NAZI GERMANY - A TO Z INDEX

ATLANTIS STORY MAP & OPERATION HOMEPAGE

'Operation Neptune' is an original story in the John Storm franchise, featuring the Lost City of Atlantis, extreme international climate change activism, involving nuclear submarines, including the discovery of Nazi Gold in a sunken U-Boat as a complication, and the struggle between protagonists and antagonists, as they each pursue their own objectives.

NATIONAL SOCIALIST PARTY

The German Nationalist Socialist Party ideals, the Nazi Party, soon gave way to outrageous world domination themes, and Adolf Hitler appointing himself the Chancellor who's word was law. Hence, a dictator, who had amazing speech making powers that mesmerized German audiences, into believing they were the master race, and invincible.

n 1919 a Munich locksmith named Anton Drexler founded the Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (DAP; German Workers’ Party). Political parties were still a relatively new phenomenon in Germany, and the DAP - renamed the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP; National Socialist German Workers’ Party, or Nazi Party) in 1920 - was one of several fringe players vying for influence in the early years of the Weimar Republic. It is entirely possible that the Nazis would have remained a regional party, struggling to gain recognition outside Bavaria, had it not been for the efforts of Adolf Hitler. Hitler joined the party shortly after its creation, and by July 1921 he had achieved nearly total control of the Nazi political and paramilitary apparatus.

To say that Hitler understood the value of language would be an enormous understatement. Propaganda played a significant role in his rise to power. To that end, he paid lip service to the tenets suggested by a name like National Socialist German Workers’ Party, but his primary - indeed, sole - focus was on achieving power whatever the cost and advancing his racist, anti-Semitic agenda. After the failure of the Beer Hall Putsch, in November 1923, Hitler became convinced that he needed to utilize the teetering democratic structures of the Weimar government to attain his goals.

Over the following years the brothers Otto and Gregor Strasser did much to grow the party by tying Hitler’s racist nationalism to socialist rhetoric that appealed to the suffering lower middle classes. In doing so, the Strassers also succeeded in expanding the Nazi reach beyond its traditional Bavarian base. By the late 1920s, however, with the German economy in free fall, Hitler had enlisted support from wealthy industrialists who sought to pursue avowedly anti-socialist policies. Otto Strasser soon recognized that the Nazis were neither a party of socialists nor a party of workers, and in 1930 he broke away to form the anti-capitalist Schwarze Front (Black Front). Gregor remained the head of the left wing of the Nazi Party, but the lot for the ideological soul of the party had been cast.

Hitler allied himself with leaders of German conservative and nationalist movements, and in January 1933 German President Paul von Hindenburg appointed him chancellor. Hitler’s Third Reich had been born, and it was entirely fascist in character. Within two months Hitler achieved full dictatorial power through the Enabling Act. In April 1933 communists, socialists, democrats, and Jews were purged from the German civil service, and trade unions were outlawed the following month. That July Hitler banned all political parties other than his own, and prominent members of the German Communist Party and the Social Democratic Party were arrested and imprisoned in concentration camps. Lest there be any remaining questions about the political character of the Nazi revolution, Hitler ordered the murder of Gregor Strasser, an act that was carried out on June 30, 1934, during the Night of the Long Knives. Any remaining traces of socialist thought in the Nazi Party had been extinguished.

Through the 1920s, Hitler gave speech after speech in which he stated that unemployment, rampant inflation, hunger and economic stagnation in postwar Germany would continue until there was a total revolution in German life. Most problems could be solved, he explained, if communists and Jews were driven from the nation. His fiery speeches swelled the ranks of the Nazi Party, especially among young, economically disadvantaged Germans.

Many dissatisfied former army officers in Munich also joined the Nazis, including Ernst Röhm, the man responsible for recruiting the Sturmabteilung (SA) “strong arm” squads that Hitler used to protect party meetings and attack opponents.

The group promoted German pride and anti-Semitism, and expressed dissatisfaction with the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, the 1919 peace settlement that ended World War I.

Sales of Hitler's political autobiography “Mein Kampf,” sometimes referred to as the bible of the Nazi Party, made him a millionaire. From 1933 to 1945, free copies were given to every newlywed German couple. But after World War II, the publication of “Mein Kampf” in Germany became illegal.

