Nazi Party Research Articles

The Medical Professional Elimination Program and the Ideology and Motivation of Nazi Physicians.

The appointment of a new chancellor in 1933 marked the beginning of the Third Reich in Germany. The ideology of the Nazi Party focused on establishing a pure Aryan state characterized by nationalism and racial superiority. Their goals would be achieved through a totalitarian form of government that enforced the subjugation, exclusion, and elimination of those they defined as inferior minorities, particularly Jews, who were depicted as non-human. Implementation of the Nazi ideology required the exclusion of Jewish people and other dissenters, particularly Jewish physicians, from their professions. The exclusion of Jewish physicians, referred to herein as a "Medical Professional Elimination Program," was gradually imposed on other Jewish professions in nations absorbed by the Third Reich, and particularly enforced by incorporated Austria. Why did German and Austrian doctors support the Nazi racial ideology, the removal of Jewish physicians from every possible sphere of influence, and subsequently participate in criminal medical research and experimentation, as well as euthanasia of perceived non-contributors to society, and become involved in refining the effectiveness of the death camps? Was the Medical Professional Elimination Program an opportunistic political concept, or was it part of an entrenched ideology? With these questions in mind, the lives of four key Nazi physicians and two institutions are examined.

Martin Heinrich Corten (1889-1962): Nazi victim or perpetrator?

At first glance, Martin Heinrich Corten's biography appears to be the classic story of a German physician persecuted by the Nazis. Because of his "Jewish descent," Corten lost his position as a pathologist in Berlin and later his license to practice medicine. Emigration failed. But Corten was not a typical Nazi victim. In 1933, he applied for membership in the Nazi Party, and during the last two years of the war he collaborated with the Gestapo as the Hamburg representative of the "Reich Association of Jews in Germany." Although he tried to provide basic welfare and health care for Hamburg's remaining Jewish population, he was heavily involved in the deportation of Jewish citizens to concentration and extermination camps. After the war, Corten thus came into conflict with the Jewish community and lost his position as medical director of the Jewish Hospital in Hamburg. He became a "double outcast" and was unable to re-establish himself in academia. His biography, however, is a vivid example of how the line between victim and perpetrator can be blurred.

Tudor Ghosts in Black Shirts: The British Union of Fascists, Nazi Germany and the Quest for Musical Greatness in Britain

Abstract The United Kingdom has for centuries suffered the reputation of an ‘unmusical nation’ that could not produce a great composer or compete with the rich musical cultures of Germany, Italy or Russia. In the 1930s, members of the British Union of Fascists (BUF) who worked in the musical professions began to challenge and reject this long-standing stereotype. These self-described Blackshirts hoped to achieve a ‘rebirth’ of British classical music under the leadership of Oswald Mosley and expel racially impure ‘alien’ performers from Britain’s houses of culture. As British fascists conceived and debated these plans, the example of Nazi Germany loomed large in their imaginations. BUF Blackshirts professed admiration for Joseph Goebbels’s campaigns against ‘degenerate’ music and imitated the Nazi Party’s völkisch criticisms of jazz, modern art and consumerism. Especially intriguing to Mosley’s followers was the Nazi cult of Richard Wagner, which offered a compelling illustration of how a hypothetical fascist Britain might revere a historical composer as an emblem of racial nationalism. The Third Reich’s glorification of Wagner prompted debate within the BUF about which figure, or figures, could fulfil such a role in Britain, with two schools of thought predominating: either the late Victorian generation of composers or the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Tudor masters. If Nazi cultural policy was a source of inspiration for British fascists, it was equally one of intimidation and self-doubt, reviving insecurities that the British people were a ‘musically inferior race’ unable to produce a composer rivalling Wagner’s genius.

