NAZI PARTY | Birth, January 5, 1919

The original name of the Nazi Party, the
German Workers Party.

January 5, 2020 – This day in 1919, the German Workers' Party was created. Hitler joined it later in the year and it became his Nazi Party.

On September 12, 1919, Corporal Adolf Hitler was sent by the German Army to investigate the Workers’ Party, which by its name seemed to have Bolshevik leanings. 

Hitler was not impressed with the 25 people he found in the back of a Munich beer hall. He didn’t like what their leader said, and told them all so. https://www.historyplace.com/worldwar2/riseofhitler/joins.htm

The group, however, was impressed and invited him to join them. He did. The group became the Nazi Party. Within a year it had 2,000 members. In 1921, Hitler became its leader. https://www.history.com/topics/world-war-ii/nazi-party

By 1928, the Nazi Party had 100,000 members. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/true-story-reichstag-fire-and-nazis-rise-power-180962240/

The Crash of 1929 gave Hitler the opening he needed. By 1934, he became Germany’s dictator. https://nyctimetraveler.blogspot.com/2016/08/hitler-aug-19-becomes-president-and.html

TIME TRAVEL | A. E. (George William Russell), Irish Futurist Poet

George William Russell ("A.E.")

George William Russell was an Irish poet, born in Lurgan, Ulster on April 10, 1867. He used as his pseudonym the letters A.E., signifying the diphthong "AE" as in Aeon. 

The following notes are based primarily on the entry for A.E. by JC in the Internet Speculative Fiction Database, and the entry by JE and JC on A. E.'s friend Joseph James O’Neill.

Much of A.E.’s work reflects a mystical agenda that he shared with William Butler Yeats. In 1886 they helped found the Dublin Lodge of the Theosophical Society. 

A. E.'s first book was a collection of supernatural tales, The Mask of Apollo, and Other Stories, published by Whaley in Dublin and Macmillan in London in 1904.

I have a copy of the first edition of The Mask of Apollo, illustrated by hand by my mother, Hilda van Stockum, in 1956, when we had left Ireland (having lived in the Dublin area for three years 1951-54 and in Paris for one, 1954-55) and were living again in Montreal. I am thinking of publishing the book with my mother's drawings. The book itself is now in the public domain, but not my mother's drawings.

Another book by A.E., published 18 years later, is described by JC as "more coherent" than The Mask of Apollo. It is called The Interpreters (Macmillan, 1922), set in a great City in the indeterminate future, as a long-lived Pax Aeronautica dissolves into factional warfare involving great Airships; those captured in this schism then engage in philosophical debates.

In another, later book set in a future Ireland, The Avatars: A Futurist Fantasy (Macmillan, 1932), two supernatural beings hauntingly invoke a vision of a world less abandoned to materialism. Their seductive discourse draws the protagonists to "the margin of the Great Deep", as Monk Gibbon puts it. Gibbon’s long, informative essay on A.E.’s work introduces The Living Torch (collected, Macmillan, 1937), a posthumous volume of nonfiction. "The House of the Titans", the long narrative tale that dominates The House of the Titans and Other Poems (a chapter in Macmillan’s 1934 collection), inhabits similar territory.

A.E. wrote an introduction to Joseph James O'Neill's book Land Under England (1935). A. E. takes the book to be a Satire on Hitlerian totalitarianism, an impression strengthened on the appearance of Day of Wrath (1936), a Future-War novel which describes the destruction of civilization in 1952 by advanced aircraft following a coalition between Germany, Japan and China (see Pax Aeronautica; Yellow Peril). 

A. E. died at 68 in Bournemouth, Dorset, July 17, 1935, at the height of his powers.

WW2 | Sept. 1 – Hitler Invades Poland

September 1, 2017 – This day in 1939 Adolf Hitler invaded Poland. He had been aggressive before without provoking a response from the rest of Europe.

Hitler began his plan with a nonaggression pact with Poland in January 1934.

This pact was contravened five and a half years later – Hitler had just been buying time.  The pact was unpopular with his supporters, who resented the Versailles Treaty's giving former German provinces to Poland. Hitler, however, saw the nonaggression pact as a way to prevent a French-Polish military alliance against Germany before the Wehrmacht had rearmed.

