Nazi Germany, officially known as the German Reich until 1943, later the Greater German Reich, was the German state between 1933 and 1945, when Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party controlled the country, transforming it into a totalitarian dictatorship.
The Nazi Party, officially the National Socialist German Workers' Party, was a far-right political party in Germany active between 1920 and 1945 that created and supported the ideology of Nazism. Its precursor, the German Workers' Party, existed from 1919 to 1920. The Nazi Party emerged from the extremist German nationalist, racist and populist Freikorps paramilitary culture, which fought against communist uprisings in post–World War I Germany. The party was created to draw workers away from communism and into völkisch nationalism. Initially, Nazi political strategy focused on anti–big business, anti-bourgeois, and anti-capitalist rhetoric; it was later downplayed to gain the support of business leaders. By the 1930s, the party's main focus shifted to antisemitic and anti-Marxist themes. The party had little popular support until the Great Depression, when worsening living standards and widespread unemployment drove Germans into political extremism.
The German Democratic Party was a liberal political party in the Weimar Republic, considered centrist or centre-left. Along with the right-liberal German People's Party, it represented political liberalism in Germany between 1918 and 1933. It was formed in 1918 from the Progressive People's Party and the liberal wing of the National Liberal Party, both of which had been active in the German Empire.
Theodor Heuss was a German liberal politician who served as the first president of West Germany from 1949 to 1959. His cordial nature – something of a contrast to the stern character of chancellor Konrad Adenauer – largely contributed to the stabilization of democracy in West Germany during the Wirtschaftswunder years. Before beginning his career as a politician, Heuss had been a political journalist.
The German State Party was a short-lived German political party of the Weimar Republic, formed by the merger of the German Democratic Party with the People's National Reich Association in July 1930.
German Christians were a pressure group and a movement within the German Evangelical Church that existed between 1932 and 1945, aligned towards the antisemitic, racist and Führerprinzip ideological principles of Nazism with the goal to align German Protestantism as a whole towards those principles. Their advocacy of these principles led to a schism within 23 of the initially 28 regional church bodies (Landeskirchen) in Germany and the attendant foundation of the opposing Confessing Church in 1934. Theologians Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer drafted the Barmen Declaration the same year opposing Nazi doctrines.
The German National Library is the central archival library and national bibliographic centre for the Federal Republic of Germany. It is one of the largest libraries in the world. Its task is to collect, permanently archive, comprehensively document and record bibliographically all German and German-language publications since 1913, foreign publications about Germany, translations of German works, and the works of German-speaking emigrants published abroad between 1933 and 1945, and to make them available to the public. The DNB is also responsible for the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie and several special collections like the Deutsches Exilarchiv 1933–1945, Anne-Frank-Shoah-Bibliothek and the Deutsches Buch- und Schriftmuseum. The German National Library maintains co-operative external relations on a national and international level. For example, it is the leading partner in developing and maintaining bibliographic rules and standards in Germany and plays a significant role in the development of international library standards. The cooperation with publishers has been regulated by law since 1935 for the Deutsche Bücherei Leipzig and since 1969 for the Deutsche Bibliothek Frankfurt am Main.
National Political Institutes of Education were secondary boarding schools in Nazi Germany. They were founded as ‘community education sites’ after the Nazi seizure of power in 1933.
Friedrich Blume was professor of musicology at the University of Kiel from 1938 to 1958. He was a student in Munich, Berlin and Leipzig, and taught in the last two of these for some years before being called to the chair in Kiel. His early studies were on Lutheran church music, including several books on J.S. Bach, but broadened his interests considerably later. Among his prominent works were chief editor of the collected Praetorius edition, and he also edited the important Eulenburg scores of the major Mozart Piano Concertos. From 1949 he was involved in the planning and writing of Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart.
The National Socialist German Students' Union was founded in 1926 as a division of the Nazi Party with the mission of integrating University-level education and academic life within the framework of the Nazi worldview. Organized strictly in accord with the Führerprinzip as well as the principle of Machtdistanz, the NSDStB housed its members in so-called Kameradschaftshäusern, and had its members decked out in classic brown shirts and its own distinctive Swastika emblems.
This article discusses universities in Nazi Germany. In May 1933 books from university libraries which were deemed culturally destructive, mainly due to anti-National Socialist or Jewish themes or authors, were burned by the Deutsche Studentenschaft in town squares, e.g. in Berlin, and the curricula were subsequently modified. Martin Heidegger became the rector of Freiburg University, where he delivered a number of National Socialist speeches and for example promulgated the Führerprinzip at the University on August 21, 1933.
The Nazi book burnings were a campaign conducted by the German Student Union to ceremonially burn books in Nazi Germany and Austria in the 1930s. The books targeted for burning were those viewed as being subversive or as representing ideologies opposed to Nazism. These included books written by Jewish, half-Jewish, communist, socialist, anarchist, liberal, pacifist, and sexologist authors among others. The initial books burned were those of Karl Marx and Karl Kautsky, but came to include very many authors, including Albert Einstein, Helen Keller, writers in French and English, and effectively any book incompatible with Nazi ideology. In a campaign of cultural genocide, books were also burned en masse by the Nazis in occupied territories, such as in Poland.
The Bücker Bü 134 was a German single engine, high wing cabin monoplane prototype designed and built by Bücker Flugzeugbau GmbH.
The Deutsche Hochschule für Politik (DHfP), or German Academy for Politics, was a private academy in Berlin, founded in October 1920. It was integrated into the Faculty for Foreign Studies of the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität in 1940, was re-founded in 1948 and turned into the Otto-Suhr-Institut of the Freie Universität Berlin in 1959.
Deutsche Mathematik was a mathematics journal founded in 1936 by Ludwig Bieberbach and Theodor Vahlen. Vahlen was publisher on behalf of the German Research Foundation (DFG), and Bieberbach was chief editor. Other editors were Fritz Kubach, Erich Schönhardt, Werner Weber, Ernst August Weiß, Karl Dörge, Wilhelm Süss, Günther Schulz (de), Erhard Tornier, Georg Feigl, Gerhard Kowalewski, Maximilian Krafft, Willi Rinow, Max Zacharias, and Oswald Teichmüller. In February 1936, the journal was declared the official organ of the German Student Union (DSt) by its Reichsführer, and all local DSt mathematics departments were requested to subscribe and actively contribute. In the 1940s, issues appeared increasingly delayed and bunched; the journal ended with a triple issue in June 1944.
The Academy for German Law was an institute for legal research and reform founded on 26 June 1933 in Nazi Germany. After suspending its operations during the Second World War in August 1944, it was abolished after the fall of the Nazi regime on 8 May 1945.
Wolfgang Herrmann was a German librarian and member of the Nazi Party, whose blacklist provided the template for the Nazi book burnings in May 1933.
The Gau Halle-Merseburg was an administrative division of Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945 in the Prussian Province of Saxony. Before that, from 1925 to 1933, it was the regional subdivision of the Nazi Party in that area.
The Gau Hesse-Nassau was an administrative division of Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945. It was formed by the merger of two separate Gaue comprising the People's State of Hesse and the southern parts of the Prussian province of Hesse-Nassau that were, from 1927 to 1933, the regional subdivisions of the Nazi Party in those areas.
Werner Weber was a German mathematician. He was one of the Noether boys, the doctoral students of Emmy Noether. Considered scientifically gifted but a modest mathematician, he was also an extreme Nazi, who would later take part in driving Jewish mathematicians out of the University of Göttingen.
