A Companion to Nazi Germany

Shelley Baranowski, Armin Nolzen, Claus-Christian W. Szejnmann, Shelley Baranowski, Armin Nolzen, Claus-Christian W. Szejnmann

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781118936900
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

A Deep Exploration of the Rise, Reign, and Legacy of the Third Reich

For its brief existence, National Socialist Germany was one of the most destructive regimes in the history of humankind. Since that time, scholarly debate about its causes has volleyed continuously between the effects of political and military decisions, pathological development, or modernity gone awry. Was terror the defining force of rule, or was popular consent critical to sustaining the movement? Were the German people sympathetic to Nazi ideology, or were they radicalized by social manipulation and powerful propaganda? Was the "Final Solution" the motivation for the Third Reich's rise to power, or simply the outcome?

A Companion to Nazi Germany addresses these crucial questions with historical insight from the Nazi Party's emergence in the 1920s through its postwar repercussions. From the theory and context that gave rise to the movement, through its structural, cultural, economic, and social impacts, to the era's lasting legacy, this book offers an in-depth examination of modern history's most infamous reign.

• Assesses the historiography of Nazism and the prehistory of the regime
• Provides deep insight into labor, education, research, and home life amidst the Third Reich's ideological imperatives
• Describes how the Third Reich affected business, the economy, and the culture, including sports, entertainment, and religion
• Delves into the social militarization in the lead-up to war, and examines the social and historical complexities that allowed genocide to take place
• Shows how modern-day Germany confronts and deals with its recent history

Today's political climate highlights the critical need to understand how radical nationalist movements gain an audience, then followers, then power. While historical analogy can be a faulty basis for analyzing current events, there is no doubt that examining the parallels can lead to some important questions about the present. Exploring key motivations, environments, and cause and effect, this book provides essential perspective as radical nationalist movements have once again reemerged in many parts of the world.

Part I
Theories, Background, and Contexts

Chapter One
How Do We Explain the Rise of Nazism?: Theory and Historiography

Geoff Eley

What are the contexts for understanding the rise of Nazism? Immediately after 1945, Nazism’s origins were sought straightforwardly in the far regions of the deeper German past: ‘Nazi Germany [was] seen as the culmination of German history, the logical endpoint of a malign potential nurtured in that culture for centuries’ (Caplan 2008, 4). This characterized most of the public commentary after the war’s end, from the reportage and reflections of journalists and academics through the moralizing of critics and clergymen to the rhetoric of politicians and the popular common sense. Without some grappling with those deeper origins, it seemed, the disastrous turn in German history would never be explained. The Nazis were thought to have drawn upon beliefs deemed characteristic of German culture stretching back through the nineteenth century to the Lutheran Reformation, and even the Middle Ages. Only by relating Nazism’s appeal to a set of deep‐seated and pervasive dispositions – militarism, deference to authority, veneration of the state, weakness of liberalism – could it be rendered intelligible. If such traditions of thought set Germany sharply apart from the liberal‐democratic West, then perhaps Nazi success could begin to make sense.

An origins narrative had already emerged from the war itself. A prime instance was A.J.P. Taylor’s Course of German History (completed in September 1944), initially commissioned by Britain’s Political Warfare Executive for the advice of the future occupying administration of Germany. Expanding an essay on the Weimar Republic into a full‐scale account of what we now call the long nineteenth century, Taylor related German national character to the geopolitical determinism of Germany’s central European location: ‘it was no more a mistake for the German people to end up with Hitler than it is an accident when a river flows into the sea’ (Taylor 1961, vii). Likewise, having published as a medievalist in 1938, Geoffrey Barraclough produced three books in rapid succession after the war, each placing the twentieth century in the strongest possible relationship to earlier times (Barraclough 1938, 1946a, 1946b, 1950). In The Roots of National Socialism, 1783–1933 (1941), to cite a third example, Rohan D’Olier Butler, a British civil servant and official historian, presented Nazism as merely the political climax of a long‐seeded intellectual tradition. ‘The exaltation of the heroic leader’; ‘the racial myth’; antisemitism; ‘the concept of the all‐significant totalitarian state’; ‘the community of the folk’; ‘the full program of economic autarky’; ‘the tradition of militarism’; the idea of ‘the dynamic originality of German culture in contrast to the superficial civilization of the West’; ‘the polemic against reason’; ‘the supernatural mission of German culture’; ‘living‐space’; ‘Pan‐Germanism’; ‘law as folk‐law’; ‘the abasement of the individual before the state’ – each of these was taken to be distinctively German, descending by linear continuity from the late eighteenth century. As Butler put it: ‘The Nazis said that might is right; Spengler said it; Bernhardi said it; Nietzsche said it; Treitschke had said as much; so had Haller before him; so had Novalis’ (Butler 1941, 277–278).

