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Nazi Germany, [i] officially known as the German Reich [j] and later the Greater German Reich, [k] refers to the German state between 1933 and 1945, when Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party controlled the country, transforming it into a totalitarian dictatorship.
Nazi Germany was established in January 1933 with the appointment of Adolf Hitler as Chancellor of Germany, followed by suspension of basic rights with the Reichstag Fire Decree and the Enabling Act which gave Hitler's regime the power to pass and enforce laws without the involvement of the Reichstag or German president, and de facto ended with ...
[15] [16] By mid-March, the government began sending communists, labor union leaders, and other political dissidents to Dachau, the first Nazi concentration camp. [17] The passing of the Enabling Act marked the formal transition from the democratic Weimar Republic to the totalitarian Nazi dictatorship. From 1933 onward, Hitler continued to ...
The Weimar Republic, [d] officially known as the German Reich, [e] was a historical period of Germany from 9 November 1918 to 23 March 1933, during which it was a constitutional republic for the first time in history; hence it is also referred to, and unofficially proclaimed itself, as the German Republic.
Adolf Hitler [a] (20 April 1889 – 30 April 1945) was an Austrian-born German politician who was the dictator of Nazi Germany from 1933 until his suicide in 1945. He rose to power as the leader of the Nazi Party, [c] becoming the chancellor in 1933 and then taking the title of Führer und Reichskanzler in 1934.
While Hitler had always intended to bring Germany into conflict with the Soviet Union so he could gain Lebensraum ("living space"), he supported a temporary strategic alliance between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union to form a common anti-liberal front so they could defeat liberal democracies, particularly France. [71]
The relationship between the Wehrmacht (from 1935 to 1945 the regular combined armed forces of Nazi Germany) and the Nazi Party which ruled Germany has been the subject of an extensive historiographical debate. After the Nazis came to power, they sought to control all aspects of civil society and the state, including the military.
[158] [u] In his work The German Dictatorship, Bracher called the invasion the consequence of Hitler's "ideological obsession" and stated that "Hitler's drive for territorial expansion and the relentless expansion of the SS state ushered in the final phase of National Socialist rule". [159]