The National Socialist German Workers’ Party Almost Died One Essay Example For Students

The National Socialist German Workers’ Party Almost Died One Essay morning in 1919. It numbered only a few dozen grumblers’ it had noorganization and no political ideas. But many among the middle classadmired the Nazis’ muscular opposition to the Social Democrats. Andthe Nazis themes of patriotism and militarism drew highly emotionalresponses from people who could not forget Germany’s prewar imperialgrandeur. In the national elections of September 1930, the Nazis garnerednearly 6.5 million votes and became second only to the SocialDemocrats as the most popular party in Germany. In Northeim, where in1928 Nazi candidates had received 123 votes, they now polled 1,742, arespectable 28 percent of the total. The nationwide success drew evenfaster in just three years, party membership would rise from about100,000 to almost a million, and the number of local branches wouldincrease tenfold. The new members included working-class people,farmers, and middle-class professionals. They were both bettereducated and younger then the Old Fighters, who had been the backboneof the party during its first decade. The Nazis now presentedthemselves as the party of the young, the strong, and the pure, inopposition to an establishment populated by the elderly, the weak, andthe dissolute. Hitler was born in a small town in Austria in 1889. Asa young boy, he showed little ambition. After dropping out of highschool, he moved to Vienna to study art, but he was denied the chanceto join Vienna academy of fine arts. When WWI broke out, Hitler joined Kaiser Wilhelmer’s army as aCorporal. He was not a person of great importance. He was a creatureof a Germany created by WWI, and his behavior was shaped by that warand its consequences. He had emerged from Austria with manyprejudices, including a powerful prejudice against Jews. Again, he wasa product of his times for many Austrians and Germans wereprejudiced against the Jews. In Hitlers case the prejudice had become maniacal it was adominant force in his private and political personalities. Anti-Semitism was not a policy for Adolf Hitlerit was religion. Andin the Germany of the 1920s, stunned by defeat, and the ravages of theVersailles treaty, it was not hard for a leader to convince millionsthat one element of the nation’s society was responsible for most ofthe evils heaped upon it. The fact is that Hitler’s anti-Semitism wasself-inflicted obstacle to his political success. The Jews, like otherGermans, were shocked by the discovery that the war had not beenfought to a standstill, as they were led to believe in November 1918,but that Germany had , in fact, been defeated and was to be treated asa vanquished country. Had Hitler not embarked on his policy ofdisestablishing the Jews as Germans, and later of exterminating themin Europe, he could have counted on their loyalty. There is no reasonto believe anything else. On the evening of November 8, 1923, WyukeVavaruab State Cinnussuiber Gustav Rutter von Kahr was making apolitical speech in Munich’s spra wling B?rgerbr?ukeller, some 600Nazis and right-wing sympathizers surrounded the beer hall. Hitlerburst into the building and leaped onto a table, brandishing arevolver and firing a shot into the ceiling. â€Å"The NationalRevolution,† he cried, â€Å"has begun!† At that point, informed thatfighting had broken out in another part of the city, Hitler rushed tothat scene. His prisoners were allowed to leave, and they talked aboutorganizing defenses against the Nazi coup. Hitler was of coursefurious. And he was far from finished. At about 11 o’clock on themorning of November 9the anniversary of the founding of the GermanRepublic in 19193,000 Hitler partisans again gathered outside theB?rgerbr?ukeller. To this day, no one knows who fired the first shot. But a shotrang out, and it was followed by fusillades from both sides. HermannG?ring fell wounded in the thigh and both legs. Hitler flattenedhimself against the pavement; he was unhurt. General Ludenorffcontinued to march stolidly toward the police line, which parted tolet him pass through (he was later arrested, tried and acquitted). Behind him, 16 Nazis and three policemen lay sprawled dead among themany wounded. The next year, R?hm and his band joined forces with thefledgling National Socialist Party in Adolf Hitler’s Munich Beer HallPutsch. Himmler