National Socialism, World War II and the Holocaust (1933–1945)
The exam tests your ability to explain how a pluralistic republic was transformed within months into a dictatorship, how persecution escalated into industrial mass murder, and how war, occupation and genocide were interconnected - supported by source evidence rather than moral assertion.
Core rules and concepts
- 1933–34 Machtergreifung/Gleichschaltung: Reichstag Fire Decree (28 February 1933), Enabling Act (24 March 1933), law against the formation of parties (14 July 1933), Röhm purge 1934, death of Hindenburg and the merging of Reich President and Chancellor offices.
- Legal and social exclusion: Nuremberg Laws (15 September 1935) defining "Reichsbürger" and forbidding marriages between Jews and "Aryans"; November Pogrom (9–10 November 1938); the Volksgemeinschaft as an inclusion–exclusion mechanism.
- War: Blitzkrieg 1939–41, Operation Barbarossa from 22 June 1941, turning points Stalingrad and El Alamein 1942–43, total war declaration 1943, unconditional surrender 8 May 1945.
- Holocaust: ghettoisation in occupied Poland from 1939, Einsatzgruppen shootings after June 1941, Wannsee Conference of 20 January 1942 as a coordination step, extermination camps (Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, Sobibór), industrial killing by gas; deportations from France (Vél' d'Hiv', July 1942) and Germany.
- Interpretive disputes: intentionalism versus functionalism/structuralism; the Goldhagen–Browning debate on perpetrator motivation; the Historikerstreit of 1986–87 on comparability; research on Wehrmacht complicity.
Worked example
Source: the Wannsee protocol of 20 January 1942 speaks of "evacuation" of Jews to the East and of "appropriate treatment" in labour columns. Reasoning: (1) Provenance: minutes by Eichmann, bureaucratic language, distributed to state secretaries. (2) Content and intention: euphemism conceals intent; the document presumes a programme already under way. (3) Evaluation: it coordinates a genocide in progress rather than initiating it - evidence against a purely "one decision in 1941" reading and against the claim that murder began only in 1942. (4) Contextualisation: read with Einsatzgruppen reports and deportation timetables.
Traps that cost marks
- Presenting the Holocaust as a single decision instead of an escalating process.
- Treating the "clean Wehrmacht" myth as fact.
- Moral condemnation without source evidence or causal argument.
- Confusing camps: concentration camps (1933–) versus extermination camps (1941–42).