Examining the German Public\u27s Response to the Third Reich\u27s Anti-Jewish Policies

The anti-Jewish policies of the Third Reich progressed from anti-Jewish legislation, stripping German Jews of their rights, to systematic mass murder. Deeply rooted antisemitism and Nazi propaganda serving as a vehicle for ideology fostered an environment of approval among most of the German public for certain anti-Jewish policies such as the Nuremberg Laws. The non-Jewish, German public responses to these anti-Jewish policies by the Third Reich shifted over the course of the Nazi’s rule and during World War II. Most of the German public supported anti-Jewish legislation such as laws removing German Jews from civil service occupations because it made positions available for “Aryan” Germans. However, most of the German public was repulsed by violent acts led by the Third Reich against German Jews. The German public’s abhorrence towards violent acts committed earlier during the Third Reich’s rule against Jews shifted by the end of World War II as they became ambivalent towards stories of mass murder. Concerns for the war effort and constant air raids from the Allies overshadowed any concerns that most of the German public could muster for the persecutions of a maligned minority group

Arno Breker's Wounded Man : capturing the essence of totalitarianism

One of the prizes for the 2020 Undergraduate Research Project Contest was awarded for this paper by Devon Terry."The era of the Third Reich is most often associated with images of war and the struggle within concentration camps. However, another factor in the development of the totalitarian regime of the Third Reich is the German art that was created and released during this time. Art created by German artists underwent intense changes both before and during World War II. Arno Breker was a German artist who created a multitude of sculptures under Hitler's commission starting before and during the events of World War II. His sculptures often depicted the perfect German man and carried many implications about what German culture should contain. Arno Breker's Wounded Man, completed in 1943, shows the impacts of German culture during the Third Reich through its totalitarian implications and ideals. These ideals are shown through the inspection of Breker's life and artistic transformations, the totalitarian concepts seen in Wounded Man, and the role that Wounded Man had within the ideology of Nazism."--Page 1

The Furthest Watch of the Reich: National Socialism, Ethnic Germans, and the Occupation of the Serbian Banat, 1941-1944

This dissertation examines the Volksdeutsche (ethnic Germans) of the Serbian Banat (northeastern Serbia) during World War II, with a focus on their collaboration with the invading Germans from the Third Reich, and their participation in the occupation of their home region. It focuses on the occupation period (April 1941-October 1944) so as to illuminate three major themes: the mutual perceptions held by ethnic and Reich Germans and how these shaped policy; the motivation behind ethnic German collaboration; and the events which drew ethnic Germans ever deeper into complicity with the Third Reich. The Banat ethnic Germans profited from a fortuitous meeting of diplomatic, military, ideological and economic reasons, which prompted the Third Reich to occupy their home region in April 1941. They played a leading role in the administration and policing of the Serbian Banat until October 1944, when the Red Army invaded the Banat. The ethnic Germans collaborated with the Nazi regime in many ways: they accepted its worldview as their own, supplied it with food, administrative services and eventually soldiers. They acted as enforcers and executors of its policies, which benefited them as perceived racial and ideological kin to Reich Germans. These policies did so at the expense of the multiethnic Banat's other residents, especially Jews and Serbs. In this, the Third Reich replicated general policy guidelines already implemented inside Germany and elsewhere in German-occupied Europe. The Banat ethnic German collaboration did not derive from external factors alone. Ideological affinity between the ethnic German sense of self and aspects of National Socialist ideology, social dynamics within the ethnic German community, and the material privileges and perks the Reich extended, combined to ensure that ordinary ethnic Germans as well as their leaders proved willing and, even, eager to collaborate. Their collusion in the Reich's discriminatory and murderous policies escalated over time. It culminated in their participation in anti-partisan warfare in Southeast Europe. The bitterness and bad blood engendered by the ethnic Germans' choice to engage fully in policies proclaimed by the Reich resulted in their eventual expulsion and dispossession by the postwar Yugoslav authorities

Targeted Terror: A Historiography of the Nazi Police State

In discussions of Third Reich terror, one controversial issue has been the degree to which the ‘ordinary German’ population experienced terror, and if this terror could adequately account for the Germans’ complicity, cooperation, or collaboration with the Nazi Party. In other words, should ordinary German citizens be largely exempt from guilt of the Holocaust because they themselves lived in a state of fear of arrest, imprisonment, and death? This article explains how there existed two Nazi societies during the Third Reich, one marked by extreme terror and the other of minimal, if any, terror

