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In this sense, the word Nazi was a hypocorism of the German male name Igna(t)z (itself a variation of the name Ignatius)—Igna(t)z being a common name at the time in Bavaria, the area from which the NSDAP emerged. [17] [18] In the 1920s, political opponents of the NSDAP in the German labour movement seized on this.
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.
The Nazi government claimed to pursue Neuordnung as a means of rearranging territory for the common benefit of a new, economically integrated Europe [8] (excluding the "Asiatic" Soviet Union). [9] Nazi racial views regarded the "Judeo-Bolshevist" Soviet state as a criminal institution in need of destruction and a barbaric place so culturally ...
German refugees in Bedburg, near Kleve, 19 February 1945. Estimates of the total German war dead range from 5.5 to 6.9 million persons. [152] A study by German historian Rüdiger Overmans puts the number of German military dead and missing at 5.3 million, including 900,000 men conscripted from outside of Germany's 1937 borders. [153]
Top officials reported to Hitler and followed his policies, but they had considerable autonomy. Officials were expected to "work towards the Führer" – to take the initiative in promoting policies and actions in line with his wishes and the goals of the Nazi Party, without Hitler having to be involved in the day-to-day running of the country. [9]
The German population's psychological acceptance of the atrocities was achieved with Nazi propaganda (print, radio, cinema), a key factor behind the manufactured consent that justified German brutality towards civilians; by continually manipulating the national psychology, the Nazis convinced the German people to believe that Slavs and Jews ...
Likewise, the historian Richard J. Evans, a leading expert on modern German history, wrote that the Wehrmacht was a genocidal organization. [113] The historian Ben H. Shepherd writes that "There is now clear agreement amongst historians that the German Wehrmacht ... identified strongly with National Socialism and embroiled itself in the ...
Although the word "concentration camp" has acquired the connotation of murder because of the Nazi concentration camps, the British camps in South Africa did not involve systematic murder. The German Empire also established concentration camps during the Herero and Namaqua genocide (1904–1907); the death rate of these camps was 45 per cent ...