The Routledge Companion to Nazi Germany

Roderick Stackelberg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781134393855
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The Routledge Companion to Nazi Germany combines a concise narrative overview with chronological, bibliographical and tabular information to cover all major aspects of Nazi Germany. This user-friendly guide provides a comprehensive survey of key topics such as the origins and consolidation of the Nazi regime, the Nazi dictatorship in action, Nazi foreign policy, the Second World War, the Holocaust, the opposition to the regime and the legacy of Nazism. Features include:

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• detailed chronologies
• a discussion of Nazi ideology
• succinct historiographical overview with more detailed information on more than sixty major historians of Nazism
• biographies of 150 leading figures of Nazi Germany
• a glossary of terms, concepts and acronyms
• maps and tables
• a concise thematic bibliography of works on the Third Reich.

This indispensable reference guide to the history and historiography of Nazi Germany will appeal to students, teachers and general readers alike.

1
INTRODUCTION AND BACKGROUND

Nazi Germany and particularly the Holocaust, the signature crime of the twentieth century, present perhaps the greatest challenge to the explanatory powers of historians. Many explanations for Nazism have been offered in the course of the nine decades since the first fascist movement was founded in Italy in 1919. The most important interpretations are discussed in the section on historiography that follows the chronology in Part I. Whether we understand why the Nazis rose to power and why the Holocaust happened any better at the beginning of the twenty-first century than contemporaries did at the time remains an open question. History is, after all, an ongoing argument conducted from different and ever-changing perspectives very much dependent on the unpredictable course of events, changing public attitudes, and varying personal loyalties. But more than 60 years of intensive research have incontestably given us a clearer understanding of how the Nazis rose to power and how the Holocaust occurred. This book is intended to provide in readily accessible form the basic factual and conceptual tools and resources to understand how the Nazis established and consolidated their rule in Germany, how they drove the nation to war, how they committed their terrible atrocities, how they were resisted and eventually destroyed, and how their actions have been viewed by posterity. It sets forth basic information on what happened, how it happened, where it happened, when it happened, and who were the major actors in Germany who made it happen. By describing how the Nazi era has been interpreted, I hope this book also provides insight into why these catastrophic events occurred, without, however, presuming to offer definitive explanations to questions that historians have wrestled with for years and that will continue to challenge historians for many years to come.

To make sense of Nazism certain basic conceptual clarifications are indispensable. Although crude binary oppositions rarely do justice to the complexity of events, certain conceptual categories are helpful in recognizing the kind of movement Nazism represented and in distinguishing the fundamental values of historians who have interpreted its nature and meaning. One such binary opposition is the distinction between political movements and values of “left” and “right,” shorthand terms that are useful in identifying basic attitudes to the ideal of human equality. “Left” broadly denotes egalitarian attitudes toward human rights, material benefits, and the exercise of political power (hence partisanship for the impoverished, disadvantaged, and excluded people of the world), while “right” broadly denotes preferences for natural or traditional hierarchies of authority or power (whether based on birth, race, gender, ethnicity, talent, intelligence, wealth, or other traits that can be ranked on a comparative scale from superior to inferior). These terms “left” and “right” are most useful (and least confusing) when not overburdened by any other criterion than attitude toward human equality. The left–right conflict in the modern post-Enlightenment era has been most fiercely fought out on the issues of political power and distributive economic justice. The issues on which left and right have been in greatest disagreement are the questions of how widely and evenly political power is to be dispersed and how the material benefits of the world are to be shared among contending claimants.

The nineteenth century can be broadly described as an era of left-wing ascendancy in Europe. In fits and starts throughout the century political and social movements favoring greater equality and democracy seemed everywhere to be making headway in Europe to a greater or lesser degree. Often, to be sure, progress toward liberalization and democracy in Europe came at the expense of colonized people on other continents, even though opposition to imperialism was generally stronger on the left than on the right. To what extent the left–right class conflict in Europe contributed to the outbreak of the deadly internecine war that came to be known as the First World War is a question much debated by historians. Although the First World War was not in any clear-cut sense a war between left and right, the left–right conflict raging in different proportions within each of the combatant nations may have contributed to their respective readiness to go to war with each other. Even before the war the political right in most European countries was alert to the egalitarian challenge of the left, and right-wing extremists advocated radical policies (including discriminatory measures against Jews, proverbial outsiders and the perceived agents of divisive social change) to stem the tide of liberalism, socialism, and democracy. This left–right polarization became even more pronounced after the end of the war, particularly in the nations of central Europe. From a right-wing perspective – especially in the defeated nations – the war had been an absolute disaster, resulting in the collapse of monarchical governments, the victory of the democratically inclined Western powers, and the outbreak of the ruinously egalitarian and destructive Bolshevist revolution in Russia.

