Nazi Period Research Articles

Annals for Educators - 1 September 2020.

Annals for Educators - 1 September 2020.

Sobre el testimonio del perpetrador en 'Flughunde' de Marcel Beyer. Desenmascarando sus dispositivos lingüísticos y discursivos

En la novela Flughunde, publicada en 1995, Marcel Beyer, un autor de la tercera generación nacido en 1965 y, por lo tanto, sin vivencias directas ni de la época del nazismo ni de la posguerra, articula, a partir de una serie de datos históricos relacionados con la muerte de los hijos de Magda y Joseph Goebbels, una ficción en la que se plantea la cuestión de la fiabilidad de los testigos, fundamentalmente, cuando se trata de relatos de perpetradores. El objetivo del artículo es analizar cómo la novela aborda la representación del perpetrador, así como descubrir las estrategias discursivas del texto para desenmascarar el discurso del perpetrador, que intenta ocultar su responsabilidad en los crímenes cometidos durante el nazismo.

QUE FALTA A TEORIA FAZ? UMA ANÁLISE DA (AUSÊNCIA DE) REFLEXÃO TEÓRICA SOBRE O DIREITO NO CONTEXTO DE UM REGIME POLÍTICO AUTORITÁRIO

The aim of this essay was to explore the conditions that make it possible to affirm that the development of a critical reflection on law is indispensable for a democratic society. To demonstrate this, we will resort to an experience born out of adversity: the development of theoretical legal investigations in the midst of authoritarian regimes. We will focus on the regime that marked the 20th century as the perpetrator of a tragedy of indescribable humanitarian dimensions: the Third Reich. In the first part of the essay, the formation of dogmatic German public law until its unfolding in the democratic period is reconstructed. In the second part, the features of theoretical reflection on law during the Nazi period are presented. Finally, we conclude that the resurgence of the necessary critical dimension of the theory of law, without the development of efficient criteria to promote a critical debate concerning judicial decisions, represents a very serious symptom that the political regime has fallen ill. The theoretical reflection on law and democracy are, therefore, two sides of the same coin.

Untersuchungen zum Hansebild Fritz Rörigs

History was grist to the mill of Nazi propaganda, and the medieval Hanse was no exception. Fritz Rörig, a historian, was heavily involved in the instrumentalisation of Hanseatic history during the Third Reich. This paper analyses his writings before and during the Nazi period. What narrative patterns, phraseology and political content do they exhibit? The articles Rörig wrote in the first half of the 1940s display the typical stylistic devices and narrative patterns – indeed the buzz words – of Nazi propaganda, but impacts of racial ideology are not discernable. Indeed, some sections of these essays could be seen to constitute criticism of those in power. Despite this, the conclusion is unavoidable that Rörig was ready and willing to instrumentalise Hanseatic history for Nazi propaganda purposes. However, even before 1933, Rörig had viewed the Hanse through the lens of political ideology. What changed was not the Instrumentalisation of Hanseatic history itself, but Rörig’s political position and, in consequence, the picture of the Hanse he presented. Before the Nazi period, Rörig had been something of a free-market liberal, albeit one of a distinctly conservative and nationalist bent. Accordingly, he spotlighted the vital role of the bourgeoisie in the development of the Hanse, particularly in lectures for a broader public.

'Siegel' des Hansischen Geschichtsvereins von 1871 und 1942/43

Since its inception in 1871, the Hanseatic History Association (Hansischer Geschichtsverein) has used two different ‘seals’ or logos in its publications. While both reflect different conceptions of the Hanse, both were attuned precisely to the political climate, making a politically charged statement about what ‘the’ Hanse ‘really’ was (or, seen retrospectively, should have been). In both cases, the Reich, symbolized by a double-headed eagle, was the central iconographic element. In 1871 as in 1942 / 43, the iconography of the seal was conceived to communicate the Association’s ambition to contribute to the ‘rediscovery of the Hanseatic spirit’ and thus to catapult the historical Hanse (as well as the scholars who studied it) to prominence on the contemporary scene. The revision of the seal after 1941 was motivated by the desires of prominent Hanseatic historians to harness Hanseatic scholarship to the propaganda juggernaut of the Nazi period.

