In World War II, the United States and Germany had very different ideas of effective governments. In the United States, the most effective form of government was a Democracy while Nazism was the form of government in Germany even though it may not have been the most preferred. In both of these governments we can see that the leader can make a tremendous difference in how a country is run and maintained whether it is positively or negatively.
One of the main differences between Democracy and Nazism is how their citizens are treated. When Nazism was first becoming a thing in Germany there was a huge prejudice on the Jewish population. In America, most of its citizens had the rights to do whatever they wished as long as it was within the limits of the law. Women in the U.S were more valued for what they could do to contribute to society whereas women in Germany during that time were valued for how many children they could
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The Nazis had a mentality that the best way to show greatness is through war and to win. This shows for the United States in the way that they literally dropped an atomic bomb on a city in order to win the war and save lives. Germany, or Hitler, tried to annihilate a whole entire population of people to win the war and show how great they were. “The ‘subversive’ Jews were portrayed as responsible for all of Germany’s ills.” (1) This quote highlights the way that Germany tried to just kill all of the Jews instead of confronting them about the so called “problem” they created. I think that shows Hitler’s character, the way he tried to get rid of the “problem” instead of trying to solve it. They tried to kill all of the Jews, slaughter a whole race of people to win. On the other hand, the United States was willing to take a smaller number of lives for the greater good of a larger number of
The Weimar Republic would have continued to be a functional government far longer than achieved if not for the defeat of WWI, the economic burdens imposed by the Versailles Treaty, and the flawed Article 48 which all contributed to the down fall of Germany’s first attempt at a legitimate Democracy. This paper will argue that the societal, economical, and constitutional aspects all played a role in the hopeless Democracy Germany attempted which ultimately lead Germany into a totalitarian state that would further shake the world with the rise of the NSDAP and Adolf Hitler.
Hitler had shown unwillingness to tolerate the Jews and once he was appointed Chancellor, he started to take elimination measures like deportation, forced emigration, and isolation to enforce his belief. He took advantage of Germany’s weakness in World War One, then used it as an opportunity to blame the Jews for Germany’s defeat. Hitler’s political party was the largest political party in Germany thus allowing them to draw very large crowds to gatherings. He had very good oratory speeches with hand gestures that easily manipulated people to adhere to his views. Hitler constantly targeted the Jews because he knew people believed in these speeches. People in Germany were already anti-semitic but Hitler made it worse by constantly consuming them in his speeches. From the way he spoke about the Jews, we could clearly see the possibility of genocide. Hitler wanted Germany to be free of any humans that anyone other than his ideal master race so he personally selected bodyguards to be part of a group called the SS. Hitler was responsible for ordering the SS to carry out the extermination of anyone who did not fit this ideal. The SS handled oppositions using force and as a result of which people were forced to give into the idea of violence. Sometimes people purposely went along with this Holocaust ideal due to the fear of getting killed. These terrors allowed the holocaust occur
On The 30th of January 1933, President Hindenburg appointed Hitler as Chancellor. In the 18 months succeeding this, Hitler became, essentially, a dictator. This essay will look at what a dictatorship is and how it operates, how the population is brought to a point where they accept a dictatorship, and examine and analyze the vital events that took place in Germany which lead to Hitler assuming dictatorial power: the Reichstag fire, the Emergency Decree, the Enabling Act, the banning of trade unions and other political parties, the Night Of The Long Knives, the death of President Hindenburg, and the German army’s oath of loyalty to Hitler. It will
In addition to the damaging consequences of the First World War with the requirements of the Treaty of Versailles, certain features of Germany caused the state to be susceptible to the influence of this dangerous ideology. Along with the damage to the national ego as a result of the First World War, Germany had co-existing and conflicting highly modern strands of development forced to integrate with powerful remnants of archaic values and social structures, and had a deeply fractured parliamentary political system, and the weaknesses of this system reflected the social and political differences within the population. This shame and failure after World War I was superimposed onto a modern country which once had an advanced economy, a sophisticated state
After Germany lost World War I, it was in a national state of humiliation. Their economy was in the drain, and they had their hands full paying for the reparations from the war. Then a man named Adolf Hitler rose to the position of Chancellor and realized his potential to inspire people to follow. Hitler promised the people of Germany a new age; an age of prosperity with the country back as a superpower in Europe. Hitler had a vision, and this vision was that not only the country be dominant in a political sense, but that his ‘perfect race’, the ‘Aryans,’ would be dominant in a cultural sense. His steps to achieving his goal came in the form of the Holocaust. The most well known victims of the Holocaust were of course, the Jews.
The dualism of Nazi Germany makes it difficult to ascertain the level of Nazification present at the state-level prior to 1935. John Herz writes that the ‘underlying purposes and tendency of the originators and leaders of the Nazi regime was to create a completely party-dominated and party-permeated state and society’. However, Herz goes on to argue that this desire to completely restructure government institutions and personnel was soon recognised as being detrimental to the plan to rapidly gear Germany for war. Therefore, the Nazi leadership chose ‘to use, modify, and adapt existing institutions to its specific purposes and policies, while profiting from their efficiency and technical skill.’ This was especially true for the upper civil service, the highly experienced ministerial bureaucracy, whose members the Nazi Party could mostly not replace without damaging the effectiveness of German administration. As a result, a ‘dualism’ between the German state and the Nazi Party was perpetuated in which many state institutions continued to function largely un-Nazified—especially in the years prior to 1935.