The outcome of the First World War – its economic and political consequences, its nationalist passions, its revolutionary aftermath – gave rise to the era of fascism in Europe, a period of right-wing ascendancy and radicalization. The Fascist Party founded by Benito Mussolini (1883–1945) in 1919 was expressly designed to counter the left-wing revolutionary threat – not by restoring the status quo ante, but by mounting a counter-revolution that appropriated much of the dynamic, the symbols, the methods, and the rhetoric of the revolutionary left to appeal to the left’s working-class constituency in an age in which the institution of universal suffrage made mass support indispensable to gaining and wielding political power. Hitler modeled his National Socialist Party and its paramilitary formations on Mussolini’s example (disastrously so in 1923, when his first effort to gain power by the threat of force, as Mussolini had successfully done in Italy a year earlier, failed in the Munich-based Hitler Putsch). Because Hitler’s movement turned out to be so much more radical in its anti-Semitism and genocidal aims than Mussolini’s movement, some historians question the usefulness of subsuming Nazism under the broader rubric of fascism, preferring the even broader rubric of totalitarianism instead. But whatever the differences from Mussolini’s Fascism, historians agree that Nazism was part of the broad right-wing counter-revolutionary movement that marked the era between the two world wars. It was also, however, a distinctly German version of that wider European movement of fascism.¹

Because fascist movements were determined to combat the egalitarianism of the left by mobilizing the masses for right-wing goals, fascism is much easier to define by what its adherents opposed than by what they favored. Defining fascism negatively – by what fascists opposed – also makes sense because their ability to attract support from mainstream conservatives was primarily due to the fact that they shared common enemies on the left. Fascists opposed what they viewed as the major leveling trends of the nineteenth century, including Marxist socialism, parliamentary democracy, constitutionalism, and political liberalism – the emancipatory political movements associated with the modern era, all embracing to a greater or lesser degree the idea of progress toward a more just society. Fascism and Nazism were part of a massive backlash against these “subversive” forces of the left, which supposedly undermined traditional hierarchies, values, and institutions (the state, the Church, the aristocratic estates) by their insistent advocacy of equality, justice, tolerance, popular sovereignty, human rights, and sharing the wealth. Fascists were radically anti-establishmentarian as well insofar as they held traditional conservatives responsible for failing effectively to counter the perceived threat to the nation from the left or from foreigners. Many of the social changes that alarmed fascists (democratization, liberalization, commercialization, secularization, labor militancy, urbanization) were actually unavoidable and unplanned consequences of European industrialization, but fascists and their conservative allies unwilling to face this unpleasant reality preferred to blame these social disruptions on left-wing organizers of the rebellious subordinate classes, and particularly on the Jews.²

But to properly appreciate both the revolutionary dynamic and insidious nature of fascism and Nazism we have to recognize its positive appeal as well, its putative normality, and its orientation toward a more productive future, at least in the perception of its contemporary followers. Fascists certainly rejected the left-wing forms and expressions of modernity mentioned above, but they fanatically embraced another important product of the modern era – namely, nationalism. The common denominator of fascist movements throughout Europe was commitment to the regeneration and rejuvenation of their own national communities, understood as communities of people related to each other by ethnicity, culture, language, and homeland – in short by “blood and soil.” That such a doctrine should have particular appeal in the defeated nations of the First World War, or in those whose national aspirations had been somehow disappointed by events, is not surprising. Italy, for example, had failed to gain the territorial acquisitions it had been promised by England and France during the war. Strong fascist movements developed, especially in nations in which there was either a widespread feeling of victimization as a result of the post-First World War settlement or a sense of threat from forces proclaiming or representing democracy, socialism, internationalism, or pacifism – allegiances that threatened to undermine the power of the nation to regenerate itself in the fascist sense. What rendered this mix of frustrations especially volatile and lethal were economic crises and redistributive pressures from below. The propertied classes who had the greatest stakes in existing property relations within each nation were prepared to support fascism especially when their economic status and hold on power was threatened by the breakdown of the deferential attitudes that traditional political and religious institutions had fostered for centuries. Fascism promised national unity and solidarity while protecting the rights of private property, an end to class conflict and selfish individualism, full popular mobilization for the national interest, an efficient chain of command for decisive national action, and a new youthful vigor and readiness to make personal sacrifices for the national good.

