| FACTS & DATA ABOUT THE 3RD REICH |
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| 1- The term Third Reich (Das Dritte Reich) was coined by a colourful radical nationalist, Möller van den Bruck, whose book Das Dritte Reich was published in 1923. Two years later he was confined to a mental institution where he shot himself. |
| 2- Hitler after WW1 understood national defeat as if it were a direct personal humiliation and he bore with him a lust for vengeance that bordered on the deranged. |
| 3- Hitler would gaze fixedly into your eyes with a searching intensity; the effect could be hypnotic as though a rabbit had been transfixed by the stare of a snake |
| 4- In 1932 alone, 155 people were killed in Germany in political clashes, including 55 National Socialists and 54 Communists. |
| 5- After the Night of the Long Knives in 1934, Stalin declared that "Hitler was a great man ! This is the way to deal with your political opponents." |
| 6- On 2 August 1934, the day of Hindenburg's death, a Law was promulgated, allowing Hitler to take over the role of President without a direct election. The joint responsibilities of President and Chancellor were amalgamated into the single office of the "Führer". |
| 7- On 3 April 1939, Hitler decided to go to war after the Polish government had refused to accept territorial transfers to Germany in March 1939. |
| 8- In 1937 appeared a book in Zurich under the title Der Mythos Hitler (The Hitler Myth) which compared Hitler to Mahommet and his followers to Muslim fanatics |
| 9- "In the hereditary monarchies, said Hitler at a dinner in March 1942, there were at least eight kings out of ten who would not have been capable of successfully running a grocery." |
| 10- Alois Spaniel, a NSDAP leader from the Saar, described Hitler as "a new, a greater and a more powerful Jesus Christ." |
| 11- In 1932 the economist Werner Sombart, co-founder of the German Democratic Party, told an audience of businessmen that Germany should search for a single strong-will leader or "we will sink into chaos." |
| 12- "This little brown-coated man, Herr Adolf Hitler, wrote Martha Dodd, daughter of the American ambassador in Berlin, is a fairy-tale." |
| 13- Max von Gruber, president of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences, wrote after seeing Hitler for the first time:"appearance and head of bad race, half-breed, low sloping forehead, unattractive nose, broad cheekbones, small eyes, dark hair." |
| 14- By the end of the 3rd Reich, an estimated 8-9 million copies of Mein Kampf had been sold but by the time of his death Stalin had sold 706 million copies of his different writings |
| 15- One enthusiastic philologist decreted that the name Adolf was composed of "ath" (divine act) and "wolfa" (creator). |
| 16- In the Third Reich, the remark "It is an order from the Führer" eliminated all disicussion. |
| 17- In 1945, the NSDAP had 8 million members. The USSR PC had only 7 million at the time of Stalin's death in 1953 |
| 18- Between 1930 and 1932 the proportion of manual working-class recuits in the NSDAP was 36% of the total. |
| 19- In 1939 there were 7.7 million members in the Hitler's Youth and the Bund deutscher Mädel (Leage of German Girls). |
| 20- Three SA men who had raped Jewish girls during the pogrom of 9 November 1938 were imprisoned -not for rape- but for contaminating the race. |
| 21- At the start of the war the NSDAP had an estimated 2 million officials. |
| 22- In February 1933, Hermann Göring, minister of the Interior in Prussia, instructed police officials that terrorism against Left wing parties did not conflict with the rights and laws of the Reich. |
| 23- On 28 February 1933, the Reichstag Fire Decree for the "protection of people and State" suspended the articles of the German constitution (114,115, 117,118,123,124, 153) guaranteeing civil rights. |
| 24- The Secret State Police Office (Geheime Staatspolizeamt or Gestapo) was formally established on 26 April 1933. Its headquarters were established in Berlin at 8, Prinz Albrechstrasse and the organization placed under the command of a Bavarian policeman named Heinrich Müller. |
| 25- The Gestapo had the right to place people under "protective custody" (Schutzhaft) and as soon as June 1933 there were 26,789 people under that form of custody. In effect, this meant confinement in a concentration camp or in a prison without the right of a Court hearing or a lawyer. |
