German Reich (1933–1945)

Nazi Germany (also known as the German Reich, the Greater German Reich, the Third Reich, and the Thousand Year Reich) was a right-wing fascist dictatorship ruled by the Nazi party, which existed in Europe between 1933 and 1945. It was preceded by the Weimar Republic before its dissolution with the issuance of the Reichstag Fire Decree and the Enabling Act of 1933, which allowed for the then Chancellor of Germany Adolf Hitler to act outside of parliamentary control. The Nazi government would, over the course of its existence, aggressively expand into neighboring countries, ultimately resulting in the beginning of the Second World War with the Nazi Invasion of Poland. Internally, concentration camps were set up for the forced labor, detention, and execution of Jewish and Roma people, political prisoners, communists, socialists, and trade-union activists. A program of involuntary euthanasia was adopted for the state-sponsored mass murder of the disabled. This campaign of mass detention and extermination was based on pseudo-scientific racist, sexist, and anti-Semitic eugenic beliefs, which culminated in a systematic genocide commonly known as the Holocaust. With Hitler's suicide and the fall of Berlin, the German Instrument of Surrender legally declared the surrender and dissolution of Nazi Germany, which ended both the Holocaust and World War Two in Europe. The succeeding Allied Occupation of Germany would result in the creation of separate West and East German states.