How many nazis were there in ww2

After his release from prison, he set about rebuilding the Nazi Party and attempting to gain power through the election process. In , Germany entered a period of severe economic depression and widespread unemployment. The Nazis capitalized on the situation by criticizing the ruling government and began to win elections.

In January , Hitler was appointed German chancellor and his Nazi government soon came to control every aspect of German life. Under Nazi rule, all other political parties were banned. In , the Nazis opened their first concentration camp in Dachau , Germany, to house political prisoners.

Dachau evolved into a death camp where countless thousands of Jews died from malnutrition, disease and overwork or were executed. Although the Treaty of Versailles was explicitly based on the principle of the self-determination of peoples, he pointed out that it had separated Germans from Germans by creating such new postwar states as Austria and Czechoslovakia, where many Germans lived. From the mid- to late s, Hitler undermined the postwar international order step by step.

He withdrew Germany from the League of Nations in , rebuilt German armed forces beyond what was permitted by the Treaty of Versailles, reoccupied the German Rhineland in , annexed Austria in and invaded Czechoslovakia in After conquering Poland , Hitler focused on defeating Britain and France.

At the beginning of the war, Hitler and his Nazi Party were fighting to dominate Europe; five years later they were fighting to exist. By late , Jews were banned from most public places in Germany. In the invasion and occupation of Poland, German troops shot thousands of Polish Jews, confined many to ghettoes where they starved to death and began sending others to death camps in various parts of Poland, where they were either killed immediately or forced into slave labor.

In , when Germany invaded the Soviet Union, Nazi death squads machine-gunned tens of thousands of Jews in the western regions of Soviet Russia. The Nazis ruled Germany as a one-party, totalitarian dictatorship from to The Party used its power to persecute Jews.

The Nazi Party was the radical far-right movement and political party led by Adolf Hitler. Nazi ideology was racist, nationalist, and anti-democratic. It was violently antisemitic and anti-Marxist. The Nazi Party was founded in , but won little popular support until the crisis of the Great Depression.

In , the German president appointed Hitler Chancellor. However, the Nazis used emergency decrees, violence, and intimidation to quickly seize control. The Nazis abolished all other political parties. They declared Germany a one-party state with Hitler as its supreme leader. After World War I ended, Germany experienced great political turmoil. The Treaty of Versailles imposed harsh terms on Germany, which had lost the war. In addition, the country saw the overthrow of its monarchy.

In its place was the new Weimar Republic , a democratic government. Racist and antisemitic groups sprang up on the radical right. These groups opposed the Weimar Republic and the Treaty of Versailles. They were against democracy, human rights, capitalism, socialism, and communism. They advocated to exclude from German life anyone who did not belong to the German Volk or race. This small political organization sought to convert German workers away from Marxist Socialism.

He was recruited to a leading role. They called for the abolition of nation states. National Socialists, however, sought to unify members of the German Volk in complete obedience to the state.

Hitler formulated a point program in Among its points, it rejected the Versailles settlement. The country was to acquire new lands and colonies. The program would deny citizenship and rights to all non-Germans, particularly Jews. It attracted support from influential people in the military, big business, and society.

The Party also absorbed other radical right-wing groups. SA members were war veterans and members of the Free Corps Freikorps , paramilitary units that battled left-wing movements in postwar Germany.

On November , , Hitler and his followers staged a failed attempt to seize control of the Bavarian state. They believed this would trigger a nationwide uprising against the Weimar Republic. About 2, Nazis and sympathizers followed. City police clashed with the marchers, leading to an exchange of gunfire. Four police officers and 14 Nazis were killed. After the putsch , German authorities banned the Nazi Party. Several of its leaders were arrested and charged with high treason.

Hitler was convicted and sentenced to 5 years in jail. While in prison, Hitler began dictating his book, Mein Kampf. The book set out his world view and personal mission. He would achieve this by creating a racially pure state and conquering Lebensraum living space in the Soviet Union. Further, he would destroy the Germans' ultimate enemy, the Jews, and their most dangerous weapon: Judeo-Bolshevism. It did not become a bestseller in Germany until after he became Chancellor.

Returning texture and agency to one such perpetrator allows Griesinger to stand in for the thousands of anonymous ordinary Nazis whose widespread culpability wreaked havoc on countless lives and whose biographies have, until now, never seen the light of day. So many other stories just like his have never been put to paper and, given the rapidly declining number of people still able to remember personal elements of these individual, one wonders whether they will ever be written. Daniel Lee is the author of The S.

Contact us at letters time. Nazi leader Adolf Hitler addresses soldiers with his back facing the camera at a Nazi rally in Dortmund, Germany, in By Daniel Lee. Related Stories. Already a print subscriber? There is no credible evidence that Hitler had any Jewish ancestors.

Read Adolf Hitler: Early Years — to learn more. The Germans and their collaborators used paper records and local knowledge to identify Jews to be rounded up or killed.

