Adolf Hitler’s rise to power began in Germany in September 1919when Hitler joined the political party known as the Deutsche Arbeiterpartei — DAP (German Workers’ Party). In 1920, the name was changed to the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei — NSDAP (National Socialist German Workers’ Party, commonly known as the Nazi Party). This political party was formed and developed during the post-World War I era. It opposed the democratic post-war government of the Weimar Republic and the Treaty of Versailles. Instead, it advocated extreme nationalism and Pan-Germanism (the idea or principle of a political unification of all Europeans speaking German or a Germanic language) as well as anti-Semitism (hostility to or prejudice against Jews). President Paul von Hindenburg appointed Hitler as Chancellor on January 30, 1933 after a series of parliamentary elections. The Enabling Act— when used ruthlessly and with authority—virtually assured that Hitler could thereafter constitutionally exercise dictatorial power without legal objection.
A cleansing pogrom
From 1941 to 1945, Jews were systematically murdered in the deadliest genocide in history, which was part of a broader aggregate of acts of oppression and killings of various ethnic and political groups in Europe by the Nazi regime. Under the coordination of the SS ( Schutzstaffel - Protection Squadron), following directions from the highest leadership of the Nazi Party, every arm of Germany’s bureaucracy was involved in the logistics and the carrying out of the genocide.
Reinhard Heydrich, (the chief of the Reich Security Main and the Chief of the SS convened the Wannsee Conference in Berlin on January 20, 1942 with 15 top Nazi bureaucrats to coordinate the Final Solution (Endlösung) in which the Nazis would attempt to exterminate the entire Jewish population of Europe — an estimated 11 million people. The meeting was named after this villa on Grossen Wannsee 56/58 near Berlin. The minutes of this conference, written by Adolf Eichmann, were found in 1947 in the files of the Ministry for Foreign Affairs
Final Solution was the code name to mask their planned destruction and was used to hide the intent of mass murder.
While several mobile killing squads were already slaughtering Jews in the occupied Soviet Union, it was at the conference that the plan was formally revealed to non-Nazi leaders who were expected to help. They were expected to arrange for Jews to be transported from all over German-occupied Europe to SS-operated extermination camps in Poland. Camps at Belzec, Birkenau, Chelmno, Majdanek, Sobibor, and Treblinka were in operation in Poland soon. These units would be separated by gender. The able-bodied Jews would be made to build roads, and this exercise would ensure lowering their numbers through natural reduction. The Theresienstadt camp-ghetto for elderly and disabled Jews was decided to be built. Life at the concentration camps would be tough, and work and living conditions would be extremely harsh so as to kill large numbers. Within a few months of the meeting, the first gas chambers were installed in some of the extermination camps in Poland. It was also decided that once the mass deportation strategy was complete, the exterminations would become an internal matter of the SS.
The conference lasted for only 90 minutes but ended up deciding the fate of millions. The Wannsee House, site of the conference, is now a Holocaust memorial.
