Hitler aggressively pursued his aim of making Germany great again by buildingup the German army, navy, and air force, and seeking to reverse the territoriallosses of World War One. Annexationof the Rhineland was followed bythe invasion of Austria, the Sudetenland~, and then the rest of Czechoslovakia . Ruthlessly crushing all internal opposition, he created a totalitariandictatorship that indoctrinated the public with Nazi ideology, and set out torealize its dream of creating a racially pure Aryannation by forcibly actingagainst "undesirable" groups——not only dissidents , but alsoRomanies , Russians, prostitutes, homosexuals, and, above all, Jews.In 1939, flush with his earlier successes, he plunged Germany once more intowar by invading Poland.
During the Second World War the Nazis engaged in slave labor, plunder,and mass extermination, building concentration camps throughout centraland eastern Europe for this purpose. In the Holocaust between 1939 and 1945an estimated six million European Jews died in the camps, as well as millions ofothers besides.
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