Folk Songs, Youth, and Propaganda: Music of the Third Reich

As the world watched the rise of a new political power in Central Europe, the German youth perceived a new, exciting movement sweep through their backyard. The Third Reich gained control over Germany through the planning and organization of Hitler and his Nazis. Hitler sought to construct his pure society, accomplished through the orzanization of the sovernment and the National Socialist German Workers\u27 Party b . b (NSDAP). While their nation made drastic shifts politically, the rich history of German art music and folk music played into the changes during the rise of the Nazi party. German culture was formed in part through a deep history of folk music within their society and Hitler was meticulous about the music he personally promoted within the Third Reich. It was this combination that resulted in the use of art music and folk music as propaganda for Nazi Germany

An Accident of Resistance in Nazi Germany: Oskar Kalbus\u27s Three-Volume History of German Film (1935–37)

This article reconsiders the first comprehensive history of German film, Oskar Kalbus’s two-volume Vom Werden deutscher Filmkunst (On the Rise of German Film Art, 1935) in terms of its contemporary reception in Nazi Germany and in light of a newly surfaced third volume. This is the first article dedicated to a work that scholars have long cited, though rarely without suspicion. The newly surfaced typescript for Der Film im Dritten Reich (Film in the Third Reich, 1937) confirms the author’s National So- cialist sympathies, but at the same time it highlights by contrast the virtues of the two published volumes

The Continued Legacy of German Naturalness Contextualized Within a Fraught History and Issues of Inclusion

Contemplating the place of remembrance and history within German environmentalism has driven the idea of this thesis and its research. My central aim is to capture at least a slice of how Germans today perceive nature, environmentalism, and themselves within the context of a cultural history that contains both a national socialist and an environmental narrative. These two narratives have, during periods of German history, intersected. While I originally thought the influence of national socialist environmental thought would still penetrate Germans’ perception of nature, my findings revealed instead that German perceptions of environmentalism and ideas of nature are rooted in a much older story of German naturalness and a proximal closeness to nature. This notion of “German naturalness” is not only connected to German identity, as the women suggests above, but also connected to how other European countries, particularly the French, view German environmentalism. I also found an almost complete lack of knowledge surrounding national socialist conservation, both in terms of any knowledge of nature ideology in the Third Reich, and the actual creation of protected areas under the Third Reich. Lastly, I found a lack of ethnic and racial diversity within the German parks I studied

Backwards Romanticism or a Glimpse of the Future? The Visual Language of Reactionary Modernism in National Socialist Landscape Painting

In 1935, two years prior to the opening of the House of German Art in Munich, Adolf Hitler declared the following during a speech to the German people in Nuremberg: “Art, precisely because it is the most direct and faithful emanation of the Volksgeist, constitutes the force that unconsciously models the mass of the people in the most active fashion, on condition that this art is a sincere reflection of the soul and temperament of a race and is not a deformation of it.” Numerous scholars have noted the importance and necessity of art in the creation and molding of the Third Reich, from the establishment of the Reichskulturkammer, or Reich Chamber of Culture under Alfred Rosenberg (and later famously run by Joseph Goebbels) in 1933 to the opening of the House of German Art four years later to Hitler’s ultimately failed plans for the creation of an even grander complex of German art in Linz. Some contemporaries of the Third Reich, including Thomas Mann, noted the direct link between the Wagnerian Romantic doctrine that “German art should not be content simply to aspire but must realize its German essence,” and Nazism. As Robert Scholz, a Nazi art theorist, described it, “the desire to create of the German people is always born from two roots: a strong sensitive inclination toward nature and a deep metaphysical aspiration.” These lofty Romantic ideals seemingly manifested themselves deeply in the artistic policies of the Third Reich as it attempted to reestablish and cement a thoroughly German Volksgemeinschaft, notably in the prevalence of idyllic German landscapes present in most major Nazi art exhibitions under the Third Reich. Nazism’s propensity for Romantic and Realist-inspired landscapes depicting the connectedness of the German people to their land and representing a longing for an idyllic, communal past belied a worldview that was both modern and regressive. Indeed, those drawn to the movement and its leaders themselves viewed it not as a refuge from the twentieth century, but a revolutionary movement intent on forming a new type of nation-state. This paper explores the tensions between the brand of perverted and philistine Romanticism that the Third Reich exploited and the technology-driven modernism necessary as a driving force behind the mass movement, tensions that Jeffrey Herf characterizes as forces of “reactionary modernism.” The means of exploring these tensions are the landscape paintings that were produced under the Reichskulturkammer. Though painting subjects favored by the Nazis ranged from images of women to genre scenes to heroic images of the leaders, landscape comprised the largest portion of painting output, representing 40 percent of the paintings displayed in the House of German Art in Munich. Though Hitler aimed to create and foster a new, “eternal” brand of Nazi art, these paintings (rarely studied seriously by art historians) have been derided as “second-rate” and derivative. They visually embody the leadership’s nineteenth century tastes as well as an empty brand of Romanticism that the Nazis used to exploit their own nihilistic goals driven by racism and a desire to destroy in order to create a New Order. These horrific goals were sold to the German people visually through comforting landscapes and rural-scapes that touted the purity of the German soil, and strength of the German peasant, and celebrated the “sublime” and superior beauty of the specifically Nordic landscape. However, another less familiar type of “landscape” emerged around 1940, deemed the “heroic landscape” by architect Paul Schultze-Naumberg. These scenes juxtaposed the unique beauty and appeal of that Nordic landscape with scenes of worksites – from granite quarries to bridges to the Autobahnen – in a manner that more aggressively stated Hitler’s progressive and modernistic goals for Germany’s future. They gained popularity during the “peak” years of the Third Reich, that is, post-1938, all and pre-1943, when victories from the Anschluß (1938) to the Fall of France (1941), all stemming from the notion of Lebensraum, bolstered confidence and made the creation of a New Order seem possible. It was at this time, it seems, that visual depictions of the more modernistic, and often disturbing (one painting depicts slave laborers from Dachau mining a granite quarry for another labor camp at Mauthausen-Gusen) were fed to the German public. These “heroic landscapes” disappear for the last two years of the Reich’s existence (according to evidence in Die Kunst im Deutschen Reich, the official National Socialist arts publication), and are again replaced by an abundance of comforting, benign landscapes and farm scenes. Ultimately, although these landscapes have been dismissed by art historians, their subject matter has much to say about National Socialist ideology and its mode of indoctrination. In spite of the derivative nature of the landscapes, in the words of historian Roger Griffin, “the Nazi exploitation of…Romanticism is not the archaism of a society nostalgic for the past, but the modernism of a regime which was nostalgic for the future.” The arts program “pulled the wool over the eyes,” so to speak, of the German people with comforting, appealing landscapes that had a deep-rooted tradition in the German collective consciousness. Following the stunning successes between 1938 and 1942, the most modern, radical, and criminal impulses of the Reich revealed themselves in painting, in the form of the still-beautiful, sanitized “heroic landscapes.” This more modern subject matter was abandoned as the possibility of German victory disappeared, replaced once again by a preponderance of those affirming landscapes and rural-scapes