The general characteristics of fascism should not, however, obscure the specificity of Nazism and the unparalleled horrors it unleashed. Historians agree that for various reasons, not least the enormous military and economic power it commanded at the height of its power, Nazi Germany generated the most extreme form of European fascism and system of rule. All fascist movements shared racist attitudes to some extent, a function of the typically fascist proclivity to rank races and peoples according to their supposed innate attributes as well as the typically fascist commitment to the supremacy of the ethnic group native to the homeland. Fascist movements also shared at least a latent anti-Semitism, a function of the perception that Jews represented and promoted precisely the modernizing trends that fascists opposed. The Nazis gave exceptional priority and importance to the pseudo-science of race, an ideology that paved the way to the Holocaust. Biopolitics – the project of solving social problems through biological means, such as eugenics – had a tradition in Germany dating back to the pre-war era, but defeat in the First World War gave particular urgency to the project of strengthening the biological fibre of the German race

Why did Nazi Germany develop the most lethal form of fascism, racism, and anti-Semitism, eventually culminating in the genocide of the Holocaust? To this heavily researched but not definitively explained question this book hopes to make a contribution by assembling a variety of useful data. The interpretations that historians have offered to explain fascism in general and Nazism specifically have varied according to such factors as the availability of archival documentation and the state of current research. Interpretations also reflect the changing generational social, cultural, and political concerns that determine research agendas and affect the perspectives of individual historians. Part I of this book provides a basic chronology, a historiographical survey from the 1920s to the present, and capsule intellectual biographies of major historians and their most important contributions to the research on Nazi Germany. Part II offers an exposition of the major narrative and analytical themes of the Nazi era in roughly chronological format. Part III provides mini-biographies of major personages and representative figures in Nazi Germany, both Nazi and anti-Nazi, as well as a glossary of terms, concepts, and acronyms, and a selective bibliography of monographs and historical works grouped according to the themes discussed in Part II. The aim of this book is to give students, teachers, and scholars of Nazi Germany the informational tools, based on the current state of knowledge and thinking, to enable readers to reach their own conclusions on how best to understand and interpret this extraordinary chapter of recent history.

I
NAZI GERMANY IN HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE

2
CHRONOLOGY

1871

(January) Unification of Germany and founding of the German Empire under Kaiser Wilhelm I and Chancellor Otto von Bismarck

1888

Wilhelm II becomes kaiser

1889

(20 April) Adolf Hitler born in Braunau am Inn in Austria

1914

(August) Hitler welcomes the start of the First World War in Munich

1916

(August) Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg appointed commander-in-chief of German forces with General Erich Ludendorff as his chief of staff

1917

(November) Russian Revolution; Bolsh-eviks under Vladimir Ilyich Lenin seize power

1918

(19 February) Germany signs peace treaty with independent Ukraine

(14 March) Treaty of Brest-Litovsk imposes punitive peace on Russia

(May) Civil war in Russia

(October) German government under Prince Max von Baden sues for peace

(November) Revolution in Germany

(9 November) Abdication of Kaiser Wilhelm II; proclamation of German republic

(11 November) German government emissaries sign armistice at Compiègne ending the First World War

1919

(January) Spartacus uprising crushed in Berlin

(6 February) National Constitutional Assembly convenes in Weimar

(23 March) Benito Mussolini organizes new fascist movement in Italy

(May) Soviet government crushed in Bavaria

(28 June) Signing of Treaty of Versailles

(1 July) Mussolini issues Fascist manifesto

(31 July) Adoption of Weimar Constitution

(12 September) Hitler joins the German Workers’ Party in Munich

1920

(24 February) German Workers’ Party adopts “Twenty-five Point Program”

(March) Kapp Putsch fails in Berlin

1921

(29 July) Hitler becomes chairman of renamed National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP)

1922

(16 April) Germany recognizes Soviet Russia in Treaty of Rapallo, angering the radical right

(24 June) German foreign minister Walter Rathenau assassinated by Free Corps members

(August) Fascists clash with communists in Italy

(30 October) Mussolini asked to head Italian government in Italy after threatening a “march on Rome”

1923

(11 January) French army occupies Ruhr to collect reparations

(27 January) First Nazi Party Congress in Munich

(June–November) The Great Inflation in Germany

(12 August) Gustav Stresemann becomes German chancellor and ends passive resistance to the French occupation

(20 October) Authoritarian Bavarian government under Gustav von Kahr breaks relations with liberal national government in Berlin

(9 November) Hitler and Ludendorff launch “Beer Hall Putsch” in Munich on the “Day of the Republic”

(15 November) Introduction of new currency ends Great Inflation

1924

(1 April) Hitler sentenced to minimum term of five years in prison for high treason with eligibility for parole in six months

(20 December) Hitlerreleased from prison

1925

(27 February) Hitler reorganizes NSDAP

(25 April) Hindenburg elected German president

(J...

Table of contents

• Routledge Companions to History
• CONTENTS
• ILLUSTRATIONS
• PREFACE
• 1 INTRODUCTION AND BACKGROUND
• I NAZI GERMANY IN HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE
• II NAZI GERMANY
• III KEY ACTORS AND TERMINOLOGY
• NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX