Overview on the History of National Socialism in Munich
National Socialism began in Munich, where Anton Drexler and Karl Harrer founded the DAP, the German Workers’ Party in 1919. The same year, Adolf Hitler became a member. In 1920 the party was renamed the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, or NSDAP. In the 1920s, Munich was a hub of anti-democratic tendencies, where populist nationalist ideas, a preference for authoritarianism and resentment of everything modern were particularly widespread. The propaganda of the NSDAP thus fell on fertile soil in Munich. The party became a reservoir of rightwing extremists, while it also received cultural and financial support from sections of the upper middle-classes.
On 9 November 1923 a putsch by militant and anti-Semitic forces under the leadership of Adolf Hitler was quelled. Nevertheless, the National Socialists gained considerably in popularity, also in part due to the lenient sentence given to Hitler and his supporters by the Bavarian justice at the subsequent trial. Hitler became a figure of hope for a “national rising”. He used the detention in Landsberg fortress to write his book “Mein Kampf” (My Struggle). But even after the ban placed on the party was lifted in 1925, the NSDAP remained a splinter party at first. Its primary objective now was to set up a national party structure with an organizational headquarters in Munich.
After Adolf Hitler was appointed Reichskanzler on 30 January 1933, Munich played a prominent role in the organisation and self-portrayal of the Nazi regime. Hitler gave Munich the bynames 'Capital of German Art’ (in 1933) and 'Capital of the Movement' (in 1935). In the new 'House of German Art’, an essentially retrogressive concept of art was idealised. Modern artists were discredited in the exhibition of so-called 'Degenerate Art’. Around the square at Königsplatz, a spaciously laid-out administrative district with central organs and branch offices of the Nazi party emerged. During march-pasts and pseudo-religious cult celebrations, Munich served as the backdrop for the Nazi regime’s rites of self-portrayal. The signing of the 'Munich Agreement' on 29 September 1938, made the city the stage for the aggressive foreign policy of Nazi Germany. The treaty decreed that Czechoslovakia – without being consulted – had to cede the Sudetenland to the German Reich.
Munich played a major role in setting up the Nazi system of concentration camps. As early as March 1933, one of Germany’s first concentration camps was built in Dachau on the outskirts of Munich. The camp served as a prototype for almost all other concentration camps, including the mass extermination camp at Auschwitz. In the main hall of the Old Town Hall, Josef Goebbels prompted the Night of Pogroms of 9 November 1938, marking a new peak in the deprivation of rights, the dispossession, persecution and expulsion of Germany’s Jewish population and to be followed by the systematic murder of Europe’s Jewry.
During the Second World War, Munich became a centre of the German armaments industry. In order to maintain production, more than 40,000 foreigners were pressed into service as forced labour, about one third of them women. They were housed in primitive barrack-style camps, some of them serving as feeder camps for the concentration camp in Dachau.
On 29 April 1945, American soldiers liberated the concentration camp in Dachau, moving on to take Munich the following day. The capitulation of the German Armed Forces on 8 May 1945 finally marked the end of the Third Reich. Meanwhile, Munich itself lay in ruins. Allied air raids had destroyed 90 per cent of the Old Town and left 300,000 inhabitants homeless. After the end of the war, many former concentration camp inmates, forced labourers, prisoners of war and refugees assembled in Munich. Only a small number of Jews had survived the extermination camps. Before the Nazi era, there had been 12,000 members of the Israelite Religious Community of Munich. By the end of 1945, there were only 300 members left. The victims of Nazi terrorism tried to find a way back to some kind of normality barely possible in view of the chaotic circumstances and the misery they had suffered. The post-1945 aftermath of the Nazi regime differed greatly depending on how people had experienced, survived or actively contributed to the Nazi era.
Also see: ThemenGeschichtsPfad "National Socialism in Munich"
