Nazi Germany - Name

Name

The official name of the state was the Deutsches Reich ("German Reich") from 1933 to 1943, and the Großdeutsches Reich ("Greater German Reich") from 1943 to 1945. The name Deutsches Reich is usually translated into English as "German Empire" or "German Reich". The term "Reich" does not always connote an empire; the official name of Germany remained "Deutsches Reich" during the Weimar period.

The most popular English terms are "Nazi Germany" and "Third Reich." The latter was adopted by the Nazis and first used in a 1923 novel by Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, that counted the medieval Holy Roman Empire (962–1806) as the first and the German Empire (1871–1918) as the second. The Nazis ignored the previous Weimar Republic (1918–1933), which the Nazis denounced as a historical aberration, contemptuously referring to it as "the System". Historiographically, Germans today refer to the period as Zeit des Nationalsozialismus or the abbreviated NS-Zeit ("National Socialist period"). A formal term frequently used in political speech or legal context is Nationalsozialistische Gewaltherrschaft (referring more specifically to the Nazi terror regime).