In the second half of the 1930s, France and Britain pursued a policy of appeasement toward Germany. Public opinion (especially in Britain) was sympathetic to revising some territorial provisions of the Versailles treaty, and neither Britain nor France in 1938 was militarily prepared to fight the Nazis.  So Britain and France acquiesced to:

• German rearmament (1935-1937). 
• Remilitarization of the Rhineland (1936).
• Annexation of Austria (the Anschluss, March 1938). 
• Invasion of the Sudetenland and breakup of the Czechoslovak state (March 1939) in violation of Anglo-French guarantees of the integrity of rump Czechoslovakia in what is called the Munich agreement.

The invasion of Czechoslovakia was the last straw. France and Germany responded by guaranteeing the integrity of the Polish state. Hitler's shocking answer to that was   a nonaggression pact with Premier Josef Stalin in August 1939, partitioning Poland between the two powers, giving Germany the western third and enabling Hitler to attack Poland without fear of its defense by the Soviet Union.

One week after the surprise pact with Stalin, at 5:11 a.m., Hitler issued an order for the Wehrmacht to invade Poland, claiming that the Poles were preparing to invade Germany. In fact, the Wehrmacht was massing on the German side of Poland's western border and the Poles were simply moving their army to defend this border.

Britain and France declared war within two days, but it was too late. The German army launched its Blitzkrieg, its "lightning war."  From East Prussia and Germany in the north and Silesia and Slovakia in the south, more than 2,000 German tanks,covered by  more than 1,000 planes, broke through Polish defenses along the border. Within six days they took Krakow and within ten they were outside Warsaw. By early October, Poland had fallen. World War II was on.

HITLER | Aug. 19–Elected President and Führer

Hitler Feigns Respect for President von Hindenburg,
who dies later that day (August 2, 1934).

Already appointed Chancellor of Germany, Adolf Hitler on this day in 1934 is elected President.

Now holding both offices, he no longer had any constraint. Hitler's dictatorship was in place.

How Hitler Became Chancellor

Germany was a strong democracy in the 1920s, when the country was prospering, even though the terms of the Treaty of Versailles were onerous Hitler had some modest success exporting the loss of German face.

The country's democracy was destroyed step by step as Hitler appealed to a public that was demoralized by the loss of the war, the Treaty, and then the Crash of 1929:

• Hitler blamed German labor unions for hurting the economy and won financial backing from business leaders by promising to break them. 
• After the Crash of 1929, he attacked the Weimar Republic for failing to protect the German people from financial panics and high unemployment and promised the public a better deal. 
• In 1930 Hitler's support jumped to six million votes, 8 percent of the German vote, making the Nazi Party Germany's second-largest. 
• In the 1932 contest for President of Germany, an anti-Nazi coalition supported 84-year-old Paul von Hindenburg against Hitler. Although von Hindenburg was reelected, the Nazi share grew more than four-fold, to 37 percent.
• Now afraid of the growth of the Nazis, in January 1933, von Hindenburg–even though he had made clear he despised his opponent–sought to control Hitler by appointing him Chancellor.

How Hitler Became Dictator

Although now Chancellor, the appointed chief executive of Germany, he was not a dictator. He was subject to the elected President, to whom the Germany Army reported. This Having irritated Hitler and he went about eliminating constraints on his actions: 

• In February 1933, the Reichstag building, where the parliament met, suffered a fire. Hitler used this as an opportunity to call for another election. This time, Nazi police under Hermann Göring intimidated Nazi opponents. Even so, the Nazis and their allies won only a bare majority.
• Later in 1933, Hitler consolidated his power through the Enabling Act (Ermächtigungsgesetz). He started arresting and executing political opponents, and even purged the Nazis’ own SA paramilitary organization in a successful effort to win support from the German army. 
• August 2, 1934. Hitler visited President von Hindenburg to pay his respects.  A few hours later, von Hindenburg died. 
• After von Hindenburg's death, Hitler purged the Nazi Brown Shirts, his own storm troopers.
• On August 9, 1934, a plebiscite vote was held on August 19. Intimidation, admiration of job growth under Hitler, and fear of Communists, brought Hitler a 90 percent majority. Hitler decided to unite the chancellorship and presidency under the new title of Führer. He now controlled the army. His dictatorship was solidly in place.