Walter Eichler and his role in the development of electroneurography

ABSTRACT Walter Eichler (1904–1942) performed the first in situ nerve conduction studies in humans. Eichler’s work has been largely overlooked and there have been no biographical accounts written of him. His 1937 paper, Über die Ableitung der Aktionspotentiale vom menschlichen Nerven in situ (On the recording of the action potentials from human nerves in situ) was translated and reviewed. Archival material was obtained on his career that was housed predominantly at the University of Freiburg im Breisgau. He had memberships in Nazi organizations but did not appear to be politically active. During his brief career, he constructed novel equipment and established seminal principles for performing nerve conductions on humans. The authors repeated his experiment in the ulnar nerve, which duplicated Eichler’s findings. His recordings were quite remarkable given advances in technology. In summary, the Eichler paper is the first study in the development of in situ clinical electroneurography in humans. Many of his procedural observations are still fundamental in the current practice of electroneurography. As best can be determined, his study in humans did not appear ethically compromised. Although Eichler’s personal background remains open to question, his paper is a seminal study in the history and development of clinical electroneurography. Abbreviations: AP: Action potential; C: Capacitor; CNP: Compound nerve potential; DC: Direct current; E1: Preferred term for active electrode; E2: Preferred term for reference electrode; NSDÄB: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche NSD-Ärtzebund (National Socialist German Doctors’ League; NSDAP: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (National Socialist German Workers’ Party/ Nazi Party); SS: Schutzstaffel (Protective Echelon or Squad of the Nazi party)

The Myth of the Inevitable: How the Mistakes of the Powerful Facilitated the Rise of Nazi Germany

When examining the lead-up to World War II, Adolf Hitler's invasion of Poland is often seen as the catalyst for the war. However, this oversimplification neglects the circumstances that led Hitler to such a position. This essay challenges the prevailing notion that Hitler and the Nazis attained power solely through unwavering determination and exceptional political acumen. Instead, it argues that mistakes and misinterpretations by German and international leaders played a crucial role in facilitating the Nazi Party's rise to power and the establishment of the Third Reich. The Weimar leadership's political and economic miscalculations, combined with their misunderstandings of Hitler and his party's intentions, created an environment ripe for Hitler's seizure of power in 1933. Additionally, the miscalculations and misreadings of influential nations like Great Britain, France, and the United States enabled the Nazi regime to solidify its power and pursue expansionist goals while missing crucial opportunities to halt its progress.

Судето-немецкая партия в Чехословакии: на пути к объединению с нацистской Германией (1933–1938 гг.)

The history study of nationalist parties in the 20th century is the subject of close attention of many researchersgermanists. However, the history of the Sudeten-German party in Czechoslovakia in the 1930s does not often become an object of research. The purpose of the article is to consider the activities of the Sudeten-German party, to highlight the key reasons for its emergence. Particular attention is paid to the evolution of the party leaders' views on the way to unification with Nazi Germany. Also, the work proposed, if possible, an objective analysis of the essence of Henlein movement. The urgency of the problem is substantiated, first of all, by the fact that according to a similar scenario events, developed and continue to develop on the territory of the former Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union, especially in the Baltic countries, where the Russian-speaking population makes up a significant part, like the Sudeten Germans in Czechoslovakia at their time, however, they are also targeted by the discriminatory policy of the authorities. The source base was made up of the documents collected by the Czechoslovak researcher V. Kral and published by him in 1964. As part of these materials, a large group of sources can be distinguished, which make up materials at the meetings of the main leadership in the Sudeten German Home Front - the Sudeten German Party in the period from 1933 to 1937, early 1938 and the speech by the leader of the Sudeten German Party K. Heinlein. Since the early 1990s we can talk about the renaissance of the historiography of the Sudeten-German history, mainly due to the development of archives in Germany, the Czech Republic and Slovakia. The First World War did not contribute to the resolution of national contradictions. After the end of the First World War the Sudeten Germans were also included in Czechoslovakia at the behest of the Entente. The Sudeten-German party of K. Henlein took an active position in this struggle. Summing up, the authors conclude that the question of the nature of Henlein movement is controversial. Henlein movement really resembled the Nazi party in Germany, but at the initial stage of its activity in 1933-1936. However, as the Czechoslovak authorities opposed, pressure from the Nazi party in Germany and the strengthening of the right-wing radical branch, the Sudeten German Party practically lost its characteristics and turned into an analogue of the National Socialist German Workers' Party. This fact largely predetermined the radical solution of the Sudeten-German question through the Munich agreements on September 29, 1938, when the border regions of Czechoslovakia were annexed to Germany. Undoubtedly, these agreements were in the interests of the majority of the Sudeten Germans, who, however, once again became victims of the big European politics.

