Nazi Germany 1933 to 1945: the consolidation of dictatorship, the terror and propaganda state, economic and social policy, persecution and the Holocaust, and the impact of total war.

What this dot point is asking

You need to explain how the Nazis turned Hitler's chancellorship into a total dictatorship in 1933 to 1934, how the regime ruled through terror and propaganda, its economic and social policies, the persecution culminating in the Holocaust, and the impact of total war.

Consolidating the dictatorship

The Nazis then moved through a process of Gleichschaltung (coordination): they banned the other parties (the Law against the Formation of New Parties, July 1933) to create a one-party state, abolished free trade unions and replaced them with the German Labour Front, and brought the state governments and civil society under Nazi control. The radical SA under Rohm, whose talk of a "second revolution" alarmed the army and elites, was destroyed in the Night of the Long Knives (June 1934), in which Rohm and other rivals were murdered. On Hindenburg's death in August 1934, Hitler merged the offices of Chancellor and President as Fuhrer and made the army swear a personal oath to him, completing the dictatorship within nineteen months.

Terror and propaganda

The relationship between fear and consent is the key AQA debate. The older picture of an all-seeing Gestapo terrorising a cowed population has been revised by historians such as Robert Gellately, who showed the Gestapo was understaffed and relied heavily on voluntary denunciations from ordinary Germans, implying widespread collusion rather than pure coercion. Propaganda saturated daily life through radio, film (Riefenstahl), rallies and press control, while economic recovery and foreign triumphs generated genuine enthusiasm, what Ian Kershaw called the "Hitler myth". The strongest answers see terror and consent as mutually reinforcing.

Economy and society

• Economic recovery under Schacht cut unemployment, followed by the Four Year Plan (1936) under Goring driving rearmament and autarky.
• Social policy targeted women (children, church, kitchen), youth (Hitler Youth) and workers (the German Labour Front replacing trade unions).

Persecution and the Holocaust

Anti-Jewish persecution escalated from boycotts and the Nuremberg Laws (1935), through the violence of Kristallnacht (1938), to systematic genocide during the war. The Holocaust murdered around six million Jews, alongside Roma, disabled people and political prisoners.

Total war

Germany entered the war geared for short, sharp Blitzkrieg campaigns rather than a long struggle. After the failure to defeat the USSR and the entry of the United States, the regime shifted from 1942 to total war under Speer's armaments drive, which raised output sharply through rationalisation and the brutal use of millions of forced and slave labourers. The home front endured intensifying Allied strategic bombing of cities. The combination of overwhelming Allied resources and the moral and military exhaustion of the regime brought defeat, ending with Hitler's suicide and the German surrender in May 1945.

Try this

Q1. What did the Enabling Act (1933) allow? [2 marks]

• Cue. The government to pass laws without the Reichstag, ending parliamentary democracy.

Q2. What were the Nuremberg Laws (1935)? [2 marks]

• Cue. Anti-Jewish laws stripping Jews of citizenship and banning marriage with non-Jews.