IRELAND | June 24–Éamon de Valera Resigns

This day in 1973, Éamon de Valera resigned as President of Ireland. His personal survival to that age can be attributed to his birth in New York City! His birthplace seemed to be of little importance until his life was spared by the British after the 1916 Easter Rising, because of his U.S. citizenship.

He lived out his years in Blackrock and I could see the sentry box in front of his walled enclave every day when I bicycled in 1951-52 from our house–"Springfield", Sydney Avenue (as I remember the address)–to Blackrock College. I was in the junior school at Blackrock, Willow Park, being nine years old.

They started me out in a lower grade but realized that they main thing holding me back was not knowing the Irish language. Someone, possibly my mother, persuaded the Holy Ghost Fathers (C.S.Sp.) that learning Irish was not a priority for a typical U.S. citizen visitor not planning to spend the rest of his life in Ireland.

From my first days learning Irish I remember a few words like an cupán, meaning cup. When my instruction in Irish was ended, I was advanced one grade.

But I digress. When he resigned, de Valera was the world’s oldest statesman, 90 years old.

He was born in New York City in 1882 to a Spanish father and Irish mother. His father died when young Éamon was two years old. His mother couldn't look after him alone and so he was packed off to live with his mother’s family in County Limerick, Ireland. He attended the Royal University of Ireland, class of 1904 and obtained his degree in mathematics.

He became an important figure in the Irish-language revival movement and the independence movement. In 1913, he joined the armed Irish Volunteers, which advocated Ireland’s independence from Britain. In 1916 he participated, as mentioned, in the Easter Rising in Dublin. He was the last rebel leader to surrender and his life was spared because of his American birth. He was released from prison in 1917 under a general amnesty.

He then became president of the nationalist Sinn Fein Party. In May 1918, he was deported to England and imprisoned again, but in December 1918 Sinn Fein won an Irish national election, making him the unofficial leader of Ireland.

In February 1919, he escaped from jail and traveled to the United States, where he raised money for for the Irish Republican (independence) movement. When he returned to Ireland in 1920, Sinn Fein and the Irish Republican Army (IRA) were waging a guerrilla campaign against the British army. forces. In 1921, a truce was declared. The following year a group of Sinn Fein leaders including Arthur Griffith split with de Valera and signed a treaty with Britain that partitioned off the more Protestant counties in the north and let the rest of Ireland, Éire, be independent.

A civil war followed, with de Valera supporting the IRA against the Irish Free State (the new government of the autonomous south). He was imprisoned by William Cosgrave’s Irish Free State ministry. In 1924, he was released and two years later left Sinn Fein, forming Fianna Fail, which eight years later won control of the Dail Eireann, the Irish assembly.

So the same year that FDR was elected President, de Valera was elected Taoiseach, or Irish prime minister. For the next 16 years, de Valera pursued a policy of political separation from Great Britain, including the introduction of a new constitution in 1937 that declared Ireland the fully sovereign state of Éire. During World War II, he maintained a policy of neutrality but repressed anti-British intrigues within the IRA.

In 1948, de Valera narrowly lost reelection because the public was weary of his party’s long monopoly of power. Out of office, he toured the world advocating the unification and independence of Ireland. His successor as Taoiseach, John Costello, officially made Ireland an independent republic in 1949 but lost the prime minister’s office to de Valera in 1951. The seesaw continued–relative Irish economic prosperity in the 1940s declined in the 1950s, and Costello began a second ministry in 1954, replaced again by de Valera in 1957. In 1959, de Valera resigned as prime minister and was elected Irish president–a largely ceremonial post. On June 24, 1973, de Valera retired, and died two years later.

