Government In Germany Research Articles

Homophobic Propaganda and the Denunciation of Same-Sex-Desiring Men under National Socialism

In 1935, under the guise of wide-ranging legal reforms, the National Socialist regime in Germany stiffened the provisions of Paragraph 175 and introduced a new subclause (Paragraph 175a) that laid the legal groundwork for increasingly radical measures against homosexual behavior. Such behavior became subject to harsh persecution, as many thousands of men were sentenced to prison terms or penal servitude, incarcerated in psychiatric institutions, and castrated or murdered in concentration camps.

British Immigration Policy to Palestine in the 1930s: Implications for Youth Aliyah

In the middle of the 1930s the conflict between the Jews and the Arabs in Palestine intensified. At the same time British policy towards the Jews in Palestine took a major turn, which was largely expressed by limiting Jewish immigration to the country. In light of the political developments in Europe following the rise of the Nazis to power, the immigration limitation constituted an internal political move in Palestine, for by its decision Britain sealed the fate of hundreds of thousands of Jews. Moreover the attempts to save children by bringing them to Palestine, as revealed by the uncovering of new documents, illuminate British policy from yet another point of view. When the Nazis began persecuting the Jews in Germany, the Zionist Organization rallied to help them in their distress. A department for assisting the Jews of Germany was established by the Jewish Agency in Palestine, headed by Chaim Weizmann who for many years served as President of the Zionist Organization. Within this department a Youth Aliyahl bureau was established, headed by Henrietta Szold.2 The aim of Youth Aliyah was to organize groups of youth aged 15-17 to study in Palestine for two years.3 The vast majority of Jews in Germany had lived there for generations, were involved in its cultural and scientific life and identified with German culture, and many had no intention of uprooting themselves. They hoped to deal with the new situation and weather the raging storm.4 Nevertheless they did wish to reduce their children's suffering, and supported a programme to send them to Palestine to continue their studies and receive professional training. However, with the consolidation of the Nazi regime in Germany, the attitude towards Youth Aliyah changed from a study and professional training programme into an enterprise for saving Jewish children. Initially the Mandatory Government displayed a positive attitude towards Youth Aliyah, but in the second half of the 1930s, just at the time when Nazi ruthlessness and persecution of the Jews intensified, the British

Genetics of susceptibility to tuberculosis: Mengele's experiments in Auschwitz.

Great experiments will always be remembered. I highlight an experiment that was conducted during the Nazi regime in Germany. Not only did the experiment fail, it was also linked to fraud and crimes against humanity. This failed experiment will never be forgotten.

Bringing Down the Other Berlin Wall: Germany's Repeal of the Corporate Capital Gains Tax

Faced with pressure from increased global competition and capital mobility, Germany's government made a surprise announcement in December 1999 that it would repeal the longstanding capital gains tax on sales of corporate crossholdings. The repeal was hailed as a revolutionary step toward breaking up Germany's complex web of cross-ownership. When the changes become effective in 2002, Germany will move from having one of the most punitive taxes on corporate capital gains to having the smallest among major industrial countries. This paper uses Germany as a natural experiment to provide evidence on the extent to which taxes present a barrier to the efficient acquisition and divestiture of stakes in other firms. In particular, we examine the stock market response by German firms to the announcement that capital gains taxes on intercompany holdings would be eliminated. We find a positive association between a firm's abnormal stock returns and the extent of its crossholdings, consistent with taxes acting as a barrier to efficient allocation of ownership and investment. However, the reaction is limited to the largest banks and insurers and their extensive minority holdings in industrial firms, suggesting that taxes are not the binding constraint preventing most firms from divesting their crossholdings.

