- The Nazis expressed populist yearnings of the middle class and advocated a strong, anti-Marxist mobilization representing the common good of the German people. They portrayed themselves as breaking down social barriers and celebrating the populist community, focusing pre-existing middle class resentments against the establishment and privilege. This populist rhetoric, promising to resolve resentments in a technologically advanced people's utopia, was key to their appeal.

1. QUESTIONS&ANSWERS

3. • It is always in regard to the question, always relate your need to write
(quantity) as one argument to answer your question.
• The most important thing is the nature and timing of the decisions that led to
the Final Solution.
• The program evolved during the first 25 months of war leading to the
attempt at "murdering every last Jew in the German grasp“.
• Most historians agree (Christopher Browning), that the Final Solution cannot
be attributed to a single decision made at one particular point in time.
• "It is generally accepted the decision-making process was prolonged and
incremental.“
• Write only the main ideas, you won’t have enough time to go in details. Only
if this is the subject of your exam question you will write about:
responsibilities, early policies, victims, ghettos, atrocities, camps, resistance,
allied response, aftermath.

4. • Wannsee Conference, meeting of Nazi officials on January 20, 1942, in the
Berlin suburb of Wannsee to plan the “final solution” (Endlösung) to the so-
called “Jewish question” (Judenfrage).
• On July 31, 1941, Nazi leader Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring had issued
orders to Reinhard Heydrich, SS (Nazi paramilitary corps) leader and Gestapo
(Secret Police) chief, to prepare a comprehensive plan for this “final solution.”
The Wannsee Conference, held six months later, was attended by 15 Nazi
senior bureaucrats led by Heydrich and including Eichmann, chief of Jewish
affairs for the Reich Central Security Office.
• An earlier idea, to deport all of Europe’s Jews to the island of Madagascar, off
of Africa, was abandoned as impractical in wartime. Instead, the newly
planned final solution would entail rounding up all Jews throughout Europe,
transporting them eastward, and organizing them into labour gangs. The
work and living conditions would be sufficiently hard as to fell large numbers
by “natural diminution”; those that survived would be “treated accordingly.”

5. • The men seated at the table were among the elite of the Reich. More than half
of them held doctorates from German universities!
• The men needed little explanation. They understood that “evacuation to the
east” was a euphemism for concentration camps and that the “final solution”
was to be the systematic murder of Europe’s Jews, which is now known as the
Holocaust.
• The final protocol of the Wannsee Conference never explicitly mentioned
extermination, but, within a few months after the meeting, the Nazis installed
the first poison-gas chambers in Poland in what came to be called
extermination camps.
• Responsibility for the entire project was put in the hands of Heinrich
Himmler and his SS and Gestapo.

7. • Waffen SS (Armed SS) was the armed wing of the Nazi Party's Schutzstaffel
(SS, "Protective Squadron").
• Its military formations included men from Nazi Germany, along with
volunteers and conscripts from both occupied and un-occupied lands.
• In September 1934, Hitler authorized the formation of the military wing of
the Nazi Party and approved the formation of the SS-Verfügungstruppe (SS-
VT), a special service troop under Hitler's overall command.
• The SS-VT had to depend on the German Army for its supply of weapons and
military training.
• More complex explanation on next slide.

8. • When Hitler, with SS help, purged the SA in 1934 and reduced it to political
impotence, the SS became an independent group responsible, via Himmler, to
Hitler alone.
• Between 1934 and 1936 Himmler and his chief adjutant, Reinhard Heydrich,
consolidated SS strength by gaining control of all of Germany’s police forces
and expanding their organization’s responsibilities and activities.
• At the same time, special military SS units were trained and equipped along
the lines of the regular army.
• By 1939 the SS, now numbering about 250,000 men, had become a massive
and labyrinthian bureaucracy, divided mainly into two groups:
• the Allgemeine-SS (General SS)
• the Waffen-SS (Armed SS).

9. • The Allgemeine-SS dealt mainly with police and “racial” matters.
• Its most important division was the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (RSHA; Reich
Security Central Office), which oversaw the Sicherheitspolizei (Sipo; Security
Police), which, in turn, was divided into the Kriminalpolizei (Kripo; Criminal
Police) and the dreaded Gestapo under Heinrich Müller.
• The RSHA also included the Sicherheitsdienst (SD; Security Service), a security
department in charge of foreign and domestic intelligence and espionage.

10. • The Waffen-SS was made up of three subgroups: the Leibstandarte, Hitler’s
personal bodyguard; the Totenkopfverbände (Death’s-Head Battalions),
which administered the concentration camps and a vast empire of slave
labour drawn from the Jews and the populations of the occupied territories;
and the Verfügungstruppen (Disposition Troops), which swelled to 39
divisions in World War II and which, serving as elite combat troops alongside
the regular army, gained a reputation as fanatical fighters.

