History, Western Europe

In 1900 Germany was the most progressive and dynamic nation in Europe, the only country whose rapid technological and social growth and change challenged that of the United States. How then can we explain the fact that in little more than a generation this stable modern country would be in the hands of a violent, racist, extremist political movement that would lead it and all of Europe into utter moral, physical, and cultural ruin?

Hitler's Vienna was not the artistic and intellectual center normally associated with Sigmund Freud, Gustav Mahler, Arthur Schnitzler, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Instead, it was a cauldron of fear and indignation, a city teeming with the "little people" who rejected Viennese modernity as too international, too "Jewish," and too libertine. Brigitte Hamann compellingly depicts the undercurrent of disturbing social and political ideologies that permeated this city of civil unrest. Hitler's Vienna reveals the vital connection between Hitler's indoctrination into the devastating racial politics that swept Germany's multinational state and the hotbed of nationalistic activity that was Vienna in the early 20th century.

Jones offers a detailed and comprehensive overview of the development and decline of the German Democratic party and the German People's party from 1918 to 1933. In tracing the impact of World War I, the runaway inflation to the 1920s, and the Great Depression of the 1930s upon Germany's middle-class electorate, the study demonstrates why the forces of liberalism were ineffective in preventing the rise of nazism and the establishment of the Third Reich.

The end of the postwar European order which was the legacy of the Third Reich provides a fitting moment to reassess the foundations of Hitler's calamitously destructive power. This interpretative study makes no claim to offer a new biography of Hitler. In some ways its approach is indeed quite non-biographical. It focuses directly upon the nature and mechanics, the character and exercise of Hitler's dictatorial power.

This text documents the radical transformation of Germany under Nazi rule, exploring how virtually every area of life was reordered to comply with the regime's preparations for war, and describes the increasing brutality towards marginalized groups.

The power of big business in the Third Reich economy remains one of the most important issues of that disastrous era. Drawing on prodigious research in German corporate and government archives, Peter Hayes argues that the IG Farben chemicals combine, Nazi Germany's largest corporation, proved unable to influence national policy outside the firm's sphere of expertise.

This book is an attempt to decipher just what went on in German churches during the Kirchenkampf in the era of Hitler, what actions were taken, for what reasons, and with what effect on the churches themselves.

Focusing on Nazi Germany's relations with a number of regions such as Italy, France and Britain, and the Americas, Christian Leitz explores the diplomatic and political developments that led to the outbreak of war in 1939 and its transformation into a global conflict in 1941. The author considers, for instance, how Hitler's foreign policy ultimately meant the invasion of the Soviet Union was inevitable, and how Germany's relations with China deteriorated in favour of improved relations with Japan.

This book analyzes the attitudes and policies of the Nazi leadership towards the German working class. The author argues that the regime did not securely integrate the working class and was thus less successful in imposing mass economic sacrifices in the interests of forced rearmament. With a growing labour shortage in the late 1930s, industrial conflict re emerged. These two factors slowed down military preparations for war and may well, it is argued, have influenced Hitler's foreign policy in 1938/39.

BL Controversial account of the nature of the German economy in the 1930s and in the Second World War These eleven essays, collected here for the first time with a substantial new introduction, examine the tension between between Hitler's vision of an armed economy and the reality of German economic and social life.

In fact, the gap between the ideology of the Reich and its actual character was enormous. But under the spell of the mirage, the will to resist was undermined by an accelerating process of social disintegration.

What Hitler Knew is a fascinating study of how the climate of fear in Nazi Germany affected Hitler's advisers and shaped the decision making process. It explores the key foreign policy decisions from the Nazi seizure of power up to the hours before the outbreak of World War II. Zachary Shore argues persuasively that the tense environment led the diplomats to a nearly obsessive control over the "information arsenal" in a desperate battle to defend their positions and to safeguard their lives. Unlike previous studies, this book draws the reader into the diplomats' darker world, and illustrates how Hitler's power to make informed decisions was limited by the very system he created.

This chilling book gets to grips with how Hitler's Nazi empire really functioned. There was no aspect of Nazi power untouched by economics - it was Hitler's obsession and the reason the Nazis came to power in the first place. Adam Tooze's controversial new book challenges the conventional economic interpretations of that period to explore how Hitler's surprisingly prescient vision- ultimately hindered by Germany's limited resources and his own racial ideology-was to create a German super-state to dominate Europe and compete with what he saw as America's overwhelming power in a soon-to- be globalized world.

In this book the author focuses on the 11 months following the Munich conference in September 1938, and chronicles the events that led to world war. His approach is through the eyes of the leaders of all the powers involved, drawing on official records, private papers, reminiscences and biographies of the politicians, soldiers, diplomatists and others who took part in the processes which led to war.

