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Home Quizzes & Games History & Society Science & Tech Biographies Animals &
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Nazism
Table of Contents
Nazism
Table of Contents
 * Introduction
   
 * 
   The roots of Nazism
   
 * 
   Totalitarianism and expansionism
   

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TOTALITARIANISM AND EXPANSIONISM


Adolf Hitler

Working from these principles, Hitler carried his party from its inauspicious
beginnings in a beer cellar in Munich to a dominant position in world politics
20 years later. The Nazi Party originated in 1919 and was led by Hitler from
1920. Through both successful electioneering and intimidation, the party came to
power in Germany in 1933 and governed through totalitarian methods until 1945,
when Hitler committed suicide and Germany was defeated and occupied by the
Allies at the close of World War II.

The history of Nazism after 1934 can be divided into two periods of about equal
length. Between 1934 and 1939 the party established full control of all phases
of life in Germany. With many Germans weary of party conflicts, economic and
political instability, and the disorderly freedom that characterized the last
years of the Weimar Republic (1919–33), Hitler and his movement gained the
support and even the enthusiasm of a majority of the German population. In
particular, the public welcomed the strong, decisive, and apparently effective
government provided by the Nazis. Germany’s endless ranks of unemployed rapidly
dwindled as the jobless were put to work in extensive public-works projects and
in rapidly multiplying armaments factories. Germans were swept up in this
orderly, intensely purposeful mass movement bent on restoring their country to
its dignity, pride, and grandeur, as well as to dominance on the European stage.
Economic recovery from the effects of the Great Depression and the forceful
assertion of German nationalism were key factors in Nazism’s appeal to the
German population. Further, Hitler’s continuous string of diplomatic successes
and foreign conquests from 1934 through the early years of World War II secured
the unqualified support of most Germans, including many who had previously
opposed him.


Nazi Party rally

Despite its economic and political success, Nazism maintained its power by
coercion and mass manipulation. The Nazi regime disseminated a continual
outpouring of propaganda through all cultural and informational media. Its
rallies—especially its elaborately staged Nürnberg rallies—its insignia, and its
uniformed cadres were designed to impart an aura of omnipotence. The underside
of its propaganda machine was its apparatus of terror, with its ubiquitous
secret police and concentration camps. It fanned and focused German
anti-Semitism to make the Jews a symbol of all that was hated and feared. By
means of deceptive rhetoric, the party portrayed the Jews as the enemy of all
classes of society.



Heinrich Himmler

Nazism’s principal instrument of control was the unification, under Heinrich
Himmler and his chief lieutenant, Reinhard Heydrich, of the SS (the uniformed
police force of the Nazi Party) and all other police and security organizations.
Opposition to the regime was destroyed either by outright terror or, more
frequently, by the all-pervading fear of possible repression. Opponents of the
regime were branded enemies of the state and of the people, and an elaborate web
of informers—often members of the family or intimate friends—imposed utmost
caution on all expressions and activities. Justice was no longer recognized as
objective but was completely subordinated to the alleged needs and interests of
the Volk. In addition to the now-debased methods of the normal judicial process,
special detention camps were erected. In these camps the SS exercised supreme
authority and introduced a system of sadistic brutality unrivaled in modern
times.


invasion of Poland

Between 1938 and 1945 Hitler’s regime attempted to expand and apply the Nazi
system to territories outside the German Reich. This endeavour was confined, in
1938, to lands inhabited by German-speaking populations, but in 1939 Germany
began to subjugate non-German-speaking nationalities as well. Germany’s invasion
of Poland on September 1, which initiated World War II, was the logical outcome
of Hitler’s plans. His first years were spent in preparing the Germans for the
approaching struggle for world control and in forging the military and
industrial superiority that Germany would require to fulfill its ambitions. With
mounting diplomatic and military successes, his aims grew in quick progression.
The first was to unite all people of German descent within their historical
homeland on the basis of “self-determination.” His next step foresaw the
creation, through the military conquest of Poland and other Slavic nations to
the east, of a Grosswirtschaftsraum (“large economic unified space”) or a
Lebensraum (“living space”), which thereby would allow Germany to acquire
sufficient territory to become economically self-sufficient and militarily
impregnable. There the German master race, or Herrenvolk, would rule over a
hierarchy of subordinate peoples and organize and exploit them with ruthlessness
and efficiency. With the initial successes of the military campaigns of 1939–41,
his plan was expanded into a vision of a hemispheric order that would embrace
all of Europe, western Asia, and Africa and eventually the entire world.