12. • Marburg Speech was an address given by German Vice Chancellor Franz von
Papen at the University of Marburg on 17 June 1934.
• It is said to be the last speech made publicly, and on a high level, in Germany
against National Socialism. This is the SIGNIFICANCE.
• Papen spoke out publicly about the excesses of the Nazi regime, whose ascent
to power, 17 months earlier when Adolf Hitler became chancellor of
Germany, had been greatly assisted by him.
• In his speech, Papen called for an end to rule by terror and the clamouring
for a "second revolution" by the Sturmabteilung (SA – the NSDAP's storm
troopers), and the restoration of some measure of civil liberties.

14. • After Hess' solo flight to Britain on 10 May 1941 to seek peace negotiations
with the British government, Bormann assumed Hess' former duties, with the
title of Head of the Parteikanzlei (Party Chancellery).
• He had final approval over civil service appointments, reviewed and
approved legislation, and by 1943 had de facto control over all domestic
matters.
• He was in office from 12 May 1941 till 2 May 1945. He was preceded by
Rudolf Hess (as Deputy Führer) and had no succesor as the position was
abolished.
• So the answer is yes.

16. • The Reich Chancellery was the traditional name of the office of the
Chancellor of Germany (then called Reichskanzler) in the period of the
German Reich from 1871 to 1945.
• Hitler's Chancellery, known as the Kanzlei des Führers der NSDAP
("Chancellery of the Führer of the Nazi Party" or KdF) was a Nazi Party
organization.
• Also known as the Privatkanzlei des Führers, the agency served as private
chancellery of Adolf Hitler, handling many different issues pertaining to
matters such as complaints against party officials, appeals from party courts,
official judgments, clemency petitions by NSDAP fellows and Hitler's personal
affairs.
• The Chancellery established in 1934 in Berlin as a separate agency which
was parallel to the German Reich Chancellery under Hans Heinrich Lammers
and the Nazi Party Chancellery (until 1941: "Staff of the Deputy Führer") in
Munich, led by Martin Bormann.

18. • On 10 May 1941 he undertook a solo flight to Scotland, where he hoped to
arrange peace talks with the Duke of Hamilton, whom he believed to be
prominent in opposition to the British government.
• He secretly flew alone from Augsburg and landed by parachute in Scotland
with peace proposals, demanding a free hand for Germany in Europe and the
return of former German colonies as compensation for Germany’s promise to
respect the integrity of the British Empire.
• Hess’s proposals met with no response from the British government, which
treated him as a prisoner of war and held him throughout World War II.
• His quixotic action was likewise rejected by Hitler himself, who accused Hess
of suffering from “pacifist delusions.”

19. • Hess was immediately arrested on his arrival and was held in British custody
until the end of the war, when he was returned to Germany to stand trial in
the Nuremberg Trials of major war criminals in 1946.
• Throughout much of the trial, he claimed to be suffering from amnesia, but
later admitted this was a ruse. Hess was convicted of crimes against peace and
conspiracy with other German leaders to commit crimes and was transferred
to Spandau Prison in 1947, where he served a life sentence.
• He committed suicide in 1987 at the age of 93.

21. • The Hossbach Memorandum was the summary of a meeting on 5 November
1937 between German dictator Adolf Hitler and his military and foreign
policy leadership where Hitler's future expansionist policies were outlined.
The meeting marked a turning point in Hitler's foreign policies, which then
began to radicalize. It outlined Hitler's plans for expansion in Europe.
According to the Memorandum, Hitler did not want war in 1939 with Britain
and France. What he wanted was small wars of plunder to help support
Germany's struggling economy.
• The Memorandum is often used by intentionalist historians such as Gerhard
Weinberg, Andreas Hillgruber and Richard Overy to prove that Hitler
planned to start a general European war, which became the Second World
War, as part of a long-range master plan. However, functionalist historians
such as Timothy Mason, Hans Mommsen, and Ian Kershaw argue that the
document shows no such plans, and they instead contend that the Hossbach
Memorandum was an improvised ad hoc response by Hitler to the growing
crisis in the German economy in the late 1930s. JP. Taylor believes that the
meeting was merely an attempt by Hitler to drum up support from the
military.

23. • Otto Adolf Eichmann was Obersturmbannführer (lieutenant colonel) and one
of the major organisers of the Holocaust.
• Eichmann was tasked by SS-Obergruppenführer (general/lieutenant general)
Reinhard Heydrich with facilitating and managing the logistics of mass
deportation of Jews to ghettos and extermination camps in German-occupied
Eastern Europe during World War II.
• Eichmann was to coordinate the details of the final solution; thus, although it
was not yet generally known that the “final solution” was mass execution,
Eichmann had in effect been named chief executioner.
• Thereupon he organized the identification, assembly, and transportation of
Jews from all over occupied Europe to their final destinations at Auschwitz
and other extermination camps in German-occupied Poland.

