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The Nazi term Gleichschaltung or "coordination" was the process of Nazification by which Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party successively established a system of totalitarian control and coordination over all aspects of German society and societies occupied by Nazi Germany "from the economy and trade associations to the media, culture and education". Although the Weimar Constitution remained nominally in effect until Germany's surrender following World War II, near total Nazification had been secured by the 1935 resolutions approved during the Nuremberg Rally, when the symbols of the Nazi Party and the state were fused and German Jews were deprived of their citizenship.
Pan-Germanism, also occasionally known as Pan-Germanicism, is a pan-nationalist political idea. Pan-Germanists originally sought to unify all the German-speaking people – and possibly also non-German Germanic-speaking peoples – in a single nation-state known as the Greater Germanic Reich, fully styled the Greater Germanic Reich of the German Nation.
The racial policy of Nazi Germany was a set of policies and laws implemented in Nazi Germany under the dictatorship of Adolf Hitler, based on pseudoscientific and racist doctrines asserting the superiority of the putative "Aryan race", which claimed scientific legitimacy. This was combined with a eugenics program that aimed for "racial hygiene" by compulsory sterilization and extermination of those who they saw as Untermenschen ("sub-humans"), which culminated in the Holocaust.
The Romani Holocaust or the Romani genocide was the planned effort by Nazi Germany and its World War II allies and collaborators to commit ethnic cleansing and eventually genocide against European Roma and Sinti peoples during the Holocaust era.
The Enabling Act of 1933, officially titled Gesetz zur Behebung der Not von Volk und Reich, was a law that gave the German Cabinet – most importantly, the Chancellor – the power to make and enforce laws without the involvement of the Reichstag or Weimar President Paul von Hindenburg, leading to the rise of Nazi Germany. Critically, the Enabling Act allowed the Chancellor to bypass the system of checks and balances in the government.
Karl Lueger was an Austrian lawyer and politician who served as Mayor of Vienna from 1897 until his death in 1910. He is credited with the transformation of Vienna into a modern city at the turn of the 20th century, although the populist and antisemitic politics of the Austrian Christian Social Party (CS), which he founded and led until his death, remain controversial, as they are sometimes viewed as a model for Adolf Hitler's Nazism.
The Constitution of the German Reich, usually known as the Weimar Constitution, was the constitution that governed Germany during the Weimar Republic era (1919–1933). The constitution declared Germany to be a democratic parliamentary republic with a legislature elected under proportional representation. Universal suffrage was established, with a minimum voting age of 20. The constitution technically remained in effect throughout the Nazi era from 1933 to 1945 as well as during the Allied occupation of Germany from 1945 to 1949, though practically it had been repealed by the Enabling Act of 1933 and thus its various provisions and protections went unenforced for the duration of Nazi rule, and after World War II, the power of the Allied Control Council and four occupying powers once again stood above the provisions of the constitution.
The Reichsrat of the Weimar Republic was the de facto upper house of Germany's parliament; the lower house was the popularly elected Reichstag. The Reichsrat's members were appointed by the German state governments to represent their interests in the legislation and administration of the nation at the federal level. Its powers were relatively limited, making it considerably weaker than its predecessor, the Bundesrat of the German Empire (1871–1918). It could introduce legislation for the Reichstag to consider and veto laws that it passed, but the vetoes could be overridden. The Reichsrat also played a role in administering and implementing Reich laws.
The Imperial Council was the legislature of the Austrian Empire from 1861 until 1918. It was a bicameral body: the upper house was the House of Lords, and the lower house was the House of Deputies. To become law, bills had to be passed by both houses, signed by the government minister responsible, and then granted royal assent by the Emperor. After having been passed, laws were published in the Reichsgesetzblatt. In addition to the Imperial Council, the fifteen individual crown lands of Cisleithania had their own diets.
