From Chancellor to Führer

Hitler was appointed Chancellor on 30 January 1933. Within eighteen months Germany was a one-party dictatorship.

• The Reichstag Fire (27 February 1933) — blamed on communists, it justified an emergency decree suspending civil liberties and mass arrests before the March 1933 election.
• The Enabling Act (23 March 1933) — passed with intimidation and the support of the Centre Party, it let Hitler's government make laws without the Reichstag.
• Gleichschaltung ("coordination") — trade unions were abolished, other political parties banned, and state governments brought under Nazi control.
• The Night of the Long Knives (30 June 1934) — Röhm and the SA leadership were murdered. This removed a rival power base and reassured the army and business.
• 2 August 1934 — von Hindenburg died. Hitler combined Chancellor and President as Führer; the army swore a personal oath of loyalty to him.

Why the Night of the Long Knives?

The police state

The Nazi police state rested on several overlapping bodies:

• Himmler headed the SS, a fanatically loyal elite that came to run the camps and the security apparatus.
• The Gestapo, the secret police, could arrest without trial. Much of its information came from ordinary informers — neighbours, colleagues, even family.
• The law courts were Nazified: judges swore loyalty to Hitler, and the People's Court handed down political death sentences.
• Concentration camps — the first, at Dachau, opened in 1933 — held political prisoners, and later many other groups.

Impact on daily life: people learned to self-censor. The fear of denunciation — not the number of Gestapo officers, which was relatively small — is what made the system so effective.

How the Gestapo worked

Goebbels and the control of minds

Joseph Goebbels, Minister of Propaganda, controlled what Germans read, heard and saw:

• Press — newspapers received daily instructions; Jewish and left-wing journalists were driven out.
• Radio — cheap "People's Receivers" put Hitler's voice in homes, factories and cafés; sets were built with limited range to make foreign broadcasts harder to receive.
• Film — newsreels before every feature; propaganda films glorified the regime and demonised its enemies.
• Spectacle — the Nuremberg rallies, and the 1936 Berlin Olympics, staged to impress foreign visitors.
• Censorship — book burnings, banned music and "degenerate art" exhibitions.

How did the Nazis keep control?

Tap an item, then tap the method of control it belongs to.

Who resisted — and at what cost?

Open opposition was extremely dangerous, but it existed:

• The churches: Pastor Martin Niemöller helped found the Confessing Church against the Nazified "German Christians". He was arrested and imprisoned in concentration camps.
• Young people: the Edelweiss Pirates — working-class youths who roamed, sang banned songs and taunted the Hitler Youth — and the Swing Youth, middle-class teenagers who listened to banned jazz and swing.
• Students: the White Rose group in Munich distributed leaflets against the regime in 1942–43; its leaders were arrested and executed in February 1943.
• The army: the July Bomb Plot of 1944, led by Stauffenberg, failed; the plotters were killed.

Exam point: weigh the extent of support against opposition. Many Germans backed the regime for jobs, order and national pride; others conformed out of fear; a minority resisted — and paid dearly.

When was the Enabling Act passed?

Work, wages and the Labour Front

Unemployment stood at around six million in 1932. Nazi policies cut it sharply:

• Public works — the autobahns and public buildings.
• The National Labour Service (RAD) — six months of compulsory manual labour for young men.
• Conscription (1935) and rearmament absorbed hundreds of thousands more; autarky (self-sufficiency) protected German industry.
• The German Labour Front (DAF) replaced banned trade unions; workers could not strike or bargain.
• Strength Through Joy (KdF) offered cheap holidays, concerts and the promised People's Car; Beauty of Labour (SdA) improved workplace conditions.

Judge it carefully: jobs and order were real gains — but wages rose slowly, hours grew longer, and workers lost their rights. Nazi unemployment figures also excluded Jews and women pushed out of work.

Match the organisation to its job

Tap a Nazi organisation on the left, then what it did on the right.

Kinder, Küche, Kirche — and the Hitler Youth

Women: Nazi ideology cast women as mothers of the Aryan race — Kinder, Küche, Kirche (children, kitchen, church). Women were pushed out of the professions, encouraged to marry (with marriage loans) and to have large families, rewarded with the Mother's Cross, and discouraged from smoking, wearing make-up or slimming. In wartime, the need for labour forced the regime to bring women back into factories.

Young people: membership of the Hitler Youth (boys) and the League of German Maidens (girls) became effectively compulsory. Boys were prepared for soldiering, girls for motherhood.

Schools were Nazified: teachers joined the Nazi Teachers' League, PE hours were increased, history was rewritten, and "race studies" taught antisemitic pseudo-science.

Nazi policy towards women

The Jewish community and other minorities

Nazi racial ideology drove escalating persecution:

• 1 April 1933 — a national boycott of Jewish shops and businesses, enforced by the SA.
• September 1935 — the Nuremberg Laws removed German citizenship from Jews and banned marriage or relations between Jews and other Germans.
• 9–10 November 1938 — Kristallnacht: synagogues burned, Jewish shops and homes destroyed, and tens of thousands of Jewish men sent to concentration camps. The Jewish community was then fined for the damage.
• Other minorities — Roma and Sinti, gay men, and disabled people (murdered in the so-called "euthanasia" programme) were also persecuted.
• During the war — ghettos, mass shootings by the Einsatzgruppen in the occupied east, and then the Final Solution: deportation to death camps and industrialised murder.

When was Kristallnacht?

The Nuremberg Laws

The home front, 1939–45

Early victories kept the home front comfortable — food and goods flowed in from occupied Europe. From 1942–43 that ended:

• Total war was declared after the defeat at Stalingrad; consumer industries were converted to war production, and women were drafted into factories despite Nazi ideology.
• Air raids and bombing devastated German cities; children were evacuated and civilians spent nights in shelters.
• Rationing tightened; shortages of food, fuel and clothing bit deeply.
• Labour shortages were met with millions of foreign and forced labourers, worked brutally.
• Racial persecution escalated to genocide, and repression at home intensified — the White Rose and the July 1944 plotters were executed.

Total war

Answering CCEA Unit 1 questions

CCEA papers mix short knowledge questions with source work and longer explanations.

• Know precise detail — dates, names, laws and organisations. "Nazis were nasty to Jews" earns nothing; "the Nuremberg Laws (1935) removed citizenship" earns marks.
• Use sources with provenance — who produced it, when and why. Nazi photographs of smiling KdF holidaymakers are propaganda, not neutral evidence.
• Evaluate effectiveness — the specification repeatedly asks how effective Nazi policies were by 1939. Give evidence on both sides, then judge.

Judging Nazi policies

The big ideas to know

That is CCEA Unit 1 Section A: Life in Nazi Germany, 1933–45. Press Finish to see your score.