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Early timeline of Nazism

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Through Nazism, Imperialism and World War I

LabNazism HitlerLab · Class 5–9History ExplorerLab · Class 10Nationalism Europe

19th century influences

  • 1841: German economist Friedrich List publishes National System of Political Economy, espousing settlement farming and agricultural expansion eastwards along with economic industrialization manipulated by the state, and the establishment of a German-dominated European economic sphere as part of the solution to Germany's economic woes (predecessor ideas to Nazi imperialism).
  • 1856: French aristocrat and author Arthur de Gobineau publishes his An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races in which he divides the human species into three races, black, white, and yellow; arguing therein that racial distinctions form a clear and natural genetic barrier of sorts. Gobineau wrote that racial mixing would lead to chaos. While not an anti-Semite (he is often characterized as philosemitic, as he wrote positively about the Jews), his work is still considered an early manifestation of scientific racism. Historian Joachim C. Fest, in his biography of Hitler, claims that Arthur de Gobineau's negative views on race mixing influenced Hitler and thereby, the ideology of Nazism.
  • 1870s: German chancellor Otto von Bismarck promotes campaigns against Catholics (Kulturkampf) and, later, against the Social Democratic Party, in an attempt to unify Germans in common opposition to a minority. Later referred to as "negative integration," historians cite it as setting a tone of exclusion in early Germany, which had a lasting influence on later German nationalism.
  • 1882: The Linz Program, one of the most notable expressions of early German nationalism in Austria, is published. The program advocates a break with the Habsburg monarchy, the full Germanization of Austria and its annexation to Germany as a single nation.
  • 1888: German jurist and international law reformer, Franz von Liszt argues that criminal characteristics are innate as opposed to being determined by a person's social environment and coins the term, Criminal Biology, a theory that would later influence Nazi anthropologists and racial hygiene proponents in their justification for sterilization and euthanasia.

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