Rudolf Nissen’s years in Bosphorus and the pioneers of thoracic surgery in Turkey

Rudolph Nissen is one of the most distinguished pioneers in thoracic surgery, well known for his pneumonectomy operation performed for the first time in surgical history. He migrated to Istanbul like most of his contemporary colleagues, avoiding the fascist regime in Germany in the 1930s. He was enthusiastically welcomed in Turkey and appointed as the Chief of the First Surgery Clinic in Istanbul University in 1933. He worked with discipline and in cooperation with his Turkish colleagues, such as Ahmed Burhaneddin Toker, Fahri Arel, Derviş Manizade, and others, who were to become the leading authorities of general thoracic surgery in Turkey. During his 6 years of residence and working in Istanbul, he contributed highly to the practice of general and thoracic surgery. He had to leave for the United States in 1939 for treatment of his lung abscess due to a retained bullet from World War I. He stayed in New York and later in Basel until his death. He was presented an honorary professorship from Hacettepe University, Ankara in 1973.

Capital Dilemma: Germany's Search for a New Architecture of Democracy

The decision to move Germany's government seat from Bonn to Berlin by the year 2000 poses an architectural challenge and has fostered an international debate on which building styles are appropriate to represent German national identity. This volume investigates the political decisions and historical events behind the redesign of Berlin's official architecture. It tells of the complex drama of politics, memory, cultural values and architecture, in which Helmut Kohl, Albert Speer, Sir Norman Foster, and I.M. Pei all figure as players.

Chapter 10. Regulation and Evaluation Criteria for Housing for the Elderly

ABSTRACT Housing for the elderly is subject to regulation in most countries. The types of housing that should be subject to regulation are discussed, including issues to be addressed by regulation, such as the interdependence between location and services, and the implications Of continuous occupancy. Regulatory regimes in Germany, Israel, the Netherlands, the U.K. and the U.S.A. are described and compared, to suggest the dimensions of the ideal regulatory framework. Criteria for evaluating elderly housing proposals are developed, and this paper presents an evaluation system for use in the regulatory review of congregate housing and small nursing home projects.

Berlin Revisited

Berlin Revisited Wyndham Lewis and Paul Edwards (bio) Introduction “Berlin Revisited” exists as a fifteen-page autograph manuscript in the Lewis archive at Cornell. The first page is inscribed (not in Lewis’s hand) “Blasting & Bombardiering,” but in fact Lewis and his wife visited Germany and Poland in October 1937, immediately after the publication of that autobiography. (See Jeffrey Meyers, The Enemy: A Biography of Wyndham Lewis; the 1935 visit mentioned in the first sentence of the article is not recorded by Meyers.) 1 During the mid-1930s, Lewis’s promotion of an understanding with the new Nazi regime in Germany brought him close to being an unofficial apologist for it. His fear of a repetition of World War I, in which he had served as an artillery officer, was an inextricable part of his attitude. Count Your Dead: They are Alive!, published in April 1937, is the climax of his campaign. After the 1937 visit, Lewis made no more attempts to persuade the British public of the beneficence of the Nazis, and, as his biographer notes, decisively distanced himself from anti-Semitism. “Berlin Revisited,” then, records a visit that seems to have coincided with the turning point in Lewis’s attitude to Hitler’s Germany. It does not itself record the change of attitude, however. An “extremely vulnerable” (177) Germany is still seen as a potential victim of aggression. But Lewis is clearly disappointed by the lack of a heroic temper in Berlin’s well-dressed bourgeoisie (which indicates that he had expected the Nazis to induce one). The shoppers and café-loungers of Third City in the 1955 Monstre Gai (sometimes taken as a reflection of Lewis’s attitude to the Welfare State in postwar Britain) clearly [End Page 175] owe something to his memories of the Kurfürstendamm in 1937. 2 In Count Your Dead, Lewis had half insinuated the existence of a conspiracy by Jewish financiers to undermine European society by war, just as Russia had been subverted by communism. He was shocked by his visit to the Warsaw Ghetto, but there was evidently not yet sufficient change in his worldview for him to do more than record without comment the heroic or desperate Herr Israel’s absurdist defiance of persecution. A week or so ago I dropped into Berlin, which I had not visited for two years. This time I stayed in a small hotel off the Kurfürstendamm. The Kurfürstendamm is a big boulevard, thick with cafés. It is a sort of little Paris consisting of a single great boulevard, created under the Brüning and earlier régimes, in stark contrast with the old imperial city. The “terraces” of these cafés which lie thick along the Kurfürstendamm are for the most part sumptuous marquees. Within these spacious tents, infested with palms, the elegant ladies and gentlemen of the new Berlin discuss coffee and cakes. These great Konditoreien are somewhat oppressively respectable, and incidentally extremely expensive. It takes you a few days to sort out the essentials of this swarming tent-life, of Berlin’s fashionable boulevard. The first thing you remark is the admirable taste displayed in all the clothes, hats, and shoes worn. There is a great surface effect of luxury. But these are only Konditoreien, or cake-and-coffee palaces, after all. If you go into the equivalent of these places in the matter of restaurants—the Weinrestaurant—you will find that more than half the customers are not eating, or not more than one dish. They have the wine but not the food of the wine-restaurant, many of them, whereas in London or Paris they would all be eating a four-course dinner. After this, and a few similar discoveries, seeing the extreme smartness, notwithstanding, of these half-eaters, or mere drinkers, you will be disposed to say to yourself that these Germans put all their available cash on their backs. But that would not be entirely correct. There is an explanation for this paradoxal smartness. It is probably true to say that they put too much of their money on their backs, and think too much of sitting for an hour or two in...