Post-1990 Screen Memories:How East and West German Cinema Remembers the Third Reich and the Holocaust

The following article examines the contribution of German feature films about the Third Reich and the Holocaust to memory discourse in the wake of German unification. A comparison between East and West German films made since the 1990s reveals some startling asymmetries and polarities. While East German film-makers, if they continued to work in Germany’s reunified film industry at all, made very few films about the Third Reich, West German directors took advantage of the recent memory boom. Whereas films made by East German directors, such as Erster Verlust and Der Fall Ö, suggest, in liberating contradiction to the anti-fascist interpretation of history, that East Germany shared the burden of guilt, West German productions subscribe to the normalisation discourse that has gained ideological hegemony in the East-West-German memory contest since unification. Films such as Aimée & Jaguar and Rosenstraße construct a memory of the past that is no longer encumbered by guilt, principally because the relationship between Germans and Jews is re-imagined as one of solidarity. As post-memory films, they take liberties with the traumatic memory of the past and, by following the generic conventions of melodrama, family saga and European heritage cinema, even lend it popular appeal

Indoctrinating German Youth: Children’s Stories and Textbooks as Propaganda in the Third Reich

Indoctrinating German Youth: Children’s Stories and Textbooks as Propaganda in the Third Reich discusses the ways in which Nazis twisted children’s education in an effort to ensure that the Third Reich lasted. When Hitler assumed power in 1933, most Germans were not anti-Semitic. The Nazis planned to create a “purified” Aryan race starting with young children. While preteens participated in Hitler Youth and the League of German Girls, younger children were not constantly exposed to Third Reich ideology. The party found a way to create more Nazis through education and children’s books. My research focuses on textbooks and children’s books created during the Third Reich. I argue that these books were forms of propaganda meant to enforce anti-Semitism, reinforce traditional gender roles, and place all trust in Hitler and the Nazi party. All three aspects present in children’s education under the Third Reich prove what the Nazis wanted in their idealized Aryan race. Books such as The Poisonous Mushroom used short stories and crude images to depict the Jews as evil incarnate in an effort to ingrain fear into children’s minds. Textbooks emphasized traditional gender roles and reinforced the cult of personality around Hitler. Stories involved boy protagonists idolizing soldiers and playing war games while the girl characters practiced homemaking skills. The stark contrast for genders in these stories was intentional, for each gender had a specific role in the Third Reich. Nazi textbooks prepared boys for wartime and emphasized a girl’s duty to enter motherhood. Nazi elementary readers included fictionalized meetings and accounts of Hitler’s life in order to strengthen the Third Reich through the idolization of their leader. The Nazis developed literature for young children as a means to instill their value system and indoctrinate the youngest members of the Third Reich to ensure it would last for generations