Article 48 of the constitution of the Weimar Republic of Germany (1919–1933) allowed the Reich president, under certain circumstances, to take emergency measures without the prior consent of the Reichstag. This power came to be understood to include the promulgation of emergency decrees. It was used frequently by Reich President Friedrich Ebert of the Social Democratic Party to deal with both political unrest and economic emergencies. Later, under President Paul von Hindenburg and the presidential cabinets, Article 48 was called on more and more often to bypass a politically fractured parliament and to rule without its consent. After the Nazi Party's rise to power in the early 1930s, the law allowed Chancellor Adolf Hitler, with decrees issued by Hindenburg, to create a totalitarian dictatorship by seemingly legal means.
Sir Ian Kershaw is an English historian whose work has chiefly focused on the social history of 20th-century Germany. He is regarded by many as one of the world's experts on Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany, and is particularly noted for his biographies of Hitler.
The Historikerstreit was a dispute in the late 1980s in West Germany between conservative and left-of-center academics and other intellectuals about how to incorporate Nazi Germany and the Holocaust into German historiography, and more generally into the German people's view of themselves. The dispute was initiated with the Bitburg controversy, which related to a commemorative service at a German military cemetery where members of the Waffen-SS were buried. The service was attended by President of the United States Ronald Reagan, who had been invited by the West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl. The Bitburg ceremony was widely interpreted in Germany as the beginning of the "normalization" of the nation's Nazi past, and inspired a slew of criticisms and defenses that made up the initiating arguments of the Historikerstreit. The dispute quickly outgrew the initial context of the Bitburg controversy, however, and became a series of broader historiographic, political, and critical debates about how the episode of the Holocaust should be understood in Germany's history and identity.
Wilhelm Miklas was an Austrian politician who served as President of Austria from 1928 until the Anschluss to Nazi Germany in 1938.
The Nuremberg Laws were antisemitic and racist laws that were enacted in Nazi Germany on 15 September 1935, at a special meeting of the Reichstag convened during the annual Nuremberg Rally of the Nazi Party. 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 any 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 and Black people. This supplementary decree defined Romanis as "enemies of the race-based state", the same category as Jews.
Austria was part of Nazi Germany from 13 March 1938 until 27 April 1945, when Allied-occupied Austria declared independence from Nazi Germany.
The Verein für Deutsche Kulturbeziehungen im Ausland, abbreviated VDA, is a German cultural organisation. During the Nazi era it was engaged in spying across the whole world, using German minorities living in other countries. Its other goals included preservation of German culture among "racial Germans".
Nazism, the common name in English for National Socialism, is the far-right totalitarian socio-political ideology and practices associated with Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party (NSDAP) in Nazi Germany. During Hitler's rise to power in 1930s Europe, it was frequently referred to as Hitlerism. The later related term "neo-Nazism" is applied to other far-right groups with similar ideas which formed after the Second World War.
German nationalism is a political ideology and historical current in Austrian politics. It arose in the 19th century as a nationalist movement amongst the German-speaking population of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It favours close ties with Germany, which it views as the nation-state for all ethnic Germans, and the possibility of the incorporation of Austria into a Greater Germany.
Adolf Hitler, dictator of Nazi Germany from 1933 until his suicide in 1945, was also a painter. He produced hundreds of works when he tried to sell his paintings and postcards to earn a living during his Vienna years (1908–1913) but had little commercial success. A number of his paintings were recovered after the Second World War and have been sold at auction for tens of thousands of dollars. Others were seized by the United States Army and are still in U.S. government possession.
Franko Stein, also Franz Stein was an Austrian and Czech journalist, politician, activist, and national syndicalist of German ethnicity. Very close to Georg von Schönerer, he led the union wing of his movement. He was also a member of the Bohemian Diet between 1899 and 1908 and of the Reichsrat between 1901 and 1907.
References
- Hamman, Brigitte (1999). Hitler's Vienna: A Dictator's Apprenticeship. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-512537-1.
- Mommsen, Hans (2003). The Third Reich Between Vision and Reality: New Perspectives on German History 1918-1945. Berg Publishers. ISBN 1-85973-627-0.