In the land of the NAZI'S

BMW, Mercedes, Volkswagen, Porsche………

As a Mechanical Engineer and a lover of the Mean Machines these must be the words which should come to my mind on the name of The Federal Republic of Germany or it should be Albert Einstein, Max Planck, Karl Diesel………But there is some fancy about the name or I don’t know what; NAZI’S is the word which comes to my mind at first.

I was super excited about my three months official trip to Germany, but my enthu. was bitten hard first by the official delays to the trip and then after reaching Germany the sleepy town Offenbach (A small town near Frankfurt, where my company’s head office is situated) punched out all my remaining excitement. Cherry on the top; it rained throughout the weekend and drained down my plans of roaming around the bustling streets of Frankfurt.

Nothing much to do rather than watching TV (which majorly runs German channels) or reading something….. I choose the later, OK now, no rewards for guessing what I am reading; yes about German history, particularly about Hitler and Nazi’s movement. Earlier also when I was in Seoul I started reading about Adolf Hitler, but now I can’t recall why I stopped in-between and went on to reading about M.K. Gandhi (I don’t use Mahatma or Bapu for him as most Indians used to prefix it with; anyways that’s another topic I will tslk about some other day).  So, I was talking about Nazi’s.

First thing I read on the internet about Germany is that it is world's fourth largest economy by nominal GDP and the fifth largest by purchasing power parity and the second largest exporter and third largest importer of goods. I know it’s a developed country but still….. Amazing figures….. Anyways lets move on to the history…….

The strangest and funniest part of the NAZI history is its formation itself, you must read about it – In 1919 Anton Drexler founded DAP – German Workers Party; his party had strong nationalistic views and was anti-Semitic. The party had been looked as a potential socialist threat by the armed forces so they sent a police spy to investigate the impending danger, and the spy is none other then – ADOLF HITLER. In few months he became so fascinated by the party’s politics that he became an active participant in every event of the party and soon he rose to the top and named his party as Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (National Socialist German Workers' Party). The term Nazi was an acronym formed from the first syllable of National and the second syllable of SoZialist. And the other strange thing about Hitler which I got to know few years back is that he is not even a German, he was an Austrian.

The earlier manifesto of 25 points by NAZI Party, which I read on the internet, seems to be all right except 1 or 2 demands. But somehow at some point of time it went all wrong. The Nazi’s advocated the supremacy of the claimed Aryan master race over all other races. They claimed that the development of humanity depends on the Aryans and the Jews are the greatest threat to the Aryan race and led to the human holocaust specially Jews.

Hitler's foreign and domestic policies had the goal of seizing space for his people. He directed the invasion of Poland in September 1939, leading to the outbreak of World War II. Under Hitler's rule, in 1941 German forces occupied most of Europe and North Africa. By 1943, Hitler's erratic military decisions led to escalating defeats. In 1945 the Allied armies successfully invaded Germany. By then Hitler's supremacist and racially motivated policies had resulted in the systematic murder of eleven million people, including an estimated six million Jews (one million Jewish children, two million Jewish women and three million Jewish men).

In the final days of the war, during the Battle of Berlin in 1945, Hitler married his long-time mistress, Eva Braun. On 30 April 1945, two days later, the two committed suicide to avoid capture by the Red Army.

The basis for Hitler’s extreme hatred for Jews are still not clear, historians had given different reasons for it from ordinary prejudices to some relate it to the Germany’s defeat in World War-1* caused by Jews.

Presently I am reading Mein Kampf (My Struggle) a book by Adolf Hitler. He wrote the book while imprisoned after his failed putsch in Munich in November 1923. It’s a lengthy book (450 Pages), hope I will finish it soon and then will definitely let you guys know what are my findings about Hitler and his fundamentals.

* I don’t know anything about World War-1; will read about it some day.