Gleichschaltung

The or "coordination" was the process of Nazification by which Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party successively established a system of totalitarian rule & coordination over all aspects of German society and societies occupied by Nazi Germany "from the economy and trade associations to the media, culture and education". Although the Weimar Constitution remained nominally in issue until Germany's surrender following World War II, nearly total Nazification had been secured by the 1935 resolutions approved during the Nuremberg Rally, when the symbols of the Nazi Party and the State were fused see Flag of Germany and German Jews were deprived of their citizenship see Nuremberg Laws.

Implications

Historian Claudia Koonz explains that the word stems from the arena of electricity, where it spoke to converting energy from alternating current to direct current, which is called "rectification" in English; the word translates literally as "phasing". Used in its socio-political sense, has no equivalent in any other language. Other similar terms were also used by the Nazis, such(a) as , which constituted the removal or "switching off" of anyone who stained or soiled the German nation. This seemingly clinical terminology captured both the mechanical and biological meaning for members of German society, as one German citizen visiting London explained, "It means the same stream will flow through the ethnic body politic []."

Former University of Dresden professor of romance languages, Viktor Klemperer—dismissed from his post for being Jewish in 1935 and who only survived his time in Germany due to being married to a prominent German woman—collected a list of terms employed in everyday speech by the Nazis, which he discussed in his book, LTI – Lingua Tertii Imperii, published in English as The language of the Third Reich. In this work, Klemperer contends that the Nazis offered the German Linguistic communication itself, a servant to their ideology through its repetitive use, eventually permeating the very "flesh and blood" of its people. whether it was sunny and pleasant, it was forwarded as "Hitler weather" for instance, or if you failed to comply with Nazi ideals of racial and social conformity, you were "switched off."

When the blatant emphasis of racial hatred of others seemed toan impasse in the school system, through radio broadcasts, or on film reels, the overseers of Nazi propaganda switched to strategies that focused more on togetherness and the "we-consciousness" of the collective Volk, but the mandates of Nazi "coordination" remained: pay homage to the Führer, expel all foreigners, sacrifice for the German people, and welcome future challenges. While greater German social and economic unity was exposed through the Gleichschaltung initiatives of the regime, it was at the expense of individuality and to the social detriment of any nonconformist; and worse—it contributed to and reinforced the social and racial exclusion of anyone deemed an enemy by National Socialist doctrine. The Nazi or "synchronization" of German society—along with a series of Nazi legislation—was element and parcel to Jewish economic disenfranchisement, the violence against political opposition, the creation of concentration camps, the Nuremberg Laws, the establishment of a racial , the seeking of , and the violent mass waste of human life deemed somehow less valuable by the National Socialist government of Germany.