Role of Prominent Individuals

Leni Riefenstahl

Propaganda director of Triumph des Willens (1935) on the 1934 Nazi Congress in Nuremberg, and Olympia (1938) on the 1936 Berlin Summer Games - grand Wagner music and endless crowds implementing Fuhrerprinzip and volkisch racial superiority

Goebbels' propaganda apparatus

Led the 10 May 1933 Book Burning; as President of the Reich Culture Chamber oversaw subsidised films such as The Eternal Jew; by 1939, 70% of households had volksempfanger radios, and loudspeakers were placed in factories and schools for broadcasting speeches

Goebbels' referendum success

The Law on the Head of State of the German Reich referendum (90% support) is used as evidence of his propaganda success

Gertrud Scholtz-Klink's public life

1936 speech: "the deepest calling we women have is: motherhood"; known as the "Reich Mother-in-Chief" - a model Aryan woman wearing a traditional German dirndl dress

Scholtz-Klink's Frauenschaft

The National Socialist Women's League introduced the "household year" before university study and created the Mother's Service - courses on childcare, cooking and sewing in Home-Mother Schools

Reich Bride School

1936 - fiancees of prominent SS members and senior officials were taught child care and polishing uniforms, and were required to swear oaths to Hitler

Himmler's terror apparatus

Chief of German Police in 1936; set up the first concentration camp at Dachau in March 1933 (25,000 political prisoners in Prussian camps by June); led the SS - Hitler's paramilitary, absorbing the Gestapo - which carried out the Night of the Long Knives, purging Rohm and 84 others

Kristallnacht

10 November 1938 - facilitated by the SS: a 1 billion mark fine on Jews, 200 synagogues destroyed, 100 killed, 25,000 sent to concentration camps

Goring as Minister of the Interior in Prussia

Handed the Gestapo over to Himmler and assembled "evidence" against Rohm; replaced locally elected officials with Gauleiters (Nazi leaders)

Goring's economic policy

As economic plenipotentiary, his 1936 Four Year Plans established the Hermann Goring Reich Works - an industrial conglomerate for steel, synthetic fuel oil and rubber to counteract potential blockades; by 1939 it was the largest European industrial enterprise, building on Schacht's 1934 New Plan using state work to reduce unemployment