Дальний Восток и европейские евреи в годы нацизма (1933-1945)

Дальний Восток и европейские евреи в годы нацизма (1933-1945)

Review: City Dreamers, directed by Joseph Hillel

Review: <i>City Dreamers</i>, directed by Joseph Hillel

Oswald Bumke (1877-1950)-silence as resistance?

In 1924 Oswald Bumke was appointed as Emil Kraepelins successor to the Chair of Psychiatry at the University of Munich. After 1933 he was apromoting member of the SS and the National Socialist Teachers Federation but he was never amember of the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP). In 1933 he assumed the presidency of the Society of German Neurologists but only 2 years later he withdrew from the executive board because of scientific and personal differences with Ernst Rüdin, the new "strong man" of the merged Society of German Neurologists and Psychiatrists. After the end of WWII, Bumke affirmed that despite his exposed position as professor of psychiatry during the NS era, he had lacked any influence and that he had sabotaged the "Law for the Prevention of Genetically Diseased Offspring" (GzVeN). He declared that for scientific reasons he had been extremely critical of the GzVeN and even had expressed his views in various publications. Nevertheless, he supported forced sterilization in his treatise "The State and Mental Diseases" published in 1939. His statement that the clinic in Munich had manipulated diagnoses in order to protect patients from eugenic measures and "euthanasia" refers to apotential interference, but as documents are lacking this cannot be substantiated. After 1940 Bumke functioned as aconsulting military psychiatrist in expert reports. Political assessments from this period presented him as politically reliable. His biography exemplarily shows that ameticulous juxtaposition of post-war documents with correspondent records stemming from the Nazi period is imperative in order to arrive at a source-critical well-founded and differentiated evaluation.

Angeschlossen und gleichgeschaltet: Kino in Österreich 1938– 1945 by Klaus Christian Vögl

Reviewed by: Angeschlossen und gleichgeschaltet: Kino in Österreich 1938– 1945 by Klaus Christian Vögl Joseph W. Moser Klaus Christian Vögl, Angeschlossen und gleichgeschaltet: Kino in Österreich 1938– 1945. Vienna: Böhlau, 2018. 447 pp. In Angeschlossen und gleichgeschaltet: Kino in Österreich 1938–1945, Klaus Christian Vögl examines movie theaters in Austria during the Nazi period from 1938 to 1945. The author uses the term Kino to define in a literal sense the structure, organization, and history of Austrian movie theaters and not cinema or film, so this book is not a history of film in Austria in this time period. However, given the significance of film in the Nazi period, questions of how movie theaters operated in this era should be of considerable interest to film scholars. Vögl worked as the "Geschäft sführer der Fachgruppe der Lichtspieltheater und Audivisionsveranstalter in der Sparte Tourismus und Freizeitwirtschaft der Wirtschaft skammer Wien" from 1981 to 2010. In this capacity, he discovered a steel safe in 1981 containing about twenty thousand pages of records from the Reichsfilmkammer in Austria that were about to be discarded, since it no longer seemed of any use to Vienna's Wirtschaft skammer. Vögl saved these documents, and most of his research for this book is based on these files, which provide new and interesting information. Vögl provides a detailed chapter with a historical overview of movie theaters in Austria during the monarchy from 1896 to 1906 and after the creation of the Reichsverband der Kinomatographenbesitzer in Österreich from 1907 to 1918; he also covers movie theaters in the First Republic and the Austrofascist period, which Vögl identifies as the Ständestaat. Then, the author examines the legal changes that affected movie theaters in Austria after the Anschluss. As a trained historian and lawyer, Vögl places an interesting emphasis on the legal context in which movie theaters operated. Like many German-language monographs, the book is divided into subchapters allowing for a comprehensive overview of the topics covered. The most fascinating parts of the book are on the "Arisierung" of Jewish-owned movie theaters in Austria, and in this thirty-page chapter the book crosses briefly into an important aspect of Holocaust Studies, the dispossession of Austrian Jews perpetrated by the Nazis, a process that left behind a legalistic paper trail that is an important part of Holocaust history in Austria. The other important parts of the book look at how the Nazi government and its various organizations exerted control over movie theaters, including the Deutsche Arbeitsfront (DAF), which oversaw movie theater personnel, and the Reichsfilmkammer, which controlled the issuance of movie theater operating licenses. The book [End Page 118] provides ample evidence of how tightly the Nazi regime sought to control movie theaters, which further illustrates the importance of film as media in this period. A weakness of this book is that it is almost exclusively based on the trove of documents that the author discovered in 1981, which furnish an incomplete picture of the movie theater business, in large part due to the lack of other secondary sources on the topic. To some extent this is understandable, but the book would have benefited from being edited in a way that it did not try to cover all of information available in these documents and instead focused more succinctly on the Arisierungen and the influence the state exerted on movie theater operations and then tied this in with the significance of film at the time, which might have made the book more appealing to film scholars. While the book is a heavy and somewhat disjointed read that is not suited to be used with students or scholars new to the topic, the book offers a wealth of new information for film scholars trying to contextualize the role of movie theaters for the films that people were seeing in Austria in the Nazi period. This book will undoubtedly also be of significant interest to historians studying everyday life during the Nazi period as well as the home front in Austria during World War II. Joseph W. Moser West Chester University Copyright © 2020 Austrian Studies Association

