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The Bureaucrat’s HolocaustHolocaust holocaust The systematic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of six million Jews by the Nazi regime and its collaborators between 1933 and 1945. It was the culmination of a programme of escalating persecution, exclusion, and ultimately industrialised genocide without precedent in human history. The Holocaust — the Hebrew term is Shoah, meaning catastrophe — unfolded in stages. The Nazi seizure of power in 1933 brought immediately a regime committed to removing Jews from German public life: civil service dismissals, boycotts, the Nuremberg Laws of 1935 which stripped Jews of citizenship, Kristallnacht in 1938 which destroyed synagogues and Jewish…
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A recurring claim in populist right-wing discourse asserts that Adolf Hitler and the Nazi movement were “socialist.” This argument leans superficially on the word “Socialist” in the Nazi Party’s name (National Socialist German Workers’ Party) and occasional anti-capitalist rhetoric used by Nazi propagandists. However, the overwhelming consensus of historical scholarship rejects this claim . Nazism is classified as a form of fascist, far-right ultranationalism, fundamentally opposed to Marxist and socialist ideologies . This paper addresses the “Hitler was a socialist” fallacy through a review of the historiography and a thematic analysis of key areas: ideology, economic policy, political rhetoric versus…
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One of the challenges of studying Germany from the end of the First World War to the end of the Second World War is remembering and then navigating the intense and dramatic changes that took place throughout the era. As with previous blog posts helping students to master topic areas, the trick with Germany is to break down the events of the era into understandable phases that can then be connected together. In this blog post we’ll look at the first of five distinct phases and try to avoid a couple of pitfalls along the way. One of the problems…
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Hitler, a cautious dictator for the first couple of years of his rule, had become reckless by 1941, and had gambled everything on a swift victory in the USSR. If StalinStalin Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin (18 December 1878 – 5 March 1953) was a Soviet politician, dictator and revolutionary who led the Soviet Union from 1924 until his death in 1953. Read More’s regime could be crushed and thirty million Russians starved to death as a result, then there would be enough living space for Aryan German settlers and the resources to defeat any enemy in the west. The defeat of…
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Most of the writing on individual perpetrators of the HolocaustHolocaust holocaust The systematic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of six million Jews by the Nazi regime and its collaborators between 1933 and 1945. It was the culmination of a programme of escalating persecution, exclusion, and ultimately industrialised genocide without precedent in human history. The Holocaust — the Hebrew term is Shoah, meaning catastrophe — unfolded in stages. The Nazi seizure of power in 1933 brought immediately a regime committed to removing Jews from German public life: civil service dismissals, boycotts, the Nuremberg Laws of 1935 which stripped Jews of citizenship, Kristallnacht…
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By early 1943, Adolf Hitler was an increasingly remote and reclusive figure in Germany. His health had declined due to the stresses of the war and he had begun to suffer from Parkinson’s disease. The Nazi government attempted to suppress the defeat at Stalingrad of the German Sixth Army (which had marched triumphantly into Paris three years earlier), but by February it was announced that the army had been lost, sacrificing itself for the Reich. The catastrophe, combined with Hitler’s diminished presence became an opportunity for his propagandist Goebbels to increase his role and make a bid to be a…
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This is a quick post for history students focusing on Nazi Germany. I’ve created some notes to download on the origins of the Gestapo (Geheime Staatspolizei), the Nazi Secret State Police. Secret political police forces in Germany existed before Hitler came to power and were amalgamated into the Gestapo, which fell under the auspices of the the SS by the mid 1930s. The Gestapo is a much mythologised institution, it was relatively small compared to the population it had to police and would not have been able to operate effectively without German citizens ready to denounce each other. You can…
