Hitler's Drive For German example essay topic

... to the Germans. First, the government approved marriage loans to the 'right kind' of Germans-those whose ancestors and appearance measured up to the Nazi's standard of Aryan purity. These loans were repaid as the newlyweds produced babies. To discourage the propagation of the 'wrong kind' of people, a law required the compulsory sterilization of men and women deemed likely to have defective children, primarily those with physical or mental handicaps. By 1945 some 400,000 Germans had been sterilized.

The first discriminatory laws against Jews also came in 1933. These laws barred Jews from government employment and restricted their admission to universities. In subsequent years, the anti-Semitic laws became increasingly harsh, as Jews were deprived of citizenship, excluded from more and more jobs, forbidden to own cars, thrown out of public schools, and stripped of their property. These events culminated in Kristallnacht (the 'Night of Broken Glass'), the night of November 9, 1938, when Nazi mobs killed dozens of Jews, smashed thousands of windows in Jewish neighborhoods, and set fire to almost all Jewish houses of worship throughout Germany. Following Kristallnacht, the Nazis sent more than 30,000 Jews to concentration camps.

Hundreds of thousands of others fled the country. B Rearmament of Germany Starting in 1933, Hitler began the process of German rearmament and militarization that would eventually lead to World War II. Hitler's plans for conquest consisted of four distinct wars. The first war would be against Czechoslovakia (now the Czech Republic and Slovakia). He was certain that the Czechs would put up little resistance and Czech territory and resources could then be used to further his continuing plans for conquest.

Hitler's second war would be against Britain and France. He expected this to be the most difficult conflict, as these countries had defeated Germany during World War I. Hitler prepared for this war during the 1930's. The third war would be against the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), where Hitler planned to seize huge portions of territory for German settlement. However, Hitler badly miscalculated when he assumed the conquest of the USSR would be simple. His assumption was based on his belief that the Soviets, many of whom were of Slavic descent, were an inferior race controlled by the Jews under the guise of socialism. As a result, Hitler made no military preparations for that war and counted on a quick victory to provide Germany with the resources, especially the oil, needed for the fourth war, which was to be waged against the United States.

Hitler felt that actually fighting the Americans would be easy, but technical preparations for the conflict had to be made well in advance because the United States was far away and had a large navy. These military preparations with their enormous construction projects accelerated the economic recovery in Germany that had begun in 1932. Soon Germany faced a labor shortage instead of unemployment. As rearmament shifted into high gear, Hitler found he was short of money to buy foreign materials.

This fact, combined with a desire to rely on domestic resources, led Hitler to inaugurate the Four-Year Plan in 1936. The plan called for Germany to be self-sufficient and ready for war in four years. Once the production of weapons for war against France and Britain was under way, Hitler in 1937 ordered the design and production of weapons for war with the United States. These arms included bombers that could reach America and a fleet of super battleships that Hitler planned to be the core of a dominant navy.

In response to Hitler's call for German self-sufficiency, German steelmakers protested that the quality of domestic ores was too poor to use. When industry leaders refused to process the low-grade domestic ores, Hitler forced them to pay for a government-owned company that would. German industry was producing synthetic oil by 1933, and synthetic rubber and other substitutes followed. Hitler insisted that German workers be treated carefully and generously because he believed that domestic unrest caused by the hardships of war had brought about Germany's defeat in World War I. During World War II, this policy required German armies to loot occupied territories, which resulted in the German people having the highest wartime rations in Europe.

C Military Alliances Despite Hitler's drive for German self-sufficiency he knew that Nazi forces alone could not overcome the major European powers-at least not at first-and he began to seek allies. Hitler had long hoped to win the support of Italy in any coming war. He admired Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, whose nationalistic and militaristic policies mirrored his own. This admiration was reciprocated, and in 1936, Hitler and Mussolini established the Rome-Berlin Axis. Hitler then turned to Japan as a possible ally against Britain and France. In 1940 the Rome-Berlin Axis was extended to include Japan and became the Rome-Berlin-Tokyo Axis.

V BUILDUP TO WAR A Anschluss One of Hitler's primary goals had always been to unite all German-speaking people in Europe. To this end, Hitler strongly pursued Anschluss (union) between Germany and Austria. The latter country was the primarily German-speaking remnant of the old empire of Austria-Hungary, which had been dismembered after World War I. The union of Germany and Austria had been forbidden by the treaty that ended World War I, a restriction deeply resented in both countries. Hitler, himself an ethnic German of Austrian birth, had always expected to incorporate Austria into his German empire-an empire he named the Third Reich. Union with Austria would increase Germany's population, strengthen its army, and open an avenue to southeastern Europe. Efforts to accomplish Anschluss by external pressure and an internal coup failed in 1933 and 1934.

These heavy-handed tactics considerably dampened Austrian enthusiasm for union with Germany. By 1937 Hitler was openly threatening the Austrian government and massing troops along the Austrian border. In March 1938 the Austrian chancellor resigned and was replaced by a member of the Austrian Nazi Party. On March 12, Hitler ordered his army to march into Austria. They met no resistance, and the following day in Vienna, Hitler proclaimed the official union of Austria and Germany.