The Visual Side of Privacy: State-Incriminating, Coproduced Archives

In Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt illustrates the “lesser of two evils” principle by relating the peculiar story of a state archive of photographs of women in swimwear. During the Nazi period, she writes, to receive a marriage license Czech women applying to marry German soldiers were required to furnish a photograph of themselves dressed in swimwear. Taking its cue from this historic example, this study traces the evolution of a phenomenon the author describes as state-incriminating, coproduced archives, visual archives that are coproduced by representatives of the legal and political order in the name of law, and by the subjects who are obliged to participate in their creation: staging and documenting their own performance to become or remain lawful citizens. Examining this kind of visual surveillance and the “extraterritorial” quality of the produced images, a line is drawn to privacy infringement in today’s professed democracies.

Методика створення ГІС концентраційних таборів нацистської Німеччини періоду 1941–1944 рр.

Методика створення ГІС концентраційних таборів нацистської Німеччини періоду 1941–1944 рр.

Hitler Reconsidered: A New Construct by Peter Longerich and His Contemporaries

Hitler Reconsidered: A New Construct by Peter Longerich and His Contemporaries Paul Bookbinder Hitler: A Biography. By Peter Longerich. Trans. Jeremy Noakes and Lesley Sharpe. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. Pp. 1344. Cloth $39.95. ISBN 978-0190056735. It is surprising that seventy-five years after his death there is still so much interest in Adolf Hitler. Historians are writing intensively researched books about him and political commentators are making comparisons with current Western leaders who are endorsing what is being labeled as “illiberal democracy.” In Germany, a new heavily annotated version of Mein Kampf is now available to the general public for the first time. Peter Longerich’s new biography of Hitler is a most significant addition to our understanding of Hitler both because of its comprehensive discussion of how Hitler achieved power, how he ruled, and his successes and failures and because Longerich, more than any other historian, sees Hitler as a brilliant practitioner of politics even more than as a charismatic leader. Longerich argues that Hitler understood how politics worked in an age of mass participation in national political life and could manipulate the forces that made for success in achieving and holding power. Longerich provides an armature of detail to build an understanding of Hitler’s path to power, his time as dictator, and his responsibility for World War II and the Holocaust. And he establishes a framework that students of the Nazi period can use to incorporate the work of such historians as Thomas Weber, who concentrates on the early part of Hitler’s rise to power; Johann Chapoutot, who describes his racial ideology and policies; and Stephen Fritz and Rolf-Dieter Müller, who study Hitler as a military leader. Longerich incorporates here many of the rich details amassed in his earlier exhaustive studies of the other major leaders of the Nazi movement to create a balanced and complete picture of Hitler and his unique role within the Nazi movement. While other impressive major biographies of Hitler have been around for some time, particularly Ian Kershaw’s two-volume biography Hitler, Longerich’s work represents an updated attempt at a comprehensive reconsideration of the subject. In this essay, I concentrate on the major points that Longerich advances and compare his significant interpretations of almost all aspects of Hitler’s career, and particularly his role as a political leader, with the work of other historians who have recently written about similar issues. Taken together, Longerich’s book and these other recent works yield new ways of looking at this cataclysmic figure. [End Page 593] In the conclusion of his book, Longerich sums up the centrality of Hitler’s role in every aspect of the Nazi regime. He writes: It is beyond question that no single individual was responsible for the catastrophic outcome of the twelve years of dictatorship. Millions of committed Nazis had worked tirelessly for this regime; a huge army of willing helpers and opportunistic fellow travelers had given it unquestionable support; the elites had been only too glad to put their specialized knowledge and experience at its disposal; officers and soldiers had carried out their military tasks obediently and with great commitment; the majority of the population had followed their Führer devotedly and without protest. And yet these facts on their own are not adequate to explain what happened. There had to be a political figure who knew how to exploit the preconditions and forces designed to realize his aims and ambitions. At the heart of the Third Reich there was a determined dictator who shaped this process, focused all these energies on himself as an individual, and managed to acquire such extensive powers that he enjoyed unprecedented freedom of action. (949) Longerich claims, then, that “Hitler was actively involved in the most disparate areas of politics to a much greater extent than hitherto has been assumed” (949). It is particularly valuable to note that, in this argument, Longerich returns to Karl Bracher’s emphasis on Hitler’s political skills that the large numbers of historians who have focused on his charisma have often underestimated. “In this analysis,” Longerich explains, “we are following a ‘seizure of power’ in stages set out by...