This reflex of explanation marked the immediate post‐war decades. Because Germany produced Nazism, ipso facto its history was singular, with peculiarities deeply embedded in the German past. Germany’s ‘path to modernity’ had been distorted or stalled. The intellectual outlook of Germans broke radically from the West – not only from the Enlightenment and its values, but also in a romantic‐nationalist counter‐reaction against the French Revolution. If the deeper conditions for Germany’s difference were found in earlier periods, from the Reformation and Thirty Years War to the rise of Brandenburg‐Prussia, then the main crucible remained the nineteenth century. Wars against Napoleon; Stein–Hardenberg era; Holy Alliance and Metternichian reaction; failure of the 1848 revolutions; Bismarck’s ‘revolution from above’ and policy of ‘blood and iron’; creation of the unified Prusso‐German state – these became the markers of Germany’s divergence from Britain and France. ‘Authoritarian’, ‘militarist’, bureaucratic’, ‘Prussian’ were the adjectives commonly in use. Well into the 1960s, this was the default understanding of Nazism’s place in the longer arc of Germany’s past. An imposing 1955 UNESCO anthology, The Third Reich, was one key reference point, William Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (1960) another (Vermeil 1955; Shirer 1960).¹

There was a stronger socio‐political version of this deep‐historical account. Until the new start after 1945, it ran, the ground had yet to be laid for a viable German liberalism, whether via constitutional restraints on royal and aristocratic power, the growth of parliamentary government and civil liberties, or the political culture of an active and responsible citizenry. In contrast with Britain and France, where liberalism wrested power from monarchy and aristocracy through violent revolution, liberalism in Germany lacked comparable success. Germany’s tragedy, Max Weber liked to say, was that, unlike the Stuarts and Bourbons, no Hohenzollern had ever had his head chopped off: standing before a decisive breakthrough in the 1848 Revolution (Taylor’s ‘turning‐point’ where German history ‘failed to turn’), German liberals failed the test (Taylor 1961, 69). Weber explained this sociologically: neither as forthrightly liberal nor indeed as fully ‘bourgeois’ as its British counterparts, the German bourgeoisie proved incapable of developing the political culture that Germany’s ‘modernizing’ capitalist economy required. In his concise rendition of Weber’s views, Anthony Giddens (1972, 16–17) puts it like this: ‘in Germany, the liberal bourgeoisie did not engineer a “successful” revolution. Germany achieved political unification as a consequence of Bismarck’s promotion of an aggressively expansionist policy; and industrialization was effected within a social structure in which power still devolved upon traditionally established elite groups.’

In failing to conquer the past, Germany became vulnerable to the future: with the authoritarianism of ‘pre‐industrial traditions’ still intact, the conflicts of a rapidly ‘modernizing’ society became harder to absorb. When that same authoritarianism outlasted even the German Revolution of 1918–1919, the old elites felt disastrously empowered in undermining Weimar’s new democratic order. In Edgar Feuchtwanger’s words (1973, 21), ‘the very class which should have been the buttress of liberalism and stability [the educated bourgeoisie] became a prey to extremism’, supporting democracy’s right‐wing enemies instead. German liberalism’s apparent weakness was derived from a sociology of deference and accommodation (a so‐called feudalization of the bourgeoisie), which bolstered the precedence of pre‐industrial elites. The failed Revolution of 1848 became the pivotal event – or non‐event – for the longer term future. No one put this more clearly than Theodor Hamerow (1966, vii), the classic historian of German unification: ‘The penalty for the mistakes of 1848 was paid not in 1849, but in 1918, in 1933, and in 1945.’

Through the 1960s, for Marxists and liberals alike, this perspective proved remarkably resilient. No less disparaging than Weber, Karl Marx bequeathed an indictment of the German bourgeoisie to later generations of adherents, from the pre‐1914 SPD (Social Democratic Party) to the Weimar Republic’s wider left‐wing intelligentsia.² It was shared by an assortment of younger historians open to Marxism – a disconnected network of talented outsiders fleeing Nazism in the 1930s, including Eckart Kehr, Hans Rosenberg, Georg W.F. Hallgarten, Alfred Vagts, Gustav Mayer, and Veit Valentin – who were later adopted by the critical West German historians discussed below.³ Post‐1945 Marxist philosophers and sociologists took the same view of German bourgeois deficiencies, from Georg Lukács (1980, excerpted 1966) to Leo Kofler (1979) and Ernst Bloch (2009). ‘Just as England is the eternally “finished” country in Europe’, Kofler pronounced (1979, 537, 739), ‘so Germany is the one eternally stuck halfway.’ And: ‘The historical chain of failures on the part of the bourgeoisie in Germany is the cause of “Prussianism” pure and simple.’ Isaac Deutscher (1972, 169) was especially blunt:

since the Reformation the tragedy of Germany [is] that it has not advanced with the times, and that Germany has never fought through its own revolution. The French had their great revolution. The English carried theirs through in the seventeenth century and then experienced a long process of reform, democratization, and progress. Germany has in many respects remained fixed in the sixteenth century and at the catastrophe of the Thirty Years War. Every revolution has failed.⁴

By the early 1970s, two prevailing versions had coalesced.⁵ On the one hand, a strong typification of the ‘German case’ for purposes of comparison – as an authoritarian syndrome of pre‐industrial traditions and arrested liberalism – became central to social science literatures on political development, especially when dealing directly w...