This book is designed to explain the origins of World Way II by focusing on the role of German foreign policy under Hitler. New light is shed on German rearmament, on the efforts of Britain and France to avert war, on the annexation of Austria, on the Munich Agreement, and on the final steps to war in 1939. Both specialists and general readers will find much of interest in this book. The German foreign policy, as determined by Adolf Hitler, is analyzed on the basis of comprehensive research in German, British, and American archives. The published documents of France, Italy, Russia, and numerous other countries as well as the extensive literature on the subject and the papers of many participants have been researched to present what still remains the only comprehensive study in any language of the road to way in 1939.

In examining one of the defining events of the 20th century, Bergen situates the Holocaust in its historical, political, social, cultural, and military contexts. Unlike many other treatments of the Holocaust, this volume discusses not only the persecution of the Jews, but also other segments of society victimized by the Nazis.

When the Allies tried German war criminals at the end of World War II they were attempting not only to punish the guilty but also to set down a history of Nazism and of what had happened in Europe. Yet as Donald Bloxham shows in this incisive account, the reality was that these proceedings failed. Not only did the guilty often escape punishment but the final solution was largely written out of history in the post-war era.

This is a 214 page hardback book titled THE LIBERATION OF THE NAZI CONCENTRATION CAMPS 1945: Eyewitness Accounts of the Liberators. Published by United States Holocaust Memorial Council in 1987. Illustrated with black and white photographs.

This book is the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum publication for 1995 Days of Remembrance. Includes chronology and glossary.

A three-volume study of the Holocaust. First published in 1961, Raul Hilberg's comprehensive account of how Germany annihilated the Jewish community of Europe spurred discussion, galvanized further research, and shaped the entire field of Holocaust studies. This revised and expanded edition of Hilberg's classic work extends the scope of his study and includes 80,000 words of new material, particularly from archives in Eastern Europe, added over a lifetime of research. It is the definitive work of a scholar who has devoted more than 50 years to exploring and analyzing the realities of the Holocaust.

While historical research on the Holocaust has been growing constantly, and has in the last few decades almost exploded, the perspective of the targeted group - the Jews - as an active player in the historical arena of the Holocaust, a player with its own historical background, has not been seriously integrated into the larger fabric. In a series of treatises, some of which are based on articles previously published in several languages, this book tries to analyze existing research from these neglected perspectives.

During the twelve years from 1933 until 1945, the concentration camp operated as a terror society. Renowned German sociologist Wolfgang Sofsky looks at the concentration camp from the inside as a laboratory of cruelty and a system of absolute power built on extreme violence, starvation, "terror labor," and the business-like extermination of human beings. Based on historical documents and the reports of survivors, the book details how the resistance of prisoners was broken down. Arbitrary terror and routine violence destroyed personal identity and social solidarity, disrupted the very ideas of time and space, perverted human work into torture, and unleashed innumerable atrocities. By the end of this book, Sofsky shows that the German concentration camp system cannot be seen as a temporary lapse into barbarism. Instead, it must be conceived as a product of modern civilization, where institutionalized, state-run human cruelty became possible with or without the mobilizing feelings of hatred.

Constructing the Holocaust examines the development of Holocaust historiography in the light of recent critical philosophy of history. It argues that the Holocaust provides both the occasion for, and the ultimate test of, new ways of giving meaning to the past. It also shows that examining our representations of the past is as important as archival research for understanding history. The problem under investigation is the paradox of using tools and methods inherited from western civilization in order to write about a set of events - the Holocaust - that impugn fundamental tenets of that very civilization. This paradox, though historians of the Holocaust increasingly acknowledge it, has not been investigated in detail before. This book explains how the paradox arose and why it remains largely unchallenged. It also points to ways of overcoming it.

In 1945, the Allied nations agreed on a judicial process, rather than summary execution, to determine the fate of the Nazis following the end of World War II. Held in Nuremberg, the ceremonial birthplace of the Nazi Party, the British, American, French, and Soviet leaders contributed both judges and prosecutors to the series of trials that would prosecute some of the most prominent politicians, military leaders and businessmen in Nazi Germany.

Nearly 50 years after the collapse of Hitler's Third Reich, the officially sanctioned art of his National Socialist regime remains largely unknown. Many were destroyed or stored away in inaccessible locations

Jay W. Baird comes to grips with a theme which has been generally avoided by over two generations of scholars and literary critics. He demonstrates how poets and writers responded enthusiastically to Hitler's summons to artists to create a cultural revolution commensurate with the political radicalism of the new state, thereby affirming the centrality of renewed German culture. Hitler's War Poets focuses on the lives and the works of six leading conservative, anti-communist yet revolutionary authors who articulated the dream of World War I veterans to form a socially just national community.

