Summary — The Big Picture

1. Opposition to the Nazi Regime

Did more people support than oppose the Nazis?

Here's the key thing to hold onto: this isn't a simple yes/no question — and that's exactly why it's a favourite exam topic. The honest answer is "mostly yes, but with important exceptions," and a good answer shows both sides.

Think of it like a light switch with a dimmer, not an on/off switch. From 1933–1939, the "support dial" was turned up high: Hitler had genuinely won large vote shares even before the Enabling Act removed political opposition (36% in the second 1932 presidential election, 38% for the Nazi Party in July 1932). Once in power, the Nazis delivered things people wanted — falling unemployment, national pride restored, youth groups that felt exciting and purposeful, rewards for women who had children, and a constant stream of propaganda showing only success. Four million people joined the Nazi Party between 1933 and 1939. That's not just fear — a huge amount of it was real belief.

But underneath that dial, there was always a layer of quiet resistance. Resistance came from surprisingly varied places — trade unions, political groups operating in secret, disillusioned young people, conservative army officers, and members of both the Catholic and Protestant churches. The crucial word here is "private." It was incredibly dangerous to oppose the Nazis openly, so almost all resistance stayed hidden — a whispered joke, a refused salute, a secretly passed pamphlet. Public, organised opposition was rare precisely because the Nazis had eliminated it so effectively by mid-1933 (all other political parties and trade unions banned by July 1933) and violently purged rivals within their own movement during the Night of the Long Knives (1934).

1943 is the hinge point to remember. Once Germany started losing the war badly (after the failure of Operation Barbarossa and the disaster at Stalingrad), the "support dial" started swinging back towards opposition — from ordinary citizens, and eventually from within the army itself.

Who opposed the Nazis, and how?

Rather than memorising a wall of facts, group the opposition into six "camps" — it's much easier to recall a category and then pull specific facts out of it in the exam.

Two Protestant pastors are worth knowing by name because they show the human cost of resistance clearly:

• Dietrich Bonhoeffer — helped create the Confessing Church, was banned from preaching in 1937, tried to help Jewish people escape Germany, and was executed in 1945 for conspiring to assassinate Hitler.
• Paul Schneider — spoke out against Goebbels, imprisoned in 1937, refused to remove his cap when the Nazi flag was raised, executed in 1939.

Cardinal Galen is another name worth remembering: he had openly criticised the Nazis since 1934, and in 1941 he revealed that the Nazis were killing people with physical and mental disabilities. Goebbels chose not to execute him — fearing the population of Münster "could be regarded as lost to the war effort." This is a brilliant piece of evidence for the argument that the Nazis did not have complete, unchallengeable power.

Opposition during the Second World War

Most Germans publicly supported the war at first — they believed the invasion of Poland (1939) was justified, the Nazis tightly controlled war information, and any dissent was harshly punished. But after Operation Barbarossa failed (the invasion of the Soviet Union), many Germans — including senior military figures — began turning against the Nazi Party.

2. How Did the Nazis Deal with Opposition?

The police state — SS, SD, Gestapo

Picture the Nazi police state as three layers of an onion, each doing a different job:

• The SS (Schutzstaffel) — the outer, visible layer. Created in 1925 as Hitler's personal bodyguard, led by Heinrich Himmler from 1929. Members had to be "racially pure" and fanatically loyal. They protected Nazi leaders, provided security at rallies, and oversaw the other police forces. They carried out the murders during the Night of the Long Knives (1934). Membership exploded from 240 (1925) to 800,000 (1944).
• The SD (Sicherheitsdienst) — the intelligence-gathering layer, working in the background. Created in 1931 by Himmler, led by Reinhard Heydrich. They gathered information on anyone suspected of opposing the Nazis — even other Nazi Party members — and became the only agency allowed to collect intelligence from 1934.
• The Gestapo — the most feared, plain-clothed layer, mixing in with ordinary life. Created by Hermann Goering to "investigate and combat all attempts to threaten the state," later led by Heydrich. They tapped phones, arrested and tortured suspects, and sent people straight to concentration camps using "protective custody."

Concentration camps vs. extermination camps

This is one of the most commonly confused pairs in the whole topic, so let's be really precise about the difference, because getting this muddled will cost you marks.

Concentration camps opened first — Dachau in 1933 was the very first. Their purpose was to imprison and punish: political opponents (journalists, writers, Communists), minority groups (Jewish people, Jehovah's Witnesses), and "undesirables" (homosexuals, prostitutes, Romani). Conditions were terrible and prisoners were forced into hard labour; many died from exhaustion, disease, and violence — but the camp's stated purpose was imprisonment and labour, not systematic killing.

Extermination camps came later, from 1942, once the Nazis developed the "Final Solution" — a deliberate policy to murder Europe's Jewish population. Six extermination camps were built, the most notorious being Auschwitz-Birkenau. These camps were designed to kill efficiently — that was their entire function, not a side effect.