Comment

At the beginning of World War II my father was plucked from FDR's senior civil service by William ("Wild Bill") Donovan of the O.S.S. to Dublin to check on whether de Valera was assisting the British on intelligence issues despite Éire's official neutrality. My father's conclusion was that the Irish didn't like the Brits but they liked the Nazis even less and were cooperating fully with British intelligence.

One event that sanitized biographies omit is that de Valera went to the German Embassy in Dublin to sign the condolence book when Hitler died in his bunker. By this time the Nazis were defeated, with–from the perspective of the Allies–minimal involvement by Éire (although many from Éire signed up to serve in the British Army). The poke in the eye for Churchill and Britain obviously was designed to play well with de Valera's Irish Nationalist base, and did not reflect the Éire government's actions in the war years. However, even as a strictly political move it was extremely foolish. By this time the many atrocities propagated by Hitler were largely uncovered and his signing of the book was used to justify hostility to de Valera in Britain, the USA and the many other countries that contributed to defeating Hitler. This blot on de Valera's name will never be forgotten.

HITLER | Mar 5, 1933–Nazis Win and End Democracy

This post has been updated and superseded and replaced by this one:

http://cityeconomist.blogspot.com/2017/03/hitler-mar-5-1933-germany-elects-nazis.html

This post is maintained to preserve links.

TIME LINE | The Nazis in 1922, 1933

First mention of the Nazis.
 Link tweeted by Jon Ostrower.

Time Line

Nov. 22, 1922 | The New York Times writes that Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda is just a temporary gimmick to get attention.

Mar. 4, 1933 | FDR is inaugurated for the first time in USA.

Mar. 5, 1933 | Adolf Hitler votes in his last contested election.

HITLER | Mar. 5, 1933–Germany Elects Nazi Party

This post has been updated and superseded and replaced by this one:

http://cityeconomist.blogspot.com/2017/03/hitler-mar-5-1933-germany-elects-nazis.html

This post is maintained to preserve links.

WW2 | The Book Thief–#1 Book - Courage in a German Village

In WW2, People Fell Like Dominoes.

This afternoon, on the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camps by Soviet troops, Alice and I participated in a Book Discussion Group about The Book Thief by Markus Zusak.

The book, written in 2005, has a rating of about 4.4 out of 5 (ratings are updated every 5 minutes) on Goodreads.com and ranks as the #1 book for Young Adults on World War II.  The Diary of Ann Frank ranks #2). My copy of The Book Thief was from its 34th printing.

Like other books among the top ten on this list, The Book Thief has a female heroine, is based in a small community (a fictional village outside of Munich), and brings World War II down to a manageable scale. Like many YA books, it is a general bestseller, not just for the YA market.

In my review of the discussion, I start with the general themes and then drill down to the individual characters in the book.

Courage. All of us liked the stories showing the courage shown by the heroine, a 13-year-old German girl, Liesel Meminger, and her closest friends. The discussion group spent some time asking whether today's generation would show such courage or be willing to make sacrifices of the kind that people made in World War II. Some said no. But one of us pointed out that in the wake of the 9/11 attacks she saw widespread signs of selflessness - driving up the East Coast the week of September 11, she found flags flying at half mast in every little town, out of respect for the dead at the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and in the plane that went down in Pennsylvania. "Strangers were hugging each other in the street." "You don't know what people are made of until they are faced with the crisis." "Many people in World War II were reluctant heroes. Can you say no when the only person between someone else and certain death is you?"

How Could a Man Like Hitler Come to Power in an Educated Democracy? The group talked about how an evil, crazy man like Hitler could ever be elected in a democracy and command such an educated and traditionally tolerant country as Germany. I pointed out the special economic conditions in the years that Hitler came to power. Germany was devastated after World War I, and the Versailles Treaty imposed onerous reparations. Even so, the Nazis only got 2 percent of the vote in 1928. The following year the Crash of 1929 called into question of the reliability of democratic capitalism and made alternatives - Communism or Nazism - look like possible solutions. The Nazi Party got 18 percent of the vote in 1930 and twice that in 1932. When Paul von Hindenburg was reelected President in 1932, he invited Hitler (whom he despised) to help him form a government, and he made Hitler Chancellor as of January 1933. Within a few months von Hindenburg agreed to the Enabling Act that allowed Hitler and his Cabinet to pass laws. One day before von Hindenburg died on August 2, 1934, Hitler went a step further (in violation of the Enabling Act) and dissolved the Office of the President, making himself the Führer. Democracy in Germany was then kaput.

