National Socialist Party Research Articles

The perpetrator in focus: Turn of the century Holocaust remembrance in The Specialist

In his controversial 1998 film, The Specialist, Israeli director Eyal Sivan casts the Holocaust in a new light when he represents it through the eyes of the Nazi perpetrator. Sivan and his scriptwriter, human rights activist Rony Brauman, re-assemble and manipulate footage originally filmed by Leo Hurwitz for Capital Cities Broadcasting of Adolf Eichmann’s trial by an Israeli court in Jerusalem in 1961. Specifically, Sivan recycles the video footage of the trial into a 16mm film that critiques, not the heinous nature of Eichmann’s crimes, nor the depravity of the man who committed them, but the system of regulation that constructed and judged Eichmann. While the video footage was originally filmed as a document of the trial, Sivan radically redeploys the same images in a narrative that exposes the manipulations of the court, its representations and the continued injustice of such institutions and representations today, 45 years later. According to The Specialist, Eichmann’s actions are not on trial; they are a foregone conclusion. To prove Eichmann’s guilt or innocence was not the point of the trial in the first place, and it is certainly not the goal of The Specialist. Through its careful weaving of fragments of the proceedings, over the course of its narrative, The Specialist reveals the relationship of otherness — the differences and identicalities — between Adolf Eichmann, the ‘deportation specialist’ and Attorney General Gideon Hausner for the prosecution. Simultaneously, the film considers the relationship between Eichmann and the crimes of the National Socialist Party as they were forged by the Israeli court.

The Language of Ideology: Lingual Manipulation of Readers in German Literature of the Third Reich

In recognizing more than just hyperbole in their critical studies of National Socialist language, post-war philologists Viktor Klemperer (1946) and Eugen Seidel (1961) credit persuasive words and syntax with the expansion of Hitler's ideology among the German people. This popular explanation is being revisited by contemporary philologists, however, as new historical argument holds the functioning of the Third Reich to be anything but monolithic. An emerging scholarly consensus on the presence of more chaos than coherence in Nazi discourse suggests a new imperative for research. After reviewing the foundational works of Mein Kampf (1925) and Myth of the Twentieth Century (1930), the author confirms Klemperer and Seidel’s claim for linguistic manipulation in the rise of the National Socialist Party. Most importantly, this article provides a detailed explanation of how party leaders employed rhetorical language to promote fascist ideology without an underlying basis of logical argumentation.

