War and Occupation

The Second World War changed the scale of Nazi rule. Before 1939, Nazi persecution had already stripped German Jews of rights and safety. After Germany invaded and occupied large areas of Europe, the regime controlled millions more Jewish people and many more non-German civilians. Occupation gave the Nazis territory, labour, food, railways, police powers and victims.

Germany's occupation of Europe was not the same everywhere. In much of western and northern Europe, existing administrations often continued under German control. In eastern Europe, especially Poland and the Soviet territories, Nazi rule was much more openly racial, violent and exploitative. This matters because the official row links Germany to "the occupied territories": genocide, forced labour and food exploitation were not side issues; they were part of how Nazi Germany fought the war.

Use this chronology as a spine:

So the story is a chain: conquest created occupied territories; occupation enabled racial policy and exploitation; defeat forced harsher home-front mobilisation; crisis encouraged some opposition; final collapse came through Allied military victory.

Ghettos and Genocide

Nazi policies towards Jewish people became more radical during the war. This did not happen because of one single order on one single day. It was an escalating process shaped by ideology, war, occupation and the Nazi state's willingness to use bureaucracy and violence together.

Ghettos were areas of towns and cities where Jews were forced to live, mainly in German-occupied eastern Europe. The Nazis used them to isolate Jewish communities from the non-Jewish population, seize property, control labour and prepare for later deportations. Conditions were deliberately destructive. Overcrowding, hunger, disease, cold and poor sanitation made survival extremely difficult.

Do not describe ghettos as simply "places where Jews lived". That makes them sound ordinary. A ghetto was a tool of persecution. It turned Nazi antisemitic ideology into daily control over food, movement, work, housing, health and life itself.

The next major escalation came with the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. Einsatzgruppen, or mobile killing squads, followed the German army. With help from SS units, police, army personnel, local collaborators and allied forces, they murdered Jews, Roma, Communist officials and Soviet civilians. Mass shootings such as Babi Yar near Kyiv showed that genocide in the East was carried out close to where victims lived, often with neighbours and local collaborators involved in identifying them.

The "Final Solution" was the Nazi code name for the planned genocide of European Jews. The Wannsee Conference on 20 January 1942 did not begin the murder of Jews; killings were already happening. Its importance was coordination. Senior Nazi Party and government officials discussed how deportations, transport, administration and SS killing centres would work together across German-occupied Europe. From 1942, deportation "to the east" often meant transport to killing centres in occupied Poland.

The key causation is this: Nazi ideology supplied the aim, war supplied the opportunity, occupation supplied the victims and territory, and the state bureaucracy supplied coordination. That combination made the Holocaust both violent and administrative.

Home Front

The Nazi regime remembered the First World War, when hunger and exhaustion had helped undermine morale in Germany. In 1939, it therefore tried to keep the German home front stable while fighting a war of conquest. This created a contradiction: the regime wanted more effort from civilians, but it also feared asking too much too soon.

Rationing began at the start of the war. Food cards limited access to items such as fat, meat, butter, milk, cheese and sugar, and clothing was controlled through a points system. Rationing was meant to organise scarcity and prevent panic. Yet it was unequal. "Aryan" Germans were shielded as far as possible, while Jews in Germany faced harsher discrimination, worse access to supplies and further public humiliation, including the compulsory yellow star from September 1941.

The German standard of living was also protected by exploiting occupied Europe. Food, raw materials and labour were taken from conquered territories, especially in the East. Millions of foreign and forced labourers worked in German agriculture, factories and armaments. This means the home front cannot be separated from occupation: one reason many Germans avoided the worst shortages early in the war was that others were being exploited much more brutally.

The role of women changed, but not as simply as "women entered work". Nazi ideology had promoted women as wives and mothers, and the regime was slower than Britain or the USA to mobilise women fully for wartime work. Even by September 1944, female employment was only slightly above the level of summer 1939. Still, the pressures of war changed women's lives. Women worked in agriculture, administration, transport, hospitals, air-raid services and some armaments production. Young women also faced compulsory Reich Labour Service and wartime auxiliary service.

