Innholdsfortegnelse for Nazi Germany i History Extra

Shortly after the outbreak of war, young Hannelore Schottgen felt a flurry of excitement when she learned there was to be a special visitor to her school. A woman from the Woman's Union was coming to talk to her class and it promised to be a welcome interlude from the day's timetable. The only thing that puzzled Hannelore was the subject matter. The woman was coming to talk about Lebensborn, something she had not heard of before. Schottgen lived in Pforzheim, southern Germany – a provincial town whose inhabitants were conservative in outlook and rigid in their morals. The townspeople had turned out in force when Hitler visited in 1933 and young Hannelore, like many of her friends, had been quick to join the Bund Deutscher Mädel (League of German…

It is one of the most important dates in modern history. At dawn on 22 June 1941, Nazi Germany launched Operation Barbarossa and invaded the Soviet Union. Over three million Axis troops crossed Stalin's western border from the Baltic to the Black Sea, beginning what would become the longest and costliest military campaign of all time. Yet, for those civilians back home in Berlin that weekend, Barbarossa would not have been the only – or indeed even the most important – topic of conversation. The war was already almost two years old by that point, and had become rather commonplace; the backdrop against which everyday life was played out. For all its later portent, the invasion of the Soviet Union was – initially at least – just another act in…

PROFILE CLARE MULLEY An author and broadcaster, Clare's books include The Spy Who Loved: Secrets and Lives of Christine Granville (Pan Macmillan, 2013) and Agent Zo: The Untold Story of Fearless WW2 Resistance Fighter Elżbieta Zawacka (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2024) IN CONTEXT In the Nazi regime's male-dominated air industry, two women defied expectation and rose to prominence as test pilots. The highly valued and dangerous work of Hanna Reitsch (1912–79) and Melitta Schiller (1903–45) connected them to the Third Reich's leading figures, and both were awarded the Iron Cross, Nazi Germany's military honour. Yet, as Clare Mulley's book reveals, the two women held opposing attitudes towards Nazism, which led them to dramatically different actions during the Second World War. What was the symbolic significance of flight in Nazi Germany? The…

Between 1925 and 1945 thousands of letters arrived on Adolf Hitler's desk. The Soviet army who seized them at the end of the war thought them trivial and so they lay unread in Moscow's archives until recently discovered by historian Henrik Eberle. Published in English for the first time in 2012 (see Discover More, page 81), the letters present a history of the Third Reich from the perspective of ordinary Germans rather than that of its leaders. They chronicle how Hitler rose from fringe politician to popular dictator – and how he squandered that popularity. Hitler's image as the Germans’ personal saviour and confidant was key to his success. It was also his greatest liability. While he encouraged expressions of adulation, promising a direct line to the Nazi leader meant…

The concentration camps that began appearing when Hitler seized power in 1933 housed predominantly the Nazis’ political opponents. But by the summer of 1934 most of the communists, social democrats and trade unionists had been released on the orders of state prosecutors. It was to prove only a brief hiatus as the Nazis set about establishing a more rigorous and efficient system of camps. The ‘flagship’ was Dachau, under the command of Theodor Eicke, a violent ex-policeman, whose reorganisation of the camp so impressed SS chief Heinrich Himmler that he was appointed the inspector of concentration camps in Germany. By 1937 there were only four remaining – Dachau, Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen and Lichtenburg (a women's camp) – an indication of how comprehensively the Nazis had crushed the political resistance. But with…

David Boder frequently began his interview sessions by asking a person or a group to sing a song, both to demonstrate his recording technology and in an attempt to put his subjects at ease. These songs had been sung either as acts of resistance, of solace, or to retain, even if only in verse, fragments of time, place and people. They detail life in the ghettoes, konzentration lagers and extermination camps or speak of the new lives that await, chiefly in Palestine, then almost unreachable under British mandate. The songs are throaty, raw renditions. They have no musical accompaniment and are nearly all performed in Yiddish. ‘Es Brent’ (It Is Burning) was written in 1938 by Mordechai Gerbertig following a pogrom in Poland; ‘On a Heym, on a Dakh’ (Without…

1 Name of would-be assassin: Henning von Tresckow Date: 4 August 1941 Location: Barysaw, Belarus Method: Ambush entourage and shoot Hitler Reason for failure: Aborted due to overwhelming security presence 2 Name of would-be assassin: Henning von Tresckow Date: 13 March 1943 Location: Smolensk, western Russia Method: Time-bomb planted on Hitler's plane Reason for failure: Defective fuse – device failed to explode 3 Name of would-be assassin: Rudolf-Christoph von Gersdorff Date: 21 March 1943 Location: Berlin Armoury Method: Gersdorff wired as a suicide-bomber Reason for failure: Insufficient time for fuse to run down 4 Name of would-be assassin: Axel von dem Bussche Date: December 1943 Location: Berlin Method: Suicide-bombing during an inspection of new uniforms Reason for failure: Inspection cancelled following RAF air raid 5 Name of would-be assassin: Eberhard…