Art or Propaganda? Dewey and Adorno on the Relationship between Politics and Art

Art or Propaganda? Dewey and Adorno on the Relationship between Politics and Art William S. Lewis Almost all people—even if they seldom articulate or act on this belief—believe that art is good in an "enriching" type of way, making us better people and promoting a healthy and free society. Conversely, most people believe that propaganda is bad because it "impoverishes" our experience, reducing our selves and our society to one-dimensionality and reducing our freedom. In addition, almost everybody believes that they can distinguish between art and propaganda. If it is indeed the case that art enriches our experience and propaganda impoverishes it, then establishing criteria that will allow us to make a distinction between the two would seem a worthwhile exercise, one whose ramifications could affect the quality of our educational, cultural, political, and spiritual lives. However, there is a problem with making these necessary and potentially beneficial distinctions and this problem belies the common notion that the difference between propaganda and art is easily visible. When we actually attempt to consider a specific work or body of works in its integrity, according to its form and content, distinguishing between that which is art and that which is propaganda is often troublingly difficult. As an example of this problem, consider the classic "propaganda" film, Triumph of the Will (1934), directed by Leni Riefenstahl. After numerous screenings in the "Philosophy and Film" course I regularly teach, I have noticed that my students evince two nearlyincommensurable reactions to this documentary of the National Socialist Party Congress at Nürnberg. One of these reactions is that of aesthetic arousal and enjoyment. The geometric patterns formed by columns of soldiers, the close-ups in which these soldiers appear as statuary, the minutiae conveyed by faces in the crowd: all of these masterful shots involve the film's viewer in an aesthetic experience that is neither banal nor gratuitous but satisfying and inspirational. Triumph of the Will—perceived in this first way as involving the viewer in an experience that is cathartic, fulfilling, and memorable—is enjoyed and experienced as a work of art. [End Page 42] The other response of my students to a screening of Triumph of the Will is that of visceral revulsion. It is the feeling inspired by a morally repugnant piece of propaganda. The events depicted in the film—Hitler's descent from the sky, the volks parade, the rhythmic and fevered cries of "Sig Heil"—all these engagingly filmed actions appear absolutely repellent to those whose knowledge of history demands that they be seen as seeds of World War II and of the Holocaust. Because Triumph of the Will is so artfully executed, the viewers' feelings of revulsion towards the film are made even more intense than they would have been were the picture poorly made. Even noting these intense feelings of revulsion, there remains my students' other yet simultaneous reaction to the film: specifically, that it is a great film and that it can be seen as a work of art. This feeling, and from this feeling the reasonably unavoidable contention that Triumph of the Will is indeed a work of art (it is beautiful in its execution, arouses sentiment, provokes contemplation, and offers meaning), stands in uneasy tension with its effectiveness as a piece of propaganda. Always there remains the question: "How can I be appreciating something that, as a propaganda piece for Nazi ideology, should be and is loathsome and repellent to me?" Almost since its debut, critics have been wrestling with the tension caused by the ambivalent response the film provokes. Most have resolved this tension by arguing decisively for viewing the film either exclusively as propaganda or exclusively as art. Critics like Susan Sontag and Siegfried Kracauer contend that the film is an abhorrent propaganda piece with nice cinematography, whereas analysts like David Hinton and Andrew Sarris emphasize Riefenstahl's relative autonomy from the Nazi propaganda machine and concentrate on the film as a piece of documentary art.1 This tendency to unequivocally categorize Triumph of the Will—or for that matter any creative work—as either propaganda or art is not, however, a productive, revealing, or honest analysis. With such...

Annihilating Difference: The Anthropology of Genocide (review)

Alexander Laban Hinton, ed. Annihilating Difference: The Anthropology of Genocide. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. A nthropologists have long been silent on the topic of genocide as have scholars from other disciplines (including my own, political science). What is unique to anthropology, however, is its troubling relationship to genocide. As several of the chapters in this volume show, anthropologists have acted as contributors and participants in a range of genocidal projects. It is anthropologists, after all, who have been at the forefront of developing and deploying the very concept that has made genocide, in the modern age at least, possible-the concept of human difference. But as this volume, edited by Alex Hinton, demonstrates, this disturbing past gives anthropologists a unique vantage point from which to assess their own discipline's duplicity and makes their contributions all the more valuable. Indeed, the central strength of this volume is the trenchant self-critiques offered by several authors. Bettina Arnold, for example, examines the role that archaeology played in helping the National Socialist Party create a historical, material basis for a pure German race. Through specious interpretations of the archaeological record, buffeted by the discipline's own assumption that pots = people (Arnold, 93), Nazi ideologues were able to construct a history in which Germans gave birth to themselves (Arnold, 103). In a similar vein, Gretchen Schafft reveals the extent of involvement of anthropologists in the Third Reich's exterminatory campaign against Jews, Roma and other undesirables. Through ongoing support of a prominent American funder, anthropologists not only engaged in on racial classification but also served as certifiers and judges on racial boards. Schafft's evidence is damning not so much for what she finds but for what she does not find-entire files missing from both the German and Rockefeller archives and any indications of concern on the part of Rockefeller officials about the anti-Semitic policies which their funded research helped to legitimate and realize. UIi Linke continues the theme of duplicity by examining how the New Left in West Germany has unwittingly reproduced Nazi tropes of nature, blood, and purity, through their use of exclusion/inclusion language in protest rhetoric and representations of the naked body. Finally, Scheper-Hughes's account of Alfred Kroeber's uneasy relationship with lshi, the so-called last surviving Yahi Indian (whom he befriended but later dishonored by allowing Ishi's brain to be removed from his body, an act of desecration that lshi feared), illustrates how one prominent American anthropology department remains indelibly shaped by its past. As Scheper-Hughes explains, the return of Ishi's brain (after languishing for 75 years in a Smithsonian Museum warehouse) prompted a statement of acknowledgement from the anthropology department at the University of California at Berkeley, where lshi lived his last years in a semi-carnival-like atmosphere, that fell short of formal apology. What links these examples is the level of collective denial that persists, as illustrated by the number of present-day scholars who resist or reject outright such lines of inquiry, and their reluctance to confront their discipline's involvement in past genocidal projects and current genocidal discourses. In addition to these self-critiques, the other key contribution of this volume lies in the insights offered about the nature of genocidal violence itself. For Nagengast, Genocide is always a possiblity (326) because of the multitude of symbolic forms of violence that occur, even in supposedly non-genocidal countries like the United States. …

