Germany On Stamps: Third Reich - New Theme Pages

After the First Reich (or Holy Roman Empire), from 962 to 1806, and the Second Reich, from 1871 to 1918, and mainly because the humiliation which led to the fall of Emperor Wilhelm II at the end of World War I and all the impositions that the German nation had to accept unconditionally, Adolf Hitler nurtured the dream of a Third Reich, which ends up imposing in 1933, after the rise to power of his National Socialist Party, which won the electoral supremacy during the political disorder that followed the economic crisis of 1929-1930, which creates instability and favour the emergence of extremism.

Founded in 1919, in the aftermath of the humiliating Treaty of Versailles of that year - by which Germany is obliged to pay war damages to the Allies, to reduce its military and abandon the colonies -, the Nazi Party of Hitler, after the failed uprising 1923, decides to gain power through legal means. However, the relative prosperity and stability that Germany knows between 1924 and 1929 gives poor results for the Nazis elections.Are Hitler's promises to overcome the severe economic crisis of the Great Depression, the repudiation of the Treaty of Versailles ("a stab in the back of Germany," he said) and the defence of German rearmament gradually to appeal to the electorate. In 1932, there was already the most representative party formation with a seat in the Reichstag (parliament), gained force with the appointment, the following year, Hitler as a chancellor, by Marshal Hindenburg.

Immediately, Hitler prepares to impose the dictatorship, abolishing the constitution of the Weimar Republic (1919-33) and all political parties except his own, passing to control the justice, media, security forces and education. Also leaves the League of Nations and the disarmament conference, reactivating the compulsory military service.

In Germany, opponents were murdered, declared or suspected; "purge" even the Nazi party, imprisoning them in concentration camps that were not settled; witnessing the flight of many Germans. The military corps of the party (SA, Sturmabteilung, and SS, Schutzstaffel) and its police (Gestapo) imposed a climate of torture and terror. With the death of Hindenburg in 1934, Hitler declares itself as der Führer (the leader), joining the presidency and the foreign ministry in his person. Political resistance disappears; many follow him, animated by its program of economic reconstruction (roads, war industry and similar to, self-sufficiency ...).

The objectives of Hitler were related to the imposition of German superiority affirmed the principle that other peoples were inferior, especially Jews (in fact, held the German economic structure, coveted by the Nazis to ensure economic reconstruction), the Slavs, Gypsies and other non-Germanic peoples. Within this framework of action, advocated the creation of a "living space" (Lebensraum) for German people, found the formula to justify the expansionism of the Reich, including in the East.

Anti-Semitism was another facet of this policy, by which Germany intended to "cleanse" the country. Thus, Hitler, in 1933, orders the expulsion of Jews from government positions. The persecution that moves them unreal outlines affects from 1935, with the abolition of citizenship rights and the flight of nearly 500 000 Jews from the country (where circulating properly identified by a yellow Star of David).

On November 9, 1938, groups will burn down the synagogues and destroy the business of the Jews, a night that has become known as the 'Night of Broken Glass' (Kristallnacht), or 'broken glass'.

At the same time, Hitler and Nazi Germany were preparing for war. Clearly violating the Treaty of Versailles of 1919, occupy the Rhineland in 1936, signing a pact with Mussolini's fascist Italy and an anti-communist agreement with the Japanese, forming, with these three nations, the Axis Rome-Berlin-Tokyo.

In March 1938, the Germans occupied Austria, attaching it to the Reich (Anschluss). That same year, they were able to occupy the Czech region, most of Germany, the Sudetenland, with the consent of England and France (Munich Agreements). What remained of Czechoslovakia is dismembered in the next year, with the German protectorate of Bohemia-Moravia tax.

In August 1939, the Reich gets more of its diplomatic hoaxes, with the agreement with USSR to its neutrality if one of the countries involved in war, and also agrees, but secretly, with the division of Poland and much of Eastern Europe between them.

On the first day of next month, however, the Germans forced the Polish border and march on Danzig, whose "corridor" wanted to join the conquering East Prussia, which triggers the Second World War (whose history is inseparable from the Hitler regime). The Third Reich was defeated and completely destroyed in the conflict, despite dominating scathingly until 1941 (Blitzkrieg).

Declaring war on several European powers, in turn, and then to USA, suffer tremendous setbacks on the Russian front: Nazi Germany is losing military strength (particularly with the Allied bombings of the country from 1943), being harassed for their borders and ending to surrender unconditionally in 1945, but after losing former territories and redefining its borders (Yalta and Potsdam agreements).

During this period of 1939-1945, the anti-Semitism is raised beyond the imaginable, are perpetrating acts of perfect insanity from about six million Jewish victims of Nazi concentration camps (Holocaust), along with more than five million Germans killed, not counting the wounded and missing, and all the brutal destruction of the country and much of Europe and the world.

By now only pages from 1933 to 1935.

The Third Reich Pages // Páginas do Terceiro Reich

Posted in: GermanyOnStamps