B Czechoslovakia In early May 1938 Hitler decided to begin the first of his wars, that against Czechoslovakia. Hitler planned to crush Czechoslovakia, use its sizeable ethnic German population to enlarge his army, and expel or kill its non-German inhabitants. To build support for this plan, the Nazis organized a massive propaganda campaign in Germany, which portrayed ethnic Germans in Czechoslovakia as victims of repression and discrimination at the hands of the Czechs. This campaign was unsuccessful-too many Germans remembered the horrors of the last war, and too few hated the Czechs. In addition to this lack of domestic support, there was unexpected foreign pressure against an invasion.

Mussolini urged Hitler to negotiate, and Britain took a firm stand in support of Czechoslovakia. Hitler called off the invasion in favor of negotiations, which ended in the Munich Pact. By the terms of this agreement, Czechoslovakia ceded to Germany portions of its land that were inhabited by ethnic Germans-primarily the area in western Czechoslovakia know as the Sudetenland. Hitler accepted this agreement against his better judgement; he really wanted a war that would destroy Czechoslovakia.

For the rest of his life, he considered this his worst mistake, and he was determined never to be cheated of war again. In the winter of 1938 and 1939 Hitler believed the time had come for war with France and Britain. Those countries hoped war could be avoided; the experience of World War I had convinced them that even a victorious war would not be worth the cost. As a result, leaders in London and Paris had worked hard to settle whatever international issues might arise and to escape war if at all possible. The idea that anyone might actually want war was inconceivable to them. The signs that Germany was looking for further expansion even after Munich, however, led the British and French governments to decide in early 1939 that if Germany took action against any other country and that country resisted, they would go to war.

Germany's breaking of the Munich Pact by occupying most of the rest of Czechoslovakia in March 1939 pushed the bulk of the British and French peoples behind this agreement. C Final Preparations Before attacking in the west, Hitler needed to secure two things: a quiet front on Germany's eastern border and allies against Britain and France. The first of these meant subordinating Hungary, Lithuania, and Poland to Germany. A change of government in Hungary favored Hitler's aims. He then successfully intimidated Lithuania into submitting to the Germans and annexed the formerly-German region of Memel, which had been ceded to Lithuania after World War I. The Poles, however, were unwilling to surrender without a fight.

Hitler decided to conquer Poland first and then turn to the west. As for securing allies, Italy was willing but Japan hesitant. Japan was interested only in an ally against the USSR, not against France and Britain. In a reversal of his former anti-Communist stance, Hitler turned to the USSR. The Soviets had made offers of agreements in prior years, but Hitler had turned them away. Now, in Hitler's eyes, the USSR could help destroy Poland and then provide Germany with supplies while Nazi forces defeated Britain and France.

Then Hitler would crush the Soviets. Consequently, concessions made to Soviet leader Joseph Stalin made no difference to Hitler-they would all be taken back later. Hitler offered Stalin whatever he wanted to get an agreement signed. Inducements included a plan to split eastern Europe between the Germans and the Soviets, and a promise that the USSR need only remain neutral in case of a German conflict with another nation, instead of having to fight on the German side. The deal was signed on August 23, 1939. Germany's ambassadors to London, Paris, and the Polish capital of Warsaw were recalled from their posts.

On Hitler's orders, the invasion of Poland began on September 1, 1939. Almost immediately, Britain and France declared war on Germany. World War II had begun. VI WORLD WAR II Polish resistance was no match for the German army, and the country quickly fell.

Hitler had originally hoped to attack in the west in late 1939, but bad weather forced postponement. In the meantime the German navy urged an occupation of Denmark and Norway and war with the United States. Hitler agreed to the first, an operation conducted in April 1940, but preferred to postpone war with the United States until he could either complete construction of a navy large enough to fight the Americans or could acquire an ally who had one. In May and June of 1940, Hitler's forces routed the armies of the Netherlands, Belgium, and France. Although Hitler failed to subdue Britain, he felt that by driving all resistance off the European continent he had effectively won the war in the west. He immediately accelerated the preparations for war with the United States and decided to attack the USSR in the fall of 1940.

The British refusal to surrender confirmed his decision to attack the USSR; advice from the military led him to delay the invasion until late spring of 1941. Hitler believed the United States would come to Britain's aid, and a German invasion of the USSR would encourage Japan to attack the Americans before they had a chance to help the British. He also encouraged a Japanese attack by promising to join Japan in a war against the United States. Japan had the large navy Hitler felt he needed. The invasion of the USSR was launched in spite of Stalin's attempts to prevent it. Even though Hitler had been massing troops on the border with the USSR for several weeks prior to the invasion, Stalin insisted that Soviet forces should take no action that could provoke the Nazis.