From Resistance to Liberation Theology: German Theologians and the Non/ Resistance to the National Socialist Regime

In this article I wish to examine the connection between both Christian and Christian to the National Socialist regime in Germany and the development of a new political in postwar Germany. By theology I mean the academic reflection upon the Christian faith; and by resistance I mean the opposition in word and action to Hitler's or any related form of ideological theory and praxis. I wish to approach this complex subject matter from our current need to discuss the theological implications of the overall lack of organized theological to the Nazi regime. Of course, the Barmen Declaration of 1934 and its spiritual father, Karl Barth, are well remembered for their brave attack on the Nazi regime; and the thoughts, actions, and long suffering of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Martin Niemoller, and other individual Christians are not forgotten. But my thesis is that there was at first no constructive of to the National Socialist revolution in the Third Reich. Moreover, at that time there was no solid theological foundation available upon which a of could have been constructed. Dimensions of such a of only emerged in response to the unfolding totalitarian nature of Hitler's regime-too late, however, to affect the regime itself in any significant way. In the first section I shall reflect briefly on the political dimension of in Germany prior to 1933. In the second section I shall review theological motives in the emerging Christian to the Nazi regime. In the third section I shall discuss contemporary approaches to theological that have been developed in reaction to the failure of much of German during Hitler's reign.

RISING RACISM AND ANTI-SEMITISM : A BRIEF GLANCE

Racism and the discrimination accompanying it had always been instrumenıs of oppression and justification for exploitation. Colonialism and imperialism used these concepts to advocate the superiority of certain races and tried to "prove right" their tyrannies. It is well-known that the early (1933) laws of the Nazi regime in Germany were only the beginnings of the genocide which followed. Later events proved that racism could not be confined to a single country and that it vvas, by its very nature, a threat to international peace as vvell. The present confrontations around racism and discrimination have also acquired serious proportions. Violence based on real or attempted discrimination is stili among the most explosive phenomena of our times. Racism and its accompanying consequences stili affect a number of peoples on account of the colour of their skins and/or national, ethnic or religious origins. The native peoples in the Americas, Australia, parts of Asia and northern Europe have less right than others. Discrimination is the common denominator in the cases of the Amerindiano, the Mayas (Guatemala), the Miskitos (Nicaragua), the Inuit (Canada), the Adivasis (Bangladesh), the aborigines of Australia, the Sami (Lapland) and the like.

