Nazi Germany

9. Kristallnacht ("Night of the Broken Glass")

On the night of November 9th, 1938, violence against Jews broke out across the Reich. It appeared to be unplanned, set off by Germans' anger over the assassination of a German official in Paris at the hands of a Jewish teenager. In fact, German propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels and other Nazis carefully organized the campaign. In 2 days, over 250 synagogues were burned, over 7,000 Jewish businesses were trashed and looted dozens of Jewish people were killed, and Jewish cemeteries, hospitals, schools and homes were looted while police and fire brigades stood by. It was known as the night of the broken glass for all the shattered glass from store windows that littered the streets. The morning after, 30,000 German Jewish men were arrested for the 'crime' of being Jewish and sent to concentration camps, where hundreds of them perished. Some Jewish women were also arrested and sent to local jails. Businesses owned by Jews weren't allowed to reopen unless they were managed by non-Jews. Curfews were placed on Jews, limiting the hours of the day they could leave their homes. After this event, life was understandably more difficult for German and Austrian Jewish children and teenagers. Already barred from entering museums, public playgrounds, and swimming pools, now they were expelled from the public schools.

3. Enabling Act

The Enabling Act was a 1933 amendment to the Weimar Constiution that gave the German Cabinet in effect Adolf Hitler the power to enact laws without the involvement of the Reichstag. Which basically means he can do whatever he wants and pass whatever law he pleases. The bill was passed by the Reichstag & Reichsrat on the 24th of March 1933. The act stated that it was to last 4 years unless renewed by the Reichstag (which occurred twice). This followed on the heels of the Reichstag Fire Decree which essentially abolished most civil liberties and transferred state powers to the Reich government. The combined effect of the 2 laws was to transform Hitler's government into a de facto legal dictatorship. The legislation was passed at the Kroll Opera House under the supervision of Nazi troops who may or may not have influenced the decision. Communitstshad already been banned and therefore weren't present to cast their votes, while several of the Social Democrats decided not to show up either.

2. Nuremberg Laws

These were anti-Jewish statutes enacted by Germany on September 15th, 1935, marking a major step in clarifying the racial policy and removing Jewish influences from the 'Aryan' society. The 2 laws were the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor. Which forbade marriages and extramarital intercourse between Jews and Germans and the employment of German females under 45 in Jewish households. Also the Reich Citizenship Law, which declared that only those of German or related blood were eligible to be Reich citizens; the remainder were classed as state subjects, without citizenship rights. A supplementary decree outlining the definition of who was Jewish was passed on the 14th of November, and the Reich Citizenship Law officially came into effect on that date. Out of the foreign policy concerns, prosecutions under the 2 laws didn't commence until after the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin.

4. Claus Von Stauffenberg

he was a German army officer and aristocrat who was one of the leading members of the failed July 20th plot of 1944 to assassinate Adolf Hitler and remove the Nazi Party from power. He was one of the central figures of the German Resistance movement. For his involvement in the movement he was executed by firing squad shortly after the failed attempt known as Operation Valkyrie.

10. "Night of the Long Knives" (Rohm Putsch)

sometimes referred to as Operation Hummingbird or in German Rohm Putsch. Was a purge that took place in Nazi Germany from June 30th to July 2nd 1934. When the Nazi regime carried out a series of political murders. Leading figures of the left-wing faction of the Nazi Party, along with its figurehead, Gregor Strasser, were murdered, as were prominent conservative anti-Nazis (Kurt Von Schleicher. Many of those killed were leaders of the SA, the brown shirts. Adolf Hitler moved against the SA and its leader, Ernst Röhm, because he saw the independence of the SA and the penchant of its members for street violence as a direct threat to his newly gained political power. Hitler also wanted to conciliate leaders of the Reichswehr, the official German military who feared and despised the SA—in particular Röhm's ambition to absorb the Reichswehr into the SA under his own leadership. Additionally, Hitler was uncomfortable with Röhm's outspoken support for a "second revolution" to redistribute wealth. (In Röhm's view, President Hindenburg's appointing of Hitler as German Chancellor on January 30, 1933 had accomplished the "nationalistic" revolution but had left unfulfilled the "socialistic" motive in National Socialism.) Finally, Hitler used the purge to attack or eliminate critics of his new regime, especially those loyal to Vice-Chancellor Franz von Papen, as well as to settle scores with old enemies. At least 85 people died during the purge, although the final death toll may have been in the hundreds, and more than a thousand perceived opponents were arrested. Most of the killings were carried out by the Schutzstaffel (SS) and the Gestapo (Geheime Staatspolizei), the regime's secret police. The purge strengthened and consolidated the support of the Reichswehr for Hitler. It also provided a legal grounding for the Nazi regime, as the German courts and cabinet quickly swept aside centuries of legal prohibition against extra-judicial killings to demonstrate their loyalty to the regime. The Night of the Long Knives was a turning point for the German government. It established Hitler as "the supreme judge of the German people," as he put it in his July 13, 1934 speech to the Reichstag.

5. Reinhard Heydrich

was a high ranking German Nazi official during WWII and one of the main architects of the Holocaust. Chief of the Reich Main Security Office. He chaired the Jan. 1942 Wannsee Conference, which formalized plans for the Final Solution. Hitler referred to him as "the man with the iron heart". Heydrich was attacked in Prague on the 27th of May 1942 by a British trained team of Czech and Slovak soldiers who had been sent by the Czechoslovak government to kill him in Operation Antropoid. He died a week later from his injuries.

6. Arthur Seyss-Inquart

was an Austrian Nazi politician who served as Chancellor of Austria for 2 days. From March 11th- March 13th in 1938. Before the Anschluss annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany, signing the constitutional law as acting head of state upon the resignation of President Wilhelm Miklas. During WWII he served the 3rd Reich in the general government of occupied Poland. At the Nuremberg Trials he was found guilty of crimes against humanity and sentenced to death.

8. Commissar Order

was an order issued by Adolf Hitler on June 6th, 1941 before Operation Barbarossa. It demanded that any Soviet Political commissar identified among captured troops be summarily executed as an enforcer of the communist ideology and the Soviet Communist Party line in military forces. According to the order all those prisoners who could be identified as thoroughly bolshevized or as active representatives of the Bolshevist ideology should also be killed.

7. T-4 Program

was the postwar designation for a program of forced euthanasia in wartime Nazi Germany. Under the program physicians were directed to judge patients "incurably sick, by critical medical examination" & then administer those patients a mercy death. In October of 1939, Hitler signed a euthanasia decree backdated to September 1939. It lasted until 1941 August. During which over 70,000 people were killed at various extermination centers located at psychiatric hospitals throughout Germany & Austria. But even after the official 1941 ceasing of the order, program physicians in Germany & Austria continued many of the practices until the defeat of Germany in 1945. Which led to another 200,000 deaths.

1. Gleichschaltung (coordination)

was the process by which the Nazi regime successively established a system of totalitarian controland coordination over all aspects of society. Claudia Koonz utilized the term to explain the transformation of ordinary Germans, who hadn't, before 1933, been more prejudiced than their counterparts elsewhere, into indifferent bystanders to and collaborators with persecution. Among the goals of this policy were to bring about adherence to a specific doctrine and way of thinking and to control as many aspects of life as possible. The apex of the Nazification of Germany was in the resolutions approved during the Nuremberg Rally of 1935, when the symbols of the Party and the State were fused and the German Jews were deprived of citizenship, paving the way for the Holocaust. This also included the formation of various organizations with membership segemtns of the population, in particular the youth. The Hitler Youth program.