How Could So Many Germans Become Nazis?  Someone brought up the blue-eyed vs. brown-eyed experiment that Jane Elliott tried in her third-grade class starting the day after Martin Luther King was assassinated in 1968. The exercise showed how powerful and destructive it was to divide people up according to criteria that they could not control, and make some people inferior. It turns out to be  easy for those on the favored side to accept their privileged position. Once the rules are in place, it is hard for the unfavored group to fight their inferior status.

The Importance of Meaning to Life Beyond Work. A member of the group brought up the work of Viktor E. Frankl, an Austrian Jewish doctor who had been involved in suicide-prevention work in Vienna before WW2 and the Holocaust. He spent much of the war in concentration camps and sought to find a common denominator to explain what kept some people in the camps alive longer than others. My mother used to tell me, based on stories from her relatives during and after the war, that those more likely to survive were people with a religion. Frankl generalized that to people who had meaning in their lives. In a beautiful piece of writing, he describes how he and another prisoner marching miles in the freezing cold held on to thoughts about their wives.

We stumbled on in the darkness, over big stones and through large puddles, along the one road leading from the camp. The accompanying guards kept shouting at us and driving us with the butts of their rifles. Anyone with very sore feet supported himself on his neighbor's arm. Hardly a word was spoken; the icy wind did not encourage talk. Hiding his mouth behind his upturned collar, the man marching next to me whispered suddenly: "If our wives could see us now! I do hope they are better off in their camps and don't know what is happening to us." That brought thoughts of my own wife to mind. And as we stumbled on for miles, slipping on icy spots, supporting each other time and again, dragging one another up and onward, nothing was said, but we both knew: each of us was thinking of his wife. Occasionally I looked at the sky, where the stars were fading and the pink light of the morning was beginning to spread behind a dark bank of clouds. But my mind clung to my wife's image, imagining it with an uncanny acuteness. I heard her answering me, saw her smile, her frank and encouraging look. Real or not, her look was then more luminous than the sun which was beginning to rise. A thought transfixed me: for the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth – that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which Man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of Man is through love and in love.

After the war, Frankl coined the term "Sunday Neurosis" to describe people who suffer from the illness of having only one purpose in life, their job, arbeit.

The Heroine, Liesel. The discussion group focused on Liesel Meminger's determination to read, the importance to her of words, and the fact that she never would kiss the boy she loved. She is reluctant to put her love in words or express her feelings, except her passion to understand words.  She shows great love and loyalty for her brother who dies, her foster father, the Jewish man (Max) they hide from the Nazis, and her best friend, Rudy. She is fearless when confronted with bullying, and stands up to a bigger boy in a famous fist fight. Our group liked the fact that the heroine was a girl of 13-14, and was German. As one person said, "it shows that all Germans were not bad people".  Ironically, Liesel is obsessed with books but won't accept a book as a gift. She starts as a book thief when her brother dies and she steals The Grave Digger’s Handbook from the cemetery as a remembrance of her younger brother, who died - it was her only souvenir of his burial, of him, the only thing she could pick up as she was dragged away. Ironically, she stole something she couldn’t use, because she couldn’t read. Also, she usually wants to do the right thing, but the only way she wants to acquire new books is to steal them.

The Village. The group liked the fact that the story was told from the perspective of a small village, Molching, with its neighborhoods (Himmel Street was not the best part of town) and characters - the Nazi baker, the Hitler Youth enthusiasts, the Mayor and his wife. Interestingly, although the book is informed by strong religious allegories, there is no rabbi or priest.  At one point Jews march in a parade reminiscent of a Passion Play. Someone tries to help and a Nazi soldier responds by beating both the Jewish prisoner and the villager who shows compassion, in a scene that for me echoes Veronica's intervention in the Way of the Cross, or that of Simon of Cyrene, except that Simon was actually recruited by a  Roman soldier either as an act of mercy or to speed things up.