| 26- The Nacht und Nebel decree (Night and Fog) of 7 Decembrer 1941 (Pearl Harbour day) allowed the Gestapo to dispose of their prisoners without trace. |
| 27- The great majority of German victims of state repression before 1933 and 1945 were biological victims, imprisoned or murdered not for political crimes, but to protect the race. Between 1933 and 1945, some 400,000 men and women were sterilized. |
| 28- In Nazi Germany denunciation thrived : 69.5% of the cases defined wrongly or not as treason or high treason were put to life as denunciations. |
| 29- The Gestapo closed down the Bauhaus' offices in April 1933. |
| 30- For Hitler, "the state must act as the guardian of a millennial future in the face of which the wishes and selfishness of the individual appear as nothing and submit." |
| 31- In Mein Kampf Hitler called on young Germans to be "final witness to the total collapse of the bourgeois order." He called the bourgeois "a bunch of cowardly shits" in 1922. |
| 32- In 1935 a census found that 1/3 of party members were manual workers and 1/5 white collar employees. |
| 33- Hitler's fascination with technical modernity is well known:"I am a fool for technology", he told his circle in 1942. |
| 34- In July 1933 a Law for the Prevention of Offspring with Hereditary Diseases listed nine conditions that threatened racial health : feeblemindedness, schizophrenia, manic depression, hereditary epilepsy, alcoholism, blindness and deafness, hereditary physical disfigurement and Huntington's chorea. |
| 35- By 1945 an estimated 360,000 Germans had been sterilized and more than 2,000 sexual criminals castrated. |
| 36- The Nazis introduced a generous system of family allowances for large families that by 1941 cost the State more than 1 billion marks per year. |
| 37- In the SS Lebensborn maternity homes 12,000 babies were born, about 50% of them to unmarried mothers. |
| 38- In 1939 Hitler authorized his physician SS Dr Karl Brandt and Philip Bouhler, Head of the Chancellery, to kill handicapped children. Officials and doctors set up offices at 4 Tiergarten Strasse in Berlin (Project T4) where disabled men, women and children were gassed. About 80,000 Germans were murdered in these first gas chambers. |
| 39- Hitler saw the conflict of races as the instrument of historical transformation : it was a crude and vulgar Darwinism stressing the importance of natural selection for human populations. |
| 40- In his Monumental History of Mankind drafted in 1920 and never published, Hitler wrote that "racial purity is the highest law". |
| 41- In 1933, on the occasion of Martin Luther's 450th birthday, Ludwig Müller, the new Reich bishop, told his congregation that the Protestant Church looked on Hitler "as a gift from the hand of God", behind whose government the Church stands "firmly and invincibly." |
| 42- From the mid-30s the regime and the party were dominated by the prominent anti-Christians, Himmler, Goebbels, Bormann, Heydrich, but were restrained by Hitler. |
| 43- During the war Hitler reflected that in long run National Socialism and religion will no longer be able to exist together. |
| 44- In April 1933 120 out of 378 law academics were sacked on grounds of race or political outlook. |
| 45- In 1933 all lawyers were required to make an oath of direct fealty to Hitler: "I sweat to remain loyal to Adolf Hitler, the leader of the German nation and people...." |
| 46- "The Law, wrote Hans Frank, party head of the League of Jurists, is an order from the Führer." |
| 47- In Nazi Germany, the State was above the Law and the Law was an instrument in the war against the enemies of society, i.e. those bent on crime or political deviancy. |
| 48- Alfred Rosenberg, the party ideologue, boasted that strong men were strong because they were absolutely hard men. |
| 49- In May 1933, strikes were formally outlawed. The Law for the ordering of national labour (20 January 1934) established for German managers absolute powers over their employees:wage rates were fixed at the levels of the depression and altered little during the course of the 3rd Reich. |
| 50- Of the 422 communist party leaders, 219 had been arrested by the autumn of 1935, 125 had emigrated, 24 had been killed and 42 had left the party. |
| 51- The number of women in the workforce increased from 2.4 million in 1928 to 7 million in 1933 when they made up 1/3 of the industrial labour forces. In 1937, they were 42% of it. |
