What was Nazi Germany?

Nazi Germany was a totalitarian one-party dictatorship under Adolf Hitler and the National Socialist German Workers' Party that ruled Germany from January 30, 1933 until the country's surrender on May 8, 1945, and it pursued genocide against Jews and other minorities while waging war across Europe. The Nazi regime is sometimes called the Third Reich, meaning the third German empire after the Holy Roman Empire and the Wilhelmine Empire.

After Hitler became chancellor, he used the Reichstag fire of February 27, 1933 to push through the Reichstag Fire Decree, which suspended freedom of speech, press, and assembly, and the Enabling Act of March 23, 1933, which let his cabinet pass laws without parliamentary approval. By July 14, 1933, all political parties except the Nazis were banned. Trade unions were dissolved, replaced by the German Labour Front. Independent newspapers were shut down, and Joseph Goebbels became Minister of Propaganda.

The Gestapo, the secret state police, and the SS, the Nazi paramilitary force under Heinrich Himmler, ran a vast system of concentration camps starting with Dachau in March 1933. The Night of the Long Knives in June and July 1934 purged Hitler's own SA paramilitary leadership and consolidated his power.

Racial laws began with the Nuremberg Laws in September 1935, which stripped Jews of citizenship and banned intermarriage with non-Jews. Books were burned, modern art was condemned as degenerate, and education was redesigned around Nazi ideology. Hitler Youth membership became compulsory for boys ten and older.

The state controlled the economy through rearmament, public works such as the autobahn highway system, and central planning. By 1939 unemployment had been eliminated, partly through massive military buildup.

Foreign policy aimed to overturn the Treaty of Versailles, expand German Lebensraum, or living space, in Eastern Europe, and impose racial hierarchy across Europe. Germany annexed Austria in March 1938, took the Sudetenland in October 1938, occupied the rest of Czechoslovakia in March 1939, and invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, starting World War II.

During the war, Nazi Germany conquered most of continental Europe, ran death camps that killed six million Jews and millions of others, and used millions of forced laborers. The regime collapsed with Hitler's suicide on April 30, 1945, and Germany's unconditional surrender a week later.