Themes in the History of the State of Israel

THE STATE OF ISRAEL declared its independence on May 14, 1948, effective with the termination of the British mandate of Palestine on May 15, but its creation was preceded by more than fifty years of efforts by the Zionist movement to establish an independent Jewish state in Palestine as a solution to the Jewish question.' Although Israel is a new state, it is located in the historic area where ancient Jewish kingdoms had existed, and it has a long and complex background.2 The history of the modern Jewish state antedates its independence and may be traced to the nineteenth century, when secular Jewish immigration to Palestine grew and when the practical, modern effort to establish a state began with the development of political Zionism and the creation of the World Zionist Organization by Theodor Herzl.3 The process gained impetus with the issuance of the Balfour Declaration in November 1917, in which the British government expressed support for the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine. Jewish immigration to Palestine continued throughout the following years, but, with the advent of the Nazi regime in Germany in the 1930s and the Holocaust that followed, the need and the numbers grew rapidly. With the end of World War II,

Policymaking by Referendum in Palau

Among the many mechanisms connecting citizens and leaders, it is the referendum that has emerged as a valuable political tool. Formal solicitation of voter sentiment at the ballot booth gives elected officials crucial information about public values.' At the same time, citizens participate in political decisions that may have a profound effect on the future of their society. Historically, the referendum, or plebiscite, was employed by dictators as an emotional device to shore up support for controversial decisions. Thus, when Napoleon felt threatened from within, he conducted (somewhat transparent) votes of confidence via the referendum.2 During the fascist regimes in Germany and Italy, Hitler and Mussolini employed the referendum to demonstrate widespread domestic support of their policies.3 In modern times, the referendum has often served as a policymaking instrument for significant public issues, going far beyond the artificial support of a particular regime. One study points to the utilization of the referendum in at least seventeen countries since 1945. In some places-such as Belgium, Colombia, Norway, and Turkey-it has been used only once; alternatively, Switzerland has employed the referendum as a policymaking conduit on more than 160 occasions.4 Perhaps the most recent example of a truly influential referendum was the Chilean decision in 1988 on whether to continue under the authoritarian regime of President Augusto Pinochet or to choose a new president through the competitive electoral process. On this occasion (although it has not yet been implemented), the plebiscite became a vehicle to replace one form of government with another.

Demilitarizing east‐west conflict: U.S. and Soviet military disengagement from Germany

Abstract This paper argues that Washington should bilaterally negotiate a treaty with Moscow to gradually remove all Soviet and American forces from Germany. The establishment of a bilaterally negotiated security regime in Germany would pose more of a constraint to future Soviet behavior than would an informal and ill‐defined evolution of the policies of the two superpowers in Europe. This proposal was presented to members of the Department of the Army staff during a seminar on the conventional stability talks at Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas, in February 1989.

Ernst Boris Chain, 19 June 1906 - 12 August 1979

Ernst Boris Chain was one of the highly gifted scientists who found refuge in Britain from Hitler’s regime in Germany. His great contribution to science and medicine lay in his role in the initiation of the work in Oxford which led to the demonstration of the therapeutic power of penicillin. For this he shared a Nobel Prize with Howard Florey and Alexander Fleming. He was a cosmopolitan and controversial figure.

British Intelligence on the German Air Force and Aircraft Industry, 1933–1939

The advent of the Hitler regime in Germany in early 1933, with its emphasis on the overthrow of the Versailles- peace treaty restrictions and the re-militarization of German society, caused a fundamental shift in the focus of Bntish intelligence activity. Germany replaced Russia and the Comintern as the primary target. The arm of German military power which commanded the most attention was the Luftwaffe, Germany's new air force. The bomber was the only weapon with which Germany could directly threaten Britain; by which London and the industrial Midlands could be made vulnerable; which could strike at the civilian population. Out of this nexus of strategic anxieties, the air staff created their ‘worst-case’ assumption. The worst case, as the air ministry consistently saw it during the 1930s, was a massive German air attack launched against Great Britain with the object of forcing a quick surrender, primarily through the collapse of civilian morale. Group Captain J. C. Slessor, director of plans in the air ministry (and a future chief of the air staff), admitted in his memoirs that,’ in those years immediately before the war the possibility of what was referred to as the knock-out blow bore very heavily on the minds of the Air Staff’.

