Paul Joseph Goebbels was a German Nazi politician and philologist who was the Gauleiter of Berlin, chief propagandist for the Nazi Party, and then Reich Minister of Propaganda from 1933 to 1945. He was one of Adolf Hitler's closest and most devoted followers, known for his skills in public speaking and his deeply virulent antisemitism which was evident in his publicly voiced views. He advocated progressively harsher discrimination, including the extermination of the Jews in the Holocaust.
Martin Ludwig Bormann was a German Nazi Party official and head of the Nazi Party Chancellery, private secretary to Adolf Hitler, and a war criminal. Bormann gained immense power by using his position as Hitler's private secretary to control the flow of information and access to Hitler. He used his position to create an extensive bureaucracy and involve himself as much as possible in the decision making.
Walther Immanuel Funk was a German economist and Nazi official who served as Reich Minister for Economic Affairs (1938–1945) and president of Reichsbank (1939–1945). During his incumbency, he oversaw the mobilization of the German economy for rearmament and arrangement of forced labor in concentration camps. After the war he was tried and convicted as a major war criminal by the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg. Sentenced to life in prison, he remained incarcerated until he was released on health grounds in 1957. He died three years later.
The Berghof was Adolf Hitler's holiday home in the Obersalzberg of the Bavarian Alps near Berchtesgaden, Bavaria, Germany. Other than the Wolfsschanze, his headquarters in East Prussia for the invasion of the Soviet Union, he spent more time here than anywhere else during his time as the Führer of Nazi Germany. It was also one of the most widely known of his headquarters, which were located throughout Europe.
The Party Chancellery, was the name of the head office for the German Nazi Party (NSDAP), designated as such on 12 May 1941. The office existed previously as the Staff of the Deputy Führer but was renamed after Rudolf Hess flew to Scotland in an attempt to negotiate a peace agreement without Adolf Hitler's authorization. Hess was denounced by Hitler, his former office was dissolved, and the new Party Chancellery was formed in its place under Hess' former deputy, Martin Bormann.
Karl August Hanke was an official of the Nazi Party (NSDAP) during its rule over Germany who served as the fifth and final Reichsführer of the Schutzstaffel (SS). He also served as Gauleiter of Gau Lower Silesia from 1941 to 1945 and as Oberpräsident of the Prussian Province of Lower Silesia. Captured on 6 May 1945, he was shot and wounded during an escape attempt and then beaten to death by Czech guards on 8 June, after the war had ended.
Adolf Hitler was an Austrian-born German politician who was the dictator of Nazi Germany from 1933 until his suicide in 1945. He rose to power as the leader of the Nazi Party, becoming the chancellor in 1933 and then taking the title of Führer und Reichskanzler in 1934. His invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939 marked the start of the Second World War. He was closely involved in military operations throughout the war and was central to the perpetration of the Holocaust: the genocide of about six million Jews and millions of other victims.
Der Sieg des Glaubens is the first Nazi propaganda film directed by Leni Riefenstahl. Her film recounts the Fifth Party Rally of the Nazi Party, which occurred in Nuremberg, Germany, from 30 August to 3 September 1933. The film is of great historic interest because it shows Adolf Hitler and Ernst Röhm on close and intimate terms, before Hitler had Röhm killed during the Night of the Long Knives on 1 July 1934. As he then sought to remove Röhm from German history, Hitler ordered all known copies of the film be destroyed, and it was considered lost until a surviving copy was found in the 1980s in East Germany.
Erich Kempka was a member of the SS in Nazi Germany who served as Adolf Hitler's primary chauffeur from 1936 to April 1945. He was present in the area of the Reich Chancellery on 30 April 1945, when Hitler shot himself in the Führerbunker. Kempka delivered petrol to the garden behind the Chancellery, where the remains of Hitler and Eva Braun were burned. After Kempka's capture by United States forces, he served as an eyewitness as to Hitler's demise, albeit his self-admitted unreliability.
Werner Haase was a professor of medicine and SS member during the Nazi era. He was one of Adolf Hitler's personal physicians. After the war ended, Haase was made a Soviet prisoner of war. He died while in captivity in 1950.