With incompetent leadership and an unhappy nation, the German people began to realize that their country was in a vulnerable situation and began to look for stable alternatives to democracy. Hitler’s
The Holocaust was one of, if not the worst mass murder in history. The Nazis did one of the most horrifying things you could think of, killing so many innocent people. Many different groups of people other than jews were also victims of this tragic event. Some of those other groups were: LGBTQ individuals, the physically and mentally disabled, slavs, and members of opposing political groups. These groups of people were ripped from their homes and put into concentration camps. The Nazis would either separate them from their family or they would keep them together and they would have to watch the Nazis torture their family and friends. During this very tragic point in history, more than six million Jewish lives were taken, in total there were over 12 million victims of the Holocaust. Not only did this affect the survivors it also affected families of the victims, survivors and anybody else that was connected through this tragedy. The Nazis, came to “power” in January 1933, which was during a time Germany was going through an economic hardship. They believed that Germans were "racially superior" and that the Jews, were "inferior.” Adolf Hitler played a very big factor in everything that went down. Adolf Hitler was a German politician who was the leader of the Nazi Party and was also known as the dictator of the Holocaust. The Nazis did have others that were Hitler’s “army” and they took orders from Hitler to do awful things to the victims and they were commonly known as
Did you know that the country of Germany had the most feared, fascist government in the world? Well it did, but that was many years ago. Now it has a new government that is more democratic. It was Nazi Germany now it is the Federal Republic of Germany. It did have a Fuhrer now it is a President and parliament. The Germans’ have had several forms of government that didn’t work and now they have the democracy they currently use. The German government currently uses a Federal system with a Parliamentary head that is Democracy based.
From leaving jews naked in front of hundreds of people, to leaving them without food, and even taking away their names, the German Nazis dehumanized the whole of the jewish population which helped Hitler reach his ends. As Elie Wiesel writes in his award winning novel
Hitler was obsessed with the racial superiority he believed the German peoples had over all other inferior peoples. He wanted to rule the world, but in order to carry out his solution, he needed to convince the German people to listen to him. Perhaps Hitler would never have been able to do what he did had World War I never occurred. As Resnick said in his book, The Holocaust; After World War I, Germany was trying to rebuild and recover…Both the Treaty of Versailles and the Great Depression severely afflicted Germany. "In many respects, these terrible conditions made Hitler's rise to power possible." (Resnick p. 15) People in desperate situations will listen to anyone offering a way out. Hitler offered not only a way out of Germany's turmoil, but also someone to blame for it; he pointed at the Jews.
Since Hitler was permitted to aggressively continue his fascist tendencies, in effect the other countries aided him in installing his racist program of genocide. As the war progressed, Hitler was able to start up concentration camps, and later death camps to eliminate Jews, and increase land for his Aryan Race. He was able to make the concentration camps because of the many easy victories earlier in the war. With the concentration camps in place Hitler's first step to his Final Solution was completed. Many Jews were killed on their way to concentration camps, "I cannot say how many people in our car alone died on this trip. Everything was so confusing, and always there was screaming. The chaos was unbelievable. Her Germans created it on purpose to upset us, and then used our behavior as an excuse for beating or shooting us. It didn't take long for us to see the full truth of our situation. No on pretended any more. We had been brought here to die." Hitler's racism was out of control. The fact that he exterminated Jews was atrocious, but the way he had it done was even worse, "Close to it, a huge chimney smoked constantly. That building was the gas chamber where many people, mostly Jews, were killed with poisonous gas, 24 hours a day. When I asked him the rather stupid question, "How do we get away from here?" he told me bluntly. "There is NO way out for any of us but through the chimney. We
The Nazi Party’s strength in three main areas allowed it to precipitate the failure of democracy in Germany. Ideologically, structurally and politically the Nazi party was superior to the Weimar Democracy especially in the period 1928-1934. Ideologically, historian Hans Mommson claims the Nazi Party was a “catch all party” in that the party’s nationalistic, socialist and racist policies
Nazi Germany was a dictatorship under the control of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party, which transformed Germany into a fascist totalitarian state. Germany was conquered by the Soviet Union and the other Allied powers and surrendered within a year. The plan to exterminate the Jews of Europe formed in the 1942 Swansea Conference, replacing the previous policy of forced emigration of Jews from the Reich. In alliance with Italy and smaller Axis powers, Germany conquered most of Europe by 1940 and threatened Great Britain. Hitler became dictator of Germany by merging the powers and offices of the Chancellery and Presidency. Large-scale aerial bombing of Germany escalated in 1944, and the Nazis retreated from Eastern and Southern Europe. The victorious
German history is seen as a ‘painful issue for thousands of Germans and other Europeans’ . However it has interested many historians over the years into inquiring how and why Hitler came to power and how much of this was to do with the failure of parliamentary democracy in Germany. To fully ascertain to what extent these events have in common and what reasons led to the fall of democracy and rise of the Nazis, each have to be looked at individually. Also it seems beneficial, to be able to evaluate these in the relevant context, to look at the situation in Germany was in prior to 1920.