1. The pseudo-medievalism of the Bismarck memorial in Hamburg, unveiled in 1906, promises a revival of past German glories under a new national leader.

2. Antisemitic postcard from ‘the only Jew-free hotel in Frankfurt’, 1887. Such attitudes were a new phenomenon in the 1880s.

3. (top) The promise of victory: German troops advance confidently across Belgium in 1914.

4. (middle) The reality of defeat: German prisoners of war taken by the Allies at the Battle of Amiens, August 1918.

5. (bottom) The price to be paid: the skeletons of German warplanes scrapped in fulfilment of the 1919 Treaty of Versailles.

6. (top) Descent into chaos: a street battle in Berlin during the ‘Spartacist uprising’ of January 1919.

7. (right) Revenge of the right: a Free Corps lieutenant in charge of a firing squad photographs his irregulars with the ‘Red Guardist’ they are about to execute during their bloody suppression of the Munich Soviet, May 1919.

8. A racist cartoon in a German satirical magazine highlights the murders, robberies and sex offences supposedly committed by French colonial troops during the Ruhr occupation of 1923.

9. The hyperinflation of 1923: ‘So many thousand-mark notes for just one dollar!’

10. The balance-sheet of reparations, 1927: 14,000 suicides in Germany are the result, according to a satirical periodical, of economic hardship caused by the financial burden imposed on the country by the Treaty of Versailles.

11. The Roaring Twenties in Berlin: artist Otto Dix’s bitter view of German society in 1927-28; war veterans are forced out to the margins, while women of easy virtue and their clients live it up at a jazz party.

12. The beer-hall putsch: armed Nazi stormtroopers wait outside Munich city hall, November 1923, for the takeover that never came.

13. Hitler relaxing, but not drinking, with his friends in a Munich beer-cellar in 1929. Gregor Strasser is on the far left.

14. Hitler leads a street march at an early Nazi Party rally in Weimar, 1926, while stormtroopers clear the way. A hatless Rudolf Hess can be seen to his left, with Heinrich Himmler directly behind.

15. The face of fanaticism: stormtroopers listen to a speech at an open-air rally, 1930.

16. The Communist threat: criminality, poverty and extreme left-wing commitment often went together, to the alarm of middle-class voters, as in this slum district of Hamburg during an election campaign in 1932.

17. The futility of Brüning’s ban on uniforms (December 1930): the brownshirts wear white shirts instead, and the effect is the same.

18. A pacifist poster warns in 1930 that ‘anyone who votes for the right votes for war’, and Nazism can mean only death and destruction. ‘German,’ it asks rhetorically, ‘shall he grab you again?’

19. The violence of the visual image: where the Nazis lead in 1928, other parties follow in later elections. (a) ‘Smash the world-foe, International High Finance’ - Nazi election poster, 1928. (b) ‘An end to this system!’ - Communist election poster, 1932. (c) ‘Clear the way for List 1!’ - the Social Democratic worker elbows aside the Nazi and the Communist, 1930. (d) ‘Against civil war and inflation’ - the People’s Party knocks down its rivals to right and left, an example of wishful thinking from 1932.

20. The choice before the electorate in September 1930: the parties target women, benefit claimants, young people and other specific social groups.

21. ‘Harbinger of the Third Reich’. A Social Democratic poster warns against the violence of the Nazis, January 1931. After scrawling ‘Germany, awake!’ and daubing swastikas on the walls, the figure of Death, dressed in a brownshirt uniform and holding a pistol, kills an opponent and marches on.

22. (top) Drowning out the opposition: Nazis use loudhailers to shout ‘Hail, Hitler!’ during the election campaign of March 1933.

23. (below) The respectable face of Nazism: Hitler, in formal attire, meets leading businessmen shortly after his appointment as Reich Chancellor in January 1933.

24. The reality on the streets: Communists and Social Democrats arrested by stormtroopers acting as ‘auxiliary police’ await their fate in a torture cellar of the brownshirts in the spring of 1933.

25. The first concentration camps, 1933: Social Democrats are registered on their arrival at the Oranienburg camp.

26. ‘The noble Communist in the concentration camp’. Nazi propaganda gave wide publicity to the camps but tried to give them a positive image. According to this cartoon from 14 May 1933, ‘arrest’ was followed by a ‘clean-up’, a ‘cut (hair and beard)’ - the German word is the same as that for circumcision - an ‘airing’ and a ‘photograph’. In Berlin’s ‘Romanesque Café’ and the ‘Café Megalomania’, well-known haunts of modernist artists and radical writers, the supposedly Jewish regulars lament their friend’s transformation six weeks later: ‘What the poor man must have gone through!’

27. Hitler’s cultural revolution: out of a mass of squabbling pygmies, ‘Germany’s sculptor’ creates a new giant German ready to take on the world.

28. The exiles: the Nazi satirical journal The Nettle portrays the flight of Germany’s most eminent writers and intellectuals as a triumph for the German nation: while Thomas Mann works the hurdy-gurdy, others, mostly Jewish, slink away from Germany to his tune. Among those caricatured are Albert Einstein, Lion Feuchtwanger and Karl Marx. ‘What is gone, won’t return.’

29. ‘Against the un-German spirit’: Nazi students burn Jewish and leftist books outside Berlin University on 10 May 1933.

30. ‘Germans! Defend yourselves! Do not buy from Jews!’ Stormtroopers paste stickers onto a Jewish shop window during the boycott of I April 1933, while shoppers look on.

31. Continuity in the National Socialist Revolution: a postcard from 1933 draws a direct line from Frederick the Great of Prussia through Bismarck to Hitler.