Nazism

The creation of the “new order” enabled the National Socialists to eliminate unemployment; provide the German workers and farmers with a tolerable standard of living; enrich the elite ruling group of the state, industry, and finance; and build a stupendous war machine. As they constructed their “new order” in Germany, they pressed forward politically and diplomatically for the creation of Greater Germany. The record of Hitler's foreign policy constitutes an ugly chapter in history and is told in detail in the articles in this encyclopedia on Germany, Europe, Austria, Czechoslovakia (now the Czech Republic and Slovakia), Spain, Italy, and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. The outstanding events of the era of totalitarian aggression were the remilitarization of the Rhineland (1936), formation of the Italo-German Fascist Axis (1936), intervention in the Spanish civil war (1936-1939) on behalf of the royalist forces of Francisco Franco, Anschluss (“union”, that is, annexation) with Austria (1938), destruction of the Czechoslovak state (1939), negotiation of a non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union containing a secret agreement to partition Poland, and, in consequence of that pact, the invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, which precipitated World War II.

Hitler boasted that National Socialism had solved the problems of German society and would endure for a thousand years. That the party resolved problems with which the Weimar Republic was powerless to cope, and that it transformed the weak republic into an industrially and politically powerful state is a matter of record. Equally of record and undeniable is that the cost of that transformation included the horror of World War II, the bloodiest and most destructive conflict in human history, from which Germany emerged beaten, divided, and impoverished. Also included in that cost is the price paid in suffering endured by the German people under Hitler and after his death. The most tragic aspect of the National Socialist reign was the systematic murder of approximately 6 million European Jews.

After the war a small neo-Nazi movement continued to exist in West Germany. Neo-Nazism gained some popularity after the reunification of Germany in 1990. The movement is largely composed of discontented young males who target Jews, blacks, homosexuals, and other groups with acts of violence and menace. Neo-Nazi groups have also sprung up in other countries, including the United States.