Eighty years later, we still struggle to comprehend how the Nazi regime could ever have happened. In these two lectures, Jess Velona, who has taught courses on Nazi Germany at Fordham, NYU, and elsewhere, provides key answers, using rarely seen historical film footage, eyewitness interviews, and original documents. Explore how beneath an apparently advanced German society lay traditions of authoritarianism, militarism, and antisemitism. Watch the Nazis exploit Germany's bitter defeat in World War I and its fragile Weimar democracy to gain popularity, and then accept an invitation to take power and consolidate a dictatorial regime. See the Nazis' twin evils - escalating persecution and aggressive warfare - merge during the invasion of the Soviet Union to produce mass killing of European Jews. Throughout, Jess will recount extraordinary stories of resistance, rescue, and survival, by Jews and others, in the face of Nazi repression.