Rassenschande
Rassenschande or Blutschande was an anti-miscegenation concept in Nazi German racial policy, pertaining to sexual relations between Aryans and non-Aryans. It was put into practice by policies like the Aryan certificate requirement, the Nuremberg Laws, adopted unanimously by the Reichstag on 15 September 1935; these laws referred predominantly to relations between Germans and non-Aryans. In the early stages the culprits were targeted informally, later on punished systematically by a repressive legal apparatus. In the course of the ensuing war years, relations between Reichsdeutsche Germans and millions of foreign Ostarbeiters brought to Germany by force, were legally forbidden. Concerted efforts were made to foment popular distaste for it; the reasons for this were purely practical, because the Eastern European female slave labour servicing the German war economy soon became targets of rampant sexual abuse at the hands of the German farm workers and overseers. The Polish and Soviet women and girls began giving so many unwanted births on the farms that hundreds of special homes known as Ausländerkinder-Pflegestätte had to be created, in order to exterminate the infants out of sight.
Prior to the Nazi ascension to power in 1933, Adolf Hitler blamed moral degradation on Rassenschande, or on "bastardization"—a way to assure his followers of his continuing anti-Semitism, toned down for popular consumption. As early as 1924, Julius Streicher argued for the death penalty for Jews found guilty of having sexual relations with Gentiles; when the Nazis came to power, considerable clashes and infighting had stemmed from conflicting views on what constituted a Jew—anything from full Jewish background to one-sixteenth part Jewish blood were argued for—thus complicating the definition of the offense. Some regarded the number of intermarriages as too small to be harmful. Freisler published a pamphlet that called for banning "mixed-blood" sexual intercourse in 1933, regardless of the "foreign blood" involved, which faced strong public criticism and, at the time, no support from Hitler, his superior, Franz Gürtner, opposed it both for reasons of popular support and such problematic issues as people who did not know they had Jewish blood, that allegations of Jewish blood could be used for blackmail.
Local officials, were requiring betrothed couples to prove they were worthy to marry by presenting proof of Aryan ancestry. In 1934, Wilhelm Frick warned local officials about banning such marriages on their own, but in 1935, authorized them to delay applications by mixed couples. Before the Nuremberg Laws were passed, the SS arrested those accused of racial defilement and paraded them through the streets with placards around their necks detailing their crime. Stormtroopers acted with overt hostility toward mixed couples. One girl was paraded through the streets, with her hair shaved and a placard declaring, "I have given myself to a Jew." Placards were used to humiliate. Das Schwarze Korps, in its April 1935 issue, called for laws against it as preferable to the extra-legal violence being indulged in, it reported a story that a Jew had enticed a seventeen-year-old employee into nude midnight bathing—the girl being saved from suicide only by the intervention of an SS patrol, a mob of thousands besieged the Jew's house until the police took him into protective custody.
Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler was the main person behind the persecution of those involved with accusations of Rassenschande. In Nazi Germany, after the Nuremberg Laws were passed in 1935 sexual relations and marriages between Aryans and non-Aryans were prohibited. Although the laws at first were against Jews, they were extended to the Romani and their offspring. Persons accused of racial defilement were publicly humiliated by being paraded through the streets with placards around their necks proclaiming their crime; those convicted were sentenced to a period of time in a concentration camp. As the laws themselves did not permit the death penalty for those charged with racial defilement, the jurisdiction bypassed this and summoned special courts to allow the death penalty for such cases; the extent of the law meant. Germans who had intermarried with Jews and other non-Aryans prior to the Nuremberg Laws did not have their unions nullified, but were targeted and encouraged to divorce their existing partners.
