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The term great purge, an allusion to the French Revolution's Reign of Terror, was popularized by the historian Robert Conquest in his 1968 book The Great Terror. Following the death of Vladimir Lenin in 1924, a power vacuum opened in the Communist Party, the ruling party in the Soviet Union (USSR).
Nazi Germany, [h] officially known as the German Reich [i] and later the Greater German Reich, [j] is a term used 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.
As Hitler and the Nazi Party gained power in the early 1930s, his inner circle began to take shape. Many of these men held key positions within the Nazi government and played crucial roles in implementing Hitler‘s policies and carrying out his brutal agenda. One of the most powerful members of Hitler‘s inner circle was Heinrich Himmler, who ...
While Nazi propaganda manipulated mass opinion and paralyzed opponents, Nazi violence and terror guaranteed swift success in seizing power and implementing racist and political policy. Within a month of seizing power, in February of 1933, Hitler suspended all constitutional rights.
Adolf Hitler [a] (20 April 1889 – 30 April 1945) was an Austrian-born German politician who was the dictator of Nazi Germany from 1933 until his suicide in 1945. He rose to power as the leader of the Nazi Party, [c] becoming the chancellor in 1933 and then taking the title of Führer und Reichskanzler in 1934.
Third Reich, official Nazi designation for the regime in Germany from January 1933 to May 1945, as the presumed successor of the Holy Roman Empire (800–1806; First Reich) and the German Empire (1871–1918; Second Reich). Learn more about the history and significance of the Third Reich in this article.
Learn about the role of the SS, headed by Heinrich Himmler, in Adolf Hitler's reign of terror. (more) See all videos for this article. The son of a Roman Catholic secondary-school master, Himmler studied agriculture after World War I and joined rightist paramilitary organizations.
