Mein Kampf is a 1925 autobiographical manifesto by Nazi Party leader Adolf Hitler. The work describes the process by which Hitler became antisemitic and outlines his political ideology and future plans for Germany. Volume 1 of Mein Kampf was published in 1925 and Volume 2 in 1926. The book was edited first by Emil Maurice, then by Hitler's deputy Rudolf Hess.
Lebensraum is a German concept of expansionism and Völkisch nationalism, the philosophy and policies of which were common to German politics from the 1890s to the 1940s. First popularized around 1901, Lebensraum became a geopolitical goal of Imperial Germany in World War I (1914–1918), as the core element of the Septemberprogramm of territorial expansion. The most extreme form of this ideology was supported by the Nazi Party and Nazi Germany. Lebensraum was a leading motivation of Nazi Germany to initiate World War II, and it would continue this policy until the end of the conflict.
Heinrich Müller was a high-ranking German Schutzstaffel (SS) and police official during the Nazi era. For most of World War II in Europe, he was the chief of the Gestapo, the secret state police of Nazi Germany. Müller was central in the planning and execution of the Holocaust and attended the January 1942 Wannsee Conference, which formalised plans for deportation and genocide of all Jews in German-occupied Europe—The "Final Solution to the Jewish Question". He was known as "Gestapo Müller" to distinguish him from another SS general named Heinrich Müller.
The political views of Adolf Hitler, dictator of Germany from 1933 to 1945, have presented historians and biographers with some difficulty. His writings and methods were often adapted to need and circumstance, although there were some steady themes, including antisemitism, anti-communism, anti-parliamentarianism, German Lebensraum, belief in the superiority of an "Aryan race" and an extreme form of German nationalism. Hitler personally claimed he was fighting against "Jewish Marxism".
Raimund Pretzel, better known by his pseudonym Sebastian Haffner, was a German journalist and historian. As an émigré in Britain during World War II, Haffner argued that accommodation was impossible not only with Adolf Hitler but also with the German Reich with which Hitler had gambled. Peace could be secured only by rolling back "seventy-five years of German history" and restoring Germany to a network of smaller states.
Ronald Rosenbaum is an American zionist, literary journalist, literary critic, and novelist.
The functionalism–intentionalism debate is a historiographical debate about the reasons for the Holocaust as well as most aspects of the Third Reich, such as foreign policy. It essentially centres on two questions:
Adolf Hitler was an Austrian-born German politician who was the dictator of 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. During his dictatorship, he initiated World War II in Europe by invading Poland on 1 September 1939. He was closely involved in military operations throughout the war and was central to the perpetration of the genocide of about six million Jews and millions of other victims.
The Nazi regime in Germany actively promoted and censored forms of art between 1933 and 1945. Upon becoming dictator in 1933, Adolf Hitler gave his personal artistic preference the force of law to a degree rarely known before. In the case of Germany, the model was to be classical Greek and Roman art, seen by Hitler as an art whose exterior form embodied an inner racial ideal. It was, furthermore, to be comprehensible to the average man. This art was to be both heroic and romantic. The Nazis viewed the culture of the Weimar period with disgust. Their response stemmed partly from conservative aesthetics and partly from their determination to use culture as propaganda.
The Zweites Buch, published in English as Hitler's Secret Book and later as Hitler's Second Book, is an unedited transcript of Adolf Hitler's thoughts on foreign policy written in 1928; it was written after Mein Kampf and was not published in his lifetime.
Untermensch is a German language word literally meaning 'underman', 'sub-man', or 'subhuman', that was extensively used by Germany's Nazi Party to refer to non-Aryan people they deemed as inferior. It was mainly used against "the masses from the East", that is Jews, Roma, and Slavs.
The religious beliefs of Adolf Hitler, dictator of Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945, have been a matter of debate. His opinions regarding religious matters changed considerably over time. During the beginning of his political life, Hitler publicly expressed favorable opinions towards Christianity, but later totally rejected it. Most historians describe his later posture as adversarial to organized Christianity and established Christian denominations. He also criticized atheism.
Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust is a 1996 book by American writer Daniel Goldhagen, in which he argues that the vast majority of ordinary Germans were "willing executioners" in the Holocaust because of a unique and virulent "eliminationist antisemitism" in German political culture which had developed in the preceding centuries. Goldhagen argues that eliminationist antisemitism was the cornerstone of German national identity, was unique to Germany, and because of it ordinary German conscripts killed Jews willingly. Goldhagen asserts that this mentality grew out of medieval attitudes rooted in religion and was later secularized.
Holocaust victims were people targeted by the government of Nazi Germany based on their ethnicity, religion, political beliefs, and/or sexual orientation. The institutionalized practice by the Nazis of singling out and persecuting people resulted in the Holocaust, which began with legalized social discrimination against specific groups, involuntary hospitalization, euthanasia, and forced sterilization of persons considered physically or mentally unfit for society. The vast majority of the Nazi regime's victims were Jews, Sinti-Roma peoples, and Slavs but victims also encompassed people identified as social outsiders in the Nazi worldview, such as homosexuals, and political enemies. Nazi persecution escalated during World War II and included: non-judicial incarceration, confiscation of property, forced labor, sexual slavery, death through overwork, human experimentation, undernourishment, and execution through a variety of methods. For specified groups like the Jews, genocide was the Nazis' primary goal.
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 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 collapse of Hitler's Third Reich.
Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin is a 2010 book by Yale historian Timothy Snyder. It is about mass murders committed before and during World War II in territories controlled by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.
Conspiracy theories about the death of Adolf Hitler, dictator of Germany from 1933 to 1945, contradict the accepted fact that he committed suicide in the Führerbunker on 30 April 1945. Stemming from a campaign of Soviet disinformation, most of these theories hold that Hitler and his wife, Eva Braun, survived and escaped from Berlin, with some asserting that he went to South America. In the post-war years, the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) investigated some of the reports, without lending them credence. The 2009 revelation that a skull in the Soviet archives long (dubiously) claimed to be Hitler's actually belonged to a woman has helped fuel conspiracy theories.
The historiography of Adolf Hitler deals with the academic studies of Adolf Hitler from the 1930s to the present. In 1998, a German editor said there were 120,000 studies of Hitler and Nazi Germany. Since then many more have appeared, with many of them decisively shaping the historiography regarding Hitler.
Helmut Krausnick was a German historian and writer. From 1959 to 1972, he was the head of the Institute of Contemporary History, a leading German research institute on the history of National Socialism.
During a speech at the Reichstag on 30 January 1939, 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.