Rape of Jewish women during World War II was forbidden, though it did little to stop the soldiers who killed the woman afterwards, to ensure silence. In the only case where German soldiers were prosecuted for rape during the military campaign in Poland—the case of mass rape committed by three soldiers against the Jewish Kaufmann family in Busko-Zdrój – the German judge sentenced the guilty for Rassenschande rather than rape. After the invasion of Poland in 1939, Nazi reports of sexual relations between Polish women and German soldiers brought about a directive issued for the press to promulgate that the links between Poles and Germans brought about a decline in German blood, that any connection with people of Polish extraction was dangerous; the press was to describe Poles as on the same level as Jews and Gypsies in order to discourage association. The Nazi German government on 8 March 1940 issued the Polish decrees with regard to the Polish forced laborer workers in Germany stated that any Pole "who has sexual relations with a German man or woman
Nazi Germany
Nazi Germany is the common English name for Germany between 1933 and 1945, when Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party controlled the country through a dictatorship. Under Hitler's rule, Germany was transformed into a totalitarian state that controlled nearly all aspects of life via the Gleichschaltung legal process; the official name of the state was Deutsches Reich until 1943 and Großdeutsches Reich from 1943 to 1945. Nazi Germany is known as the Third Reich, meaning "Third Realm" or "Third Empire", the first two being the Holy Roman Empire and the German Empire; the Nazi regime ended. Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany by the President of the Weimar Republic, Paul von Hindenburg, on 30 January 1933; the NSDAP began to eliminate all political opposition and consolidate its power. Hindenburg died on 2 August 1934 and Hitler became dictator of Germany by merging the offices and powers of the Chancellery and Presidency. A national referendum held 19 August 1934 confirmed Hitler as sole Führer of Germany.
All power was centralised in Hitler's person and his word became the highest law. The government was not a coordinated, co-operating body, but a collection of factions struggling for power and Hitler's favour. In the midst of the Great Depression, the Nazis restored economic stability and ended mass unemployment using heavy military spending and a mixed economy. Extensive public works were undertaken, including the construction of Autobahnen; the return to economic stability boosted the regime's popularity. Racism antisemitism, was a central feature of the regime; the Germanic peoples were considered by the Nazis to be the master race, the purest branch of the Aryan race. Discrimination and persecution against Jews and Romani people began in earnest after the seizure of power; the first concentration camps were established in March 1933. Jews and others deemed undesirable were imprisoned, liberals and communists were killed, imprisoned, or exiled. Christian churches and citizens that opposed Hitler's rule were oppressed, many leaders imprisoned.
Education focused on racial biology, population policy, fitness for military service. Career and educational opportunities for women were curtailed. Recreation and tourism were organised via the Strength Through Joy program, the 1936 Summer Olympics showcased Germany on the international stage. Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels made effective use of film, mass rallies, Hitler's hypnotic oratory to influence public opinion; the government controlled artistic expression, promoting specific art forms and banning or discouraging others. The Nazi regime dominated neighbours through military threats in the years leading up to war. Nazi Germany made aggressive territorial demands, threatening war if these were not met, it seized Austria and Czechoslovakia in 1938 and 1939. Germany signed a non-aggression pact with the USSR, invaded Poland on 1 September 1939, launching World War II in Europe. By early 1941, Germany controlled much of Europe. Reichskommissariats took control of conquered areas and a German administration was established in the remainder of Poland.
Germany exploited labour of both its occupied territories and its allies. In the Holocaust, millions of Jews and other peoples deemed undesirable by the state were imprisoned, murdered in Nazi concentration camps and extermination camps, or shot. While the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 was successful, the Soviet resurgence and entry of the US into the war meant the Wehrmacht lost the initiative on the Eastern Front in 1943 and by late 1944 had been pushed back to the pre-1939 border. Large-scale aerial bombing of Germany escalated in 1944 and the Axis powers were driven back in Eastern and Southern Europe. After the Allied invasion of France, Germany was conquered by the Soviet Union from the east and the other Allies from the west, capitulated in May 1945. Hitler's refusal to admit defeat led to massive destruction of German infrastructure and additional war-related deaths in the closing months of the war; the victorious Allies initiated a policy of denazification and put many of the surviving Nazi leadership on trial for war crimes at the Nuremberg trials.