Die Kinderpsychiatrie in Österreich 1945–1975 – Entwicklungen zwischen historischer Hypothek und sozialpsychiatrischem Anspruch

The development of child and adolescent psychiatry in Austria carries the burden of its historical inheritance of the Nazi period. The development after 1945 shows contradictory aspects as a reflection of the social and political situation. A compromise (additive specialisation “Kinderneuropsychiatrie”) between child psychiatry (in the narrow sense), oriented towards social-psychiatric and psychotherapeutic approaches and the – quantitatively dominant – “heilpädagogisches Netzwerk” following conservative approaches, was established in 1975.

Visiting Holocaust: Related Sites in Germany with Medical Students as an Aid to Teaching Medical Ethics and Human Rights

Some doctors and nurses played a key role in Nazism. They were responsible for the sterilization and murder of people with disabilities. Nazi doctors used concentration camp inmates as guinea pigs in medical experiments that had military or racial objectives. What we have learnt about the behaviour of doctors and nurses during the Nazi period enables us to reflect on several issues in present-day medicine (research limitations, decision making at the beginning and the end of a life and the relationship between physicians and the State). In some authors' opinions, the teaching of the medical aspects of the Holocaust could be a new model for education relating to professionalism, Human Rights, Bioethics and the respect of diversity. Teaching Medicine and the Holocaust could be a way of informing doctors and nurses of violations of Ethics in the past. Moreover, a Study Trip to Holocaust and Medicine related sites has a strong pedagogical value. Visiting Holocaust related sites, T4 centres and the places where medical experiments were carried out, has a special meaning for medical students. Additionally, tolerance, anti-discrimination, and the value of human life can be both taught and learned through this curriculum. The following article recounts our experiences of organizing and supervising a study trip with a group of medical students to some Holocaust and medicine-related sites in Berlin and Hadamar (Germany). The study tour included lectures at universities in Düsseldorf and Berlin.

First Victims at Last: Disability and Memorial Culture in Holocaust Studies

This essay begins with a Berlin memorial to the victims of National Socialist “euthanasia” killings first unveiled in 2014. The open-air structure was the fourth such major public memorial in the German capital, having followed earlier memorials already established for Jewish victims of Nazi atrocity in 2005, German victims of homosexual persecution in 2008, and Sinti and Roma victims in 2012. Planning for the systematic persecution and extermination of at least 300,000 infants, adolescents, and adults deemed “life unworthy of life” (Lebensunwertes Leben) long preceded and extended beyond the 12-year Nazi period of massacre linked to other victim groups. Yet those constructing collective memory projects in Berlin appear to consider these particular victims as an afterthought, secondary to the other groups. Rather than address the commemorations themselves, this essay addresses the sequence in which they have appeared in order to demonstrate a pattern of first-victimized/last-recognized. I argue that the massacre of Jews, Roma, homosexuals, and others had to come into legal jurisprudence, scholarship, and public memory projects first before the murdered disabled body and its related memorialization could be legitimized as a category of violence important in and of itself. I argue further that the delay is rooted in a shared trans-Atlantic history that has failed to interrogate disability in terms of the social and cultural values that categorize and stigmatize it. Instead, the disabled body has been seen as both a physical embodiment of incapacity and a monolith that defies historicization. An examination of the broader foundation behind delayed study and representation that recognizes the intersection of racism and ableism allows us to reconfigure our analysis of violence and provides fertile ground from which to make connections to contemporary iterations still playing out in the present.