Gustave Hervé's Transition from Socialism to National Socialism: Continuity and Ambivalence

In 1901 Gustave Hervé attained notoriety by writing an article which included the image of the tricolour planted in a pile of manure. Soon he founded a French anti-militarist movement called Hervéism which attempted to unite the revolutionary left. When French socialists united in 1905, Hervé led the most extreme faction and soon created a weekly newspaper, La Guerre sociale. Before the first world war Hervé was a strident voice within European socialism, advocating revolutionary means to prevent war. Six years of provocative campaigns failed to implement his ideas. Despite his dedication, the quixotic Hervé grew frustrated due to continuing leftist divisions. His disillusionment was connected to a rather naive reading of the increasingly anachronistic revolutionary tradition. Hervé was sincere, yet his romantic and eclectic socialism exhibited atavistic features. Well before 1914 he rallied to 'la patrie en danger' and eventually renamed his paper La Victoire. In 1919, Hervé and several prominent socialists created a national socialist party. Startling as his reversal may appear, Hervé's activist Insurrectionalism actually included an anti-materialistic critique of society. That critique was crucial to his national socialism which looked to the nation and its religious traditions to remedy social division. His interwar writing and organizations offered various authoritarian panaceas to end French decadence. Despite Hervé's marginalization during the interwar era and his reluctance to engage in violence, his neo- Bonapartist views and admiration for Mussolini must inescapably be included within 'the fascist drift'. Striking shifts, such as Hervé's , from one extreme to the other, have often been tied to fascism. But the two chief interpretations of French fascism sometimes use Hervé's career to buttress their contrasting arguments. Such a paradox demands an explanation. This article analyses the anomalous features of Hervé's socialism in order to make his shift to the extreme right understandable. As strange as it may seem, the anti-militaristic, anti-patriotic and international socialist Hervé exhibited patriotic, ethnocentric, ascetic and anti-democratic attitudes from the very beginning, and he was episodically ambiguous on the issue of antisemitism. Hervé's ideas often belie the apparent logic of political language. Such continuity and ambivalence underscore the limits of political language in dealing with hybrid movements such as fascism.

From Class to Nation: Left, Right, and the Ideological and Institutional Roots of Post-Communist “National Socialism”

This article explores the ideological and institutional causes of the emergence of political coalitions between orthodox communists and extreme nationalists in the late communist and post-communist periods. The causes of the emergence of new forms of national socialist ideologies, parties, movements, and regimes are sought in the historically rooted ideological affinities between socialist and nationalist ideologies and the perceived necessity for communist cadres of defining a substitute “combat task,” co-opting the nationalist intelligentsia, and attracting desperately needed popular support. Such attempts at “national-socialist” mobilization in the late communist and post-communist context face serious social-structural, institutional, and ideological constraints. Consequently, it is inappropriate to subsume these parties, movements, and regimes under familiar concepts such as fascism, totalitarianism, integral nationalism, populism, or sultanism. Instead, they should be seen as distinct subspecies of late communist and post-communist authoritarianism.

