The National Socialist German Workers’ Party, otherwise known as the Nazi Party, held power in Germany from 1933 to 1945. Led by the fascist dictator Adolf Hitler, the party instituted a policy of racial cleansing based on discriminatory and illegitimate racial science that promoted the Aryan race as superior. The Nazi Party’s genocidal policies, which systematically exterminated Jewish people, along with other races and groups it saw as undesirable, aimed to restore the Fatherland of Germany to its alleged former glory. As part of this restoration, Hitler invaded surrounding countries, first Austria and then Poland, prompting an Allied Forces response that signaled the beginning of World War II.

Within Nazi Germany, an aggressive propaganda campaign directed German citizens to support the party by presenting news on the wondrous achievements of the Fuhrer and by depicting allegedly racially inferior groups, most notably Jewish people, as subhuman and evil. The propaganda represented pity for these races as un-German, traitorous, and shameful; those who aided or harbored Jewish people were condemned as enemies of the Fatherland and often shot or imprisoned in cruel and dehumanizing labor camps.

Hitler Youth groups, or the jungmädel, gave children heavily biased education in the tenets of Nazism and the superiority of the Aryan race.