Nazi Germany

Short Oxford History of Germany

by Jane Caplan (Editor)

The history of National Socialism as a movement and a regime remains one of the most compelling and intensively studied aspects of twentieth-century history, one whose significance extends far beyond Germany or even Europe. Featuring ten chapters by leading international experts, this volume presents an up-to-date and authoritative introduction to the history of Nazi Germany.
Opening with an introduction delineating the challenges this period of history has posed to historians since 1945, Nazi Germany continues on with chapters that explain how Nazism emerged as an ideology and a political movement; how Hitler and his party took power and remade the German state; and how the Nazi "national community" was organized around a radical and eventually lethal distinction between the "included" and the "excluded." Later chapters discuss the complex relationship between Nazism and Germany's religious faiths; the perverse economic rationality of the regime; the path to war laid down by Hitler's foreign policy; and the intricate and intimate intertwining of war and genocide. The volume concludes with a final chapter on the aftermath of National Socialism in postwar German history and memory.

Genres: History, Germany, Nonfiction, Politics, World War II, Essays, Holocaust

326 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2008

Reviews

[Jan-Maat]

Overall I was surprised reading this 2008 volume of essays how little had changed in terms of the big ideas and concepts since I had studied this subject in school, I suppose more or less twenty years before this was published, This would not have been true I think twenty years before or twenty years before that. The study of Nazi Germany, on the basis of this volume at least has calmed down, the pace of change has dropped off, there are no big theoretical differences between the author's here, just a few same nuances of interpretation to distinguish them, they broadly accept a view of the Third Reich as poly-centric, with the relation between those centres as dynamic and competitive with different Nazis struggling to build up power bases, while at the same time there was a dialectic between the leadership and supporters which meant that occasionally a leader had to intervene to cool down over enthusiastic policy initiatives. None here go as far as Hans Mommsen in seeing Hitler as weak dictator, they all prefer to work within Kershaw's conception of the Party, and the bureaucracy, as 'working towards the Fuehrer', which one could see as nuanced Mommsenism rather than a completely new idea. On the other hand this is entirely a work of Anglo-Saxon scholarship - all the authors are active in the English speaking academic world, while the big ideas and debates over the nature of the Third Reich mostly I believe came of Germany in the 1960s and 70s.

Not a good book for the reader who has never read anything about the Third Reich, but not a bad second or third book - particularly if you have read an older book from the 60s or 70s (or before!) in which case this may offer you some different perspectives. On the other hand if you read something recent like Ian Kershaw's books then I guess you'll find little new or striking here.

Bonus points for the obese SA men on the front cover.

