Backing Hitler

Backing Hitler PDF

Author: Robert Gellately

Publisher: OUP Oxford

Published: 2002-03-14

Total Pages: 384

ISBN-13: 0191604526

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The Nazis never won a majority in free elections, but soon after Hitler took power most people turned away from democracy and backed the Nazi regime. Hitler won growing support even as he established the secret police (Gestapo) and concentration camps. What has been in dispute for over fifty years is what the Germans knew about these camps, and in what ways were they involved in the persecution of 'race enemies', slave workers, and social outsiders. To answer these questions, and to explore the public sides of Nazi persecution, Robert Gellately has consulted an array of primary documents. He argues that the Nazis did not cloak their radical approaches to 'law and order' in utter secrecy, but played them up in the press and loudly proclaimed the superiority of their system over all others. They publicized their views by drawing on popular images, cherished German ideals, and long held phobias, and were able to win over converts to their cause. The author traces the story from 1933, and shows how war and especially the prospect of defeat radicalized Nazism. As the country spiralled toward defeat, Germans for the most part held on stubbornly. For anyone who contemplated surrender or resistance, terror became the order of the day.

Hitler's American Friends

Hitler's American Friends PDF

Author: Bradley W. Hart

Publisher: Thomas Dunne Books

Published: 2018-10-02

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 1250148960

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A book examining the strange terrain of Nazi sympathizers, nonintervention campaigners and other voices in America who advocated on behalf of Nazi Germany in the years before World War II. Americans who remember World War II reminisce about how it brought the country together. The less popular truth behind this warm nostalgia: until the attack on Pearl Harbor, America was deeply, dangerously divided. Bradley W. Hart's Hitler's American Friends exposes the homegrown antagonists who sought to protect and promote Hitler, leave Europeans (and especially European Jews) to fend for themselves, and elevate the Nazi regime. Some of these friends were Americans of German heritage who joined the Bund, whose leadership dreamed of installing a stateside Führer. Some were as bizarre and hair-raising as the Silver Shirt Legion, run by an eccentric who claimed that Hitler fulfilled a religious prophesy. Some were Midwestern Catholics like Father Charles Coughlin, an early right-wing radio star who broadcast anti-Semitic tirades. They were even members of Congress who used their franking privilege—sending mail at cost to American taxpayers—to distribute German propaganda. And celebrity pilot Charles Lindbergh ended up speaking for them all at the America First Committee. We try to tell ourselves it couldn't happen here, but Americans are not immune to the lure of fascism. Hitler's American Friends is a powerful look at how the forces of evil manipulate ordinary people, how we stepped back from the ledge, and the disturbing ease with which we could return to it.

Social Outsiders in Nazi Germany

Social Outsiders in Nazi Germany PDF

Author: Robert Gellately

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2018-06-05

Total Pages:

ISBN-13: 0691188351

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When Hitler assumed power in 1933, he and other Nazis had firm ideas on what they called a racially pure "community of the people." They quickly took steps against those whom they wanted to isolate, deport, or destroy. In these essays informed by the latest research, leading scholars offer rich histories of the people branded as "social outsiders" in Nazi Germany: Communists, Jews, "Gypsies," foreign workers, prostitutes, criminals, homosexuals, and the homeless, unemployed, and chronically ill. Although many works have concentrated exclusively on the relationship between Jews and the Third Reich, this collection also includes often-overlooked victims of Nazism while reintegrating the Holocaust into its wider social context. The Nazis knew what attitudes and values they shared with many other Germans, and most of their targets were individuals and groups long regarded as outsiders, nuisances, or "problem cases." The identification, the treatment, and even the pace of their persecution of political opponents and social outsiders illustrated that the Nazis attuned their law-and-order policies to German society, history, and traditions. Hitler's personal convictions, Nazi ideology, and what he deemed to be the wishes and hopes of many people, came together in deciding where it would be politically most advantageous to begin. The first essay explores the political strategies used by the Third Reich to gain support for its ideologies and programs, and each following essay concentrates on one group of outsiders. Together the contributions debate the motivations behind the purges. For example, was the persecution of Jews the direct result of intense, widespread anti-Semitism, or was it part of a more encompassing and arbitrary persecution of "unwanted populations" that intensified with the war? The collection overall offers a nuanced portrayal of German citizens, showing that many supported the Third Reich while some tried to resist, and that the war radicalized social thinking on nearly everyone's part. In addition to the editors, the contributors are Frank Bajohr, Omer Bartov, Doris L. Bergen, Richard J. Evans, Henry Friedlander, Geoffrey J. Giles, Marion A. Kaplan, Sybil H. Milton, Alan E. Steinweis, Annette F. Timm, and Nikolaus Wachsmann.

Hitler's Willing Executioners

Hitler's Willing Executioners PDF

Author: Daniel Jonah Goldhagen

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2007-12-18

Total Pages: 656

ISBN-13: 0307426238

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This groundbreaking international bestseller lays to rest many myths about the Holocaust: that Germans were ignorant of the mass destruction of Jews, that the killers were all SS men, and that those who slaughtered Jews did so reluctantly. Hitler's Willing Executioners provides conclusive evidence that the extermination of European Jewry engaged the energies and enthusiasm of tens of thousands of ordinary Germans. Goldhagen reconstructs the climate of "eliminationist anti-Semitism" that made Hitler's pursuit of his genocidal goals possible and the radical persecution of the Jews during the 1930s popular. Drawing on a wealth of unused archival materials, principally the testimony of the killers themselves, Goldhagen takes us into the killing fields where Germans voluntarily hunted Jews like animals, tortured them wantonly, and then posed cheerfully for snapshots with their victims. From mobile killing units, to the camps, to the death marches, Goldhagen shows how ordinary Germans, nurtured in a society where Jews were seen as unalterable evil and dangerous, willingly followed their beliefs to their logical conclusion. "Hitler's Willing Executioner's is an original, indeed brilliant contribution to the...literature on the Holocaust."--New York Review of Books "The most important book ever published about the Holocaust...Eloquently written, meticulously documented, impassioned...A model of moral and scholarly integrity."--Philadelphia Inquirer

