97 Fun Facts About Nazi Germany

Who appointed Adolf Hitler Chancellor of Germany on 30 January 1933?

President Paul von Hindenburg had beaten Hitler in the 1932 presidential runoff, then appointed him chancellor months later.

'Third Reich' cast Nazi Germany as heir to the Kaiser's Germany and which earlier realm?

The Holy Roman Empire was the first Reich in the 1923 book that supplied the slogan; its author had rejected Hitler for his 'proletarian primitiveness'.

Hitler's failed 1923 coup in Munich is known as what?

The Beer Hall Putsch ended when police fired on the marchers, yet judges gave Hitler the lightest allowable sentence and freed him within a year.

Which book did Hitler write while imprisoned after his failed 1923 coup?

Mein Kampf sold slowly at first, but once Hitler came to power it became a bestseller in Germany.

A Dutch communist was convicted of setting fire to which building on 27 February 1933?

Marinus van der Lubbe was blamed, and the next day's Reichstag Fire Decree rescinded most civil liberties and allowed indefinite detention.

With Communist deputies barred, which party alone voted against Hitler's 1933 Enabling Act?

The Social Democrats cast all 94 no votes, and their leader Otto Wels spoke against the act while SA men stood inside the chamber.

Which Nazi term named the drive, from 1933, to put every part of German society under party control?

Gleichschaltung ('coordination') saw SA men seize union offices on 2 May 1933; by 14 July every party except the Nazis had been banned or dissolved.

Which SA chief of staff was arrested and shot in the Night of the Long Knives?

Ernst Röhm was given a pistol in his cell and told to kill himself; when he did not, he was shot.

When Germany's president died in August 1934, what happened to his office?

It was merged with the chancellorship, and soldiers now had to swear unconditional obedience to Hitler personally.

Which Nazi leader, whose office approved most new laws, flew solo to Scotland in 1941?

Rudolf Hess parachuted into Scotland hoping to broker peace, was arrested at once, and was later sentenced to life in prison.

Who ran the Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda?

Joseph Goebbels was named chancellor in Hitler's will, and the next day he and his wife killed themselves after poisoning their six children.

Which Nazi force grew from Hitler's bodyguard unit into one of the regime's most powerful bodies?

The SS, led by Heinrich Himmler from 1929, had begun as a small unit under the SA, the stormtroopers whose power it later took over.

Which economist devised the Mefo bills used to finance Nazi rearmament through deficit spending?

Hjalmar Schacht was later sent to concentration camps after the 1944 bomb plot, and the Allied war-crimes tribunal acquitted him.

Which American athlete won four gold medals at the 1936 Berlin Olympics?

Jesse Owens won the 100m, 200m, long jump and 4x100m, yet host Germany still topped the medal table.

Which demilitarised region did Hitler send troops into in March 1936, breaking the Versailles Treaty?

The Rhineland reoccupation broke the Locarno Treaties as well, yet Britain and France took no military action against it.

Which Olympic ritual was invented for the 1936 Berlin Games?

The torch relay had no ancient precedent: organiser Carl Diem devised it, carrying a flame lit at Olympia to Berlin, and it became a lasting tradition.

Which filmmaker made Triumph of the Will and Olympia?

Leni Riefenstahl was ruled a Nazi 'fellow traveller' after the war, then reinvented herself photographing the Nuba of Sudan and filming underwater.

Which banner became Germany's sole national flag in September 1935?

The party swastika became the sole flag weeks after New York protesters tore one from the liner Bremen, an incident that may have prompted the change.

The 1935 laws that stripped German Jews of basic rights are named after which city?

Nuremberg lent its name because Hitler called parliament into a special session at the Nazi Party rally there to pass the laws.

The November 1938 shooting of diplomat Ernst vom Rath in Paris was the pretext for which Nazi action?

Kristallnacht's victims were made to pay: German Jews were fined one billion Reichsmarks and their insurance payouts were confiscated.

Which 1937 Munich exhibition put modern art seized from German museums on show?

Degenerate Art drew more than two million visitors, several times the crowd at the approved Great German Art Exhibition nearby.

Which youth gangs in western Germany defied the Hitler Youth and fought its members?