The extravagant hopes of Nazism came to an end with Germany’s defeat in 1945,
after nearly six years of war. To a certain extent World War II had repeated the
pattern of World War I: great initial German military successes, the forging of
a large-scale coalition against Germany as the result of German ambitions and
behaviour, and the eventual loss of the war because of German overreaching.
Nazism as a mass movement effectively ended on April 30, 1945, when Hitler
committed suicide to avoid falling into the hands of Soviet troops completing
the occupation of Berlin. Many Nazi scientists and technicians were then allowed
to immigrate to the United States, because their expert knowledge was deemed
critical to the defeat of Japan and, after the war, to the struggle against
communism during the Cold War. Part of controversial programs such as Project
Paperclip, some 1,500 German and Austrian professionals and their families
relocated to the United States, the majority of them going on to become U.S.
citizens.

Out of the ruins of Nazism arose a Germany that was divided until 1990. Remnants
of Nazi ideology remained in Germany after Hitler’s suicide, and a small number
of Nazi-oriented political parties and other groups were formed in West Germany
from the late 1940s, though some were later banned. In the 1990s gangs of
neo-Nazi youths in eastern Germany staged attacks against immigrants, desecrated
Jewish cemeteries, and engaged in violent confrontations with leftists and
police. In the early 21st century, small neo-Nazi parties were to be found in
most European countries as well as in the United States, Canada, and several
Central and South American countries. They were rare, but not unheard of, in the
rest of the world.

The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
This article was most recently revised and updated by Jeff Wallenfeldt.


white supremacy
Table of Contents
white supremacy
Table of Contents
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History & Society


WHITE SUPREMACY

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Written by
John Philip Jenkins
Distinguished Professor of History, Baylor University. Author of A History of
the United States, Mystics and Messiahs: Cults and New Religions in America,
Synthetic Panics: The Symbolic...

John Philip Jenkins
Fact-checked by
The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
Encyclopaedia Britannica's editors oversee subject areas in which they have
extensive knowledge, whether from years of experience gained by working on that
content or via study for an advanced degree. They write new content and verify
and edit content received from contributors.

The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
Last Updated: Sep 19, 2023 • Article History
Table of Contents
Category: History & Society
Key People: Hugh Cholmondeley, 3rd Baron Delamere Sir Charles Eliot ...(Show
more) Related Topics: fascism racism alt-right skinhead ...(Show more)
See all related content →


RECENT NEWS

Sep. 19, 2023, 2:19 PM ET (AP)
White supremacist admits threatening jury and witnesses in Pittsburgh synagogue
shooter's trial

white supremacy, beliefs and ideas purporting natural superiority of the
lighter-skinned, or “white,” human races over other racial groups. In
contemporary usage, the term white supremacist has been used to describe some
groups espousing ultranationalist, racist, or fascist doctrines. White
supremacist groups often have relied on violence to achieve their goals.

From the 19th to the mid-20th century the doctrine of white supremacy was
largely taken for granted by political leaders and social scientists in Europe
and the United States. For example, in the four-volume Essai sur l’inégalité des
races humaines (1853–55; Essay on the Inequality of Human Races), the French
writer and diplomatist Arthur de Gobineau wrote about the superiority of the
white race, maintaining that Aryans (Germanic peoples) represented the highest
level of human development. According to 19th-century British writers such as
Rudyard Kipling, Charles Kingsley, Thomas Carlyle, and others, it was the duty
of Europeans—the “white man’s burden”—to bring civilization to nonwhite peoples
through beneficent imperialism. Several attempts were made to give white
supremacy a scientific footing, as various institutes and renowned scientists
published findings asserting the biological superiority of whites. Those ideas
were bolstered in the early 20th century by the new science of intelligence
testing, which purported to show major differences in intelligence between the
races. In such tests northern Europeans always scored higher than Africans.