| 52 - In 1936 two former social-democrats officials, Hermann Brill and Otto Brass, founded a German Popular Front with a ten-point programme for the re-establishment of democracy, headed by point #1:"Overthrow and destruction of the Hitler dictatorship." They were caught in 1938 and sentenced to 12 years in prison. |
| 53- By 1939, left-wing activity in Germany had all but disappeared. |
| 54- Hans Frank once boasted that the Third Reich only left its citizens alone when they were finally fast asleep. |
| 55- For Hitler, artistic creation was an expression of racial health and eternal racial value. |
| 56- By 1939 the German censor organization employed over 6,000 people. |
| 57- The cathedral of light (right) imagined by Albert Speer for the Nuremberg rally in 1937 was made of 130 anti-aircraft searchlights placed at 40-feet intervals around the Zeppelin Field stadium. |
| 58- By 1932 the economy was in severe crisis; the output of heavy industry was little higher than the 1890s, trade had fallen by half of 1928 and unemployment reached over 6 million. |
| 59- In 1934, Hitler told one party leader that "the economic system of our day is the creation of the Jews" and he explained to Mussolini in 1944 that "capitalism had run its course". |
| 60- For Hitler, the acquisition of soil is always linked with the employment of force. He developped this idea in the sequel never published to Mein Kampf, the so-called Second Book, where he is preoccupied with the relationship between racial survival, war and economic resources. |
| 61- In the Third Reich, the survival of the private sector was not incompatible with the existence of extensive state planning, economic interventionn, or even public ownership of the means of production. |
| 62- In November 1937, Schacht was compelled to resign as economics minster, and in January 1939 was sacked from the direction of the Reichsbank. He ended up in a concentration camp. |
| 63- Among the first acts of the Nazi government were the repudation of further reparation payments and the reduction or suspension of repayments on foreign loans. |
| 64 - In 1913 Imperial Germany devoted 3% of the national product to the military, in 1939 Nazi Germany devoted 29% and the Soviet Union 17%. |
| 65- In 1938 Britain and the USA each produced 13% of the quantity of weapons produced by Germany |
| 66- About 70% ol all industrial investment in Germany by 1938-39 anticipated the waging of war. |
| 67- By 1938 real weekly earnings had expanded well beyond depression levels thanks to longer hours and extensive overtime, but were still fractionally lower than in 1928. |
| 68- For the Nazis private property did not imply unrestricted dominion over a good but was an obligation towards the community enjoyed in trusteeship for the good of all. |
| 69- The huge Volkswagen plant was state-owned as was the Reichswerke complex Hermann Goering that employed 60,000 people. |
| 70- At the Volkswagen plant the young apprentices were trained under the title of "soldiers of labour" in a special centre with military routines and a militarized uniform, and lectures on loyalty to the work front. |
| 71- Germany mobilized 18 millions soldiers between 1941 and 1945, plus millions more from her allies and the conquered territories. |
| 72- Between 1933 and 1939 around 40% of the military budget was devoted to air power. |
| 73- In 1935 von Blomberg issued instructions to soldiers not to buy good in Jewish-owned shops and in 1936 he asked soldiers to marry "Aryan women" only. |
| 74- On 4 February 1938, Hitler announced that there would no longer be a war minister and that he would assume an active role as Supremer Commander of the Armed Forces. |
| 75- "Hitler, wrote an adjutant in his diary, could not understand a soldier who feared war." |
| 76- On 23 August 1939 Germany and the USSR signed a non-aggression pact; on 28 September a treaty of friendship was sealed which divided Poland and parts of eastern Europe between Germany and Russia; on 10 January 1941, a treaty was signed confirming a treaty of February 1940 concerning econnomic relations; on 22 June 1941, Germany invaded Russia. |
| 77- At a meeting on 31 July 1941, Hitler made it clear that the invasion of Russia was a way of securing complete mastery of Europe as a springboard for the war against the British Empire, and perhaps the USA. |
| 78- At a meeting on 30 March 1941, Hitler explained that the war against Russia would be no oridnary war but a struggle of two opposing world views which had to be fought merciless to exterminate communism, an asocial criminal system, for all time. |