Edelweiss Pirates rejected the Hitler Youth's drill: boys and girls hiked together, and members risked arrest by the Gestapo.

Which Nazi association, founded by Himmler in 1935, ran maternity homes for single mothers deemed racially suitable?

Lebensborn ('Fount of Life') was meant to raise Germany's falling birth rate, and in wartime it took part in kidnapping foreign children.

Which designer drew up the KdF-Wagen, the 'Strength Through Joy' people's car?

Ferdinand Porsche's car took savers' money, but the factory switched to military vehicles and none were sold until after the war, as the Volkswagen.

Which architect built the party rally grounds and the new Reich Chancellery in Berlin?

Albert Speer later ran war production as armaments minister, and after the war he served 20 years in prison.

Which country did Germany annex in the Anschluss of 1938?

Austria's chancellor Kurt Schuschnigg had called a referendum on independence, but Hitler forced its cancellation and German troops crossed the border unopposed.

Which British prime minister signed the Munich Agreement and promised 'peace for our time'?

Neville Chamberlain's deal handed Hitler part of Czechoslovakia, yet in March 1939 Germany occupied the rest of the country.

Which German foreign minister negotiated the August 1939 non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union?

Joachim von Ribbentrop's pact had a secret protocol dividing Poland, and within weeks both Germany and the Soviet Union had invaded it.

Which Free City did Germany capture on 1 September 1939 as it invaded Poland?

Danzig's Polish depot at Westerplatte was shelled by the battleship Schleswig-Holstein on 1 September, and its small garrison held out for seven days.

What was the German name for the tactic of quick coordinated assaults that avoided enemy strong points?

Blitzkrieg was never official German military doctrine, and after the failed invasion of the Soviet Union Hitler denied ever using the word.

France's 1940 surrender was signed in the railway carriage used for which agreement?

The WWI armistice was signed in that carriage in 1918, and Hitler had it taken out of a museum and put back on the same forest spot.

Action T4 was a programme of systematic murder targeting whom?

Disabled people were gassed under T4 until protests, including Bishop von Galen's 1941 sermon, led Hitler to halt it; the killing continued anyway.

Which Nazi security chief called the Wannsee Conference of 20 January 1942?

Reinhard Heydrich was ambushed in Prague months later by Czech and Slovak soldiers trained in Britain, and died of his wounds in June 1942.

Which German field marshal's Afrika Korps was defeated in Egypt by Montgomery's forces?

Erwin Rommel was later linked to the July 1944 plot and chose suicide over a trial; the regime gave him a state funeral and blamed his war wounds.

Which German army officer planted the briefcase bomb in the 20 July 1944 plot?

Claus von Stauffenberg's bomb went off, but Hitler survived, and the plotters had planned for Carl Goerdeler to replace him as chancellor.

Before which court were the officers behind the July 1944 bomb plot against Hitler tried?

The People's Court under Roland Freisler, who insulted the accused in filmed trials, convicted the plotters, and most were executed at Plötzensee prison.

Whom did Hitler marry in the Berlin bunker less than two days before their joint suicide?

Eva Braun, his companion of many years, died beside him, and their bodies were carried to the Chancellery garden and burned with petrol.

Which Grand Admiral led Germany's final government after Hitler's suicide?

Karl Dönitz, named head of state in Hitler's will, had the surrender signed within a week and was later sentenced to ten years in prison.

Which Nazi leader did the main Allied war-crimes trial try in absentia?

Martin Bormann was sentenced to death in absentia, but his remains, found in Berlin, showed he had died there in the war's final days.

On 1 April 1933 Hitler declared a national boycott of what?

Jewish businesses were targeted as supposed revenge for foreign 'atrocity propaganda', with SA men posted outside and Stars of David painted on doors.

Which Nazi ideologue wrote the 1930 racial-theory book The Myth of the Twentieth Century?

Alfred Rosenberg also set up a task force that looted art and cultural treasures across occupied Europe, and he was hanged in 1946.

In which French city did Germany sign its unconditional surrender to the Allies on 7 May 1945?

Reims hosted Eisenhower's headquarters, where he refused a surrender to the Western Allies alone and threatened to close his lines to fleeing Germans.

What did the Nazis call the eastern territory they meant to seize for German settlers?