Hitler's True Believers

Hitler's True Believers PDF

Author: Robert Gellately

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2020-05-01

Total Pages: 465

ISBN-13: 0190689927

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Understanding Adolf Hitler's ideology provides insights into the mental world of an extremist politics that, over the course of the Third Reich, developed explosive energies culminating in the Second World War and the Holocaust. Too often the theories underlying National Socialism or Nazism are dismissed as an irrational hodge-podge of ideas. Yet that ideology drove Hitler's quest for power in 1933, colored everything in the Third Reich, and transformed him, however briefly, into the most powerful leader in the world. How did he discover that ideology? How was it that cohorts of leaders, followers, and ordinary citizens adopted aspects of National Socialism without experiencing the "leader" first-hand or reading his works? They shared a collective desire to create a harmonious, racially select, "community of the people" to build on Germany's socialist-oriented political culture and to seek national renewal. If we wish to understand the rise of the Nazi Party and the new dictatorship's remarkable staying power, we have to take the nationalist and socialist aspects of this ideology seriously. Hitler became a kind of representative figure for ideas, emotions, and aims that he shared with thousands, and eventually millions, of true believers who were of like mind . They projected onto him the properties of the "necessary leader," a commanding figure at the head of a uniformed corps that would rally the masses and storm the barricades. It remains remarkable that millions of people in a well-educated and cultured nation eventually came to accept or accommodate themselves to the tenants of an extremist ideology laced with hatred and laden with such obvious murderous implications.

The Gestapo and German Society

The Gestapo and German Society PDF

Author: Robert Gellately

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 1990

Total Pages: 322

ISBN-13: 9780198202974

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An examination of the everyday operations of the Gestapo, the Nazi secret police. It looks at the three-way interaction between the police, the German people and the enforcement of Hitler's policies, as an example of popular participation in the operations of institutions such as the Gestapo.

Hitler's True Believers

Hitler's True Believers PDF

Author: Robert Gellately

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2020

Total Pages: 465

ISBN-13: 0190689900

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Nazi ideology drove Hitler's quest for power in 1933, colored everything in the Third Reich, and culminated in the Second World War and the Holocaust. In this book, Gellately addresses often-debated questions about how Führer discovered the ideology and why millions adopted aspects of National Socialism without having laid eyes on the "leader" or reading his work.

Letters to Hitler

Letters to Hitler PDF

Author: Henrik Eberle

Publisher: Polity

Published: 2012-07-02

Total Pages: 289

ISBN-13: 0745648738

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Between 1925 and 1945 thousands of ordinary Germans of both sexes and all ages wrote letters to Hitler. Lost for decades, a large cache of these letters was recently discovered in the KGB Special Archive in Moscow, having been carted off to Russia by the Soviet Secret Police at the end of the war. The letters range from gushing love letters - ‘I love you so much. Write to me, please,’ this from a seven-year old girl named Gina - to letters from teachers, students, priests, businessmen and others expressing gratitude for alleviating poverty or restoring dignity to the German people. There are a few protest letters and the occasional desperate plea to release a loved one from a concentration camp, but the overwhelming majority are positive and even rapturous, shedding fresh light on the nature of the Hitler cult in Nazi Germany. This volume is the first publication of these letters in English. It comprises a selection of the letters and includes a contextualizing commentary that explains the situation of each writer, how the letter was dealt with and what it tells us about Nazi Germany. The commentary also describes the bureaucratic procedures that evolved to deal with the correspondence (Hitler never read any of it), which ranged from warm thanks to referral to the Gestapo.

My German Question

My German Question PDF

Author: Peter Gay

Publisher: Yale.ORIM

Published: 1998-10-07

Total Pages: 251

ISBN-13: 0300133146

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“Not only a memoir, it’s also a fierce reply to those who criticized German-Jewish assimilation and the tardiness of many families in leaving Germany” (Publishers Weekly). In this poignant book, a renowned historian tells of his youth as an assimilated, anti-religious Jew in Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1939—“the story,” says Peter Gay, “of a poisoning and how I dealt with it.” With his customary eloquence and analytic acumen, Gay describes his family, the life they led, and the reasons they did not emigrate sooner, and he explores his own ambivalent feelings—then and now—toward Germany its people. Gay relates that the early years of the Nazi regime were relatively benign for his family, yet even before the events of 1938–39, culminating in Kristallnacht, they were convinced they must leave the country. Gay describes the bravery and ingenuity of his father in working out this difficult emigration process, the courage of the non-Jewish friends who helped his family during their last bitter months in Germany, and the family’s mounting panic as they witnessed the indifference of other countries to their plight and that of others like themselves. Gay’s account—marked by candor, modesty, and insight—adds an important and curiously neglected perspective to the history of German Jewry. “Not a single paragraph is superfluous. His inquiry rivets without let up, powered by its unremitting candor.” —Los Angeles Times Book Review “[An] eloquent memoir.” —The Wall Street Journal “A moving testament to the agony the author experienced.” —Chicago Tribune “[A] valuable chronicle of what life was like for those who lived through persecution and faced execution.” —Choice

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