| 78- Hitler initially estimated that the campaign against Russia would only take 4 months. |
| 79- By the end of November 1941, the German forces were only 12 miles from the Kremlin. They never went closer. |
| 80- Hitler and Stalin were two amateur warlords commanding the largest forces in history. |
| 81- Between June and December 1941 the Red Army lost 2.6 million killed and 3.3 million taken prisoner; the German forces had 164,000 killed. |
| 82- The Russian regions occupied by the German armies at the end of 1941 contained 60% of Soviet livestock supplies, 40% of the grain area, 84% of sugar production. |
| 83- In 1944 Germany had a foreign labour force of 7.6 million people, all prisoners or volunteers from allied or occupied countries. An estimated 20 million workers outside Germany were employed for the German war effort by 1943-44 |
| 84- By the end of the war, women were making 51% of the German workforce |
| 85- In 1941 General von Brauschitsch, German army commander, instructed the troops that "Soviet political Commissars" should, if possible, be killed "inconspicuously". |
| 86- In 1941, Gal Franz Halder, chief-of-staff or the Army, drew up instructions for the Barbarossa campaign demanding "iron severity" in dealing with a civilian population deluded by the exponent of the Jewish-Bolshevik ideology." |
| 87- During the war the German forces judged 35,000 cases of alleged desertion, condemned 20,000 to death and executed between 15,000 and 20,000 of their own soldiers. |
| 88- By the summer of 1944, the German armed forces had captured a total of 5.2 million Soviet soldiers; of these 2.2 million were reported as dead. |
| 89- From the 2.88 million German prisoners taken by the Soviets 356,00 died, a loss of 15%. |
| 90- On 16 September 1942 General Keitel, chief-of-staff, distribued the hostage order, allowing troops to execute between 50 and 100 Soviet citizens for every German killed. |
| 91- On 16 December 1942 Himmler published his guidelines for the war against guerrilla in Russia and spelled out thatr it was to be fought regardless of any legality or morality, without limitation even against children and women." |
| 92 - By the end of 1942, there were some 300,000 partisans in Russia of which thousands were killed by the 10 security divisions allocated to the German army rear areas. |
| 93- The Soviet areas occupied by the Axis forces by mid-1942 contained about 66 million people. |
| 94 - The Soviet Union lost more than 5 million trained soldiers in the first year of the war, including the hard core of the army |
| 95- Military speaking the greatest weakness of Hitler was, according to General Jodl, his grasp of operational realities. |
| 96 - Out of 38,000 letters sent during September 1944 by the men of the 14th Army, only 2% displayed faith in the Führer and 5% in the prospect of a final victory. |
| 97 - Hitler's nationalism was exclusive and defensive, an expression of cultural superiority and racial affinity |
| 98 - A curved left sloping swastika was introduced to the German Worlers' Party in 1919 by a dentist, Friedrich Krohn, as a mark of its Aryan, anti-semitic outlook. Later Hitler strengthened the arms, turned then rightwards and set a black swastika on a white background surrounded by red. |
| 99 - For Hitler, the German nation was a genealogical community |
| 100 - In 1937 600 offsprings of unions between German women and black French soldiers during the Ruhr occupation of 1923 were compulosry sterilized to remove any propsect of further contamination of German blood. |
| Source : The Dictators, Hitler's Germany, Stalin's Russia by Richard Overy,, W.W.Norton & Cy, New York, London, ISBN 0-393-32797-3 pbk |
| 101 - Hitler never defined what would geographically be the infamous 'lebensraum" |
| 102 - Hitler was not interested in the creation of a new European political and economic system (Arnold Toynbee). 103 - Hitler said that "we (the Nazis) were Barbarians" and that 'it was an honorable title". 104 - The Nazism never carried out an anti-bolshevik campaign. They only planned the elimination of the 3/4 of the Slavic population who would be enslaved and exploited. 105 - And Himmler added :"What it would mean for the Russians is supremely unimportant." 106 - The masterplan of Hitler and his henchmen would have been if implemented the colonial rule of the Nazis and the German people founded on straigthforward slavery. |