Lebensraum was popularised by the geographer Friedrich Ratzel around 1901, long before Hitler made it a plan to conquer and colonise Eastern Europe.

Which pair of Nazi plans targeted occupied Soviet lands?

Generalplan Ost and the Hunger Plan meant forcing over 30 million Slavs into Siberia and starving millions of Soviet citizens so Germany could take their food.

Whom did Hitler name Plenipotentiary of the Four Year Plan on 18 October 1936?

Hermann Göring used the post to take over economic policy, and in 1937 he founded a state steel giant named after himself, the Reichswerke Hermann Göring.

Which League of Nations territory voted over 90% to rejoin Germany in 1935?

The Saar's coal mines had been handed to France under the Versailles Treaty as part of Germany's war reparations.

Which Munich student was executed in February 1943 for distributing anti-Nazi leaflets at her university?

Sophie Scholl, of the White Rose group, was reported by a university janitor who saw the leaflets, and was executed with her brother Hans on 22 February 1943.

Which soft drink was invented in wartime Germany after a trade embargo cut off Coca-Cola's syrup?

Fanta was mixed from whatever Coca-Cola's German arm could still get, including whey and apple pomace, and took its name from the German word for imagination.

Which German fashion house's founder joined the Nazi Party in 1931 and supplied its uniforms?

Hugo Boss sewed brown shirts and army uniforms in Metzingen, and during the war his factory used 140 forced labourers, most of them women from Poland and the Soviet Union.

Which American magazine named Adolf Hitler its Man of the Year for 1938?

Time gives the title to whoever most shaped the year's events, for good or ill, which is why Stalin received it twice in the years that followed.

Which future West German chancellor opened Germany's first public autobahn in 1932, before Hitler took power?

Konrad Adenauer, then mayor of Cologne, opened the road to Bonn in August 1932, yet the Nazis, who had opposed a motorway network, later presented it as Hitler's own idea.

Which drug, sold over the counter as Pervitin, did German troops nickname 'Stuka tablets'?

Methamphetamine was prized for dulling pain and tiredness, but its side effects proved so serious that the German army sharply cut back its use in 1940.

Which American carmaker accepted the Grand Cross of the German Eagle on his 75th birthday?

Henry Ford received the highest honour the regime could give a foreigner in July 1938, having spent the 1920s publishing antisemitic articles in his newspaper, The Dearborn Independent.

Which country's navy did Adolf Hitler's Liverpool-born nephew William Patrick Hitler join in 1944?

The United States Navy took William Patrick Hitler as a pharmacist's mate; wounded in action, he earned a Purple Heart and changed his surname to Stuart-Houston once he was discharged.

What breed was Blondi, the dog Adolf Hitler kept beside him in the Berlin bunker in 1945?

German Shepherd Blondi came to Hitler as a puppy in 1941, and the day before his own death he had a cyanide capsule tried on her to be sure the poison worked.

Which German weapon, first fired at Paris and London in 1944, was the first practical ballistic missile?

The V-2 flew faster than sound, so it struck with no warning, and a vertical test launch in June 1944 made it the first artificial object to reach space.

Which was the only British territory in Europe that German forces occupied in the Second World War?

The Channel Islands were left undefended by Britain in June 1940, and their German garrison held out until 9 May 1945, a day after the war in Europe ended.

Which concentration camp, opened near Munich in March 1933, stayed in operation longer than any other?

Dachau took its first 200 prisoners into a disused munitions factory seven weeks after Hitler became chancellor, and it ran until American troops arrived in April 1945.

Which German cipher machine did Polish mathematicians first break in 1932, long before Bletchley Park?

Enigma began as a commercial product, on sale from 1923, and Marian Rejewski broke the military version in December 1932 using the mathematics of permutations.

At which Soviet city did Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus surrender the German Sixth Army in early 1943?

Stalingrad saw Paulus give himself up a day after Hitler promoted him to field marshal, a nudge to shoot himself, since no German officer of that rank had ever been captured alive.

What code name did Germany give its 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union?

Barbarossa, launched on 22 June 1941, became the largest military offensive in history, with around 10 million combatants taking part in its opening phase.

Which country joined Germany and Italy in signing the Tripartite Pact in Berlin in September 1940?

