The summer of 1936 and the world was coming to Berlin ... Germany won 89 Olympic medals – more than any other nation. The United States ranked second, with a total of 56. ibid.
In 1936 900 girls came home from the Nuremberg rally pregnant. Unwed mothers were known as the Fuhrer Brides. ibid.
1938: The majority of Austrians welcomed it. ibid.
Within days 70,000 Austrians would be sent to concentration camps. ibid.
Hitler had demanded that Czechoslovakia cede a large portion of its German speaking territory – the Sudetenland – to the Third Reich. ibid.
The Third Reich would bring every German eternal shame. Third Reich: The Fall II
The miracle was being financed in part by land and raw materials stolen from other countries. ibid.
On 9th November the Nazis unleashed a two-day orgy of violence against Jewish businesses, places of worship, and Jews themselves. ibid.
Across Germany 1,200 synagogues and prayer rooms were destroyed. 30,000 Jews were sent to concentration camps. ibid.
During the Third Reich close to 300,000 German Jews applied for American visas. Only one third of these were granted. ibid.
1 September 1939: If you were German, you knew that this finally meant war with England and France. Another world war. ibid.
The German onslaught lasted for twenty-eight days before Warsaw finally surrendered. ibid.
An average of 3,000 Poles a day died under German occupation. ibid.
June 1940: in only six weeks Germany had conquered the Netherlands, Norway, Denmark and Belgium ... By mid-June Germany had also conquered France. ibid.
The fall of the Third Reich would begin in the east. ibid.
Nearly one million Jews had been murdered in the east. ibid.
Not all Germany’s enemies would be merciful. ibid.
The Allies were closing in on Germany. In the east there was chaos. ibid.
The recruitment age would soon be lowered to thirteen. ibid.
Many simply couldn’t imagine Germany after the Third Reich. Mass suicide occurred across the country on a scale never before seen in western Europe. ibid.
In April and May of 1945 there were 5,000 suicides in Berlin. One of these was Adolf Hitler’s. ibid.
As many as two million German women were raped by Red Army soldiers. One in ten women raped in Berlin died as a result. Most from suicide. ibid.
Across Germany the Allies forced local Nazi party members to bury the dead. ibid.
At the time of surrender more than eleven million Germans were prisoners of war. ibid.
Nowhere to live and little to eat. Millions died. And those who survived would live on near-starvation rations for three more years. ibid.
Germany’s reconstruction was not complete until the 1980s. ibid.
The result was a level of destruction and suffering unprecedented in the history of war. Fifty-five million people died in World War II. The Germans took five million Russian prisoners alone; only two million survived. The Nazis: A Warning From History: Helped into Power, BBC 1997
Nazism which was to create the Second World War was born out of the First. ibid.
It would flourish and grow in the south of Germany: in Bavaria. ibid.
In Bavaria by 1921 Hitler had become the leader of the small German Workers Party ... It was still one of many right-wing parties. ibid.
Along with their anti-Semitism went the belief that violence was an indispensable part of the political process. ibid.
In the mid-1920s the Nazi party was small but radical. Their party programme promised that if the Nazis came to power, German Jews would be stripped of German citizenship and could even be expelled from the country. ibid.
The party had its own paramilitary wing – the brown-shirted Stormtroopers. ibid.
The Nazis were a tiny fringe party. Almost a joke. Yet just four years and eight months later Hitler was chancellor of Germany. ibid.
Something sinister was happening to this new democracy; it seemed to be splitting apart as voters rushed to the extremes ... By 1932 the majority of Germans in voting for communists and Nazis were voting for parties openly committed to overthrowing German democracy. ibid.
The five major banks crashed in 1931; more than 20,000 German businesses folded. Now the middle class were suffering. ibid.
On January 30th 1933 the same day Hitler was appointed chancellor the Nazis held a torchlight celebration parade in Berlin. The revolution had begun. ibid.
The Nazis were obsessed with images of order ... But in Germany the Nazis only created an illusion of order. The Nazis: A Warning From History: Chaos and Consent
The first to be imprisoned in this revolution were the Nazis’ political opponents: communists and socialists. ibid.
Thousands of Jews emigrated from Germany during the 1930s realising that there could never be a fair or safe place for them in German society while the Nazis ruled. ibid.
Goebbels asked for Hitler’s permission to let loose the Stormtroopers in an act of vengeance against the innocent Jews of Germany. Hitler agreed. And so began Kristallnacht – the Night of Broken Glass. ibid.
The concentration camps were a tool of oppression – not yet of systematic murder. In 1933 for many Germans they were an acceptable part of the Nazi revolution. ibid.
Staff here on their own selected the children they wanted to kill. ibid.
These armaments were paid for by a series of sophisticated loans which mortgaged Germany’s future. The Nazis: A Warning From History: The Wrong War
What did Hitler want his new army for? At first it seemed the answer might be just to return the worst consequences of Versailles. In 1936 Hitler moved his troops into the demilitarised portion of Germany, the Rheinland. There was little international protest. ibid.
At the Berghof Hitler would indulge himself by planning the great cities he would build in his new Germany. ibid.
Hitler’s popularity soared; to German soldiers he was the military genius who had allowed them to regain all the territory in the east they had lost in World War I. Germany was a world superpower and Hitler was the man to thank. The Nazis: A Warning From History: The Wild East
But it wasn’t just fear of the Russians that kept the Germans fighting. It was fear of other Germans. In the last months of the war Nazi terror and oppression directed against German civilians increased dramatically. The Nazis: A Warning From History: Fighting to the End
Nazism had been destroyed at a terrible cost. There were many reasons the Germans unlike the Italians had fought to the very end. Crucially, an inability to rid themselves of Hitler, and a fear of the approaching Soviet forces, people they had been taught to believe were scarcely human. ibid.
Shortly after he came to power Hitler called me to see him and explained that he wanted a film about a Party Congress, and wanted me to make it. My first reaction was to say that I did not know anything about the way such a thing worked or the organization of the Party, so that I would obviously photograph all the wrong things and please nobody – even supposing that I could make a documentary, which I had never yet done. Hitler said that this was exactly why he wanted me to do it: because anyone who knew all about the relative importance of the various people and groups and so on might make a film that would be pedantically accurate, but this was not what he wanted. He wanted a film showing the Congress through a non-expert eye, selecting just what was most artistically satisfying – in terms of spectacle, I suppose you might say. He wanted a film which would move, appeal to, impress an audience which was not necessarily interested in politics. Leni Riefenstahl
On 5th September 1934, twenty years after the outbreak of the World War, sixteen years after the beginning of German suffering, nineteen months after the beginning of German suffering, nineteen months after the beginning of the German rebirth, Adolf Hitler flew again to Nuremberg to review the columns of his faithful followers. Leni Riefenstahl, Triumph of the Will 1935, opening commentary
My Fuhrer, around you stand the flags and standards of this National Socialism. Only when they are threadbare will the people be able to understand by hindsight the greatness of our time. ibid. Hess