Благодарственный лозунг в немецкой политической коммуникации 30–50-х годов XX века

The article deals with gratitude slogans in German political communication and aims to analyze the functions of such slogans, to identify their fundamental features related to their structure and the meanings they can convey, and to classify the slogans. Data for this study were collected from the minutes of the German governments’ meetings held between 1930 and 1959. Utterances expressing gratitude in political communication are motivational and inspirational in nature because they are aimed at changing the recipient’s emotional condition and are used to change the audience’s attitude toward the problem discussed. The article pays much attention to the classification of gratitude slogans into different types. Such slogans used in political communication in Germany can be divided into three groups: appeals, statements, and slogans comprising the qualities of both appeals and statements. Slogans of all the three types are declarative in nature. In terms of content, a gratitude slogan in political communication can convey: gratitude itself; prognostic gratitude; the need to express gratitude; an appeal to be grateful (can be expressed both implicitly and explicitly); gratitude-manipulation; prognostic ingratitude. Having analyzed the capability of the speech act of gratitude and its combinations with other speech acts, the author has discovered that they are most often combined with demands, appeals, and requests. Such compatibility allows these speech acts to mutually influence each other, which results in gratitude obtaining the features and functional properties of slogans. This study has shown that gratitude slogans have significant influential potential and come in many different forms; however, their historical connection with the language of the Nazi Party had a negative impact on the frequency of use and the expressiveness of such slogans.

The Katyń Forest Massacre

This article explores the relationship between political expediency, perception management, and governmental goals. The subject matter forms the research question of “How a tool such as perception management can be used to politically expedite a government’s interests and goals?” It is understood that these ends can be achieved through the usage of perception management by constructing them from a given audience’s interests and values. The concept of perception management is introduced to the reader and illustrated by the example of the United States government’s knowledge of the Katyń Forest Massacre. This article is presented in two parts – the United States’ initial conclusion that the Nazi party was responsible for the massacre and its later reassignment of fault to the Soviet Union. The first instance which involved the reconstruction of truth, was used to politically advance the United States’ cooperation with the Soviet Union in fighting Hitler’s Germany. The second instance also involved the revelation of truth and was used to justify its fight against the North Korean communists. This article should effectively demonstrate how the practice of perception management has been used historically by the United States government to expediate its political goals. The instrumentalization of Katyń is important as it may inspire the reader to consider why certain events take hold of the media’s attention versus others, and how these events specifically may relate to domestic and international political issues.

“When I think about Shortfield, I think about mosquitos, and neo-Nazis”: Students’ narratives of racism, sexism, and intolerance in rural Swedish schools

The aim of this study was to analyse how young people living in geographical areas with a tradition of high neo-Nazi activism talk about racism and sexism, in particular, and the “school climate”, in general. Two schools situated in traditional rural mill towns were selected, and students (of ages 14–16) were interviewed. Influenced by Essed's theory on everyday racism, the study addresses how micro and macro dimensions of racism intersect through the voices of the students, when they talk about their community, their school, and the visible traces or signs of the neo-Nazi movement. The results show a recurrence of everyday racism in the schools, and indicate that the expression of racism was largely taken for granted. Initially in the narratives the students talked about their school and community in terms of inclusion and social connectedness. As the discussions proceeded, quite a few examples of racist practices and verbal racist and sexist harassment were mentioned. Such expressions were often downplayed, such that everyday racism and sexism appeared to have been normalised. This apologetic stance also seemingly contributed to a “return of the repressed”, in the form of overt expressions of neo-Nazi symbols and acts in the school environment.

Kreatismus

Abstract Far from deemphasizing Jesus’ Jewishness, as theologians in Nazi Germany regularly did, Dietrich Schuler claims that the New Testament’s message was and continues to be detrimental for “Aryans”. In fact, he finds it far more problematic than the Old Testament. His solution is to invent a new religion. I shall thus delve into Dietrich Schuler’s literature that permeated the German neo-Nazi movement during the first decade of the 21st century. Moreover, this article attempts to answer the question why Schuler was unsuccessful in turning his secular disciples into actual believers. I will use and build on a framework put forth by the American sociologist Rodney Stark. I shall also refer to religious sociologist Martin Riesebrodt and his theory of religion.

Efforts to create an erroneous perception in historiography: The case of Stefan Ihrig

Although history is a science based on concrete documents and information in the study of the past, it has started to be used as a tool of political powers, power centers, and groups who want to gain benefits by creating perceptions. As a result of the falsification of concrete facts, popularized history has started to replace real history and manipulate social perceptions. Dozens of popular historiographies create erroneous perceptions about the Turkish nation. These include the Blue Book, which portrays the 1915 events as the Armenian genocide, George Horton's "The Scourge of Asia", which claims that the Great Smyrna Fire was started by the Turks, and Margaret Housepian Dobkin's "Smyrna 1922: The Destruction of a City". One of these is Stefan Ihrig's "Atatürk in the Nazi Imagination". Immediately after the publication of the book by Harvard University Press, newspapers close to the Nazi Party and speeches of politicians within the party began to emphasize the admiration of the Nazis and Hitler for Atatürk, and it was discussed that Hitler took Atatürk as a role model. In particular, the book, which attempted to draw similarities between the Armenian deportation and the Holocaust, was also adopted and supported by some publications supporting the Armenian claims in order to strengthen the "so-called Armenian Genocide" allegations. This study aims to demonstrate the use of popular historiography as a method to create erroneous perceptions of societies by taking the book "Atatürk in the Nazi Imagination" by Stefan Ihrig as an example.