The official name of the state was Deutsches Reich from 1933 to 1943 and Großdeutsches Reich from 1943 to 1945, while common English terms are "Nazi Germany" and "Third Reich". The latter, adopted by Nazi propaganda as Drittes Reich, was first used in Das Dritte Reich, a 1923 book by Arthur Moeller van den Bruck; the book counted the Holy Roman Empire as the German Empire as the second. Germany was known as the Weimar Republic during the years 1919 to 1933, it was a republic with a semi-presidential system. The Weimar Republic faced numerous problems, including hyperinflation, political extremism, contentious relationships with the Allied victors of World War I, a series of failed attempts at coalition government by divided political parties. Severe setbacks to the German economy began after World War I ended because of reparations payments required under the 1919 Treaty of Versailles; the government printed money to make the payments and to repay the country's war debt, but the resulting hyperinflation led to inflated prices for consumer goods, economic chaos, food riots.
When the government defaulted on their reparations payments in January 1923, French troops occupied German industrial areas along the Ruhr and widespread civil unrest followed. The National Socialist German Workers' Party (National
The Holocaust
The Holocaust known as the Shoah, was a genocide during World War II in which Nazi Germany, aided by local collaborators, systematically murdered some six million European Jews—around two-thirds of the Jewish population of Europe—between 1941 and 1945. Jews were targeted for extermination as part of a larger event during the Holocaust era, in which Germany and its collaborators persecuted and murdered other groups, including Slavs, the Roma, the "incurably sick", political and religious dissenters such as communists and Jehovah's Witnesses, gay men. Taking into account all the victims of Nazi persecution, the death toll rises to over 17 million. Germany implemented the persecution of the Jews in stages. Following Adolf Hitler's appointment as German Chancellor in January 1933, the regime built a network of concentration camps in Germany for political opponents and those deemed "undesirable", starting with Dachau on 22 March 1933. After the passing of the Enabling Act on 24 March, which gave Hitler plenary powers, the government began isolating Jews from civil society, which included a boycott of Jewish businesses in April 1933 and enacting the Nuremberg Laws in September 1935.
On 9–10 November 1938, during Kristallnacht, Jewish businesses and other buildings were ransacked, smashed or set on fire throughout Germany and Austria, which Germany had annexed in March that year. After Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, triggering World War II, the regime set up ghettos to segregate Jews. Thousands of camps and other detention sites were established across German-occupied Europe; the deportation of Jews to the ghettos culminated in the policy of extermination the Nazis called the "Final Solution to the Jewish Question", discussed by senior Nazi officials at the Wannsee Conference in Berlin in January 1942. As German forces captured territories in the East, all anti-Jewish measures were radicalized. Under the coordination of the SS, with directions from the highest leadership of the Nazi Party, killings were committed within Germany itself, throughout occupied Europe, across all territories controlled by the Axis powers. Paramilitary death squads called Einsatzgruppen, in cooperation with Wehrmacht police battalions and local collaborators, murdered around 1.3 million Jews in mass shootings between 1941 and 1945.
By mid-1942, victims were being deported from the ghettos in sealed freight trains to extermination camps where, if they survived the journey, they were killed in gas chambers. The killing continued until the end of World War II in Europe in May 1945; the term holocaust, first used in 1895 to describe the massacre of Armenians, comes from the Greek: ὁλόκαυστος, translit. Holókaustos; the Century Dictionary defined it in 1904 as "a sacrifice or offering consumed by fire, in use among the Jews and some pagan nations". The biblical term shoah, meaning "destruction", became the standard Hebrew term for the murder of the European Jews, first used in a pamphlet in 1940, Sho'at Yehudei Polin, published by the United Aid Committee for the Jews in Poland. On 3 October 1941 the cover of the magazine The American Hebrew used the phrase "before the Holocaust" to refer to the situation in France, in May 1943 The New York Times, discussing the Bermuda Conference, referred to the "hundreds of thousands of European Jews still surviving the Nazi Holocaust".
In 1968 the Library of Congress created a new category, "Holocaust, Jewish". The term was popularized in the United States by the NBC mini-series Holocaust, about a fictional family of German Jews, in November 1978 the President's Commission on the Holocaust was established; as non-Jewish groups began to include themselves as Holocaust victims too, many Jews chose to use the terms Shoah or Churban instead. The Nazis used the phrase "Final Solution to the Jewish Question". Most Holocaust historians define the Holocaust as the enactment, between 1941 and 1945, of the German state policy to exterminate the European Jews. In Teaching the Holocaust, Michael Gray, a specialist in Holocaust education, offers three definitions: "the persecution and murder of Jews by the Nazis and their collaborators between 1933 and 1945", which views the events of Kristallnacht in Germany in 1938 as an early phase of the Holocaust; the third definition fails, Gray writes, to acknowledge that only the Jewish people were singled out for annihilation.