Death, The Narrator. The group liked the narration by Death, who comes across as a busy man at first and starts in by complaining about the exhaustion of his job in World War II, with so many souls to carry away. The narrator seems bored by most of the souls, and only a few get his attention; Liesel is one of the ones he finds most memorable. He sums up individual lives, even comments on the entire human race. Death states, “I’m always finding humans at their best and worst. I see their ugly and their beauty, and I wonder how the same thing can be both” (p. 491). Death is constantly admiring colors in the sky.

The Hubermanns.  Liesel's foster parents (misidentified by one commentator as adoptive parents, but they were paid by the state to take Liesel in) are in one way opposites. Rosa has a loud mouth and uses strong words, but the subtext can be kindly. When Rosa comes to Liesel's school she shouts to hide her true message. That scene is deeply moving. Hans Hubermann is more passive. But both are loving - Rosa, through her actions, and Hans though his decency, patience, empathy and generosity. Ironically, Hans’s life is saved first by his handwriting (paralleling Liesel’s inability to read), by a broken leg, and by someone pre-empting his seat. Hans is a house painter, but the only colors in use in the war are black (for the blackout blinds) and white (for Max to paint over pages of Mein Kampf). When Hans first finds The Grave Digger's Handbook he immediately understands why it means so much to Liesel, which shows his compassion for her own loss.

Max Vandenburg. Max is the son of a man that Hans Hubermann served with in the German military in World War I, Erik Vandenburg. Hans had never before met the son, but told Max's father that he would be available if ever needed, and Max was given that information by his father. Max was desperate because under the Nazi regime he was being hunted as a Jew. He was dependent on the Hubermanns for his life, his food, his shelter. He has a loving nature and a poetic spirit, and he is full of gratitude for being protected. But he feels he is a burden and is apologetic about it. Mein Kampf saves Max’s life and enables him to write.

Rudy Steiner.  Rudy, Liesel's love interest, is reckless, competitive, passionate and a good friend. The final scene where Liesel kisses him in death the author says was the hardest for him to write.

Mrs. Hermann. The Mayor's wife is desperate over the loss of her son, and shows compassion for Liesel.

The Book Thief costs $13 in hardcover and $8 in paperback, but you don't need to steal it because many used copies are available for under $2.

November 9 - Kristallnacht, the Public Start of Hitler's Holocaust

The morning after Kristallnacht... Hitler's murderous
Holocaust was now without fear and in full view.

Today is the 75th anniversary of Kristallnacht (Crystal-night, "the night of broken glass"). In 1938 the Nazis coordinated an attack throughout Germany on Jewish homes, businesses, and synagogues - as Garrison Keillor has reminded us in The Writer's Almanac.

My brother Randal Marlin has just issued a second edition of his book on Propaganda, and I was interested to see how the Kristallnacht attacks as outlined by Keillor follow the Propaganda playbook.

1. The attacks were inspired by the murder of a German diplomat by a Jew in Paris. When Hitler heard the news, he decided to use the event to stage a mass uprising in response. (Playbook: Milk events for propaganda purposes.)

2. He and Joseph Goebbels contacted storm troopers throughout Germany and told them to attack Jewish buildings, making the attacks look like spontaneous demonstrations. (Playbook: Stir up public resentment, or fake it.)

3. The police were told not to interfere with the demonstrators, but instead to arrest the Jewish victims! (Playbook: Accuse the victims.)

4. Similarly, firefighters were told only to put out fires in any adjacent non-Jewish properties. (Playbook: Do not protect the victims.)

Everyone cooperated. In all, more than 1,000 synagogues were burned or destroyed. Rioters looted 7,500 Jewish businesses and vandalized Jewish hospitals, homes, schools, and cemeteries. Many of the attackers were neighbors of the victims.

To pile injury on injury:

1. The Nazis confiscated any compensation claims that insurance companies paid to the Jews who lost their property.

2. They imposed a huge collective fine on the Jewish community for the crime of having incited the violence by the murder of the diplomat.

