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Nazi Germany, [i] officially known as the German Reich [j] and later the Greater German Reich, [k] was the German state between 1933 and 1945, when Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party controlled the country, transforming it into a totalitarian dictatorship.
Due to the great care that Hitler took to give his dictatorship an appearance of legality, the Enabling Act was renewed twice, first in 1937 and then in 1941. Its renewal was practically assured because all other parties were banned. Voters were presented with a single list of Nazis and Nazi-approved candidates under far-from-secret conditions.
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 ...
A major policy of the German Nazi Party was Lebensraum for the German nation based on claims that Germany after World War I was facing an overpopulation crisis and that expansion was needed to end the country's overpopulation within existing confined territory, and provide resources necessary to its people's well-being. [162]
According to Encyclopedia Britannica, the Soviet Union during the period of Joseph Stalin's rule, along with Nazi Germany, was a "modern example" of a totalitarian state, being among "the first examples of decentralized or popular totalitarianism, in which the state achieved overwhelming popular support for its leadership."
German newspapers wrote that, without doubt, the Hitler-led government would try to fight its political enemies (the left-wing parties), but that it would be impossible to establish a dictatorship in Germany because there was "a barrier, over which violence cannot proceed" and because of the German nation being proud of "the freedom of speech ...
Nazi propaganda and officials such as Robert Ley describe Germany as a "proletarian nation" [108] as opposed to plutocratic England, a political divide that Goebbels described as "England is a capitalist democracy" and "Germany is a socialist people's state."
Their assessment of its significance, however—whether it shaped or merely directed and exploited public opinion—is influenced by their approach to wider questions raised by the study of Nazi Germany, such as the question of whether the Nazi state was a fully totalitarian dictatorship, as argued by Hannah Arendt, or whether it also depended ...