Eva Anna Paula Hitler was a German photographer who was the longtime companion and briefly the wife of Adolf Hitler. Braun met Hitler in Munich when she was a 17-year-old assistant and model for his personal photographer, Heinrich Hoffmann. She began seeing Hitler often about two years later.
The Reichssicherheitsdienst was an SS security force of Nazi Germany. Originally bodyguards for Adolf Hitler, it later provided men for the protection of other high-ranking leaders of the Nazi regime. The group, although similar in name, was completely separate from the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), which was the formal intelligence service for the SS, the Nazi Party and later Nazi Germany.
The government of Nazi Germany was a totalitarian dictatorship governed by Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party according to the Führerprinzip. Nazi Germany was established in January 1933 with the appointment of Adolf Hitler as Chancellor of Germany, followed by suspension of basic rights with the Reichstag Fire Decree and the Enabling Act which gave Hitler's regime the power to pass and enforce laws without the involvement of the Reichstag or German president, and de facto ended with Germany's surrender in World War II on 8 May 1945 and de jure ended with the Berlin Declaration on 5 June 1945.
The Stennes revolt was a revolt within the Nazi Party in 1930 through 1931 led by Walter Stennes, the Berlin commandant of the Sturmabteilung (SA), the Nazi's "brownshirt" storm troops. The revolt arose from internal tensions and conflicts within the Nazi Party of Germany, particularly between the party organization headquartered in Munich and Adolf Hitler on the one hand, and the SA and its leadership on the other hand. There is some evidence suggesting that Stennes may have been paid by the government of German chancellor Heinrich Brüning, with the intention of causing conflict within and destabilizing the Nazi movement.
Adolf Hitler, dictator of Germany from 1933 to 1945, initiated World War II in Europe with the invasion of Poland in September 1939 and was central to the Holocaust. He was hated by his persecuted enemies and even by some of his own countrymen. Although attempts were made to assassinate him, none were successful. Hitler had numerous bodyguard units over the years which provided security.
The Reich Harvest Thanksgiving Festival was a monumental Nazi German celebration of the peasantry and the German farmers. The festivals ran from 1933 to 1937 on the Bückeberg, a hill near the town of Hamelin. Most festivals occurred every October, with the 1934 festival commencing 30 September. The official purpose of the festival was the recognition of the achievements of the German farmers, whom the Nazis called the Reichsnährstand. The celebration was also used by the Nazis as a propaganda tool to showcase the connection between Führer Adolf Hitler and the German people. The festival was part of a cycle of Nazi celebrations which included the annual party rally at Nuremberg, Hitler's birthday celebrations and other important events on the Nazi calendar.
The Reich Plenipotentiary for the Total War Effort was a position created by Adolf Hitler, the Führer ("leader") of Nazi Germany, on 23 July 1944 for Joseph Goebbels, who was also at the time the regime's Propaganda Minister. The purpose of the new office was to rally the German people behind an effort to achieve "total war", in which all civilian resources and all aspects of civilian infrastructure are subordinated to the needs of the military and the war effort. The idea to create the new office, and to appoint Goebbels to it, had come from Goebbels himself. Hitler had acceded to it because of the rapid deterioration of the German military position in the war in the East against the Soviet Union; he had finally been convinced that only a total war effort could counter what Hitler felt was the constant undermining of his military strategies by his generals.
During a speech at the Reichstag on 30 January 1939, German Führer Adolf Hitler threatened "the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe" in the event of war:
If international finance Jewry inside and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, the result will be not the Bolshevization of the earth and thereby the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.
Adolf Hitler's cult of personality was a prominent feature of Nazi Germany (1933–1945), which began in the 1920s during the early days of the Nazi Party. Based on the Führerprinzip ideology, that the leader is always right, spread by incessant Nazi propaganda, and reinforced by Adolf Hitler's success in fixing Germany's economic and unemployment problems by remilitarising during the global Great Depression, his bloodless triumphs in foreign policy prior to World War II, and the rapid military defeat of the Second Polish Republic and the Third French Republic in the early part of the war, it eventually became a central aspect of the Nazi control over the German people.
