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The instability created in Europe by the First World War (1914-18) set the stage for another international conflict–World War II–which broke out two decades later and would prove even more devastating.
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Hitler joined the party the year it was founded and became its leader in 1921.
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In 1929, Germany entered a period of severe economic depression and widespread unemployment.
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From the mid- to late 1930s, Hitler undermined the postwar international order step by step.
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Under the leadership of Adolf Hitler (1889-1945), the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, or Nazi Party, grew into a mass movement and ruled Germany through totalitarian means from 1933 to 1945.
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Founded as the German Workers’ Party, the group promoted German pride and anti-Semitism, and expressed dissatisfaction with the terms of the Treaty of Versailles.
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When Hitler and the Nazis came to power in 1933, they instituted a series of measures aimed at persecuting Germany’s Jewish citizens.
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Beginning in late 1941, the Germans began mass transports from the ghettoes in Poland to the concentration camps.
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Poland in September 1939 drove Great Britain and France to declare war on Germany, and World War II had begun.
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Hitler had long planned an invasion of Poland, a nation to which Great Britain and France had guaranteed military support if it was attacked by Germany.
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On September 17, Soviet troops invaded Poland from the east.
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.On September 1, 1939, Hitler invaded Poland from the west; two days later, France and Britain declared war on Germany, beginning World War II.
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Tripartite Pact of 1940, and honored its 1939 Nazi-Soviet Nonaggression Pact with the Soviet Union until 1941, when Germany launched a massive blitzkrieg invasion of the Soviet Union.
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On April 9, 1940, Germany simultaneously invaded Norway and occupied Denmark, and the war began in earnest.
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On June 14, German forces entered Paris; a new government formed by Marshal Philippe Petain (France’s hero of World War I) requested an armistice two nights later.
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After Germany’s defeat in World War II (1939-45), the Nazi Party was outlawed and many of its top officials were convicted of war crimes related to the murder of some 6 million European Jews during the Nazis’ reign.
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From 1942 to 1945, Jews were deported to the camps from all over Europe.
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Among the estimated 45-60 million people killed were 6 million Jews murdered in Nazi concentration camps as part of Hitler’s diabolical “Final Solution,” now known as the Holocaust.
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The first mass gassings began at the camp of Belzec, near Lublin, on March 17, 1942.
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Allied governments, who were harshly criticized after the war for their failure to respond, or to publicize news of the mass slaughter.
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At Auschwitz alone, more than 2 million people were murdered in a process resembling a large-scale industrial operation.
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Hungary’s Jewish population was deported to Auschwitz, and as many as 12,000 Jews were killed every day.
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A large population of Jewish and non-Jewish inmates worked in the labor camp there; though only Jews were gassed, thousands of others died of starvation or disease.
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During the summer of 1944, even as the events of D-day (June 6, 1944) and a Soviet offensive the same month spelled the beginning of the end for Germany in the war.
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On June 6, 1944–celebrated as “D-Day”–the Allied began a massive invasion of Europe, landing 156,000 British, Canadian and American soldiers on the beaches of Normandy, France.