‘Ihr Berge, adieu’ – nature as a sanctuary for a persecuted Munich Jew

ABSTRACTThe connectedness of place, space and time is a well-known idea in the context of space in social theory. This paper argues that the factor of agency, specifically the question whether meaning is given to a space in a conscious or unconscious process, should also be discussed. By analysing a body of correspondence, the perception of nature in the eyes of the Munich Jewish citizen, Erwin Schwager, during the Nazi period is explored, showing the meaning of nature as space of Heimat, recreation and sanctuary in changing circumstances. The usage of a microhistorical approach proved effective for linking the concepts of place, space, time and agency.

Muzeum-archiwum pamięci. Uwagi na temat roli materiałów archeologicznych w muzeach-miejscach pamięci na przykładzie KL Plaszow

The issues of memory, heritage, and archaeology are strictly connected to the archaeology of the contemporary past and the Nazi period. That connection is a new field of research that lead to the reconceptualization of ideas of a museum, archives, and their relations to memory. In the paper authors discuss the case study of the area of former labor and concentration camp Plaszow in Krakow (1942–1945). Since 2016, numerous archeological research and education programs were conducted by the Museum of Krakow. The main purpose of documentation, surface surveys, and excavations was preservation of the architectural relicts and landscape, and supplementing the historical knowledge of authentic archaeological sources. The results of the research were related to the preparation of the boundaries for the future commemoration of the former camp’s area and its history as a museum and memorial site. The outcome of the archaeological activity is collection of artifacts, documentation and archaeological knowledge that influenced the idea of commemoration in its specific way. The article attempts to answer the questions about the categories of archives and museums.

Jewish commentaries on Star Wars: theology, history, and debate

ABSTRACTThis paper examines how pop culture commentators, rabbis, bloggers, and others create commentaries on the implicit Jewish dimensions of Star Wars movies. These midrashic commentaries fundamentally challenge the conceptual divide between pop culture and religious life, and online religion and religion online. Commentaries examined here are grouped into three categories, including those created by commentators who link a range of points from Jewish theology to the Star Wars universe, events, and characters; see in Star Wars traces of Jewish historical experiences, from biblical episodes, Second Temple times, the Enlightenment, and the Nazi period, to the present day; and believe that aspects of the Star Wars story, particularly key scenes and characters from Star Wars: The Last Jedi (2017), facilitate critical debate on Jewish movements today.

Germany Since 1945: Politics, Culture, and Society

The Federal Republic is the most enduring political formation in modern German history. In just a few years, by 2023, it will have lasted as long as the German Empire, the Weimar Republic and the Nazi period taken together. Over the last few decades, an entire series of mostly German language books have synthesized its history into a coherent though occasionally somewhat predictable narrative. Employing paradigms such as modernization, Westernization, liberalization or Americanization, historians have traced the gradual evolution of the Federal Republic from the unconditional military, political and moral collapse of the Third Reich to an at least seemingly well-functioning, prosperous and multicultural democratic state. After the collapse of state socialism in 1989, the Federal Republic managed to absorb the former East Germany, whose history then often featured as a negative counterpoint to West German success. And since historians have gained access to East German files up to 1989, the history of the GDR became its own growth industry.

Top Incomes in Germany, 1871–2014

This study provides new evidence on top income shares in Germany from industrialization to the present. Income concentration was high in the nineteenth century, dropped sharply after WWI and during the hyperinflation years of the 1920s, then increased rapidly throughout the Nazi period beginning in the 1930s. Following the end of WWII, German top income shares returned to 1920s levels. The German pattern stands in contrast to developments in France, the United Kingdom, and the United States, where WWII brought a sizeable and lasting reduction in top income shares. Since the turn of the millennium, income concentration in Germany has been on the rise and is today among the highest in Europe. The capital share is consistently positively associated with income concentration, whereas growth, technological change, trade, unions, and top tax rates are positively associated in some periods and negative in others.