Records included those created by Jewish communities of their members, parish records of Protestant and Catholic churches for converted Jews , government tax records, and police records, including registries of Jews compiled by local, collaborating police.

In both Germany and occupied countries, Nazi officials required Jews to identify themselves as Jewish, and many complied, fearing the consequences if they did not. In many countries occupied by or allied with Germany during World War II, local citizens often showed authorities where their Jewish neighbors lived, if they did not themselves help in rounding them up.

Jews in hiding everywhere lived in constant fear of being identified and denounced to officials by individuals in exchange for money or other rewards. Of course, Hitler and many Nazis leaders did not have blonde hair or blue eyes, but as with all racists, their prejudices were not consistent or logical.

This was especially true for Jewish men: circumcision is a Jewish ritual, but was uncommon for non-Jews at the time. Jewish men knew they could be physically identified as Jewish. Read Locating the Victims to learn more. Similar to their fellow Germans, German Jews were patriotic citizens. More than 10, died fighting for Germany in World War I, and countless others were wounded and received medals for their valor and service.

The families of many Jews who held German citizenship, regardless of class or profession, had lived in Germany for centuries and were well assimilated by the early 20th century. At first, Nazi Germany targeted the , Jews in Germany at a relatively gradual pace, attempting attempted to make life so difficult that they would be forced to leave their country.

Up until the nationwide anti-Jewish violence of , known as Kristallnacht , many Jews in Germany expected to be able to hold out against Nazi-sponsored persecution, as they hoped for positive change in German politics. Before World War II, few could imagine or predict killing squads and killing centers. Those who tried to leave had difficulty finding countries willing to take them in, especially since the Nazi regime did not allow them to take their assets out of the country.

A substantial percentage tried to go to the United States but American immigration law limited the number of immigrants who could enter the country. The ongoing Great Depression meant that Jews attempting to go to the United States or elsewhere had to prove they could financially support themselves—something that was very difficult since they were being robbed by the Germans before they could leave. Even when a new country could be found, a great deal of time, paperwork, support, and sometimes money was needed to get there.

In many cases, these obstacles could not be overcome. By , however, about , German Jews had already left. Once Germany invaded and occupied Poland, millions of Jews were suddenly living under Nazi occupation. The war made travel very difficult, and other countries—including the United States—were still unwilling to change their immigration laws, now fearing that the new immigrants could be Nazi spies. In October , Germany made it illegal for Jews to emigrate from any territory under its control; by then, Nazi policy had changed from forced emigration to mass murder.

Visit the Americans and the Holocaust online exhibition and the Challenges to Escape lesson plan for more information. The idea that Jews did not fight back against the Germans and their allies is false. Against impossible odds, they resisted in ghettos, concentration camps, and killing centers.

There were many factors that made resistance difficult, however, including a lack of weapons and resources, deception, fear, and the overwhelming power of the Germans and their collaborators. Read a Holocaust Encyclopedia article about Jewish resistance for more information. In Europe, the Holocaust was not a secret. Even though the Nazi government controlled the German press and did not publicize mass shooting operations or the existence of killing centers, many Europeans knew that Jews were being rounded up and shot, or deported and murdered.

Many individuals—in Germany and collaborators in the countries that Germany occupied or that were aligned with Germany during World War II—actively participated in the stigmatization, isolation, impoverishment, and violence culminating in the mass murder of six million European Jews. People helped in their roles as clerks and confiscators of property; as railway and other transportation employees; as managers or participants in round-ups and deportations; as informants; sometimes as perpetrators of violence against Jews on their own initiative; and sometimes as hand-on killers in killing operations, notably in the mass shootings of Jews and others in occupied Soviet territories in which thousands of eastern Europeans participated as auxiliaries and many more witnessed.

Many more people—the onlookers who witnessed persecution or violence against Jews in Nazi Germany and elsewhere—failed to speak out as their neighbors, classmates, and co-workers were isolated and impoverished—socially and legally, then physically. Only a small minority publicly expressed their disapproval. Other individuals actively assisted the victims by purchasing food or other supplies for households to whom shops were closed; providing false identity papers or warnings about upcoming roundups; storing belongings for those in hiding that could be sold off little by little for food; and sheltering those who evaded capture, a form of help that, if discovered, especially in Nazi Germany and occupied eastern Europe, was punished by arrest and often execution.

Although Jews were the main target of Nazi hatred, they were not the only group persecuted. American newspapers reported frequently on Hitler and Nazi Germany throughout the s. Americans read headlines about book burning, about Jews being attacked on the street, and about the Nuremberg Race laws in , when German Jews were stripped of their German citizenship. The Kristallnacht attacks in November were front-page news in the United States for weeks.

Americans staged protests and rallies in support of German Jews, and sent petitions to the US government calling for action. But these protests never became a sustained movement, and most Americans were still not in favor of allowing more immigrants into the United States, particularly if the immigrants were Jewish.