Feminism, Pragmatism or Both? Czech Radical Nationalism and the Woman Question, 1898–1914

During a debate on the franchise reform bill in the Austrian Reichsrat on 12 September 1906, the Czech National Socialist Party deputy Václav Choc demanded that suffrage be extended to women as well as men. Otherwise, Choc asserted, the women of Austria would be consigned to the same status as “criminals and children.” Choc was certainly not the only Austrian parliamentarian to voice his support for votes for women during the debates on franchise reform. However, his party, the most radical of all the Czech nationalist political factions, was unique in that it not only included women's suffrage in its official program, as the Social Democrats had done a decade earlier, but also worked hard to change the political status of women in the Monarchy while the Social Democrats generally paid only lip service to this goal. Moreover, Choc and his colleagues in the National Socialist Party helped change the terms of the debate about women's rights by explicitly linking the “woman question” to the “national question” in ways entirely different from the prevailing discourse of liberalism infin-de-siècleAustria. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, liberal reformers, whether German or Czech, tried to mold the participation of women in political life to fit the liberal view of a woman's “proper” role in society. By contrast, the radical nationalists who rose to prominence in Czech political culture only after 1900, attempted to recast the debate over women's rights as central to their two-pronged discourse of social and national emancipation, while at the same time pressing for the complete democratization of Czech political life at all levels, not merely in the imperial parliament. In so doing, and with the active but often necessarily covert collaboration of women associated with the party, these radical nationalists helped extend the parameters of the debate over the place Czech women had in the larger national society.

Fascism and the Female Form: Performance Art in the Third Reich

Nazi Germany is generally understood to have been a sexually repressive society, and in fundamental social and political ways, it was repressive. The National Socialist Party intervened in the private space of the body to an extent never before experienced and in hitherto unprecedented ways. The state instituted a politics of the body that rendered the individual body a public site whose purpose was to further the larger social organism. In the drive toward the establishment of a pure, thriving Volk, the National Socialist regime conducted a dual campaign, a pronatalist campaign encouraging "healthy" Aryan women to bear and rear children and an antinatalist policy aimed at preventing the reproduction of "undesirable" elements (Jews, Poles, Africans, and the mentally disabled, among others). Whereas pronatalist policies operated through incentives, such as government subsidies, child allowances, tax rebates, and medals for childbearing, antinatalist measures were carried out through repressive laws, including compulsory sterilization of the genetically "inferior," forced abortions, and marriage prohibitions. 1 The body became a social site onto [End Page 164] which political ideals were mapped. The notion of the healthy body as a microcosm for the healthy state was reiterated in the images of the "sacred wife and mother" in officially sanctioned art and promoted in a vast propaganda campaign enjoining women to lend their bodies to the movement to maintain the vitality of the race.

German Schoolteachers, National Socialism, and the Politics of Culture at the End of the Weimar Republic

In the Third Reich a high percentage of the civil servants in the cadres of functionaries of the National Socialist Party on the local and district levels were teachers. It is thus not surprising that some historians who studied the elementary school teaching profession in the Weimar Republic began their research with assumptions about the “ideological affinities” of teachers to fascism and discussed “the specific predispositions that made it easy for them to identify with National Socialism.” The German Teachers' Association, one scholar wrote, “proved to be more a precursor than an opponent of fascism.” At its national congress in May 1932, another historian related, the representatives of the chapters voted for a policy which, in effect, abandoned the democratic republic and “indirectly helped those political forces that would create a dictatorship in Germany within a year.” In 1932 and 1933, on the other hand, recruiters for the National Socialist Teachers’ League often complained about “hard and difficult soil” and “unpenetrable” regions.

The DollfuΒ Ministry: The Demise of the Nationalrat

The demise of Parliament in March 1933 was the most significant single act in the march to semifascism in Austria, which began with the formation of the Heimwehr in the early days of the First Republic and was well under way when significant changes were made in the government on September 21,1933, and a concentration camp was established at Wöllersdorf a few days later. Traditional democratic means were employed to abolish Parliament. Dollfuβ, the Heimwehr, and the Christian Social Party only did what parties in power in democracies do when under attack. They used all the means at their disposal to protect their government from being overthrown. The Social Democrats and Greater Germans, likewise, employed only democratic means in their effort to overthrow the Dollfuβ regime and to preserve a democratically elected Parliament. Dollfuβ and the leaders of all but the National Socialist Party in Austria were well aware of the great danger to Austria that stemmed from the intensification of National Socialist efforts to overthrow a democratic form of government in Austria after Hitler came to power in Germany and knew that the German National Socialists were providing financial support to the Austrian Greater German Party to support them in their efforts to take control of Austria.

