William II succeeded Frederick III in 1888. He dismissed Bismarck and built the country into a military nation. In 1914 Germany backed Austria against Russia and launched World War I (see World War I). Defeat came in 1918, however, and William II abdicated. Under the Treaty of Versailles, Germany ceded land to France, Belgium, Denmark, Poland, Lithuania, and Czechoslovakia. It also lost its colonies.
The German people in 1919 elected a national assembly. At Weimar it drew up a constitution for a democratic republic, and Friedrich Ebert was elected the first president. Unemployment and hunger mounted. In the Treaty of Rapallo of 1922, the new Soviet Union waived war reparations, but the following year France occupied the Ruhr when reparations lagged. Inflation soared until a thousand billion marks equaled one prewar mark.
In 1924 the Allies aided Germany with the Dawes Plan on reparations. The following year President Ebert died, and Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg succeeded him. Germany signed a nonaggression pact at Locarno, Switzerland, and in 1926 joined the League of Nations. The Young Plan in 1929 fixed the amount of reparations to less than one third of the original amount.
Germany's prosperity remained unsound. It was based too much on foreign credit. The stock-market crash in 1929 plunged the whole world into a severe depression. It was only a one-year moratorium on debts in 1931 that saved Germany from bankruptcy.
During the depression Adolf Hitler and his Nazi party rose to power (see Hitler, Adolf). Hindenburg was reelected president in 1932, but the next year he appointed Hitler chancellor.
When the Reichstag building burned in a mysterious fire (probably started by the Nazis themselves), Hitler blamed the Communists. He forced through the Enabling Act, which provided a constitutional basis for his dictatorship. The Länder, or states, lost their powers, and the Nazi party was the only political party allowed.
In a blood purge of 1934 many party leaders were executed for an alleged plot against Hitler. When Hindenburg died, Hitler abolished the office of president and took the title Führer, or leader.
The totalitarian police state increased in power. Heinrich Himmler was chief of the Gestapo, or secret police. Joseph Goebbels directed the propaganda ministry. Cultural institutions, including the press, theater, and arts, were regimented. Schools and the Hitler Youth indoctrinated young people.
The Nazis persecuted both Roman Catholic and Protestant churches, and the infamous Nuremberg Laws of 1935 deprived Jews of citizenship. The infamous Kristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass) in 1938, during which many Jews and their property were brutally attacked, ushered in a new and more violent phase of their persecution, and the Jewish property that was left undestroyed was confiscated.
Hitler talked peace but prepared for war. In 1933 Germany withdrew from the League of Nations. It repudiated the Treaty of Versailles in 1935 and began rearming. Universal military training was restored.
Hitler denounced the Locarno Pact in 1936 and marched into the Rhineland. Germany formed a Berlin-Rome Axis with Italy. During the Spanish Civil War, Germany aided Francisco Franco and tested its new weapons. By 1938 Hitler had the most powerful mechanized army and largest air force in the world.
