German History 1933-45 Trivia Quiz

Answer: True

Hitler's appointment as Chancellor was made in accordance with the constitution. However, it was surrounded by much scheming and intrigue - on a scale that other appointments to the Chancellorship had not. It is also amazing that the man appointed to such high office had been a German citizen for only eleven months and had never previously held any public office whatsoever, but there was nothing in the constitution to prevent this.

Answer: It created a sense of panic and allowed the government to assume drastic emergency powers

The Nazis accused Communists of having started the fire, and five Communists were tried for arson in 1933. Of these, four were acquitted and only one - a feeble-minded individual - was convicted. The fire provided an excuse for a massive extension of rule by decree and for detention without trial.

Answer: Rule by decree without even the need for assent by the President

Provision for the suspension of democracy and for rule by decree, with almost no safeguards, was a well known feature of the Weimar constitution.

Answer: The SA (Stormtroopers)

Later, it was the SS and its various subsidiary organizations that were chiefly responsible for terror, though the SA was occasionally mobilized, too.

Answer: Gestapo

This was an abbreviation of the full name - 'Geheime Staatspolizei', which means 'Secret State (that is, government) Police' ('GEheime STAatsPOlizei'). Later, the term was later was often used loosely to denote the entire Nazi terror machine.

Answer: True

The term 'Nazi' was a hostile nickname, rather like 'Commie' for 'Communist'. They referred to themselves as 'Nationalsozialisten' ('National Socialists'). Moreover, in some southern Bavarian dialects the word 'Nazi' was already in use in the sense of a 'clumsy person, buffoon'!

Answer: April 1933

The decrees of April 1933 banned most Jews from public life and from employment in the public sector. There followed a further 430 antisemitic decrees. Even before that Stormtroopers had beaten up some Jews (and people who looked stereotypically Jewish).

Answer: The SA (Stormtroopers)

The SA (Sturm-Abteilung) under Captain Roehm amounted to a small army and was the only organization within the Party that was in a position to challenge Hitler's leadership. After the 'Night of the Long Knives' it became a relatively unimportant mass organization. The exercise of terror passed to the SS and the Gestapo.

Answer: Himmler

The first political head of the Gestapo was Goering. In 1934-36 Himmler, with the assistance of the energetic Heydrich, managed to combine the entire terror apparatus under his personal control. By 1936, Nazi Germany had a very powerful 'terror lobby', keen to get more and more power.

Answer: Dachau

In March 1933 a profusion of 'wildcat' concentration camps sprang up, but most of them were closed down by the late summer of 1933. Later, other permanent concentration camps were established in growing numbers. These early concentration camps were intended primarily for opponents of the Nazi regime. Auschwitz and Treblinka were established in 1940 and 1942 respectively on Polish territory. For the greater part, these two latter camps were extermination camps.

Answer: Switzerland

It is not surprising that a nation that attacked country after country after country ultimately found itself confronted by an invincible alliance.

Answer: Poland

Britain had a treaty with Poland undertaking to assist the latter country if its independence was threatened by force. This meant that any invasion of Poland would result in a major war.

Answer: 1941

Traditionally, many popular histories have taken the Wannsee Conference (20 January 1942) as the start of the Holocaust. However, the systematic, mass extermination of the Jews began within days of the attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941. Mobile killing units (SD-Einsatzgruppen), later supplemented by local volunteers and units of the regular army, rounded up and shot Jews once territory had been taken. Late in 1941 routine large-scale gassings started at Chelmno (Kulmhof) and soon after that extermination camps were set up at Auschwitz II, Treblinka II, Majdanek, Sobibor and Belzec. Before this many Jews had died of starvation and ill-treatment and had been murdered in mass open-air shootings.

Answer: Stalingrad

Stalingrad has been renamed Volgograd, but the name of this Soviet victory remains unchanged.

This is a common perception in Europe. However, many military historians place the date earlier, with the Battle of Moscow (1941-42). The failure of the German Army to take Moscow at that time, the failure of blitzkrieg tactics against the Soviet Union, especially combined with the German declaration of war against the U.S., meant that Germany was going to find itself fighting a war of attrition, something it was not well placed to do.
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Please do NOT send corrections to say that Russia is not in Europe. If you really find it hard to accept that a large part of Russia is in Europe, please look the matter up online.

Answer: False

Most Germans were glad that the fighting was over, but that's not the same thing as liberation. Moreover, conditions following the defeat of Germany were wretched and hardly felt like liberation for most.
That said, with the start of the Cold War and especially with the Berlin Airlift of 1948-49, West Germans became for the most part pro-Western. Moreover, in the longer run they confronted the country's past. The contrast with Japan is very striking indeed.