The German composer Kurt Weill moves to New York, where he writes Broadway musicals

Adolf Hitler reinstates Germany's airforce, the Luftwaffe, putting Hermann Goering in command

The people of the rich mining district of the Saar vote to merge with Germany

Adolf Hitler gets away with a calculated international risk when he reintroduces conscription in Germany

Adolf Hitler's rearmament programme begins to reduce German unemployment, and by 1938 eliminates it entirely

Adolf Hitler gives Karl Dönitz, a submarine commander from World War I, responsibility for Germany's U-boat programme

Adolf Hitler promulgates a law prohibiting any sexual relationship between Jews and 'Aryans'

New Nazi laws announced at Nuremberg strip Jews of their German citizenship

The rest of Europe offers no effective objection when Adolf Hitler moves his troops into the demilitarized Rhineland

German architect Werner March designs spectacular buildings for the Berlin Olympics

Membership of the Hitler Youth (for boys) or the League of German Maidens is made compulsory

Hitler gives Reinhard Heydrich control of the Gestapo

At the Berlin Olympics, attended by Hitler, the African-American athlete Jesse Owens sets three new Olympic records and equals a fourth

Carl Orff's cantata Carmina Burana has its premiere in Frankfurt

Hitler and Mussolini form an axis, or alliance, causing Germany and Italy to become known as the Axis powers

Germany and Japan establish an Anti-Comintern Pact against their common enemy, the USSR

Pope Pius XI issues an encyclical, Mit Brennender Sorge, condemning the Nazi ideology of racism

Under Nazi influence the University of Bonn deprives Thomas Mann of his honorary doctorate, which is restored to him in 1946

Lutheran pastor Martin Niemöller is arrested for defying the Nazis and spends the next eight years in concentration camps

A Nazi exhibition of 'degenerate art' opens in Munich, and visitors are invited to mock the avant-garde works on show

Buchenwald, near Weimar, is set up as a concentration camp providing forced labour for local arms manufacturers

Rocket engineer Wernher von Braun is appointed director of Germany's weapon research centre at Peenemünde

Adolf Hitler, entertaining Mussolini in Germany, puts on spectacular demonstrations of German military and industrial might

Adolf Hitler appoints Joachim von Ribbentrop as Germany's foreign minister

German tanks cross the border into Austria, on the official invitation of Austrian Nazis