Japan signed through its envoy Saburō Kurusu, and the pact split the world in two: a new order in Europe for Germany and Italy, and Greater East Asia for Tokyo.

Which German-born diarist hid for two years in a secret Amsterdam annex and died at Bergen-Belsen?

Anne Frank was four when her family left Germany for Amsterdam to escape Hitler, and her father Otto honoured her wish to be an author by publishing the diary in 1947.

Which German industrialist saved about 1,200 Jews by employing them in his Kraków enamelware factory?

Oskar Schindler, a Nazi Party member and military intelligence agent, spent his entire fortune on bribes and black-market supplies to keep his workers alive.

Which Nobel physicist was visiting America when Hitler took power and never returned to Germany?

Albert Einstein sailed only as far as Antwerp, where he walked into the German consulate and handed back his passport, then settled for good at Princeton.

Which Nazi secret police, formed in Prussia in 1933, could hold suspects without judicial review?

The Gestapo got its name from a post office clerk, who shortened Geheime Staatspolizei, or secret state police, so that it would fit on a franking stamp.

Which baroque German city on the Elbe was gutted by a firestorm after Allied air raids in February 1945?

Dresden lost more than 1,600 acres of its centre to the fire, and Kurt Vonnegut, held there as a prisoner of war, drew on the raids for his novel Slaughterhouse-Five.

Which German-speaking border region did Britain and France hand to Hitler at Munich in 1938?

The Sudetenland held three million people, mainly ethnic Germans, and Czechoslovakia, the country that lost it, was shut out of the meeting that gave it away.

Which Basque town, bombed by Germany's Condor Legion in 1937, became the subject of a Picasso painting?

Guernica was hit on a Monday market day, with more than 10,000 people in town, in a raid flown for Franco's Nationalists during the Spanish Civil War.

Which German battleship sank HMS Hood in May 1941, only to be hunted down by the Royal Navy days later?

Bismarck was undone by a Swordfish biplane whose torpedo wrecked her steering gear, letting British warships close in as she limped towards occupied France for repairs.

Which deposed dictator did German glider troops snatch from a Gran Sasso mountain hotel in 1943?

Benito Mussolini was flown off the mountain in a tiny Storch spotter plane, and he went on to head the Italian Social Republic, a puppet state in German-occupied northern Italy.

Through which wooded region, judged impenetrable by French generals, did German tanks strike in May 1940?

The Ardennes had been declared impenetrable by Philippe Pétain, yet German armour pushed through, crossed the Meuse and cut off the Allied armies that had advanced into Belgium.

In which country did Mossad agents seize the fugitive Holocaust organiser Adolf Eichmann in May 1960?

Argentina had been his home since 1950, when he arrived on false papers as Ricardo Klement; flown to Israel, he was tried in Jerusalem and hanged in 1962.

Which occupied country's citizens ferried over 7,000 Jews by boat to neutral Sweden in October 1943?

Denmark was tipped off by a German diplomat, G. F. Duckwitz, who leaked word of the coming round-up, and 99% of the country's Jewish population survived the Holocaust.

Which star of German cinema spurned Nazi offers to come home and became an American citizen in 1939?

Marlene Dietrich toured the front for the USO in 1944 and 1945, performing for Allied soldiers from Algeria to Germany itself, and was awarded the Medal of Freedom in 1947.

Which composer's operas did Hitler travel to Bayreuth to hear, frequently and from 1923 onwards?

Richard Wagner was Hitler's passion but not his colleagues': the Nazi hierarchy resented having to sit through the lengthy operas at his insistence.

Which banned German force trained secretly at Lipetsk in Russia before Hitler unveiled it in 1935?

The Luftwaffe was officially established on 26 February 1935, about two weeks before Germany openly defied the Versailles Treaty by announcing rearmament and conscription.

Which euphemism did Nazi officials adopt as their code name for the plan to murder every Jew within reach?

The Final Solution was typical of a party whose normal way of talking about murder was euphemism, and by 1945 the plan had killed two-thirds of Europe's Jews.

Which rescue effort brought nearly 10,000 young refugees, most of them Jewish, to Britain in 1938 and 1939?

The Kindertransport ran with no numerical cap from the British government, and only the outbreak of war in September 1939 brought it to a halt.