took part in that uprising, but he played such a minorrole that he escaped arrest. The R?hm-Hitler alliance survived thePutsch, and ?hm’s 1,500-man band grew into the Sturmabteilung, the SA,Hitler’s brown-shirted private army, that bullied the Communists andDemocrats. Hitler recruited a handful of men to act as his bodyguardsand protect him from Communist toughs, other rivals, and even the S.A. Schizophrenia or Drug abuse? EssayThe â€Å"experimental people† were also used by Nazi doctors whoneeded practice performing various operations. One doctor at Auschwitzperfected his amputation technique on live prisoners. After he hadfinished, his maimed patients were sent off to the gas chamber. A fewJews who had studied medicine were allowed to live if they assistedthe SS doctors. â€Å"I cut the flesh of healthy young girls,† recalled aJewish physician who survived at terrible cost. â€Å"I immersed the bodiesof dwarfs and cripples in calcium chloride (to preserve them), or hadthem boiled so the carefully prepared skeletons might safely reach theThird Reich’s museums to justify, for future generations, thedestruction of an entire race. I could never erase these memories frommy mind.†But the best killing machine were the â€Å"shower baths† of death. After their arrival at a death camp, the Jews who had been chosen todie at once were told that they were to have a shower. Filthy by theirlong, miserable journey, they sometimes applauded the announcement. Countless Jews and other victims went peacefully to the showerroomswhich were gas chambers in disguise. In the anterooms to the gas chambers, many of the doomed peoplefound nothing amiss. At Auschwitz, signs in several languages said,â€Å"Bath and Disinfectant,† and inside the chambers other signsadmonished, â€Å"Don’t forget your soap and towel.† Unsuspecting victimscooperated willingly. â€Å"They got out of their clothes so routinely,†Said a Sobibor survivor. â€Å"What could be more natural?†In time, rumors about the death camps spread, and undergroundnewspapers in the Warsaw ghetto even ran reports that told of the gaschambers and the crematoriums. But many people did not believe thestoried, and those who did were helpless in any case. Facing the gunsof the SS guards, they could only hope and pray to survive. As oneJewish leader put it, â€Å"We must be patient and a miracle will occur.†There were no miracles. The victims, naked and bewildered, were shovedinto a line. Their guards ordered them forward, and flogged those whohung back. The doors to the gas chambers were locked behind them. Itwas all over quickly. The war came home to Germany. Scarcely had Hitler recovered fromthe shock of the July 20 bombing when he was faced with the loss ofFrance and Belgium and of great conquests in the East. Enemy troops inoverwhelming numbers were converging on the Reich. By the middle ofAugust 1944, the Russian summer offensives, beginning June 10 andunrolling one after another, had brought the Red Army to theborder of East Prussia, bottled up fifty German divisions in theBaltic region, penetrated to Vyborg in Finland, destroyed Army GroupCenter and brought an advance on this front of four hundred miles insix weeks to the Vistula opposite Warsaw, while in the south a newattack which began on August 20 resulted in the conquest of Rumania bythe end of the month and with it the Ploesti oil fields, the onlymajor source of natural oil for the German armies. On August 26Bulgaria formally withdrew from the war and the Germans began tohastily clear out of that country. In September Finland gave up andturned on the German troops which refused to evacuate its territory. In the West, France was liberated quickly. In General Patton, thecommander of the newly formed U.S. Third Army, the Americans had founda tank general with the dash and flair of Rommel in Africa. After thecapture of Avranches on July 30, he had left Brittany to wither on thevine and begun a great sweep around the German armies in Normandy,moving southeast to Orleans on the Loire and then due east toward theSeine south of Paris. By August 23 the Seine was reached southeast andnorthwest of the capital, and two days later the great city, the gloryof France, was liberated after four years of German occupation whenGeneral Jacques Leclerc’s French 2nd Armored Division and the U.S. 4thInfantry Division broke into it and found that French resistance unitswere largely in control.