Hey! Welcome back to another blog post! This week, we continued our work on World War Two. I’m really enjoying this unit and learning more about the past. It’s really interesting being guided to think about the causes and consequences of this horrific war. 

This week we have continued to work on our podcasts, but we’ve also been working on building our knowledge surrounding the war. One of the ways we did this was by creating a terms sheet. Some of these terms stuck out to me, and I wanted to learn more than we had added to our terms sheet. 

The first of these terms was the Weimar Republic. The Weimar Republic was a Democratic government formed in the town of Weimar. The reasoning behind this government was in the hopes of appeasing the American Government and hopefully getting less harsh reparations. The constitution with the same name, the Weimar Constitution, included that the German Reich is a Republic, the term of the president is seven years, and all Germans have the right to freedom of religion. When Hitler came into power after the public grew resentful to the Weimar Republic government, he left the Weimar Constitution in place, but payed no attention to it. Instead, choosing to pass the Enabling Act.

The second, the enabling act, let Hitler pass laws with no German parliamentary aprovial. This let him and his totalitarian regime tower over all other people in the German Government. 

The final term was the Night of the Long Knives. This was actually a three day operation organized by Hitler and his closest colleagues. The night itself occurred on June 30th. His desire to consolidate his power and obliterate any enemies in the German parliament lead him to murder anyone who saw him a an undesirable light. The aftermath lead to Hitler becoming a horrible dictator without any German parliamentary dissatisfaction. 

I found these terms particularly interesting because they were all things I’d never heard of before. I think it’s interesting to have an opportunity like these weekly posts to go deeper into what we’ve learned. I hope you enjoyed this post, and I’ll see you next week!