Bodies and Spaces: Citizenship as Claims-Making in Germany, 1942–1949

AbstractIn 1935, the Nazi Party promulgated the Reich citizenship law, which, to protect the purity of the Volksgemeinschaft, denaturalized numerous people who perceived themselves as German. Despite this perceived threat to the national body, the Third Reich drafted some mixed-race men to serve in the Wehrmacht during World War II. Traditionally, scholars have focused their studies of mixed-race veterans on the so-called Jewish Mischlinge who served in the Wehrmacht. This article expands the aperture by examining the oral history testimony of Hans Hauck, a Black German Wehrmacht veteran whose wartime experiences present a complex story of a man who claimed to be German despite legal structures and normative ideals about Germanness that excluded him. Drawing on Hauck's oral history testimonies regarding two periods of his military service, I argue that Hauck used his body, symbols, and physical spaces to seek recognition as a legitimate claimant of Germanness.

White Jihad: How White Supremacists Adopt Jihadi Narratives, Aesthetics, and Tactics

ABSTRACT This article explores the growing trend of “white jihad” by examining how white supremacists have incorporated jihadi language, motifs, and tactics into their ecosystem. Using observation and content analysis of various primary sources associated with the neo-Nazi movement, we highlight the core issues and themes around which the two movements have coalesced; identify key facilitating actors who have advanced the convergence of elements of the far right and the jihadist movements; and identify operational threats that emanate from this cross-ideological encounter.

The Influence of Politics on Architectural Thought A Descriptive and Analytical Study of the Effect of Political Ideology on the Achieved Architecture (Berlin City as an Example)

The research investigates the political effect and its directions on the architectural thoughts and its achievements and how can this political system affect all fields of life in communities including architectural urban design. The problem of the research lies in the ambiguity effects of the ideological national directions of the Nazi Party on the architecture and urban design of the city of Berlin, then determining the aims of the research to discuss the concepts of politics and architecture and their relation to the way of thinking that plays a role in the process of design that works on property and achieving the suitable urban environments for those communities. After that, the Nazi's party's thought would be studied and analyzed, its concepts, public beliefs and its relation with renewing the city of Berlin as an example, to finish with introducing the conclusions.

Angermann-Beutler Family Tree

The text is a transcription of the family tree for the Angermann, Beutler and Klemm families found in the back of a diary written by Charlotte Angermann née Beutler, wife of Konrad Angermann and mother of Marianne Angermann-Bielschowsky. Those listed were from long established Saxon families, though some had moved to Rhineland Westfalia at the time the tree was sketched in 1946. Charlotte detailed the family relationships for her daughter, Marianne, in order to show what had become of them as a consequence of the Second World War. Several family members were actively involved in the Nazi Party, the Wehrmacht or SS, while others were antifascists.

“Something really very odd and singularly appropriate:” The Fashionable Swastika in the US Before 1939

Abstract More than a decade before Hitler became the leader of the Nazi party, on the other side of the Atlantic, the Ladies’ Home Journal hit on the perfect insignia for their new “Girl’s Club”: a swastika. This was far from anomalous; an examination of American fashion and lifestyle publications shows that the swastika was a fashionable motif for dress, home decor, and particularly jewelry from the turn of the twentieth century until the outbreak of World War II. Moreover, the swastika continued to be used as a decorative motif even as news of life under the Third Reich was published in American newspapers. This regular use in fashion and consumer goods suggests that Americans did not want to recognize the dissonance between the way that they wore the swastika and the symbol in its German context. This distinction began to disintegrate in the mid-1930s, as conflict over the use of the symbol revealed fracture lines between those affected by its anti-Semitic connotations and those who thought that these connotations were either acceptable or easy enough to ignore. The lifecycle of the swastika in American culture in the first four decades of the twentieth century offers a unique case study of how a sign can gain and lose meaning; after arising as a seemingly superficial fad, the persistence of the motif took on increasingly problematic associations raising difficult questions of how to contend with new readings of old signs.