His policies proved futile, and the attack began on June 22, 1941. The Germans completely underestimated the USSR, however, especially the ability of its government to control and mobilize the country's resources. The Soviet army halted and then defeated the Germans in 1941 and crushed subsequent German offensives in 1942 and 1943. A The Holocaust As his armies were rolling through Polish resistance, Hitler stepped up the elimination of peoples he saw as inferior to Germans.

Shortly after their 1939 conquest of Poland, the Germans began killing thousands of Poles and driving thousands more out of their homes to make way for German settlers. The Nazis also herded Jewish Poles into city ghetto es, killing thousands of them and condemning the rest to starvation. Within Germany, Hitler ordered a program to systematically kill handicapped Germans, and over 200,000 were eventually murdered. The German authorities planned to kill all Jews in the portions of the USSR they occupied and began the process in the summer of 1941. In late July 1941, Hitler decided to extend the systematic killing of Jews to all of German-occupied Europe. After the renewed German offensive in the USSR in October 1941 appeared to make great progress, he decided the time had come to go even further: All Jews on earth would be killed.

However, the Nazis found that German police and soldiers who did the killing were often traumatized by the experience. To make the slaughter faster and less stressful, the Germans built specially designed death camps, primarily in occupied Poland, to which Jews and other prisoners from all over Europe were transported. These camps contained large gas chambers where hundreds of prisoners at a time could be quickly, easily, and impersonally murdered by poison gas. In his public speeches, Hitler repeatedly referred to the killing of Europe's Jews but without detailing the process. Because the Allies halted Germany's forces, Hitler's global ambitions were not realized; however, of the approximately 18 million Jews in the world, one-third were killed in what came to be known as the Holocaust. The great majority of European Jews perished, a fact that Hitler boasted of in his last testament.

B The End of the War By the time of the Allied D-Day invasion of Normandy (Normandie), in northern France, in June 1944, the war was going very badly for Hitler. A series of losses to the Allies and failure to defeat the Soviets had left Hitler's armies severely weakened. Hitler's Germany had also changed a great deal. British and American bombers were devastating its industries and cities. The Germans who had reservations about Hitler's regime had begun to find some recruits. However, most of the population still supported the regime and especially Hitler; consequently, those opposed to him saw his assassination followed by a military takeover as the only way to topple the dictatorship.

Several assassination attempts, beginning in March 1943, miscarried. A bomb was placed in Hitler's headquarters at Ra stenberg in East Prussia (modern Poland) on July 20, 1944, but did not kill him. The conspirators tried to launch their coup anyway, but with little support the effort failed. Hundreds involved in the coup attempt were executed, and Hitler maintained control of the country. Underestimating the Americans, Hitler launched his last reserves west into the Ardennes country of Belgium and Luxembourg in the Battle of the Bulge (December 1944-January 1945).

He felt that despite massive Allied gains, a hard blow would cause popular support for the war in America to collapse, and would lead to the disintegration of the coalition arrayed against him. All he accomplished, however, was to draw away troops needed in the east, allowing the Soviet army's winter offensive to roll all the way to the gates of Berlin. Hitler decided to remain in the city, hoping to inspire its defenders and anticipating a breakup of the Allies' alliance. When neither of these hopes were realized, he appointed Karl D", the head of the navy and a devoted Nazi, as his successor. He then married his mistress Eva Braun and committed suicide in Berlin on April 30, 1945. VII EVALUATION Hitler left Germany and much of Europe in ruins.

Over 60 million people died worldwide in the war, and tens of millions more lost their health and homes. Certain that they did not want to fight the Germans a third time, the Allies insisted on an unconditional surrender. They occupied all of Germany and divided it into British, French, American, and Soviet zones. Even after the western zones were joined into the Federal Republic of Germany in 1949, the country remained divided until 1990. The German people discovered for the first time the extent to which modern warfare could destroy a country. World War I had not been fought to any great extent on German soil.

The events of the war also demonstrated to many Germans the problems of dictatorship. Increasing numbers were now prepared to try a different, democratic, path at home, as well as an attempt at reconciliation with their neighbors. Both projects would take time, but they were major departures in the history of Germany and of Europe. The war also brought the Soviet Army into central Europe and provided the Soviet regime with legitimacy in the eyes of its own people, a new empire in east and southeast Europe, and superpower status in the world. The world role of the United States was also enhanced in spite of the American preference for remaining aloof.

Outside of Europe, the war hastened the end of colonial empires and the emergence of the new Jewish state of Israel. It also brought about the creation of new international organizations like the United Nations (UN) that might prevent such wars in the future. Ironically, these developments were the exact opposite of what Hitler had hoped for. His ambition to make Berlin the capital of the world was not realized, and the enormous buildings he started designing for it in the 1920's were never built. Hitler combined organizational and manipulative talents with great cunning. He was simultaneously obsessed with fantastic visions and blinded to reality by those very visions.

However, many Germans shared at least a portion of those visions. This support made it possible for Hitler to utilize the resources of Europe's second largest population and most advanced economy to pursue his ends. The result was an outburst of destruction that consumed the lives of millions and transformed the world.