In Germany, the National Socialist (Nazi) Party was attracting attention. The first Nazis, a rather bitter group of German World War I veterans, blamed their defeat on the Communists and German Jews. By 1932, the Nazi Party wielded considerable power in the German parliament (called the Reich-stag). German President Paul von Hindenburg was growing weak in his advanced years. Adolf Hitler, known for his racial hatred and contempt for democracy, took advantage of the situation and won a following that placed him in a position to ascend to power. Hitler gained the chancellorship in January of 1933 and became dictator three months later. Before von Hindenburg's death, Hitler had already ordered the killings of high-ranking Germans whom he saw as a threat to his power. Books that contained thoughts contrary to the Nazi beliefs were burned.

Defying the Treaty of Versailles, Germany had left the League of Nations the year before. The country also began its rearmament, again defying the treaty. Most Allies, along with the League of Nations, stood idly by as the new dictator sent troops to the demilitarized zone. All but Italy, that is. The prime minister and dictator of Italy, Benito Mussolini, was an ally of Hitler and also a Fascist. He invaded the country of Ethiopia on the African continent.

Adolf Hitler was maniacal in his obsession with creating a pure master race that had no traces of Jewish influence, and no place for the handicapped, the independent thinker, and certainly the Jew. Mein Kampf (My Struggle) written by Adolf Hitler in the early mid-1920s was part autobiography and part his political ideology of Nazism. In 1935, Hitler's Nuremberg Decrees forbade Jews from marrying non-Jews. They could not hold government positions, and they were barred from practicing law or medicine.

Furthermore, they could no longer attend German universities. In essence, their civil rights were stripped away because of their lineage. This forced many German Jewish families to emigrate. Those who felt that Nazism wouldn't endure and chose to stay made a fatal error in judgment.

Hitler's police force (called the Gestapo, a branch of the Schutzstaffel, or SS for short) began rounding up Jews and other supposed undesirables, who were then sent to forced labor camps. Those able to work were used to build roads or provide other manual labor, but the rest were exterminated in camps such as Auschwitz in Poland. Gas chambers, disguised as showers, killed thousands. It wasn't immediately apparent that Hitler was systematically murdering Jews, particularly in Russia where the victims were forced to dig mass graves before Nazi soldiers mowed them down with machine gunfire. But in time, Nazi atrocities were unveiled to the world's horror.