When the Nazis Came to Skokie: Freedom for Speech We Hate (review)

Book Reviews 105 broad to strict construction. Only Hamilton proposed a consistently expansive reading of the Constitution. Lynch argues that the Constitution was successful in meeting the demands of political life primarily because the nation adopted Hamilton's position. Lynch agrees with Hamilton that the "General Welfare" and "Necessary and Proper" clauses are grants of power entitling the government to enact whatever measures it deems advisable. Lynch's broad construction of the powers of the national government runs counter to common sense, however. If the authority of the government was unlimited , why did the Framers bother to enumerate the powers of the legislature in Article I? Lynch's views also contradict Marshall's decision in McCulloch v. Maryland. Marshall argued that the National Bank was a legitimate means to accomplish the ends enumerated in the Constitution. Marshall implies that some means would be inappropriate to those ends and that new ends could not be added to those enumerated in the document. While it is possible to disagree with Lynch's reading of the Constitution, his fine historical account shows that while discerning the intent of the Framers is often difficult , it is not impossible. Amid all the conflicting opinions judges can still give a "fair" reading of the Constitution. James F. Pontuso Center for the Study of the Constitution When the Nazis Came to Skokie: Freedom for Speech We Hate. By Phillippa Strum. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1999; pp. xii + 172. $25.00 cloth; $12.95 paper. This is a superb case study of the efforts in the 1970s by members of neo-Nazi National Socialist Party of America to demonstrate in Skokie, Illinois, a Chicago suburb of 70,000, with approximately 30,000 Jewish residents, 5,000 to 6,000 of whom are survivors of the Holocaust or family members of survivors. This book is a must for readers of Rhetoric & Public Affairs because it focuses an important attempt by the neo-Nazis to place their symbols of oppression, the storm-trooper uniforms and swastikas, before the residents of Skokie, only to be supported by the American Civil Liberties Union and the federal and higher-level state court system despite the opposition by residents and local political leaders. I learned about certain aspects of the politics of the Skokie case that I had not read in the scholarly literature . At the core of this book is an analysis of the nexus between rhetoric, politics, and public policy. It is about differences between law and politics, courts and elected bodies. It is about how citizens, elected officials, those seeking to demonstrate, and state and federal judges, seek to use their political power and the law to march or to stop a march. It also is the story about the impact of long-standing First Amendment principles which have become quite supportive of the right 106 Rhetoric & Public Affairs to demonstrate on public streets, albeit with minimal time, place, and manner restrictions, a position that is now being questioned by some legal scholars and social scientists with regard to hateful speech as it touches upon race, religion, ethnicity , and sexual orientation. I recommend this book for use in the following classes because it is a great teaching book: introductory courses in American politics, American history, civil liberties, or rhetoric and politics and advanced courses in rhetoric and public policy , American constitutional law, the First Amendment, civil liberties and civil rights, constitutional history, and law and social change, to name but a few. I think the book has wide utility for use in the classroom because it is so well written, informative, and introduces students to analyses found in several disciplines. In this short book, Professor Strum, a noted authority on constitutional law, history, and civil liberties, tells the story of the efforts of the Nazis to march in Skokie and the efforts of townspeople and public officials throughout the Chicago area to stop them, only to be thwarted by the application of First Amendment principles by federal courts and higher-level state courts. Pedagogically, the author brilliantly integrates the history and constitutional law of the right to march and the decline in the legality of the "hecklers' veto" on such...