"Total war" meant pushing the whole society more completely into the war effort. After the defeat at Stalingrad, Goebbels proclaimed total war in February 1943. From 1943-44, the regime closed non-essential businesses, extended working hours, restricted leisure, demanded more labour for armaments and later formed the Volkssturm from males aged 16 to 65. Total war was therefore both propaganda and policy: it tried to turn military crisis into more work, obedience and sacrifice.

For causation questions, link the changes to defeat. Germany did not fully mobilise because it was confident; it mobilised more harshly because the war was turning against it.

Allied Bombing

Allied bombing became one of the most visible pressures on the German home front. At first, bombing was more limited and aimed at military and industrial targets. Over time, the campaign grew into a huge strategic attack on Germany's ability to fight. Factories, railways, shipyards, oil targets, transport networks and city centres all became part of the bombing war.

The effects were immediate and long term:

Hamburg in July-August 1943 showed the destructive power of firebombing. Dresden in February 1945 showed how devastating late-war bombing could be, with massive destruction of housing and about 25,000 deaths. These examples should be used carefully. They show the severity of bombing, but they do not mean Germans were only victims in this war. The same regime was still carrying out occupation, forced labour, murder and genocide.

Bombing did not automatically produce rebellion. Some civilians became angry at the Allies; others lost confidence in Hitler; many focused simply on survival. The regime also used fear, censorship and police repression to prevent open criticism. A balanced judgement is that bombing seriously damaged the home front and war economy, but it did not by itself overthrow the Nazi regime.

Opposition to Hitler

Opposition to Hitler grew during the war, but it remained dangerous and fragmented. Nazi Germany was a police state with informers, censorship, the Gestapo, concentration camps and the People's Court. Many Germans supported the regime, adapted to it, feared it, or stayed silent. Opposition therefore took different forms, from youth non-conformity to moral protest to an attempted military coup.

The White Rose and July Plot are especially useful for judgement because their motives were not identical. The White Rose was a student-led moral protest that directly condemned Nazi crimes and apathy. The July plotters included officers and conservative civilians; some had supported aspects of German nationalism or the war earlier, but turned against Hitler as defeat and criminality became undeniable.

The July Bomb Plot failed partly because assassination and coup had to work together. Stauffenberg's bomb at the Wolf's Lair injured Hitler but did not kill him. In Berlin, Valkyrie orders were delayed, confused or countered. The conspirators did not secure radio communications, and many officers waited to see who had really won. Once Hitler was known to be alive, loyalty, fear and opportunism swung back towards the regime.

A strong consequence paragraph might argue: "The July Bomb Plot showed that opposition had reached parts of the army elite by 1944, but it also showed why opposition was unlikely to succeed. The conspirators needed Hitler dead, communications controlled and the army willing to obey them. When Hitler survived, the Nazi state used speed, propaganda and terror to isolate the plotters and restore control."

Death and Collapse

By 1945, the Third Reich was collapsing militarily. The western Allies had pushed into Germany after the Normandy landings and the Soviet Red Army advanced from the east. In January 1945, Germany was close to defeat; in April, Soviet forces encircled Berlin.

Hitler's final days showed the regime's failure. He remained in the Fuehrerbunker in Berlin while German civilians and soldiers faced destruction above ground. On 30 April 1945, Hitler and Eva Braun killed themselves. Berlin surrendered to Soviet forces on 2 May. German forces surrendered unconditionally in the west on 7 May and in the east on 9 May; VE Day was proclaimed on 8 May 1945.

Hitler's death did not cause Germany's defeat. It symbolised a defeat that had already become unavoidable. The Third Reich ended because Allied armies had destroyed Germany's ability to continue the war. Opposition weakened the image of total unity, bombing damaged cities and morale, and total war revealed desperation, but military defeat was decisive.

The final consequence was the end of Nazi rule in Europe. Germany was occupied by the Allies, the regime's crimes were exposed on a vast scale, and survivors of ghettos, camps, forced labour and bombing faced the aftermath of a war the Nazi state had begun. The "Thousand-Year Reich" had lasted twelve years.

For revision, remember the row as a connected sequence: