This book includes four essays, each written by a German specialist, that discuss important problems of the German resistance with judgment and candor, offering the kind of interpretive judgment often lacking in other histories. Hermann Graml shows that as far as foreign policy, the resistance conservatives were never quite able to reconcile their hopes for a supranational solution in central Europe with their desire to fulfill traditional national aims from a position of German strength. Addressing the social policy of resisting groups, Hans Mommsen concludes that a central purpose was the "de-massing of the masses," while rejecting both communism and Western democracy. Hans-Joachim Reichhardt assesses the labor movement, wherein Communist leaders come out badly. Utterly failing to understand the threat of Hitler, they refused to join in efforts to thwart his coming to power. On the efforts of the religious, Ernst Wolf concludes, as have so many others, that the heroic resistance of individual Christians contrasts lamentably with the role played by organized Christianity. These thoughtful essays reinforce the impression gained in larger and more detailed studies: the resistance to Hitler's barbarism by decent German citizens was widespread, genuine--and tragically ineffective.
This book includes four essays, each written by a German specialist, that discuss important problems of the German resistance with judgment and candor, offering the kind of interpretive judgment often lacking in other histories. Hermann Graml shows that as far as foreign policy, the resistance conservatives were never quite able to reconcile their hopes for a supranational solution in central Europe with their desire to fulfill traditional national aims from a position of German strength. Addressing the social policy of resisting groups, Hans Mommsen concludes that a central purpose was the "de-massing of the masses," while rejecting both communism and Western democracy. Hans-Joachim Reichhardt assesses the labor movement, wherein Communist leaders come out badly. Utterly failing to understand the threat of Hitler, they refused to join in efforts to thwart his coming to power. On the efforts of the religious, Ernst Wolf concludes, as have so many others, that the heroic resistance of individual Christians contrasts lamentably with the role played by organized Christianity. These thoughtful essays reinforce the impression gained in larger and more detailed studies: the resistance to Hitler's barbarism by decent German citizens was widespread, genuine--and tragically ineffective.
On 30 January 1933, Alfred Hugenberg's conservative German National People's Party (DNVP) formed a coalition government with the Nazi Party, thus enabling Hitler to accede to the chancellorship. This book analyzes in detail the complicated relationship between Conservatives and Nazis and offers a re-interpretation of the Nazi seizure of power - the decisive months between 30 January and 14 July 1933. The Machtergreifung is characterized here as a period of all-pervasive violence and lawlessness with incessant conflicts between Nazis and German Nationals and Nazi attacks on the conservative Bürgertum, a far cry from the traditional depiction of the takeover as a relatively bloodless, virtually sterile assumption of power by one vast impersonal apparatus wresting control from another. The author scrutinizes the revolutionary character of the Nazi seizure of power, the Nazis' attacks on the conservative Bürgertum and its values, and National Socialism's co-optation of conservative symbols of state power to serve radically new goals, while addressing the issue of why the DNVP was complicit in this and paradoxically participated in eroding the foundations of its very own principles and bases of support.
As the Nazis staged their takeover in 1933, instances of antisemitic violence began to soar. While previous historical research assumed that this violence happened much later, Hermann Beck counteracts this, drawing on sources from twenty German archives, and focussing on this early violence, and on the reaction of German institutions and the elites who led them. Before the Holocaust examines the antisemitic violence experienced in this period - from boycotts, violent attacks, robbery, extortion, abductions, and humiliating 'pillory marches', to grievous bodily harm and murder - which has hitherto not been adequately recognized. Beck then analyses the reactions of those institutions that still had the capacity to protest against Nazi attacks and legislative measures - the Protestant Church, the Catholic Church, the bureaucracies, and Hitler's conservative coalition partner, the DNVP - and the mindset of the elites who led them, to determine their various responses to flagrant antisemitic abuses. Individual protests against violent attacks, the April boycott, and Nazi legislative measures were already hazardous in March and April 1933, but established institutions in the German State and society were still able to voice their concerns and raise objections. By doing so, they might have stopped or at least postponed a radicalization that eventually led to the pogrom of 1938 (Kristallnacht) and the Holocaust.
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