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum defines the Holocaust as the "systematic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of six million Jews by the Nazi regime and its collaborators", distinguishing between the Holocaust and the targeting of other groups during "the era of the Holocaust". According to Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust memorial, most historians regard the start of the "Holocaust era" as January 1933, when Hitler was named Chancellor of Germany. Other victims of the Holocaust era include. Hitler came to see the Jews as "uniquely dangerous to Germany", according to Peter Hayes, "and therefore uniquely destined t
Caricature
A caricature is a rendered image showing the features of its subject in a simplified or exaggerated way through sketching, pencil strokes, or through other artistic drawings. In literature, a caricature is a description of a person using exaggeration of some characteristics and oversimplification of others. Caricatures can be insulting or complimentary and can serve a political purpose or be drawn for entertainment. Caricatures of politicians are used in editorial cartoons, while caricatures of movie stars are found in entertainment magazines; the term is derived from the Italian caricare -- to load. An early definition occurs in the English doctor Thomas Browne's Christian Morals, published posthumously in 1716. Expose not thy self by four-footed manners unto monstrous draughts, Caricatura representations. With the footnote: When Men's faces are drawn with resemblance to some other Animals, the Italians call it, to be drawn in Caricatura Thus, the word "caricature" means a "loaded portrait".
Until the mid 19th century, it was and mistakenly believed that the term shared the same root as the French'charcuterie' owing to Parisian street artists using cured meats in their satirical portrayal of public figures. Some of the earliest caricatures are found in the works of Leonardo da Vinci, who sought people with deformities to use as models; the point was to offer an impression of the original, more striking than a portrait. Caricature took a road to its first successes in the closed aristocratic circles of France and Italy, where such portraits could be passed about for mutual enjoyment. While the first book on caricature drawing to be published in England was Mary Darly's A Book of Caricaturas, the first known North American caricatures were drawn in 1759 during the battle for Quebec; these caricatures were the work of Brig.-Gen. George Townshend whose caricatures of British General James Wolfe, depicted as "Deformed and crass and hideous", were drawn to amuse fellow officers. Elsewhere, two great practitioners of the art of caricature in 18th-century Britain were Thomas Rowlandson and James Gillray.
Rowlandson was more of an artist and his work took its inspiration from the public at large. Gillray was more concerned with the vicious visual satirisation of political life, they were, great friends and caroused together in the pubs of London. In a lecture titled The History and Art of Caricature, the British caricaturist Ted Harrison said that the caricaturist can choose to either mock or wound the subject with an effective caricature. Drawing caricatures can be a form of entertainment and amusement – in which case gentle mockery is in order – or the art can be employed to make a serious social or political point. A caricaturist draws on the natural characteristics of the subject. Sir Max Beerbohm and published caricatures of the famous men of his own time and earlier, his style of single-figure caricatures in formalized groupings was established by 1896 and flourished until about 1930. His published works include Caricatures of Twenty-five Gentlemen, The Poets' Corner, Rossetti and His Circle.
He published in fashionable magazines of the time, his works were exhibited in London at the Carfax Gallery and Leicester Galleries. George Cruikshank created political prints that attacked leading politicians, he went on to create social caricatures of British life for popular publications such as The Comic Almanack and Omnibus. Cruikshanks' New Union Club of 1819 is notable in the context of slavery, he earned fame as a book illustrator for Charles Dickens and many other authors. Honoré Daumier created over 4,000 lithographs, most of them caricatures on political and everyday themes, they were published in the daily French newspapers Mort Drucker joined Mad in 1957 and became well known for his parodies of movie satires. He combined a comic strip style with caricature likenesses of film actors for Md, he contributed covers to Time, he has been recognized for his work with the National Cartoonists Society Special Features Award for 1985, 1986, 1987, 1988, their Reuben Award for 1987. Alex Gard created more than 700 caricatures of show business celebrities and other notables for the walls of Sardi's Restaurant in the theater district of New York City: the first artist to do so.