Controlling the legal system

The Nazis didn't need to abolish courts entirely — that would look suspicious and lawless. Instead, they did something craftier: they kept the appearance of a fair legal system while quietly rigging every part of it in their favour.

• Judges had to join the National Socialist League for the Maintenance of the Law (or be dismissed) and had to wear the swastika from 1936. Lawyers joined the German Lawyers Front.
• Trial by jury was removed — judges alone decided verdicts, and Nazi-loyal judges were far more likely to convict.
• The People's Court was set up specifically to hear treason cases: judges were handpicked loyalists, trials were held in secret, and the right to appeal was removed entirely.

The impact of these changes on execution numbers is stark and worth memorising as a statistic pair: only 8 people were executed between 1930–1932 (before Nazi control of the courts), but this rocketed to 534 people between 1934–1939.

Controlling religion

This section makes much more sense once you understand why Christianity was a genuine problem for Hitler. Germany in 1933 was overwhelmingly Christian — 67% Protestant, 33% Catholic, roughly 65 million believers combined. That's far more people than were in the Nazi Party. And crucially, Christian values directly clashed with Nazi ideology on almost every point:

So Hitler faced a genuine dilemma: destroy the churches (risky — they had more followers than the Nazi Party and could spread anti-Nazi ideas) or keep them and try to control them (many Christians had voted for Hitler, and they shared his emphasis on family). He chose control — but it went badly for him.

Catholics: Hitler signed the Concordat with the Pope (July 1933) — Catholics could worship freely and keep their schools, in exchange for priests staying out of politics and swearing loyalty to the regime. It quickly fell apart: around 400 priests were sent to Dachau, Catholic schools were closed, youth groups banned, monasteries shut down. By 1937, the Pope released "With Burning Anxiety," calling Hitler a "mad prophet."

Protestants: Many initially supported the Nazis, believing they'd protect against anti-Christian Communism. Ludwig Müller became Reich Bishop of a unified "Reich Church" (2,000 churches joined; swastikas displayed; Jewish people couldn't be baptised there). But Pastor Martin Niemöller resisted, forming the Pastors' Emergency League and then the Confessing Church (1934) — which 6,000 churches joined.

3. The Use of Culture and the Mass Media

Joseph Goebbels and propaganda

If the SS/SD/Gestapo were the "stick," Joseph Goebbels was the master of the "carrot." As Minister for People's Enlightenment and Propaganda, his job was to make sure Nazi ideas seeped into every corner of daily life — his own words capture the strategy perfectly:

The genius of this approach is that it doesn't feel like propaganda at the time — it's a newspaper you read every day, a radio you have on in the background at work, a film you watch for entertainment. That's precisely why it was so effective at shaping attitudes without people realising they were being manipulated.

Newspapers and radio

Control of newspapers grew from 3% in 1933 to controlling most newspapers by 1939 — around 1,600 newspapers were shut down in 1935 alone. Der Völkischer Beobachter (The People's Observer) was the official Nazi paper, reaching 1.1 million people by 1941.

Radio is a brilliant case study in propaganda design. The Volksempfänger ("People's Receiver") launched in 1933 was cleverly engineered for control:

• Cost only 35 Reichsmarks (about a week's salary) — one of the cheapest radios in Europe, so almost anyone could afford one.
• Had a deliberately short range so foreign stations couldn't be picked up — you literally couldn't tune into anti-Nazi broadcasts from abroad.
• Only German radio stations were marked on the dial.
• The "301" in its official name (Volksempfänger 301) referenced 30th January — the day Hitler became Chancellor.
• It made up 75% of all radio sales in 1934, and employers were required to place radios in workplaces.

The 1936 Berlin Olympics

Hitler and Goebbels saw sport as a way to prove Aryan racial superiority and show off Nazi Germany's strength to a global audience. The Games featured the world's largest stadium (110,000 spectators), swastikas displayed everywhere, and the film-maker Leni Riefenstahl directing Olympia (1938) to capture it all as propaganda. Germany won 38 gold medals — but the plan partly backfired: Jesse Owens, an African-American athlete, won four gold medals and became the most successful athlete at the Games, directly undermining the Nazi racial narrative in front of the world.

Nazi rallies — Nuremberg

When Hitler became Führer in 1934, rallies became a tool to merge his identity with Germany itself. The Nuremberg rallies (hosted annually 1933–1938, grounds designed by architect Albert Speer) were the ultimate showcase — the 1934 rally alone drew 200,000 people. Key features included the Cathedral of Light (152 searchlights forming pillars of light around the audience), military demonstrations that broke the Treaty of Versailles' restrictions, and Leni Riefenstahl's film Triumph of the Will broadcasting the spectacle nationwide.

Controlling culture and the arts

The Nazis despised the modern, experimental art of the Weimar Republic's "Golden Years" (like the Bauhaus movement), instead favouring romantic, traditional ideas about Germany's past. The Reich Chamber of Culture (1933) enforced this through four sub-chambers covering creative art, music, literature, and film.

