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During the German invasion of Poland, which started World War II, Nazi Germany carried out a number of atrocities involving Polish prisoners of war (POWs). The first documented massacres of Polish POWs took place as early as the first day of the war; [2]: 11 others followed (ex. the Serock massacre [] of 5 September).
The Third Reich, which the Nazis referred to as the Thousand-Year Reich, [m] ended in May 1945, after only 12 years, when the Allies defeated Germany and entered the capital, Berlin, ending World War II in Europe. After Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany on 30 January 1933 by Paul von Hindenburg, the President of the Weimar Republic ...
The Holocaust (/ ˈ h ɒ l ə k ɔː s t / ⓘ), [1] known in Hebrew as the Shoah (שואה), was the genocide of European Jews during World War II, and is sometimes defined to include the persecution of other groups by Nazi Germany. Between 1941 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically murdered some six million Jews across ...
Believing Nazi Germany to be imperiled by internal enemies, Himmler called for a war against the "organized elements of sub-humanity", including communists, socialists, Jews, Freemasons, and criminals. Himmler won Hitler's backing and was appointed Chief of German Police on 17 June 1936. [22]
Buchenwald (German pronunciation: [ˈbuːxn̩valt]; literally 'beech forest') was a Nazi concentration camp established on Ettersberg hill near Weimar, Germany, in July 1937. It was one of the first and the largest of the concentration camps within the Altreich (Old Reich) territories.
Adolf Hitler [a] (20 April 1889 – 30 April 1945) was an Austrian-born German politician who was the dictator of Nazi Germany from 1933 until his suicide in 1945. He rose to power as the leader of the Nazi Party , [ c ] becoming the chancellor in 1933 and then taking the title of Führer und Reichskanzler in 1934.
Germany's heavy losses of men and tanks ensured that the victorious Soviet Red Army held a strategic initiative for the rest of the war. The Battle of Kursk was the first time in the Second World War that a German strategic offensive was halted before it could break through enemy defences and penetrate to its strategic depths.
The Battle of the Seelow Heights, fought over four days from 16 until 19 April, was one of the last pitched battles of World War II: almost one million Red Army soldiers and more than 20,000 tanks and artillery pieces were deployed to break through the "Gates to Berlin", which were defended by about 100,000 German soldiers and 1,200 tanks and guns.