The Terrible Adolf Hitler

 

90 years ago today Adolf Hitler was named the chancellor of Germany. It took him two months to abolish democracy and establish the first concentration camp 

➡ Within a few years, the chancellor will become dictator, launch the most destructive conflict ever, and murder millions of people.

➡ On 30 January 1933, Adolf Hitler became the chancellor, and in early March the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP) won over 40 per cent of the vote, securing 288 of the 647 seats in the Reichstag. By the end of March 1933, the so-called Enabling Act (Ermächtigungsgesetz) was passed by a majority vote. The government was now able to issue decrees with the force of law. In the same month, by the order of Heinrich Himmler the first concentration camp was established in Dachau, near Munich.

➡ A German-Jewish Carmelite nun Edith Stein, who became a victim of the Nazi ideology and a future saint and martyr of the Catholic Church witnessed the changes taking place in Germany at that time. On 1 April 1933, the German Nazis organized a one-day boycott of all Jewish-owned businesses in the country, and a few days later they enacted the racist “Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service” (Gesetz zur Wiederherstellung des Berufsbeamtentums).

“In these last few weeks, I have been constantly wondering whether there was something I could do about the Jewish question. In the end I planned to go to Rome and ask the Holy Father for an encyclical,” wrote Edith Stein in her diary in April 1933, at a time when Germany was undergoing profound political and social change. 

➡ On the territories under the German jurisdiction, Jews were subjected to harassment, repression and persecution for several years. Those who had emigrated before the Hitler’s seizure of power could consider themselves lucky. The following years brought progressive repressions — the expulsion from their homes, life in ghettos and finally — transfer to concentration camps.

➡ Read our article “Germany, the Vatican, and Europe in the time of Edith Stein”.

👉 https://bit.ly/3jdkzMb

➡When in 1933 Hitler was forming his government, Joseph Goebbels, the head of propaganda for the NSDAP, became a minister of propaganda. The Nazi Party took control not only of the parliament or Reichstag, but also of the media. Goebbels was clear in his message to the directors of Berlin radio stations: “We won’t pretend: the radio belongs to us and to no one else! It was propaganda, that prepared the Germans for the outbreak of the war and for the Holocaust. It called for genuine dedication on the front and justified war crimes committed by the most violent cogs of the regime’s machine.

➡ Read our article “Joseph Goebbels – the propaganda master of the Third Reich”

👉 https://bit.ly/3wDTJ2L

➡While rebuilding the power of the Reich, Hitler was forced to tolerate the existence of the Polish state, even consenting to sign a declaration of non-violence in 1934. The existence of a free Poland was absolutely inconsistent with Hitler’s idea to acquire “Lebensraum” in the east of Europe. Moreover, every approach to Poland’s coexistence with a totalitarian, empire-like, and powerful German Reich bent on implementing the “Lebensraum” utopia was a mortal danger to Poland’s very being. History has proved that any concessions intended to win Hitler’s friendship opened the door to total dependence and surrender to the mercy (or lack thereof) of the totalitarian juggernaut. The demolition of the Versailles order by Adolf Hitler could only take place through the domino effect: first Austria, then Czechoslovakia, finally Poland.

➡ Read our article “Polish foreign policy in the 1930s”

👉 https://bit.ly/3XFPTC9