• Art: 42,000 artists had to join to legally work. "Too modern" work by Picasso and Van Gogh (called "Expressionist") was purged — over 12,000 paintings and sculptures removed from galleries in 1936.
• Architecture: Favoured monumental buildings inspired by ancient Greece and Rome — large, imposing, using stone and classical features like pillars and arches to project power and strength.
• Music: Traditional composers (Wagner, Beethoven, Bach) were promoted; Jewish composers were censored; jazz was banned partly for its Black origins and partly because many jazz musicians were Jewish.
• Literature: Around 2,500 writers were banned (including Einstein and Oppenheimer, for being Jewish, and Lenin for Communism). In May 1933, students in Berlin burned 20,000 books by anti-Nazi authors; book burnings happened in 34 cities.
• Cinema: All film plots needed approval; newsreels celebrating Germany's achievements played before every film. The Nazis made 1,300 films in total, including propaganda pieces like Hitlerjunge Quex.

4. Why Were Groups Persecuted in Nazi Germany?

The Aryan race and eugenics

To understand Nazi persecution, you need to understand the underlying "logic" (however twisted) that drove it. The Nazis believed in a racial hierarchy, set out by Hitler in Mein Kampf:

• Aryans (blonde, blue-eyed, athletic) at the very top — the "superior" race. Hitler even blamed Germany's WWI defeat on "pollution" of Aryan blood.
• Other white Western races — respected, but ranked below Aryans.
• Eastern European races like Slavs — labelled Untermenschen ("sub-humans").
• Jewish people and Black people — placed at the very bottom of the hierarchy.

This hierarchy combined with two pseudo-scientific ideas — eugenics (selective breeding, popularised by a distortion of Darwin's theory of evolution) and racial hygiene — to justify encouraging "the best" Germans to reproduce while preventing "undesirables" from doing so.

Persecution of Jewish people — the timeline that matters most

This is the single most important sequence to have rock-solid for your exam. Think of it as a staircase, with each step getting darker and more violent than the last.

It's also worth knowing about individual experiences for source-analysis style questions — these humanise the statistics:

• Theresia, aged 12, paralysed by polio at age two — one of 59 people transported to Hartheim Castle on 13th January 1941, where she was murdered as part of the T-4 Programme.
• Rita Prigmore, born 1943, a Sinti (Gypsy) twin — she and her sister Rolanda were taken and experimented on in April 1943; Rolanda was found dead. Rita survived but suffered severe health problems for life.

Persecution of other minorities

• Roma: Banned from marrying other Germans, banned from travelling in groups, lost citizenship if they "failed" a racial characteristics test. By 1938, orders were given to remove all Roma from Germany.
• Homosexuals: Around 100,000 arrests; 10,000 sent to concentration camps, forced to wear a pink triangle for identification.
• Disabled people: Forced sterilisation of 700,000 people. The T-4 Programme killed disabled people using carbon monoxide gas — the same techniques the Einsatzgruppen later used in the Final Solution. Public outrage forced the official end of the programme in 1941, but it continued secretly. Historians estimate it killed 250,000 people in total.
• "Asocials": Arrested by the Gestapo and SS, forced to wear black triangles in concentration camps; many died from exhaustion, beatings, and executions.

How did ordinary Germans react?

Almost every German knew, on some level, how Jewish people were being treated. Reactions split into three groups: some were shocked by the violence and discrimination but were too scared to help (because of the SS and Gestapo); some took part in acts of persecution (during the 1933 boycotts, or Kristallnacht); and some simply chose to ignore it and look the other way. This complexity — shock, participation, and indifference all existing side by side — is important nuance for higher-mark answers.

5. Was Nazi Germany a Totalitarian State?

Totalitarianism means a government has complete control over its citizens — every aspect of life, thought, and behaviour. This is a classic "argue both sides" IGCSE question, so you need solid evidence on each side.

Evidence FOR totalitarianism

• Fear stopped many people from openly opposing the Nazis.
• Many people genuinely agreed with the Nazis' racial policy.
• People actively informed on their friends and family (denunciation).
• Many Germans conformed to the Nazi regime rather than resisting it.
• Many Germans did not protect minority groups from persecution.
• Propaganda successfully made people support the Nazi Party.

Evidence AGAINST totalitarianism

• Youth organisations like the Swing Youth and Edelweiss Pirates directly challenged Nazi ideology.
• The Nazis had to use force to maintain control — a truly totalitarian state wouldn't need constant coercion if it had genuine total control.
• Many Germans privately opposed the Nazis, even if they couldn't say so openly.
• Opposition existed within the army itself (Canaris, the July 1944 Plot).
• The public spoke out against the T-4 Programme — and the Nazis actually backed down publicly in 1941, showing they weren't immune to public pressure.
• The Nazis faced continual opposition from the Church throughout the entire regime.

What to Memorise

Concepts Checklist

Exam Tips — Common Mistakes & Mark-Scheme Traps