24. • Eichmann did more than merely follow orders in coordinating an operation
of this scale.
• He was a resourceful and proactive manager who relied on a variety of
strategies and tactics to secure scarce cattle cars and other equipment used to
deport Jews at a time when equipment shortages threatened the German war
effort. He repeatedly devised innovative solutions to overcome obstacles.
• In 1960, he was captured in Argentina by Mossad, Israel's intelligence
service. Following a widely publicised trial in Israel, he was found guilty of
war crimes and hanged in 1962.

26. • The Nuremberg Laws were antisemitic laws in Nazi Germany.
• They were introduced on 15 September 1935 by the Reichstag at a special
meeting convened at the annual Nuremberg Rally of the Nazi Party (NSDAP).
• The two laws were the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German
Honour, which forbade marriages and extramarital intercourse between Jews
and Germans and the employment of German females under 45 in Jewish
households, and the Reich Citizenship Law, which declared that only those of
German or related blood were eligible to be Reich citizens; the remainder
were classed as state subjects, without citizenship rights.
• A supplementary decree outlining the definition of who was Jewish was
passed on 14 November, and the Reich Citizenship Law officially came into
force on that date. The laws were expanded on 26 November 1935 to include
Romani people and Afro-Germans.
• Answer is yes.

28. • Funk, who was a nationalist and anti-Marxist, resigned from the newspaper
in the summer of 1931 and joined the Nazi Party, becoming close to Gregor
Strasser, who arranged his first meeting with Adolf Hitler (YOUR ANSWER).
• Partially because of his interest in economic policy, he was elected a Reichstag
deputy in July 1932, and within the party, he was made chairman of the
Committee on Economic Policy in December 1932, a post that he did not hold
for long.
• After the Nazi Party came to power, he stepped down from his Reichstag
position and was made Chief Press Officer of the Third Reich.

29. • In March 1933, Funk was appointed as a State Secretary at the Ministry of
Public Enlightenment and Propaganda.
• In 1938, he assumed the title of Chief Plenipotentiary for Economics.
• He also became Reich Minister of Economics in February 1938, replacing
Hjalmar Schacht, who had been dropped in November 1937.
• In the court, in his defense he described himself as a little man “who was
frequently allowed up to the door but not in.”
• Göring himself told the court that Funk was an “insignificant” subordinate.
• The court, nevertheless, found him guilty of crimes against the peace, war
crimes, and crimes against humanity, and on October 1 he was sentenced to
life imprisonment.
• He was released from prison on May 16, 1957.

31. • Simple, do not! Nazi Party was the state, that’s the reason why Germany was
not called German Republic but Nazi Germany.

33. • Joseph Stalin began life as a trainee priest, before becoming involved in
radical politics and revolutionary groups.
• By 1917 he was a high-ranking Bolshevik, playing a leading role in the
Russian Revolution and early Soviet Union.
• Though not groomed to lead, Stalin was cunning and manipulative and by
1928 was in charge of Soviet Russia.
• Like Hitler, Stalin wanted to transform and militarise his country – and was
paranoid about threats to his power.
• Though they never met or even spoke, Hitler and Stalin loathed each other on
political grounds. Both men hoped to buy time to prepare for the future Nazi-
Soviet war they knew was inevitable.
• Comparison is futile, there are too many criteria so it is up to your judgement
and about the QUESTION!

35. • The Reichskonkordat is the most controversial of several concordats that the
Vatican negotiated during the pontificate of Pius XI.
• It is frequently discussed in works that deal with the rise of Hitler in the early
1930s and the Holocaust.
• The concordat has been described by some as giving moral legitimacy to the
Nazi regime soon after Hitler had acquired quasi-dictatorial powers through
the Enabling Act of 1933, though Reichskanzler Hitler himself is not a
signatory to the treaty and the treaty does not make mention of Hitler, or the
Nazi Party.
• Taking children out of ghetto is still debatable, and it is not the real meaning
of this pact.

37. • The Nazis expressed the populist yearnings of middle-class constituents and
at the same time advocated a strong and resolutely anti-Marxist
mobilization.... Against "unnaturally" divisive parties and querulous organized
interest groups, National Socialists cast themselves as representatives of the
commonweal, of an allegedly betrayed and neglected German public....
breaking social barriers of status and caste, and celebrating at least
rhetorically the populist ideal of the people's community..."
• This populist rhetoric of the Nazis, focused the pre-existing "resentments of
ordinary middle-class Germans against the bourgeois 'establishment' and
against economic and political privilege, and by promising the resolution of
these resentments in a forward-looking, technologically capable volkisch
'utopia,'" according to Fritzsche.