3. They barred Jews from schools and most public places, and forced them to adhere to new curfews.

4. In the days following, thousands of Jews were sent to concentration camps. Kristallnacht was the opening shot of the Holocaust. Before that night, the Nazis killed people secretly. Afterwards, the Nazis persecuted and killed Jews openly, because the propaganda ensured that public opinion would be against anyone who tried to stop them. I contacted my brother for his views on Kristallnacht. He said:

What a terrifying time it must have been to be Jew at that time, recognizing that you had no protection from lawless violence. What needs attention is the original statement of Nazi party principles. They made it quite clear that Jews were not citizens of Germany and were without civic standing regarding voting and other civic rights that we today take for granted. That was back in the early 1920s. The moral for us today is to wake up and see what is happening with respect to erosion of the principle of rule of law, and not to allow it to decay any further.

To document what my brother says about the Nazi party origins, I found a timeline used in schools for teaching about the Holocaust. It shows that the Nazi principles were developed in 1923-25.

• In 1923, the Nazis attempted to take over Munich and failed. In a 24-day trial, Hitler gained the sympathy of the judges and some of the public, and his fellow Nazis were given a light sentence. At this point, the Nazis were a small group on trial, and no one feared them. In prison, Hitler wrote Mein Kampf, which laid out the Nazi principles of German pride, and enmity to Jews and Bolsheviks in Germany and worldwide.
• In 1925, Hitler's book was published after he emerged from prison and started reconstituting the Nazi party under his sole leadership.
• In 1928, Hitler's party got 2.6 percent of the vote. 
• In 1929, the worldwide crash occurred, followed by the Great Depression. This threw the German government into confusion and provided an opportunity for Hitler to exploit public distress. 
• In 1930 Hitler's support leaped to 18 percent of the vote.
• In 1932, Hitler got 37 percent. 
• In 1933, President Paul von Hindenburg -- reelected the previous year, but aging and at his wit's end -- appointed Hitler as Chancellor. The Nazis moved in, establishing a police state, step by step. Albert Einstein was in USA, decided not to return to Germany after his German residences were ransacked. 
• In March 1938, Hitler annexed Austria without bloodshed. 
• In October 1938, having threatened Neville Chamberlain's Britain with war, the Western powers looked away as Germany marched into the Sudetenland and carved up Czechoslovakia.
• In November, convinced by now that Western governments were paper tigers, Hitler initiated the Holocaust with Kristallnacht.

Life among the Gypsies - Before WWII

"Kids in Wagon" - one of 34 photos

in exhibit of Gypsy Life.

The Center is presenting through the end of 2013 a collection of black and white photographs by Jan Yoors (1922-1977), a middle-class Belgian who lived for years with a band of Romanies and documented scenes from their daily lives. 

Yoors's 34 photographs constitute one of the few first-hand representations of Romani culture, which was one of the first targets of Adolph Hitler's regime.

The Anne Frank Center will exhibit the photographs 10 am to 5 pm through Jan. 3, 2014. Access to the exhibition is included with general admission to the Center. The Center is closed on Sundays, Monday, and holidays.

Hilda van Stockum wrote a fictionalized story about Romani life in Ireland around the same time, under the title Penengro. 

WW2 | Sept. 1–Hitler Invades Poland

By prior agreement, Hitler let Stalin take the eastern two-thirds of Poland.

At 5:11 a.m. today in 1939, Hitler issued the order for his army to invade Poland.

Hitler said he was responding to Polish provocation, but Polish troops were reacting to a German troop buildup on their western border.

The German invasion began one week after Stalin and Hitler put aside their animosities temporarily and agreed to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, dividing up Poland between Germany and the Soviet Union.

In his "Soldier's Creed", Willem van Stockum cited the

motivation of a soldier as defending "one Polish urchin" 

rather than a dream of a postwar Utopia

Britain and France entered the war after two days on behalf of Poland.

But the German army unleashed its Blitzkrieg, or "lightning war". In six days they had taken Krakow, in ten they were outside Warsaw.

The Soviet invasion commenced 16 days later, on Sept. 17, 1939.

The campaign ended on Oct. 6, 1939 with the total division and annexations of Poland.