Question

what effects did the history politics and economics of those earrings play in their decisions to turn to totalitarianism with germany and hitler

Answer 1

The history politics and economics of those earrings play in their decisions to turn to totalitarianism with germany and hitler:The main purpose and goal of the Nazi revolution was to establish a Volksgemeinschaft. Its creation required the purification and increase of the German “race” as well as its biological separation from the Jews, whose infusion of evil into the German bloodstream, the Nazis said, served to pollute and undermine Germany’s well-being. Nazi efforts to purify the German race gained an air of scientific respectability from the pseudoscience of eugenics, the racial hygiene movement that flourished widely in the early decades of the 20th century. Nazi leaders spoke of their efforts to “reconstruct the German race.” The Law for the Protection of Hereditary Health (July 14, 1933) allowed for the eventual sterilization of as many as two million people deemed unworthy of propagating. The Marriage Subsidy Law of July 1933 aimed to stimulate the birth rate by granting loans to newly married couples; these loans would be forgiven incrementally with the birth of each additional child. The Nazi idealization of mothers and the celebration of motherhood as a special service to the Reich had the same objective. Hitler spoke of an eventual doubling of the German population through these measures. The most notorious of the steps taken to purify the German race was also a milestone in the anti-Jewish legislation promulgated by the Nazis: the infamous Nürnberg Laws of September 1935, which forbade marriage or sexual relations between Jews and Germans and assigned to Jews a lower class of citizenship.

Nazi efforts to solve the “Jewish problem” were in fact products of a vicious anti-Semitism that propelled the Nazi regime toward increasingly extreme measures of persecution. SA terrorism, legislation expelling Jews from the civil service and universities, boycotts of Jewish businesses and professionals, and the eventual expropriation of Jewish-owned properties had by 1938 led to the emigration of roughly half of the 1933 Jewish population of 500,000 people. Until the massive campaign of violence against Jews and Jewish property known as Kristallnacht (“Night of Broken Glass”), during the night of November 9–10, 1938, it still seemed possible for some Jews to remain in Germany, albeit in severely circumscribed circumstances. With Kristallnacht the Nazis ushered in a new level of persecution. In its aftermath Hitler put Göring in charge of Jewish policy. Göring coordinated the numerous party and governmental agencies competing for control of—and profit from—the persecutions of the Jews.

For the Nazis, to exclude Jews from the Volksgemeinschaft was as important as attracting the German working classes to it, in order to undo the long-standing alienation of the largely socialist-minded German worker from the nationalist consensus. Any success in this effort depended heavily upon the Nazis’ ability to provide employment for the millions of jobless whom they inherited in 1933. Public spending on rearmament and on public works projects such as the superhighway, or autobahn, network helped create many of the jobs so desperately needed. By 1937 Germany was beginning to suffer from a labour shortage. It was equally important to inculcate workers with a sense of being an integral part of a racially based national community. For this the Nazis devised an elaborate program of subsidies for leisure-time activities for workers. Called “Strength through Joy,” the program subsidized workers’ vacations; it made possible excursions to mountain or seaside resorts and offered the possibility of cruises in the Mediterranean or the Baltic Sea. By providing leisure activities for workers until then reserved for their economic and social superiors, the government attempted to integrate them into the Volksgemeinschaft. A new, inexpensive automobile, the Volkswagen, was designed to give workers the opportunity to own a car, which had until then in Germany been a symbol of wealth and status largely reserved for the upper classes. Hitler once said that Henry Ford had done more than anyone else to obliterate class differences in America.

Certain that Britain and France would do nothing to stop him, Hitler decided to move up his timetable for conquests in the east. On March 15, 1939, Hitler seized what remained of Czechoslovakia, reshaping its pieces into a Bohemian and Moravian protectorate and a nominally independent state of Slovakia. Within a week he annexed from Lithuania the city of Memel and the surrounding countryside, territory lost to Germany in the Memel dispute as a consequence of Versailles. When Britain and France countered these moves by guaranteeing armed assistance to Poland—clearly next on Hitler’s agenda—in the event of German aggression, a furious Hitler ordered his military to prepare an invasion of that country. Poland was critical to Hitler’s long-range strategy for the conquest of Lebensraum in the east; any invasion of the Soviet Union required that Polish territory be available as a staging area. Until the British-French guarantee, he had hoped to enlist Poland, mostly through bombast and threat, as an ally in an attack on the Soviet Union, and he believed Poland could be dealt with summarily after the defeat of the Soviet Union. When Poland refused to play the role he had assigned it, Hitler began looking for allies in his resolution of the Polish problem. In late May 1939 he signed his “Pact of Steel” with Mussolini. Then came the most sensational diplomatic rapprochement of the 20th century. Shortly after signing the pact with Italy, Hitler put out feelers to Soviet leader Joseph Stalin about the possibility of dividing eastern Europe, Poland included, into German and Soviet spheres of influence. These negotiations led to the notorious German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact of August 24, 1939, a pact that secretly sealed Poland’s doom and delayed Hitler’s unbending determination to conquer Lebensraum from the Soviets for almost two years. On September 1, 1939, Hitler launched his invasion of Poland. Two days later Britain and France declared war on Germany.

the German military leaders’ unconditional surrender in May 1945, the country lay prostrate. The German state had ceased to exist, and sovereign authority passed to the victorious Allied powers. The physical devastation from Allied bombing campaigns and from ground battles was enormous: an estimated one-fourth of the country’s housing was destroyed or damaged beyond use, and in many cities the toll exceeded 50 percent. Germany’s economic infrastructure had largely collapsed as factories and transportation systems ceased to function. Rampant inflation was undermining the value of the currency, and an acute shortage of food reduced the diet of many city dwellers to the level of malnutrition. These difficulties were compounded by the presence of millions of homeless German refugees from the former eastern provinces. The end of the war came to be remembered as “zero hour,” a low point from which virtually everything had to be rebuilt anew from the ground up. the Potsdam Conference.Contunico

For purposes of occupation, the Americans, British, French, and Soviets divided Germany into four zones. The American, British, and French zones together made up the western two-thirds of Germany, while the Soviet zone comprised the eastern third. Berlin, the former capital, which was surrounded by the Soviet zone, was placed under joint four-power authority but was partitioned into four sectors for administrative purposes. An Allied Control Council was to exercise overall joint authority over the country.

These arrangements did not incorporate all of prewar Germany. The Soviets unilaterally severed the German territories east of the Oder and Neisse rivers and placed these under the direct administrative authority of the Soviet Union and Poland, with the larger share going to the Poles as compensation for territory they lost to the Soviet Union. The former provinces of East Prussia, most of Pomerania, and Silesia were thus stripped from Germany. Since virtually the entire German population of some 9.5 million in these and adjacent regions was expelled westward, this amounted to a de facto annexation of one-fourth of Germany’s territory as of 1937, the year before the beginning of German expansion under Hitler. The Western Allies acquiesced in these actions by the Soviets, taking consolation in the expectation that these annexations were merely temporary expedients that the final peace terms would soon supersede.