Today the images are part of the Billy Rose Theatre Collection of The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. Al Hirschfeld was best known for his simple black and white renditions of celebrities and Broadway stars which used flowing contour lines over heavy rendering, he was known for depicting a variety of other famous people, from politicians, musicians and television stars like the cast of Star Trek: The Next Generation. He was commissioned by the United States Postal Service to provide art for U. S. stamps. Permanent collections of Hirschfeld's work appear at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, he boasts a star on the St. Louis Walk of Fame. S. Jithesh is known for his speedy style of Celebrity Caricaturing Stage Shows."Cartoons take shape in no time". The Hindu. Chennai, India. February 28, 2010.</ref> He performs a'Caricature Stage Show', a blend of poetry and socio-political satire
Newspaper
A newspaper is a periodical publication containing written information about current events and is typed in black ink with a white or gray background. Newspapers can cover a wide variety of fields such as politics, business and art, include materials such as opinion columns, weather forecasts, reviews of local services, birth notices, editorial cartoons, comic strips, advice columns. Most newspapers are businesses, they pay their expenses with a mixture of subscription revenue, newsstand sales, advertising revenue; the journalism organizations that publish newspapers are themselves metonymically called newspapers. Newspapers have traditionally been published in print. However, today most newspapers are published on websites as online newspapers, some have abandoned their print versions entirely. Newspapers developed as information sheets for businessmen. By the early 19th century, many cities in Europe, as well as North and South America, published newspapers; some newspapers with high editorial independence, high journalism quality, large circulation are viewed as newspapers of record.
Newspapers are published daily or weekly. News magazines are weekly, but they have a magazine format. General-interest newspapers publish news articles and feature articles on national and international news as well as local news; the news includes political events and personalities and finance, crime and natural disasters. The paper is divided into sections for each of those major groupings. Most traditional papers feature an editorial page containing editorials written by an editor and expressing an opinion on a public issue, opinion articles called "op-eds" written by guest writers, columns that express the personal opinions of columnists offering analysis and synthesis that attempts to translate the raw data of the news into information telling the reader "what it all means" and persuading them to concur. Papers include articles which have no byline. A wide variety of material has been published in newspapers. Besides the aforementioned news and opinions, they include weather forecasts; as of 2017, newspapers may provide information about new movies and TV shows available on streaming video services like Netflix.
Newspapers have classified ad sections where people and businesses can buy small advertisements to sell goods or services. Most newspapers are businesses, they pay their expenses with a mixture of subscription revenue, newsstand sales, advertising revenue; some newspapers are at least government-funded. The editorial independence of a newspaper is thus always subject to the interests of someone, whether owners, advertisers, or a government; some newspapers with high editorial independence, high journalism quality, large circulation are viewed as newspapers of record. Many newspapers, besides employing journalists on their own payrolls subscribe to news agencies, which employ journalists to find and report the news sell the content to the various newspapers; this is a way to avoid duplicating the expense of reporting from around the world. Circa 2005, there were 6,580 daily newspaper titles in the world selling 395 million print copies a day; the late 2000s–early 2010s global recession, combined with the rapid growth of free web-based alternatives, has helped cause a decline in advertising and circulation, as many papers had to retrench operations to stanch the losses.
Worldwide annual revenue approached $100 billion in 2005-7 plunged during the worldwide financial crisis of 2008-9. Revenue in 2016 fell to only $53 billion, hurting every major publisher as their efforts to gain online income fell far short of the goal; the decline in advertising revenues affected both the print and online media as well as all other mediums. Besides remodeling advertising, the internet has challenged the business models of the print-only era by crowdsourcing both publishing in general and, more journalism. In addition, the rise of news aggregators, which bundle linked articles fro
Nuremberg
Nuremberg is the second-largest city of the German federal state of Bavaria after its capital Munich, its 511,628 inhabitants make it the 14th largest city in Germany. On the Pegnitz River and the Rhine–Main–Danube Canal, it lies in the Bavarian administrative region of Middle Franconia, is the largest city and the unofficial capital of Franconia. Nuremberg forms a continuous conurbation with the neighbouring cities of Fürth and Schwabach with a total population of 787,976, while the larger Nuremberg Metropolitan Region has 3.5 million inhabitants. The city lies about 170 kilometres north of Munich, it is the largest city in the East Franconian dialect area. There are many institutions of higher education in the city, most notably the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, with 39,780 students Bavaria's third and Germany's 11th largest university with campuses in Erlangen and Nuremberg and a university hospital in Erlangen. Nuremberg Airport is the second-busiest airport of Bavaria after Munich Airport, the tenth-busiest airport of Germany.