At which July 1945 conference did Truman, Stalin and Churchill settle how defeated Germany would be run?

Potsdam opened with Churchill at the table and closed with Clement Attlee, who replaced him midway after winning Britain's general election.

Which household device did the regime sell in a cut-price model called the Volksempfänger from 1933?

A radio set costing 76 Reichsmarks, about two weeks' average pay, was built without shortwave bands, and tuning in to foreign stations became a crime once the war began.

At which East Prussian headquarters did a briefcase bomb wound Hitler on 20 July 1944?

The Wolf's Lair, hidden in the Masurian woods of what is now Poland, was where Hitler spent over 800 days, longer than anywhere else during the war.

Which Christian denomination, the first the Nazi government banned, refused to serve in its army?

Jehovah's Witnesses, unlike those persecuted for their race, could escape harm by signing a document renouncing their faith and pledging support for the German military.

The Cross of Honour of the German Mother, given in bronze, silver and gold, rewarded women for what?

Raising large families earned bronze for four children, silver for six and gold for eight, and the decoration was closed to Jewish mothers, who were not counted as full citizens.

Which cyanide-based pesticide, invented in 1920s Germany, was used to kill in the Auschwitz gas chambers?

Zyklon B, a trade name meaning Cyclone B, was hydrogen cyanide soaked into an absorbent such as diatomaceous earth, with an eye irritant added as a warning to its users.

Which code name covered the secret American scheme that hired more than 1,600 German scientists after the war?

Paperclip took on former Nazi Party members among its recruits, a compromise Washington accepted so that German expertise would not fall into Soviet hands.

Which chemical combine, once Europe's largest company, used slave labour from Auschwitz?

IG Farben was seized by the Allies in 1945 and split back into the firms whose merger had created it, among them BASF, Bayer, Hoechst and Agfa.

Which mobile death squads trailed the German army into the Soviet Union and shot over a million Jews?

Einsatzgruppen murdered 33,771 Jews in two days at Babi Yar, and with their auxiliaries they are estimated to have killed more than two million people in all.

Which carpenter hid a bomb in a pillar of Munich's Bürgerbräukeller in 1939, narrowly missing Hitler?

Georg Elser hollowed out a chamber in the brickwork behind the speaker's rostrum, but Hitler left earlier than expected and the blast killed eight other people instead.

In which sea was the liner Wilhelm Gustloff torpedoed in January 1945, the deadliest sinking on record?

The Baltic Sea claimed an estimated 9,343 lives when a Soviet submarine struck, many of them evacuees from East Prussia aboard a ship built as a workers' holiday cruise liner.

Which December 1941 directive made resistance suspects in occupied Europe vanish without trace?

Night and Fog targeted political activists and resistance helpers in the occupied territories, and those who vanished under it were often never heard from again.

Hitler's March 1945 order to destroy all German infrastructure is nicknamed after which Roman emperor?

Nero, blamed in an apocryphal story for starting the Great Fire of Rome, lent his name to a scorched-earth decree that Hitler's own armaments minister deliberately disobeyed.

Which camp, sold to elderly Jews as a 'spa town', was beautified to fool Red Cross inspectors in 1944?

Theresienstadt then became the set of a propaganda film about the 'city' Hitler had supposedly given the Jews, shot later that year and never distributed.

Which pope's 1937 encyclical on the myth of race and blood was smuggled into Germany and read from pulpits?

Pius XI broke with custom by issuing it in German rather than Latin, and it was read aloud on Palm Sunday, one of the busiest days in the church year.

Which currency did Sachsenhausen prisoners forge by the million in the Nazis' Operation Bernhard?

The pound sterling was faked to wreck Britain's economy, and so many forgeries circulated that the Bank of England issued a new design once the war was over.

Who staged Berlin's Rosenstrasse protest in 1943 outside a building holding about 1,800 arrested Jews?

Their wives, who were not Jewish, kept up the only mass public demonstration by Germans against the deportation of Jews for seven days, until the men were let go.

The Messerschmitt Me 262, nicknamed the Swallow, was the world's first operational example of what?

A jet fighter faster and more heavily armed than any Allied fighter, it arrived late partly because Hitler demanded that the interceptor be redesigned as a bomber.