The Social Politics of Karl Escherich's 1933 Inaugural Presidential Lecture.

The essay offers a close reading of the inaugural address Termite Craze by the entomologist Karl Escherich, the first German university president to be appointed by the Nazis. Faced with a divided audience and under pressure to politically align the university, Escherich, a former member of the NSDAP, discusses how and to what extent the new regime can recreate the egalitarian perfection and sacrificial predisposition of a termite colony. The paper pays particular attention to the ways in which Escherich tries to appease the various factions in his audience (faculty, students and the Nazi party); in doing so, it also discusses how Escherich depicts his address in the altered versions of his later memoirs.

Refugees welcome? Understanding the regional heterogeneity of anti-refugee hate crime

In this article, we examine anti-refugee hate crime in the wake of the large influx of refugees to Germany in 2014 and 2015. By exploiting institutional features of the assignment of refugees to German regions, we estimate the impact of unexpected and sudden large-scale immigration on hate crime against refugees. Results indicate that it is not simply the size of local refugee inflows which drives the increase in hate crime, but rather the combination of refugee arrivals and latent anti-refugee sentiment. We show that ethnically homogeneous areas, areas which experienced hate crimes in the 1990s, and areas with high support for the Nazi party in the Weimar Republic, are more prone to respond to the arrival of refugees with incidents of hate crime against this group. Our results highlight the importance of regional anti-immigration sentiment in the analysis of the incumbent population’s reaction to immigration.

Gatekeepers of Extermination: SS Camp Physicians and Their Scope of Action.

The role of camp physicians of the Waffen-SS ("Armed SS," military branch of the Nazi Party's Schutzstaffel) in the implementation of the Holocaust has been the subject of limited research, even though they occupied a key position in the extermination process. From 1943 and 1944 onward, SS camp physicians made the individual medical decisions on whether each prisoner was fit for work or was immediately subjected to extermination, not only at the Auschwitz labor and extermination camp but also in pure labor camps like Buchenwald and Dachau. This was due to a functional change in the concentration camp system during World War II, where the selection of prisoners, which had previously been carried out by nonmedical SS camp staff, became a main task of the medical camp staff. The initiative to transfer sole responsibility for the selections came from the physicians themselves and was influenced by structural racism, sociobiologically oriented medical expertise, and pure economic rationality. It can be seen as a further radicalization of the decision making practiced until then in the murder of the sick. However, there was a far-reaching scope of action within the hierarchical structures of the Waffen-SS medical service on both the macro and micro levels. But what can this teach us for medical practice today? The historical experience of the Holocaust and Nazi medicine can provide a moral compass for physicians to be sensitive to the potential for abuse of power and ethical dilemmas inherent in medicine. Thus, the lessons from the Holocaust could be a starting point for reflecting on the value of human life in the modern economized and highly hierarchical medical sector.

Gay Nazis

Most histories on the development of homosexual identity in Germany focus on the 19th-century origins of the first homosexual rights movement, the thriving queer culture in large cities like Berlin during the 1920s, the extensive advocacy done by the liberal sexologist Magnus Hirschfield, and the ultimate eradication of all this progress by the Nazi regime. Consequently, these histories focus primarily on left-wing progressive homosexual advocacy groups like Hirschfield’s WhK (Wissenschaftlich-humanitäres Komitee; German for Scientific-Humanitarian Committee). Comparatively, less attention is paid to a smaller, but nevertheless significant cohort of right-wing male homosexual activists — or masculinists — like Adolf Brand and Hans Blüher who rejected notions that same-sex desiring men constituted an effeminate “third sex”. In their view, homoeroticism was the ultimate expression of virility and male camaraderie, and they fused this idea with nationalist, racialist, and antisemitic views in order to formulate a right-wing position against repealing Paragraph 175, Germany's anti-sodomy law. World War One (WWI) was a crucial event which allowed homosexual veterans to affirm their desires more boldly without being labelled as weak and unmanly — their war experience allowed them to defend their reputation as macho and patriotic men. This paper investigates the historical, social, and psychological reasons why many early Nazis, especially those who joined the SA, were attracted to Brand and Blüher’s ideas. The SA’s relative tolerance for homosociality provided a safe space for many homosexuals in the movement. However, this was extremely problematic for the political side of the Nazi Party whose hegemonic heterosexual masculine image came under question after a series of SA scandals in the early 1930s, and ultimately took deadly actions to quash non-heteronormative elements of the movement.