RISE TO POWER -PUSHING THE BOUNDARIES

In 1929, Germany’s Weimar Republic entered a period of severe economic depression and widespread unemployment. The Nazis capitalized on the situation by criticizing the ruling government and began to win elections. In the July 1932 elections, they captured 230 out of 608 seats in the “Reichstag,” or German parliament.

In January 1933, Hitler was appointed German chancellor and his Nazi government soon came to control every aspect of German life. Under Nazi rule, all other political parties were banned. 

Once Hitler gained control of the government, he directed Nazi Germany’s foreign policy toward undoing the Treaty of Versailles and restoring Germany’s standing in the world. He railed against the treaty’s redrawn map of Europe and argued it denied Germany - Europe’s most populous state - “living space” for its growing population.

Although the Treaty of Versailles was explicitly based on the principle of the self-determination of peoples, he pointed out that it had separated Germans from Germans by creating such new postwar states as Austria and Czechoslovakia, where many Germans lived.

INVASION OF POLAND - WORLD WAR TWO

From the mid- to late 1930s, Hitler undermined the postwar international order step by step. He withdrew Germany from the League of Nations in 1933, rebuilt German armed forces beyond what was permitted by the Treaty of Versailles, reoccupied the German Rhineland in 1936, annexed Austria in 1938 and invaded Czechoslovakia in 1939.

When Nazi Germany moved toward Poland, Great Britain and France countered further aggression by guaranteeing Polish security. Nevertheless, Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, and Great Britain and France declared war on Germany. Six years of Nazi Party foreign policy had ignited World War II.

THE HOLOCAUST

When Hitler and the Nazis came to power in 1933, they instituted a series of measures aimed at persecuting Germany’s Jewish citizens. By late 1938, Jews were banned from most public places in Germany. 

During the war, the Nazis’ anti-Jewish campaigns increased in scale and ferocity. In the invasion and occupation of Poland, German troops shot thousands of Polish Jews, confined many to ghettoes where they starved to death and began sending others to death camps in various parts of Poland, where they were either killed immediately or forced into slave labor.

In 1941, when Germany invaded the Soviet Union, Nazi death squads machine-gunned tens of thousands of Jews in the western regions of Soviet Russia.

In early 1942, at the Wannsee Conference near Berlin, the Nazi Party decided on the last phase of what it called the “Final Solution” of the “Jewish problem” and spelled out plans for the systematic murder of all European Jews in the Holocaust.

In 1942 and 1943, Jews in the western occupied countries including France and Belgium were deported by the thousands to the death camps mushrooming across Europe. In Poland, huge death camps such as Auschwitz began operating with ruthless efficiency.

The murder of Jews, communists, homosexuals, political prisoners and other people in German-occupied lands stopped only in last months of the war, as the German armies were retreating toward Berlin. By the time Hitler committed suicide in April 1945, some 6 million Jews had been killed.

NAZI WAR CRIMINALS

After Allied forces defeated Germany in World War II, Europe became a difficult place to be associated with Adolph Hitler’s Third Reich. Thousands of Nazi officers, high-ranking party members and collaborators - including many notorious war criminals - escaped across the Atlantic, finding refuge in South America, particularly in Argentina, Chile and Brazil.

Argentina, for one, was already home to hundreds of thousands of German immigrants and had maintained close ties to Germany during the war. After 1945, Argentine President Juan Perón, himself drawn to fascist ideologies, enlisted intelligence officers and diplomats to help establish “rat lines,” or escape routes via Spanish and Italian ports, for many in the Third Reich. Also giving aid: the Vatican in Rome, which in seeking to help Catholic war refugees also facilitated fleeing Nazis - sometimes knowingly, sometimes not.

As thousands of Nazis and their collaborators poured into the continent, a sympathetic and sophisticated network developed, easing the transition for those who came after. While there is no evidence that Hitler himself escaped his doomsday bunker and crossed the ocean, such a network could have helped make it possible.

OPERATION NEPTUNE CAST:

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In this fictional story, the characters and events are the product of the author's imagination.