Staatstheater Nürnberg is one of the five Bavarian state theatres, showing operas, operettas and ballets, plays, as well as concerts. Its orchestra, Staatsphilharmonie Nürnberg, is Bavaria's second-largest opera orchestra after the Bavarian State Opera's Bavarian State Orchestra in Munich. Nuremberg is the birthplace of Johann Pachelbel. Nuremberg was the site of major Nazi rallies, it provided the site for the Nuremberg trials, which held to account many major Nazi officials; the first documentary mention of the city, in 1050, mentions Nuremberg as the location of an Imperial castle between the East Franks and the Bavarian March of the Nordgau. From 1050 to 1571 the city expanded and rose in importance due to its location on key trade-routes. King Conrad III established the Burgraviate of Nuremberg, with the first burgraves coming from the Austrian House of Raab. With the extinction of their male line around 1190, the last Raabs count's son-in-law, Frederick I from the House of Hohenzollern, inherited the burgraviate in 1192.
From the late 12th century to the Interregnum, the power of the burgraves diminished as the Hohenstaufen emperors transferred most non-military powers to a castellan, with the city administration and the municipal courts handed over to an Imperial mayor from 1173/74. The strained relations between the burgraves and the castellans, with gradual transferral of powers to the latter in the late 14th and early 15th centuries broke out into open enmity, which influenced the history of the city. Nuremberg is referred to as the "unofficial capital" of the Holy Roman Empire because the Imperial Diet and courts met at Nuremberg Castle; the Diets of Nuremberg played an important role in the administration of the empire. The increasing demands of the Imperial court and the increasing importance of the city attracted increased trade and commerce in Nuremberg. In 1219 Emperor Frederick II granted the Großen Freiheitsbrief, including town rights, Imperial immediacy, the privilege to mint coins, an independent customs policy - wholly removing the city from the purview of the burgraves.
Nuremberg soon became, with Augsburg, one of the two great trade-centers on the route from Italy to Northern Europe. In 1298 the Jews of the town were falsely accused of having desecrated the host, 698 of them were killed in one of the many Rintfleisch massacres. Behind the massacre of 1298 was the desire to combine the northern and southern parts of the city, which were divided by the Pegnitz; the Jews of the German lands suffered many massacres during the plague years of the mid-14th century. In 1349 Nuremberg's Jews suffered a pogrom, they were burned at the stake or expelled, a marketplace was built over the former Jewish quarter. The plague returned to the city in 1405, 1435, 1437, 1482, 1494, 1520 and 1534; the largest growth of Nuremberg occurred in the 14th century. Charles IV's Golden Bull of 1356, naming Nuremberg as the city where newly elected kings of Germany must hold their first Imperial Diet, made Nuremberg one of the three most important cities of the Empire. Charles was the patron of the Frauenkirche, built between 1352 and 1362, where the Imperial court worshipped during its stays in Nuremberg.
The royal and Imperial connection grew stronger in 1423 when the Holy Roman Emperor Sigismund of Luxembourg granted the Imperial regalia to be kept permanently in Nuremberg, where they remained until 1796, when the advance of French troops required their removal to Regensburg and thence to Vienna. In 1349 the members of the guilds unsuccessfully rebelled against the patricians in a Handwerkeraufstand, supported by merchants and some by councillors, leading to a ban on any self-organisation of the artisans in the city, abolishing the guilds that were customary elsewhere in Europe.