When the Nazis came to Skokie: freedom for speech we hate

In the Chicago suburb of Skokie, one out of every six Jewish citizens in the late 1970s was a survivor or was directly related to a survivor of the Holocaust. These victims of terror had resettled in America expecting to lead peaceful lives free from persecution. But their safe haven was shattered when a neo-Nazi group announced its intention to parade there in 1977. Philippa Strum's dramatic retelling of the events in Skokie (and in the courts) shows why the case ignited such enormous controversy and challenged our understanding of and commitment to First Amendment values. The debate was clear-cut: American Nazis claimed the right of free speech while their Jewish targets claimed the right to live without intimidation. The town, arguing that the march would assault the sensibilities of its citizens and spark violence, managed to win a court injunction against the marchers. In response, the American Civil Liberties Union took the case and successfully defended the Nazis' right to free speech. Skokie had all the elements of a difficult case: a clash of absolutes, prior restraint of speech, and heated public sentiment. In recreating it, Strum presents a detailed account and analysis of the legal proceedings as well as finely delineated portraits of the protagonists: Frank Collin, National Socialist Party of America leader and the son of a Jewish Holocaust survivor; Skokie community leader Sol Goldstein, a Holocaust survivor who planned a counterdemonstration against the Nazis; Skokie mayor Albert Smith, who wanted only to protect his townspeople; and ACLU attorney David Goldberger, caught in the ironic position of being a Jew defending the rights of Nazis against fellow Jews. While the ACLU did win the case, it was a costly victory-30,000 of its members left the organization. And in the end, ironically, the Nazis never did march in Skokie. Forcefully argued, Strum's book shows that freedom of speech must be defended even when the beneficiaries of that defense are far from admirable individuals. It raises both constitutional and moral issues critical to our understanding of free speech and carries important lessons for current controversies over hate speech on college campuses, inviting readers to think more carefully about what the First Amendment really means.

Traitors Everywhere! Political Trials in the late Habsburg Monarchy

On 4 March 1914 the Young Czech party newspaper Národní listy published the startling accusation that a prominent Czech politician, the National Socialist Karel Šviha, was a paid informant of the Habsburg imperial police. The paper alleged that for several years Šviha, who was the chairman of the National Socialist party's parliamentary club, had exchanged information on the activities of his colleagues for a police stipend. In the weeks that followed, the public was treated to a daily diet of charge and counter-charge in the Prague newspapers, a carnival of mutual recrimination that concluded with an elaborately staged public trial of Šviha in an attempt to settle once and for all whether he was truly an informant. During the proceedings leading figures of most of the main Czech political parties either sat in judgement of Šviha or testified for one side or the other, many of them displaying for all to see a level of personal animosity previously reserved for the Bohemian Germans or the Imperial government. As one observer (a National Socialist) put it, by the summer of 1914, “there was no nation in Europe as internally disorganized as were the Czechs” and according to another (a Young Czech), political life in Prague had reached a state where it was “everyone against everything.”

Editorial - Human Experimentation

Editorial - Human Experimentation

Hermann F. Hoffmann (1891-1944)--Tübingen psychiatry on the way to national socialism

This study covers the life and scientific work of Hermann F. Hoffmann who was a disciple of Robert Gaup and in 1936 took over from him as head of the psychiatric clinic at the University of Tübinge. As a scientist, Hoffmann was especially involved in research into genetic problems in psychiatry. He introduced a new approach to some premises of the so-called Tübingen Psychiatric School. In 1933, he joined the NSDAP and became one of the most prominent members of the National Socialist party at the University of Tübingen. From then on, he saw himself as a prophet of a new "biological" philosophy of life. From the present point of view, Hoffmann is something of a contradiction. On the one hand, he was a good doctor and a serious scientist; on the other, he promoted biologistic ideology and a criminal regime. These biographical inconsistencies point to some inconsistencies in the history of psychiatry itself with its dialectics of philanthropy and discrimination.

Ernst Rüdin, 1874-1952: a German psychiatrist and geneticist.

Ernst Rüdin (1874-1952) was one of the major representatives of German psychiatry, genetics, and eugenics in the first half of the twentieth century. Born in Switzerland, he was influenced early on by his brother-in-law Alfred Ploetz, who propagated the ideas of social Darwinism and "racial hygiene" in Germany after 1890. Rüdin began his career in psychiatry at Emil Kraepelin's clinic in Munich, where he developed the concept of "empirical genetic prognosis" of mental disorders. He published his first results on the genetics of schizophrenia in 1916. From 1917-1945 Rüdin was director of the Genealogical-Demographic Department at the German Institute for Psychiatric Research, which Kraepelin had founded. After a short interruption from 1925-1928, Rüdin returned to Munich and enlarged the department. After 1933 the National Socialist government and party endorsed Rüdin's work by supplying financial and manpower support. Nazi health policy required a scientific basis to justify its actions, and Rüdin's ideas corresponded partially with this kind of thinking. In 1934 he prepared the official commentary on the "Law for the Prevention of Genetically Diseased Offspring." The connections of Rüdin's department to National Socialism can be understood as one of the main reasons for the critical attitude towards psychiatric genetics in Germany after 1945.