Jane Caplan Introduction almost a brisk summary of the whole book
Richard J. Evans The Emergence of Nazi Ideology a brief dance through the ideological roots of Nazism in the nineteenth century, showing how these were present in other far-right organisations in the early-twentieth century
Peter Fritzsche The NSDAP 1919-1934: from fringe politics to the seizure of power This cover quite a lot of ground, the overlaps between the many and various right-wing anti-Republican parties, also the success of Nazis vague appeals to various struggling interest groups, the ground work involved in maintaining a populist mass movement, how the Nazis succeded in doing what other similar groups failed to do (combine political radicalism and mass appeal, and violence, and electability)
Jeremy Noakes Hitler and the Nazi State: leadership, hierarchy, and power interesting on the tensions between Party and State interests, also the broad overlap of political opinion eg in the judiciary so Judges were perfectly happy to clamp down on Communists and Socialists, also that one can see organisations like the SS as an additional force neither entirely within the Party and partially integrated into state structures. I think this essay pointed out that the (inefficient) administrative overlap and competing agencies were typical also of post NEP Soviet Russia and the New Deal USA ie regimes in a hurry to change things
Jill Stephenson Inclusion: building the national community in propaganda and practise This was an entertaining essay arguing that the much vaunted national community - Volksgemeinschaft, was pretty much entirely propaganda (or possibly grossly misunderstood), the Nazis took the view that within the national community there was or should be racial equality, all other social divisions were ignored, re-enforced or glossed over by propaganda 'we're all in this together'! While the class structures remained the same, as did differences between rural and urban areas, Catholics and Protestants. She has a couple of interesting examples about family policy - the nazis wanted to get women out of the workplace and into bed, giving birth (repeatedly), so they set up a marriage loan scheme and child benefits if you had six or more children , but in both cases the amounts of money were too small to offset the cost of raising a child, while wage suppression meant that having a family was hard to afford, while rearmament and mobilisation meant that women were eventually drawn back into the workplace which left them with criminalising abortion and discouraging contraception
Nikolaus Wachsmann The policy of exclusion: repression in the Nazi state, 1933-1939 Really the literal flip side of the preceding essay - if the the 75% + Aryan heterosexual, apolitical to right-wing, conventionally religious, able bodied, in employment or actively seeking employment, and not sexually promiscuous German citizen was included, then everybody else was excluded and subject to repression of various kinds (death, imprisonment, sterilization), the case of the Jehovah's witnesses was particularly telling, the Nazis excluded them because they would not swear oaths nor serve in the military, the chief JW wrote to complain to Hitler pointing out that they also believed that Jews were the spawn of Satan - this however was not enough to restore them to official favour.
Richard Steigmann-Gall Religion and the Churches Felt a bit like a painting by numbers type essay, I think Wachsmann stole his thunder over the Jehovah's witnesses, the case of (successful) Catholic resistance in Germany to Nazi plans to have crucifixes removed from classrooms during the war somehow felt very telling and underdeveloped ( yes, yes, you can commit atrocities, murder priests in Poland, plunge Europe in war and that's all fine with us the Catholic hierarchy, but if by God you lay a finger on our crucifixes in schools then you'll have a fight on your hands though I suppose it is an example of being able to pick your fights ), Steigmann-Gall rather avoids pointing out that Anti-Semitism was institutionalised in the Churches eg the belief that Jesus wasn't Jewish, he prefers to point out that individual priests were Anti-Semitic instead, giving a rather misleading 'bad-apple' impression of the situation.
Adam Tooze The economic history of the Nazi regime although Tooze gives a curiously positive assessment of the Nazi regime as a relatively successful case of crisis management, my own sense (and this doesn't contradict his reading) was that the entire 'Make Germany Great Again' project was an explosive under the whole country with a fuse of uncertain length - it was always going to end in massive self destruction - that was always the implication of the base assumptions of the Party ie resources are limited, we have to fight to gain resources to grow, but we need resources to grow to be strong enough to win, which we can only get by fighting and taking resources from others . The tone of his essay felt distinctly odd to me, almost congratulatory, hopefully I misunderstood him
Gerhard L. Weinburg Foreign policy in peace and war We going to have our war and we'll go to war with anyone who tries to stop us
Doris L. Bergen Occupation, imperialism, and genocide, 1939-1945 Through their war for the interlocking goals of spatial expansion and racial purification, Nazi Germans had created ever more problems for themselves, problems they addressed with increasingly radical 'solutions'. Deadly schemes on the part of the leadership and innovative impulses on the ground were reconciled through what Ian Kershaw has highlighted as 'working towards the Fuehrer' - a tactic of anticipating or interpreting Hitler's intentions, which in this setting always involved intensifying the assault on target populations. Contradictions between ideals & pragmatic concerns such as the need for labour were resolved through practises that squandered human lives in the interest of production & profit. Military conquests expanded opportunities for destruction, but setbacks generated their own motives for participation...It was not necessary for all Germans to share their leaders' ideological convictions. The institutionalisation of prejudice meant rewards for those who participated, whether they did so eagerly or reluctantly... (pp244-5)
Robert G. Moeller The Third Reich in post-war German memory sets out briefly, with just a couple of details that German moved from a sense of their own sufferings particularly in the last two years of the war, seeing those as morally equivalent to the sufferings of others to, by 2005 that there were many signs that those who knew the difference between genocide and what Germans suffered during the war, and who understood the causal relationship between what Germans did to others and what befell the Germans, were a clear majority (p.266)

[Murat · Rating 3 out of 5]

İçerik olarak güzel bir kitap olsa da, çok ağır bir dil ve kelime hazinesine sahip. Bu çeviriden mi kitabın orijinalinden mi kaynaklanıyor bilmiyorum.

[Nikol · Rating 5 out of 5]

Miss, was Hitler the king?🙃

[Murat Sulukan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Especially I interested in this term and read lots of books as soon as possible. I can say, this book is one of the most explain and describe books in 933 to 945. Absolutely I recommended this book. It has fluent and very exited, you can finish faster.

[Mithat Can · Rating 5 out of 5]

It was little bit hard for me but such a great book for beginners. While you are reading that you need a dictionary...

[Bahadır Kılınç · Rating 5 out of 5]

Çok beğendiğim bir kitap oldu.Nazi Almayasinda yaşanan sosyopolitik l,ekonomik, uzmanlarin görüşleri ve arastirmalari döneme taniklik eder cinsinden.Meraklilarina önerilir...

[Eric Schwebel]

Some interesting perspectives

[Murat Yeğin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nazi Almanyası üzerine yazılmış farklı makalelerden oluşmakta kitap. Bu dönem her yönüyle detaylı olarak incelenmiş ve bu zamana kadar bu dönemle ilgili okuduğum en iyi kitap diyebilirim.