That is why we think of the Weimar Republic as a time of political turbulence and unrest. The active descriptions of politics before , the year Hitler came to power, undermine notions of seduction or brainwashing in the years after.
It is not possible to explain the demise of all sorts of political institutions before Hitler in one way, and to explain the power of the Nazis after that in another way. Germans constantly deliberated questions of race, authority and loyalty. Only a minority became full-fledged Nazis, but most accepted the basic premises of the regime, including the isolation of German Jews.
While most Germans had at least a vague idea of the Holocaust, they almost certainly did not endorse mass murder, which is not to say they were not complicit in the persecution of their neighbors along the way to the "final solution.
You call the collection of letters in the "Homelands" book "an indispensible source for understanding the Nazis. Historians have access to lots of propaganda tracts and to the most extreme statements made by leading Nazis, but we don't have many transcripts of more-ordinary Germans explaining their choices. In this case, family members lived both in Holland and Germany and were divided politically between enthusiastic pro-Nazism and skeptical anti-Nazism, a situation that forced correspondents to explain themselves, to argue matters out.
The letters also reveal the holes or seams in Nazi appeal. The son, for example, broke with friends over his loyalty to the Nazis, but also fell in love with a woman with a Jewish grandparent, something that complicated his assumptions. What the letters and diaries reveal is the qualified, not always easy, but nonetheless unmistakable desire to be part of the National Socialist movement.
We see people as actors, not as victims; we see them deliberating, rather than being seduced. This collection offers extraordinary insights into why Germans became Nazis, and how a Nazi mother in Germany came to disagree with her beloved anti-Nazi daughter in Holland.
In the end, the letters indicate just how self-absorbed Germans were by their sense of having been victimized, which means that the question of World War I remains relevant to World War II, even if the Nazi leaders themselves wanted something far more than a victory in a rerun of World War I. I am proud of German history. My visits to the museum have helped me to understand something.
Unlike many Arabs, Germans are not at all proud of their country's military history. In trying to understand why this is, I think of what colleagues in DW's Arabic Service have told me about German schools. Children are taught in the spirit of tolerance and acceptance of others. The teachers teach them the value of peace, and respect for other people.
I start to realize that this is why Germany was accepted back into the community of nations relatively soon after the horrors of the Nazi era.
History requires us to engage with it, to analyze and address it. Hayder al-Maliki lives in Basra, Iraq. As Hitler's Propaganda Minister, the virulently anti-Semitic Goebbels was responsible for making sure a single, iron-clad Nazi message reached every citizen of the Third Reich.
He strangled freedom of the press, controlled all media, arts, and information, and pushed Hitler to declare "Total War. The leader of the German National Socialist Workers' Party Nazi developed his anti-Semitic, anti-communist and racist ideology well before coming to power as Chancellor in He undermined political institutions to transform Germany into a totalitarian state. He committed suicide in April As leader of the Nazi paramilitary SS "Schutzstaffel" , Himmler was one of the Nazi party members most directly responsible for the Holocaust.
He also served as Chief of Police and Minister of the Interior, thereby controlling all of the Third Reich's security forces. He oversaw the construction and operations of all extermination camps, in which more than 6 million Jews were murdered. Hess joined the Nazi party in and took part in the Beer Hall Putsch, a failed Nazi attempt to gain power. While in prison, he helped Hitler write "Mein Kampf. In , he stood trial in Nuremberg and was sentenced to life in prison, where he died.
Alongside Himmler, Eichmann was one of the chief organizers of the Holocaust. After Germany's defeat, Eichmann fled to Austria and then to Argentina, where he was captured by the Israeli Mossad in Tried and found guilty of crimes against humanity, he was executed in He founded the Gestapo, the Secret State Police, and served as Luftwaffe commander until just before the war's end, though he increasingly lost favor with Hitler.
From Nazi project to public status symbol, and from East to West - a new museum exhibition highlights the automobile's place in German society. Here's a look back at the cars that have become cult over the years.
Visit the new DW website Take a look at the beta version of dw. Go to the new dw. Were Germans hoodwinked, intimidated or broadly supportive? Or was it perhaps some combination of all three? Robert Gellately is a Canadian historian who has written extensively on Nazi Germany.
Radical nationalism, socialism and anti-Semitism were already established features of the German socio-political landscape. You wind up with a lot of dry tinder just waiting for the appropriate spark. P rogressive noses often get out of joint when socialism is identified as part of the Nazi-facilitating mix. Socialism, in one form or another, was in the German air. Their version of socialism may have been different from that of the Social Democratic Party or the Communist Party, but it also eschewed anything to do with libertarian or laissez faire economics.
That was the Soviet model, which the Nazis considered to be misguided or worse. Property came with duties and had to serve the community. Community — defined racially — was a concept the Nazis were big on.
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