In the United States—especially in the South—in the era of slavery and during
the subsequent Jim Crow period of legal racial segregation, white supremacy
enjoyed broad political support, as it did in contemporary European colonial
regimes. The doctrine was especially associated with violent groups such as the
Ku Klux Klan (KKK), which enjoyed some success in the United States
(particularly in the 1920s), though many nonviolent individuals and groups also
believed fervently in white supremacist ideas. By the mid-1950s, however,
overtly racist doctrines fell into deep disfavour across much of the Western
world, a development that was hastened by both desegregation (see racial
segregation) and decolonization.

As a result of hostility among some American whites toward the American civil
rights movement, civil rights legislation, especially the Civil Rights Act
(1964) and the Voting Rights Act (1965), and Supreme Court decisions that
invalidated many racially discriminatory laws, especially Brown v. Board of
Education of Topeka (1954), white supremacy underwent a revival in the United
States in the late 1950s and the ’60s. It eventually manifested itself in the
“White Power” movement, which arose in reaction to the “Black Power” doctrines
of the 1960s and ’70s. White supremacists, as well as many social conservatives,
were troubled by the U.S. government’s adoption of or acquiescence in measures
such as affirmative action, school busing, and rules against racial
discrimination in the housing market. Their resentment contributed to the growth
of various groups and movements that actively preached white supremacy,
including the traditional KKK, various neo-Nazi organizations, and the religious
Christian Identity groups. Indeed, by the second half of the 20th century, the
Christian Identity movement—which claimed that northwestern Europeans were
directly descended from the biblical tribes of Israel and that the impending
Armageddon will produce a final battle of whites against nonwhites—was the
dominant religious viewpoint of white supremacists in the United States.

Nevertheless, white supremacists in the United States and throughout the world
ultimately were unable to defend the laws that ensured white domination. The
last regimes to institutionalize doctrines of white supremacy through
comprehensive legislation were Rhodesia, which changed its name to Zimbabwe
after its white minority finally ceded power in 1980, and South Africa, whose
apartheid system was dismantled in the 1990s.

Despite the demise of segregationist and discriminatory laws throughout the
Western world and in Africa, white supremacy has survived as a populist
doctrine. During the 1970s and ’80s the gradually uniform rhetoric and
iconography of white supremacists in the United States became influential in
Europe, where immigration, especially from former colonies in Asia, Africa, and
the Caribbean, contributed to a significant and growing nonwhite population. In
some countries white supremacist ideas found expression in the programs of
anti-immigrant political parties such as the National Front (Front National) in
France, The Republicans (Die Republikaner) in Germany, and the Freedom Party of
Austria (Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs) and (since 2005) the Alliance for the
Future of Austria (Bündnis Zukunft Österreich). In 2009, following the election
the previous year of the first African American president of the United States,
Barack Obama, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Bureau of
Investigation (FBI) warned that white supremacist groups and right-wing militias
in the country were winning new recruits by stoking fears of gun control and
expanded welfare rolls and by exploiting resentment created by the economic
recession that began in late 2007. Some observers of the movements, however,
were skeptical of those claims.

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In early 2016 the presidential campaign of real-estate developer Donald J.
Trump, the eventual Republican nominee, attracted significant support from white
supremacists and so-called white nationalists, who largely disavowed racism but
celebrated “white” identity and lamented the alleged erosion of white political
and economic power and the decline of white culture in the face of nonwhite
immigration and multiculturalism. Other Trump admirers were members of the
“alt-right” (alternative right) movement, a loose association of relatively
young white supremacists, white nationalists, extreme libertarians, and
neo-Nazis that included QAnon followers and members of the Proud Boys. Trump had
earlier questioned the validity of Obama’s American birth certificate and,
during the campaign, issued racist attacks on immigrants and ethnic minorities,
vowing to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, to deport some 11 million
persons living in the country illegally, and to ban immigration by Muslims. In
the immediate aftermath of Trump’s unexpected election as president in November
2016 and during his presidency, the reported incidence of hate crimes directed
at minorities—including Muslims, Hispanics, and Jews—increased significantly,
while racist hate groups became more outspoken and more numerous.

John Philip Jenkins The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica


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