Eleven-year-old Helmuth cowered beneath his blanket in spring 1945. He overheard his Nazi father debating murder-suicide to protect the family. “The Allies will do to us what we did to the crippled and Jews,” the doctor whispered. Hours later the father shot himself, burning his blood-stained uniform. This private terror ushers us into the public story of Nazism.

1914: Confident Germany joins the war seeking rapid victory. 1918: Military defeat forces Kaiser’s abdication; the Weimar Republic emerges. 1919: Versailles Treaty strips colonies and land, blames Germany and demands £6 billion reparations.

German nationalists’ insult for Weimar leaders who signed the 1918 armistice and Versailles Treaty. Branded as traitors, they were blamed for defeat while frontline soldiers were glorified.

French occupation of the Ruhr prompted Berlin to pay striking workers with freshly printed marks. The currency avalanche made prices explode—one US dollar leapt from 24 000 marks in April to 98 billion by December. Germans pushed wheelbarrows of notes to buy a single loaf.

The 1929 Wall Street crash choked U.S. loans sustaining Germany. Factories closed; by 1932 nearly six million Germans were jobless. Anxious middle-class families feared sinking into the proletariat, and widespread despair opened the way for a promised “saviour”.

Born in Austria in 1889, Hitler failed as an art student but earned medals as a WWI messenger.
He joined the German Workers’ Party in 1919 and soon renamed it the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, the Nazis.
Jailed after the failed 1923 Beer Hall Putsch, he wrote Mein Kampf, proclaiming Aryan supremacy and the need for Lebensraum.

Annual rallies flooded Nuremberg with red banners and a sea of Swastikas. Uniformed columns delivered rhythmic, rehearsed salutes. Microphones, radio trucks, posters and film crews broadcast the show across Germany, portraying Hitler as a messiah. Emotion, not argument, bound the crowd; ritual performance displaced critical thought.

30 Jan 1933: President Hindenburg made Hitler Chancellor, placing state power in Nazi hands. 27 Feb: the Reichstag fire justified the Fire Decree suspending speech, press and assembly. 23 Mar: the Enabling Act let Hitler legislate by decree without parliamentary control. By summer all parties and unions were banned, and Gestapo–SS terror silenced opponents.

Nazis built a ‘racial state’ that ranked Nordic Aryans as superior and Jews as the lowest race. They sought Lebensraum — living space — by conquering Eastern Europe and removing its inhabitants. At home, the Euthanasia Programme secretly killed thousands of mentally or physically disabled Germans.

Between 1933 and 1939, the Nazi regime legally and violently pushed Jews out of German society.

The Nuremberg Laws (Sept 1935) revoked Jewish citizenship and banned inter-marriage, German jobs or display of the national flag.

On 9–10 Nov 1938, Kristallnacht saw synagogues burned, 7,500 shops wrecked and 30,000 Jews arrested.

Marked by the yellow Star of David, Jews were forced into sealed ghettos such as Warsaw and Lodz, stripped of property, and trapped in extreme overcrowding, hunger and disease under constant Nazi surveillance.

From 1941 to 1945 the Nazi regime launched the so-called Final Solution.
Millions were deported in overcrowded cattle wagons to death camps like Auschwitz, Treblinka and Sobibor.
Victims were gassed in fake shower rooms, while their shoes, glasses and hair formed haunting piles outside.

1936-39: Nazi forces reoccupied the Rhineland, annexed Austria, and overran Poland in lightning blows. In June 1941 Hitler invaded the USSR; the giant campaign fatally overstretched Germany. April 1945 saw Berlin captured, prompting suicides by Hitler and Goebbels. The subsequent Nuremberg Tribunal tried surviving leaders—only eleven were executed.

Schools were ‘cleansed’; Jewish, disabled and Gypsy classmates expelled. Boys joined Jungvolk, then Hitler Youth, then military service. Girls drilled in ‘Küche, Kirche, Kinder’; mothers producing eight ‘pure’ Aryan babies earned the Gold Mother’s Cross.

Pastor Martin Niemöller’s 1946 poem warns that apathy enables tyranny. A handful of Germans and occupied peoples offered covert resistance. Yet the majority watched, fearful or indifferent, as atrocities unfolded. In 1943, Denmark ferried almost all its Jews to safety by fishing boat. Elsewhere, collaborators helped round up neighbours.

In 1945, eleven-year-old Helmuth refused every home-cooked meal for nine years, fearing his bereaved mother might poison him. His Nazi father had burned his uniform, then shot himself—ideology reduced to ashes.