Germany Blog #6
Throughout time Germany has gone through radical
changes that have ultimately made them the country they are today. In the novel, Germany. A New History by Hagen Schulze, chapters nine through
twelve covers World War I, the first democracy in Germany, the Weimar Republic,
and World War II.
In 1914 World War I erupted in Germany with everyone
behind the government for the war that was believed to end within a matter of
weeks. This was not the case though with
the war dragging on, with the original passion quickly dwindling and becoming a
thing of the past. During the middle of
the Great War, the first German democracy, Weimar Republic, was created. At the end of the First World War ten million
individuals lost their lives, among them were two million Germans (Schulze
198). Although the war was over, it
never really ended in Germany as it transgressed into the form of civil
war. Germany’s final sentence of defeat
was presented with the Versailles Treaty.
This treaty placed Germany under legal sanctions, deprived them of military
power, economically ruined and politically humiliated them (Schulze 204). At this time Germany began struggling
financially with millions of individuals needing government assistance, coal no
longer coming from the Ruhr had to be bought abroad, and since huge sums in
taxes and customs tariffs were lost as well, the government ran up an enormous
deficit that they could only pay off by printing more money (Schulze 210). The money economy completely broke down and
citizens had to go back to bartering for goods.
Newspaper Headline
With the treaty affecting the Democracy, this
allowed for Hitler’s totalitarian and aggressive regime to grow. Hitler was able to use this time to his
advantage to plea to the masses by giving them someone to follow when they were
in search of identifying who they were. Hitler
had no concept of the European politics, he only had one goal: to establish
world dominance for a “superior race” over the dead bodies of “inferiors” (Schulze
247). To reach this goal, he had to
establish National Socialist (Nazi) Party and then become a dominate presence
everywhere in Germany. On January 20th,
1939, Hitler announced that a world war would result in “the destruction of the
Jewish race in Europe” (Schulze 271). He
believed that only select individuals were capable of creating a lasting empire
and that Jews were not a part of this.
To create this German world domination, the Jewish people were
exterminated as part of Hitler’s “final solution” to the “Jewish question”
(Schulze 274). The “final solution” is
now known as the Holocaust. Millions of Jews were then murdered in
concentration camps over the years.
These mass-murders were the regimes most heinous secret, but these acts
would never have been possible without the direct or indirect participation of
numerous government agencies, organizations, and departments, due to the large
number of people needed (Schulze 274). World
War II came to an end in 1945.
Hitler
World War II
Now that World War II was over, Germany had to live
with the results of what occurred. This
war ultimately costed Germany three times as many lives as World War I,
resulting in approximately 5.5 million dead (Schulze 286). Millions of individuals lost their homes and
the civilian populations of major cities had been evacuated. In the end cathedrals, palaces, and old town
centers went up in flames and with them a considerable portion of Germany’s
cultural heritage (Schulze 278). World
War II in the end changed the face of daily life in Germany drastically.
Newspaper Headline
Since this past summer I was able to tour a
concentration camp and learn in depth the horrific events that occurred during
the Holocaust, I found it really interesting to learn more about what lead up
to Hitler’s rise to power and why Germany went along with his goal of German
world dominance.
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