz (hooked cross), became the emblem of the Nazi Party in 1920; Hitler himself took personal credit for designing the flag. It used the red, white and black of the old German imperial flag – a cunning move to link Germany's past with its future – but attributed new meanings to them. "In red we see the social idea of the movement, in white the nationalistic idea, in the swastika the mission of the struggle for the victory of the Aryan man," wrote Hitler in his 1925 autobiographical manifesto, Mein Kampf. The new design became the national flag on 15 September 1935 during the mass annual rally at Nuremberg. On the same day, two race laws were passed prohibiting marriages between Germans and Jews and declaring that only those of German blood could be citizens of the Reich. And so the act of cultural, religious and social theft that was the appropriation of the swastika was complete. It ensured that the Nazi flag would be associated with evil – under which a brutal war raged, atrocities committed and some six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust. What is the swastika? A cross with arms bent at right angles meant many things to many people, but had always been used as a sign of hope and positivity. It could represent good fortune or prosperity; symbolise the Sun or the infinity of creation; or, as it still does in several religions, evoke a sense of the divine and call for auspiciousness. The word swastika itself derives from the Sanskrit svastika, meaning "conducive to well-being". What is the history of the swastika? The oldest-known example of the swastika dates back some 15,000 years. Discovered in Ukraine in 1908, an ivory mammoth tusk carved into the shape of a bird includes an intricate pattern of connected swastikas on its body, which may have been used as a fertility symbol. There is no knowing how the design first came about. It may have simply been an elegant, easy-to-create geometric shape, although its inspiration possibly came from a comet in the night sky. It was also in Eastern Europe that single swastikas were carved by the Vinca culture during the Neolithic period, some 7,000 years ago, before they became widespread from the Bronze Age. The swastika symbolised the Sun to the Illyrians; became a common sight on Mesopotamian coins; appeared on vases and clothing in Greece; formed mosaic motifs in Rome, and stands in as a stylised cross in Celtic design. There are 27 swastikas on the Iron Age Battersea Shield, found in London in 1857, but the symbol had been in Britain long before that as the so-called Swastika Stone on Ilkley Moor, Yorkshire, from c2,000 BC, shows. This carving resembles the swastika’s shape, although with more curved arms and added spots. The swastika, often known as a gammadion or fylflot, continued to be used throughout Europe, occasionally being subsumed into religious iconography. Early Christian art depicts the hooked cross to represent Christ's victory over death, while a left-facing version of the swastika showed up in reference to the Norse god Thor's hammer. Still a popular symbol in medieval times, the swastika can be seen today on surviving church decorations, coats of arms and on textile fragments from the 12th century thought to be from a dress owned by a Slav princess. The monastery school a young Adolf Hitler attended, Lambach Abbey in Austria, had swastikas carved on the stone and woodwork. Yet the influence of the swastika reached much further than can be explained by the migration of peoples over the centuries. It has appeared in several cultures across northern Africa, including as window decorations in churches in modern-day Ethiopia, while also showing up in the Mayan, Aztec and Kuna civilisations of South and Central America. A number of Native American and First Nation tribes of North America, such as the Navajo, Hopi and Passamaquoddy, also adopted the symbol, which they called ‘whirling logs’. Undoubtedly the most enduring relationship with the swastika began in Asia, especially in India, among followers of Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism, for whom it has served as a holy symbol for millennia. To Jains, the swastika represents one of the 24 Tirthankara, or saviours, while Buddhists regard the symbol as the footprints of the Buddha. For Hindus, the right-hand svastika – a term that emerged c500 BC – is a sign of surya (the Sun) and auspiciousness, so is used to mark entrances, offerings, ceremonies, festivals and each year's account books. The left-hand version, the sauvastika, is symbolic of the night and the goddess Kali. The swastika remains as spiritually significant today, in the face of the stigma towards the symbol in the West brought on by the Nazis. How did the swastika become a Nazi symbol? Heinrich Schliemann's discovery of Troy in the 1870s set in motion the events that transformed the swastika, a symbol of fortune and hope for thousands of years, into a hated and feared sign of fascism. He concluded it to be a "significant religious symbol of our remote ancestors" when he unearthed 1,800 examples, but his colleague, Emile-Louis Burnouf, thought differently. Knowing the symbol appeared in India, Burnouf studied a sacred Hindu text called the Rigveda and claimed to have found a connection between the swastika and an enigmatic ancient people, the Aryans. Supposedly, this 'master race' of white-skinned warriors constituted the peak of human civilisation, conquering lands such as India and bringing the swastika with them. The word Aryan itself derived from Sanskrit, like svastika. Pots from the sixth-century had been found in Germany with swastikas on them and scholars noted the similarities between Sanskrit and German as further proof that the Aryans had come from Germany. But the whole notion of this 'pure' race, as well as being deeply racist, was based on a misunderstanding. The Sanskrit word for Aryan (ārya) actually meant "honourable, respectable or noble" and referred to a social or linguistic distinction, not a separate ethnic group. But the theory of the Aryans’ existence grew in popularity from the mid-19th century. The unification of Germany in 1871, the same year Schliemann started work at Troy, led to a swell of uninhibited nationalism in the country and the idea that Germans descended from Aryans. To them, the discovery at Troy of their symbol, the swastika, proved they had been a dominant race. So while the swastika existed as a benign good-luck charm across Europe and North America, it simultaneously became an icon for German nationalists and anti-Semitic groups. What is the swastika a symbol of today? In the aftermath of World War II, publicly displaying the swastika was banned in Germany, where it remains illegal. Yet while reviled in the Western world, it continues to be a potent symbol with far-right and white-supremacist groups. In the US, where its use is permitted, incidents involving swastika flags and graffiti have increased in recent years, most infamously when neo-Nazis marched in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017. But the swastika also remains a feature of worship for Hindus, Buddhists and Jains. It can be seen seemingly everywhere in parts of the Indian subcontinent – from temple entrances to the front of taxis – and plays an important role in ceremonies and festivals. During Diwali – the Hindu festival of lights – the swastika is drawn with coloured sand, or rangoli, and depicted with lanterns to celebrate the victory of light over darkness and good over evil. In 2007, when German politicians attempted to introduce a swastika ban across the European Union, Hindus vehemently opposed the measure on religious grounds. Such disparate attitudes towards the swastika raises the question of whether the symbol – which for so long has been a force for good – can be reclaimed from its association with Hitler and the neo-Nazis who still display it. Would reclaiming the symbol mark the final defeat of the Third Reich and the hatred it advocated? Or is that impossible? The 20th-century corruption of the swastika came to represent so much of the horrors of Nazism that it should never be forgotten. The answer, although not a neat one, may be that there will always be two utterly conflicting interpretations of the swastika, both of which are part of our history, present and future: one representing the worst of humanity and the other symbolising the best.