Nazi Germany (Third Reich)

Nazi Germany, officially the German Reich and from 1943 the Greater German Reich, was the German state between 1933 and 1945, when Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party (NSDAP) governed the country as a totalitarian dictatorship.

The regime, which called itself the Third Reich in a claimed succession to the Holy Roman Empire and the 1871–1918 German Empire, began on 30 January 1933 when President Paul von Hindenburg appointed Hitler chancellor. Within months the Nazis used the Reichstag fire and emergency decrees to suspend civil liberties, ban rival parties, and concentrate power; after Hindenburg's death in 1934 Hitler merged the offices of chancellor and president and ruled as Führer. The state was organised around an ideology of extreme nationalism, racial hierarchy, antisemitism, and territorial expansion. It dismantled democratic institutions, suppressed dissent through the Gestapo and SS, and built a system of concentration camps. The regime pursued rapid rearmament and an aggressive foreign policy, annexing Austria and parts of Czechoslovakia before invading Poland on 1 September 1939, an act that began the Second World War in Europe. German forces conquered much of the continent by 1941 and then invaded the Soviet Union. During the war the regime carried out the Holocaust, the systematic, industrialised genocide of approximately six million Jews, alongside the mass murder of Roma, disabled people, Soviet prisoners of war, political prisoners, and others, with total deaths from Nazi policies numbering in the many millions. The tide of the war turned after defeats at Stalingrad and in North Africa and the Allied landings in Western Europe. As Allied and Soviet armies converged on Germany in 1945, the regime collapsed. Hitler took his own life in Berlin on 30 April 1945, and German forces surrendered unconditionally, with the instrument of surrender taking full effect on 8 May 1945, ending the Third Reich after twelve years and concluding the war in Europe. Germany was subsequently occupied and divided by the Allied powers, and the regime's surviving leaders were prosecuted for war crimes and crimes against humanity at the Nuremberg trials.

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