Gauleiter
A Gauleiter was the party leader of a regional branch of the Nazi Party or the head of a Gau or of a Reichsgau. The word can be plural, depending on the context. Gauleiter was the second highest Nazi Party paramilitary rank, subordinate only to the higher rank Reichsleiter and to the position of Führer. During World War II, the rank of Gauleiter was obtained only by direct appointment from Adolf Hitler; the first use of the term Gauleiter by the Nazi Party was in 1925 after Adolf Hitler refounded the Nazi party following the failed Beer Hall Putsch. The name derives from Leiter; the word Gau is an old term for a region of the German Reich. The Frankish Realm and the Holy Roman Empire were subdivided into Gaue, which corresponds with the english word "shire", it is still in use today for some regions in Belgium and Switzerland, in the modern German states of Rhineland-Palatinate, Baden-Württemberg and Bavaria. In the earliest days of the term's existence, Gauleiter were heads of election districts during a time period when the Nazis were attempting to gain political representation in the Weimar Republic.
Gauleiter oversaw several politische Leiter who assisted the Nazis with election campaigns and hosted senior Nazis on campaign tours. In 1928, a mid-level official known as a Kreisleiter was introduced as an intermediary between the Gauleiter and the political leaders. In 1930, as the Nazis attempted to organize on a national level, Gauleiter were themselves subordinated to a new official known as a Landesinspektor, in charge of all Nazi Gaus in a particular German state, it was at this time that a standard political uniform was created for the Gauleiter, consisting of a brown Nazi Party shirt and Army style collar bars with braided shoulder cords. In 1933, when the NSDAP took power and established the state of Nazi Germany, Gauleiter became the second highest Nazi paramilitary rank, just below the new rank of Reichsleiter; the Gauleiter now became the heads of the Gauleitung — the system of Nazi political regions set up to mirror the German states. At that time Gauleiter adopted the two-leaf collar insignia most historically associated with the rank.
In theory, a Gauleiter functioned as a representative of the Nazi Party who served to coordinate regional Nazi Party events and served to "advise" the local government. In practice, each Gauleiter had unquestioned authority in his particular area of responsibility; the legal governmental establishment existed as a rubber stamp for the Gauleiter. Party control over the civil administration became institutionalized, as in many cases the Gauleiter held the supreme civil administrative post in his areas. However, since Party Gau boundaries and provincial/state boundaries coincided, this arrangement led to mutually overlapping jurisdictions and added to the administrative chaos typical of Nazi Germany. Within each Gau were a number of Kreise, followed by the Ort level, the lowest in the Nazi Party organization. There were two additional lower local levels, describing Party Cells and local Neighborhood Blocks. By this point, all political leaders wore official uniforms, with piping and collar-tab background colors indicating the level of the Party that a Political Leader served.
The original insignia for a Gauleiter consisted of Army styled collar tabs, accompanied by a braided shoulder cord worn on a brown Nazi Party shirt. After 1933, the Gauleiter adopted; the Stellvertreter-Gauleiter wore a single oak leaf. By 1939, the entire Nazi Party paramilitary rank system had been overhauled, introducing new insignia consisting of pips, as many as four miniature oak leaves per collar to represent Nazi Party political rank; the Gauleiter insignia, was considered too well "entrenched" to change and thus was not incorporated into the new insignia system. Instead, the Gautier continued to wear the pre-war two oak leaf insignia, with the rank seen as existing outside of the hierarchy, senior to all other Nazi Party ranks, with the exception of Reichsleiter. Both Gauleiter and Reichsleiter insignia was modified to display a more pronounced national eagle crest, both ranks were permitted to wear special party armbands. Gauleiter had the right to display a special vehicle flag when traveling, as a status symbol of their position.
All political leaders working at Gau level had rhomboid collar tabs with red facings, with a dark wine-red colored piping around the outer edges. Reich-level collar tabs had a bright crimson facing, with gold piping; the political leader collar-tab system underwent four changes. The Gauleiter had authority over the district leaders. An Ortsgruppe encompassed 1500 households -- a few villages. Chapter leaders directed cell leaders, responsible for 160 to 480 households. Zellenleiter had control over the lowest loca
