The Clever Teens' Guide to Nazi Germany: The Clever Teens’ Guides, #4

By Felix Rhodes

The Clever Teens' Guide to Nazi Germany: The perfect guide for background reading or revision.

Following its defeat in World War One, Germany was a country in ruins. Inflation, poverty, exhaustion, humiliation and disillusionment wrecked the nation. Out of the ashes arose a man that promised to revitalise the country and give it back its dignity. He would deal, for once and for all, with the nation's internal enemies – the communists and the Jews. That man, of course, was Adolf Hitler.

Read about how Hitler turned Germany into a one-party state, of his murderous reign and the descent into war and genocide.

The Clever Teens' Guide to Nazi Germany covers all the major facts and events giving you a clear and straightforward overview: from the rise of Hitler and the Nazi Party, his domestic policies and foreign dealings, the racism and murder to World War Two and the Holocaust.

Includes links to a further 30 articles expanding on topics introduced within the book.

More than just a textbook.

Part of the Clever Teens' series:

The Clever Teens' Guide to World War One
The Clever Teens' Guide to The Russian Revolution
The Clever Teens' Guide to Nazi Germany
The Clever Teens' Guide to World War Two
The Clever Teens' Guide to The Cold War
The Clever Teens' Bumper edition (all five books in one edition)

Ideal for your "clever teenager".

• Language: English
• Publisher: Clever Teens' Guides
• Release date: Jan 29, 2017
• ISBN: 9781386815310

Book preview

The Clever Teens’ Guide To

Nazi Germany

By Felix Rhodes

© 2017 Felix Rhodes

Post-Great War

On November 11, 1918, World War One came to an end. After four long years and four months, Germany had been defeated. Although Germany itself had not been invaded, the country was devastated by poverty and hunger. To add to its woes, Germany, like most European nations, was swept by the Spanish Flu pandemic. The nation was on its knees. On November 10, the day before Germany’s surrender, the German Kaiser, Wilhelm II, abdicated.

Peace brought relief but there was also anger – anger that the politicians, not the military leadership, had so easily surrendered to France and Great Britain. One German corporal, at the time recuperating in hospital from a gas attack, spoke for many when, in his memoirs, he remembered sobbing into his pillow on hearing the news of Germany’s defeat. The name of this particular corporal was Adolf Hitler.

Following Wilhelm II’s abdication, Germany fell into a state of chaos. Communists and the far right fought on the streets of Berlin and other cities throughout the country. A group of communists called the Spartacus League staged a revolt. It failed and 1,200 communists were executed.

Despite the fighting, Germany managed to form a republican government. Berlin was still too chaotic so this new government, headed by President Friedrich Ebert, set itself up in the town of Weimar – the Weimar Republic was born.

Treaty of Versailles

During the first six months of 1919, leaders of the victorious Allied nations convened at the Paris Peace Conference. Between them, they decided on how best to punish the defeated nations and how to make sure the war really was the war to end all wars. The treaty that dealt with Germany was named the Treaty of Versailles. Its terms were harsh and non-negotiable. Germany lost 13 per cent of its territory, which meant 12 per cent of Germans now lived in a foreign country, and all its colonial possessions in Africa and Asia. The German Rhineland, on the border with France, was to be demilitarized (stripped of an armed presence) and placed under Allied control until 1935. The small but industrially important Saar region was to be governed by Britain and France for fifteen years and its coal (2 million tons a month) exported to France. After fifteen years a plebiscite (or referendum) of the Saar population would be allowed to decide its future.

Germany’s army was to be restricted to a token 100,000 men, and its navy to just 15,000 men. She was not permitted to have an air force, nor submarines or tanks.

Then came the financial punishment – the treaty demanded that Germany pay 132 billion gold marks in reparations