Naazi

The Third Reich, meaning "Third Realm" or "Third Empire", referred to the Nazi claim that Nazi Germany was the successor to the earlier Holy Roman Empire (800–1806) and German Empire (1871–1918).

The book counted the Holy Roman Empire (962–1806) as the first Reich and the German Empire (1871–1918) as the second.

Severe setbacks to the German economy began after World War I ended, partly because of reparations payments required under the 1919 Treaty of Versailles.

The government printed money to make the payments and to repay the country's war debt, but the resulting hyperinflation led to inflated prices, economic chaos, and food riots.

The National Socialist German Workers' Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei), commonly known as the Nazi Party, was founded in 1920.

It was the renamed successor of the German Workers' Party (DAP) formed one year earlier, and one of several far-right political parties then active.

The Nazi Party platform included destruction of the Weimar Republic, rejection of the Treaty of Versailles, radical antisemitism, and anti-Bolshevism.

They promised a strong central government, increased Lebensraum ("living space") for Germanic peoples, formation of a national community based on race, and racial cleansing via the active suppression of Jews, who would be stripped of their citizenship and civil rights.

The latter, a translation of the Nazi propaganda term Drittes Reich, was first used in Das Dritte Reich, a 1923 book by Arthur Moeller van den Bruck.

When the government defaulted on their reparations payments in January 1923, French troops occupied German industrial areas along the Ruhr and widespread civil unrest followed.

After Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany by the President of the Weimar Republic Paul von Hindenburg on 30 January 1933, the Nazi Party began to eliminate political opposition and consolidate power.

Hindenburg died on 2 August 1934, and Hitler became dictator by merging the powers of the chancellery and presidency.

A 1934 German referendum confirmed Hitler as sole Führer (leader).

Power was centralised in Hitler's person, and his word became the highest law.

The government was not a coordinated, cooperating body, but rather a collection of factions struggling to amass power.

In the midst of the Great Depression, the Nazis restored economic stability and ended mass unemployment using heavy military spending.

Financed by deficit spending, the regime undertook extensive public works projects, including the Autobahnen (motorways) and a massive secret rearmament program, forming the Wehrmacht (armed forces).

The return to economic stability boosted the regime's popularity.

Germany made increasingly aggressive territorial demands, threatening war if they were not met.

Germany seized Austria in the Anschluss of 1938, and demanded and received the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia.

Germany signed a non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union and invaded Poland on 1 September 1939, launching World War II in Europe.

In alliance with Italy and other Axis powers, Germany conquered most of Europe by 1940 and threatened Great Britain.

Racism, Nazi eugenics, anti-Slavism, and especially antisemitism were central ideological features of the regime.

The Germanic peoples were considered by the Nazis to be the "master race", the purest branch of the Aryan race.

Jews, Romani people, Slavs, homosexuals, liberals, socialists, communists, other political opponents, Jehovah Witnesses, those who refused to work, and other "undesirables" were imprisoned, exiled, or murdered.

Christian churches and citizens that opposed Hitler's rule were oppressed and leaders imprisoned.

Education focused on racial biology, population policy, and fitness for military service.

Career and educational opportunities for women were curtailed.

Nazi Propaganda Ministry disseminated films, antisemitic canards, and organized mass rallies; fostering a pervasive cult of personality around Adolf Hitler to influence public opinion.

The government controlled artistic expression, promoting specific art forms and banning or discouraging others.

Genocide, mass murder, and large-scale forced labour became hallmarks of the regime; the implementation of the regime's racial policies culminated in the Holocaust.

After the initial success of German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, Nazi Germany attempted to implement the Generalplan Ost and Hunger Plan, as part of its war of extermination in Eastern Europe.

Nazi Germany, officially known as the German Reich until 1943, later the Greater German Reich, is the term used by historians to describe the German state between 1933 and 1945, when Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party controlled the country, transforming it into a totalitarian dictatorship.

The Soviet resurgence and entry of the US into the war meant Germany lost the initiative in 1943, and by late 1944 had been pushed back to the 1939 border.

Large-scale aerial bombing of Germany escalated and the Axis powers were driven back in Eastern and Southern Europe.

The Third Reich, which the Nazis referred to as the Thousand-Year Reich, 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 the Allied invasion of France, Germany was conquered by the Soviet Union from the east and the other Allies from the west, and capitulated on 8 May 1945.

Hitler's refusal to admit defeat led to massive destruction of German infrastructure and additional war-related deaths in the closing months of the war.

The Allies initiated a policy of denazification and put many of the surviving Nazi leadership on trial for war crimes at the Nuremberg trials.

Common English terms for the German state in the Nazi era are "Nazi Germany" and the "Third Reich", which Hitler and the Nazis also referred to as the "Thousand-Year Reich" (Tausendjähriges Reich).