Ernst Rüdin, 1874–1952: A German psychiatrist and geneticist

Ernst Rüdin (1874–1952) was one of the major representatives of German psychiatry, genetics, and eugenics in the first half of the twentieth century. Born in Switzerland, he was influenced early on by his brother-in-law Alfred Ploetz, who propagated the ideas of social Darwinism and “racial hygiene” in Germany after 1890. Rüdin began his career in psychiatry at Emil Kraepelin's clinic in Munich, where he developed the concept of “empirical genetic prognosis” of mental disorders. He published his first results on the genetics of schizophrenia in 1916. From 1917–1945 Rüdin was director of the Genealogical-Demographic Department at the German Institute for Psychiatric Research, which Kraepelin had founded. After a short interruption from 1925–1928, Rüdin returned to Munich and enlarged the department. After 1933 the National Socialist government and party endorsed Rüdin's work by supplying financial and manpower support. Nazi health policy required a scientific basis to justify its actions, and Rüdin's ideas corresponded partially with this kind of thinking. In 1934 he prepared the official commentary on the “Law for the Prevention of Genetically Diseased Offspring.” The connections of Rüdin's department to National Socialism can be understood as one of the main reasons for the critical attitude towards psychiatric genetics in Germany after 1945. © 1996 Wiley-Liss, Inc.

The Deterioration of Democracy in Austria, 1927–1932

By the spring of 1927 democratic institutions seemed to have secured a relatively firm footing in Austria. That appearance was deceptive. The same year saw the beginning of the deterioration of Austrian democracy.The achievement of a secure democratic political environment by 1927 appeared grounded in reality. Within eight years after the Austrian Social Democrats had quashed the threat of a Communist-inspired Soviet republic in Austria, the bourgeois-dominated democratic government had succeeded in building up a reliable police force, gendarmerie, and army adequate to protect it against any internal threats. Rent as it was by the endless power struggles of its leaders, the Heimwehr was still only a relatively weak force on the political horizon. The National Socialist Party, split into quarreling factions, amounted to little more than a noisy opposition group. With the marked improvement in the Austrian economy by the mid-1920s, Austrian anti-Semitism had noticeably declined by the end of 1926. Perhaps most important of all, the foreign financial assistance assured by the Geneva Protocol of 1922 and the subsequent economic stabilization measures under-taken by the government did much to put the country's financial house in good order.

Third Force: Zhang Junmai (Carsun Chang) and the National Socialist Party of China, 1932-1937

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Additional informationNotes on contributorsRoger JeansRoger Jeans teaches in the History Department at Washington and Lee University, Lexington, VA.

Václav Klofač and the Czechoslovak National Socialist Party

The Czechoslovak National Socialist Party powerfully influenced Czech politics during the last two decades of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy (1898–1918) and contributed greatly to the formation, consolidation and political stability of the first Czechoslovak Republic (1918–38). The first part of this essay surveys through five turbulent decades the changing goals and tactics of this party, known officially as the Czech National Socialist Party from 1898 to 1918, as the Czechoslovak Socialist Party from 1918 to 1926, as the Czechoslovak National Socialist Party from 1926 to 1938 and again as the Czechoslovak Socialist Party from 1945 to 1948. The second part of this paper examines the ideas and politics of Vaclav Jaroslav Klofac (1868–1942) — the party’s foremost leader from 9 April 1898, when he helped to found it, until 18 November 1938, when it was forcibly absorbed into the Party of National Unity — with a view to understanding his formidable influence on the development both of the party and of the Czechoslovak Republic.1