Relationships between January temperatures and the winter regime in Germany

This study investigates the possibility of providing estimates of the time of occurrence and length of the freezing season for any location in East and West Germany by using the average January air temperature (AJAT) as an index. The results indicate that reliable values of the mean freezing index can be obtained from the AJAT relationships which are developed for Germany. This association is further verified using data from the northeastern part of the U.S., and the AJAT is then used to determine the average starting and ending dates (and hence the probable length) of the freezing season for stations in Germany. The AJAT and the average dates of snowfall occurrence for numerous locations in the U.S. and Germany are also correlated. Interrelationships between these parameters and the average number of days with snow on the ground for stations up to 3000 m in elevation in Germany are examined. A detailed AJAT map for East and West Germany, in which data from 134 stations — latitude, altitude, and regional influences — are considered, is developed in order to make the relationship usable.

Fascists and Folklorists in Italy

IN 1938, COUNT GALEAZZO CIANO, the Italian foreign minister who was also Benito Mussolini's son-in-law, visited an exhibit of folk arts in Milan. As he entered the exhibit, Ciano saw a banner bearing a Mussolini quotation that said: I1 popolo, che non rispetta le tradizioni del passato, rinunzia a una parte di vita [People who do not respect the traditions of the past renounce a part of life].' The exhibit, one of many staged all over the country, the presence of a ranking member of the Fascist hierarchy, and the banner announcing the Duce's devotion to tradition, all dramatized the Fascist regime's interest in folklore. As a military regime with national and imperial ambitions, the Fascists required a militant people conscious and proud of being Italian, and they believed that exhibits of this kind alerting the people to their great folkloric heritage would serve this purpose. The exhibit in Milan was primarily a manipulation of folkloric work in behalf of the politics of the regime. As recent studies have demonstrated, there were similar maneuvers elsewhere in Europe in the period between the two world wars. Through almost all of its existence, the Soviet government has bent the work of folklorists to its political ideology.2 Less heavy-handed, the nationalist governments of Finland encouraged the work of folklorists who, consciously or not, favored government policy.3 The National Socialist regime in Germany was aggressive in directing folkloric research to conform to the views of the

The Organism: A Holistic Approach to Biology Derived from Pathological Data in Man.

Previous to the present regime in Germany, Kurt Goldstein was considered the leading pathologist in the country. His laboratory in Frankfort contained a mass of serial sections of the nervous system from the elephant down to the smallest of animals. He had considerable experience in working with traumatic cases in the first World War. After leaving Germany he paused for a short while in the Netherlands, where he wrote the present volume. Then he came to the United States, and his book has been translated into excellent English. In brief, it is a complex but basically sound summary of the general belief about the functioning of the central nervous system. Goldstein believes that the reflexes and other similar concepts of nervous activity cannot be taken out of the theoretical context but that the organism must be thought of as a whole. The point of view is broadly biologic. The clinical

Big Business and Fascism: Light on the German Case

Before the advent of the Hitler regime in Germany, the Reichsverband der Deutschen Industrie (Germany's equivalent of our National Association of Manufacturers) circulated privately to its members a newsletter entitled Deutsche Führerbriefe (German Leader Letters). Below, we publish a highly revealing excerpt from one of these Letters, dated September 1932, written at the bottom of the Great Depression, and concerned with the question of how to save capitalism under the then-existing conditions in Germany. We do not know whether the Deutsche Führerbriefe are available in this country and would be glad to hear from any of our readers who may have information on this subject. The passage below is quoted in an article in the March, 1954, issue of the West German Social Democratic monthly Links, from which we have translated it. —The EditorsThis article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

The Historical Significance of the Weimar Republic

With the military defeat of the Hitler regime in Germany in 1945, the chapter of German history between the end of the Second and the beginning of the Third Reich takes on a new significance for the historian. In the first place, unhampered research in the field of German history from 1918 to 1933 becomes once more possible, though some very valuable sources of documents have been destroyed by the Hitler regime. Secondly, the period of the “Republican Experiment” becomes to the observer in 1947 at once more historical (now not the last but the second to the last chapter of German history) and more timely, because of possible attempts to go on from where the Republic left off and because of the temptation for the historical observer to compare 1918 and after with 1945 and after.