Jazz was banned from German broadcasting as soon as the Nazis came to power in 1933. Yet throughout World War II, American jazz and swing were core components of the Third Reich's propaganda. Jazz classics such as W.C. Handy's famous St. Louis Blues, their lyrics neatly tampered with, came over the airwaves, alongside the famous Germany Calling programmes directed at Britain and allied forces around the world.

Surveying irreverent and controversial representations of the Holocaust -from Sylvia Plath and the Sex Pistols to Quentin Tarantino and Holocaust comedy -Matthew Boswell considers how theymight play an important role in shaping our understanding of the Nazi genocide and what it means to be human.

A sound track of Germany in the early twentieth century might conjure military music and the voice of Adolf Hitler rising above a cheering crowd. In "A National Acoustics," Brian Currid challenges this reductive characterization by investigating the transformations of music in mass culture from the Weimar Republic to the end of the Nazi regime. Offering a nuanced analysis of how publicity was constructed through radio programming, print media, popular song, and film, Currid examines how German citizens developed an emotional investment in the nation and other forms of collectivity that were tied to the sonic experience. Reading in detail popular genres of music the Schlager (or hit ), so-called gypsy music, and jazz he offers a complex view of how they played a part in the creation of German culture.

Art, Culture, and Media Under the Third Reich explores the ways in which the Nazis used art and media to portray their country as the champion of Kultur and civilization. Rather than focusing strictly on the role of the arts in state-supported propaganda, this volume contributes to Holocaust studies by revealing how multiple domains of cultural activity served to conceptually dehumanize Jews and other groups. Contributors address nearly every facet of the arts and mass media under the Third Reich—efforts to define degenerate music and art; the promotion of race hatred through film and public assemblies; views of the racially ideal garden and landscape; race as portrayed in popular literature; the reception of art and culture abroad; the treatment of exiled artists; and issues of territory, conquest, and appeasement.

This book explores silence and memory in Germany's ongoing discourse about the Nazi past. It examines the ways in which exile literature and critical thought by Anna Seghers joins postwar discourse and current historical research to formulate an acceptable memory of private life during the Third Reich. Seghers' work is particularly relevant in light of a postwar rift between private and public memory discourse. Her texts, The Seventh Cross, The Excursion of the Dead Girls, and especially her depictions of female figures offer a rare in-depth examination of ordinary life under Hitler. From exile, Seghers reveals hidden voices and personal experience with the Nazi regime that linger in the silenced voids of history.

What made thoughtful, educated, artistic men and women decide to put their talents in the service of a brutal and inhuman regime? This question is the starting point for The Faustian Bargain, Jonathan Petropoulos's study of the key figures in the art world of Nazi Germany. Petropoulos follows the careers of these prominent individuals who like Faust, that German archetype, chose to pursue artistic ends through collaboration with diabolical forces. Readers meet Ernst Buchner, the distinguished museum director and expert on Old Master paintings who "repatriated" the Van Eyck brother's Ghent altarpiece to Germany, and Karl Haberstock, an art dealer who filled German museums with works bought virtually at gunpoint from Jewish collectors.

Beginning with the question of the role of the past in the shaping of a contemporary identity, this volumes spans three generations of German and Austrian writers and explores changes and shifts in the aesthetics of Vergangenheitsbewältigung (coming to terms with the past). The purpose of the book is to assess contemporary German literary representations of National Socialism in a wider context of these current debates.The contributors address questions arising from a shift over the last decade, triggered by a generation change-questions of personal and national identity in Germany and Austria, and the aesthetics of memory.

This book is the first survey in English of literature and film in Nazi Germany. It treats not only works sympathetic to National Socialism, but also works of the so-called Inner Emigration, of the resistance, and those written in prisons and concentration camps. Much of this literature is not easily accessible in German, and not available at all in English translation. Historical and ideological context is provided in chapters covering influential works of the time such as Alfred Rosenberg's The Myth of the Twentieth Century and Houston Stewart Chamberlain's The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century. Schoeps also analyzes Nazi cultural policies, fascist histories of literature, and the role of German studies and Germanists in the Nazi movement.

The importance of gender as a category of analysis is now very widely accepted, but there has been a slowness to bring it to bear in general interpretative surveys of Nazi Germany. This new study aims to remedy the ommission, to reintroduce as actors on the historical stage that half of the German population who were female. This volume asks why such a sizeable proportion was ready to rally around a movement both blatantly anti-feminist and determined to exclude women from public life; how ordinary Germans translated Nazi beliefs into action; and what, other than gender, influenced their political choices between 1933 and 1945.