1920 On 24 February, Adolf Hitler addresses an audience at Munich's Hofbräuhaus at which he proclaims a manifesto – the 25-Point Programme – for the newly established National Socialist German Workers’ party (NSDAP). The ‘Nazi party’ is born. 1920 1923 In November, Hitler takes advantage of the economic and political crisis in Germany and attempts to seize power in Munich. He and his followers are stopped by the guns of the Bavarian police at the Feldherrnhalle. Twenty people are killed, including four policemen. 1924 Convicted of treason following the Munich Putsch, Hitler is sentenced to five years detention in Landsberg Jail, where he serves just under nine months in comfortable conditions, before being released on licence. During his imprisonment, he writes the first volume of his autobiography-cum-manifesto, Mein Kampf. 1925…

Meeting of minds Academics meet with the Nazi authorities to sign the ‘Leipzig proclamation’, November 1933. The proclamation endorsed Hitler, the one-party state and withdrawal from the League of Nations. At the signing, philosopher Martin Heidegger (whose position is marked with a cross), along with around 900 other university scholars, agreed that “the National Socialist revolution is not simply the assumption of a power already present in the state: this revolution brings with it the total transformation of our German being”. The declaration ends with “Heil Hitler” In the decades since Hitler's death in a Berlin bunker, no sector of German society has remained untarnished: businessmen, scientists and doctors have all been shown to have bolstered the führer's power. Yet among all these people, one group ought surely to have…

On 16 March 1941, with European cities ablaze and Jews being herded into ghettos, the New York Times Magazine featured an illustrated story on Adolf Hitler's retreat in the Berchtesgaden Alps. Adopting a neutral tone, correspondent C Brooks Peters noted that historians of the future would do well to look at the importance of “the führer's private and personal domain”, where discussions about the war front were interspersed with “strolls with his three sheep dogs along majestic mountain trails”. For more than 70 years, we have ignored Peters’ call to take Hitler's domestic spaces seriously. When we think of the stage sets of Hitler's political power, we are more likely to envision the Nuremberg rally grounds than his living room. Yet it was through the architecture, design and media depictions…

In Marvel's blockbuster movie Captain America: The First Avenger (2011), a Nazi officer searches for an ancient relic, the Tesseract, reputed to bestow on its owner infinite power. In fact Captain America contains many elements of Nazi supernaturalism: occult forces, mad scientists, fantastical weapons, a superhuman master race, and magical relics granting the Third Reich unlimited power. Steven Spielberg's Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), too, saw Indiana Jones racing to find the ancient Jewish Ark of the Covenant, again sought by Nazis planning to harness its reputed occult power. And Hellboy, a comic book superhero who starred in two bigscreen adaptations (2004 and 2008) and computer games, was a demon summoned to Earth by Nazi occultists. These are just three examples. Popular culture has long been awash with images…

Wiesbaden, Germany, late September 1946. It was the Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashanah. Judgement Day. The day the Lord records the deeds of the righteous, the wicked and the rest of us. But inside the war-damaged and newly reconsecrated synagogue, a different kind of recording was taking place, one intended not for divine judgement but for the edification of the American public. Here sat a 59-year-old academic with 27kg of recording equipment by his side, including a state-of-the-art wire recorder. Three months earlier David Boder had left the comforts of his university in Chicago to heave his bulky machine and more than 200 wire spools across a broken Europe. His intention was to record the immediate experiences of trauma from ‘displaced persons’. More than 100 people had already shared their…

Adolf Hitler occupies a unique place in history. Almost 130 years after his birth in the small Austrian town of Braunau am Inn, on 20 April 1889, the Nazi leader continues to cast a long shadow over the world. Our enduring fascination with his personality far outstrips our interest in any other dictator. But why? In a most obvious sense, the answer seems clear: Hitler was the chief author of the most devastating war, and the most terrible genocide, that the world has yet known. Certainly, that is reason enough to register his unparalleled impact on world history. It is also a good part of the reason why there have probably been more publications about Hitler than any other historical figure – apart, perhaps, from Jesus. Hitler's primary responsibility for…

Propaganda queen Hitler's close creative collaborator, film director Leni Riefenstahl, is pictured here at work in the main market square of Nuremberg during the Nazi Party Rally of 1934. The resulting footage, of an event with the Reich Labour Service, was used in the film Triumph of the Will, which has been hailed as one of the most significant and influential propaganda films in history. Riefenstahl, who would also make Olympia – about the Berlin Olympics in 1936 – was a gifted and innovative film-maker, but was also responsible for presenting a highly sanitised and aestheticised image of the Third Reich to the world. Spoils of war German forces in the Second World War not only sought to destroy those cultures that they considered inferior, they were also enthusiastic looters.…

If the name of the Nazi cruise liner Wilhelm Gustloff registers a flicker of recognition with readers, it will most probably be because of the grim circumstances of the vessel's demise during the Second World War. Torpedoed by a Soviet submarine on 30 January 1945, the ship sank into the icy waters of the eastern Baltic within an hour. Of the estimated 10,000 German refugees and wounded crammed aboard, barely 1,200 would survive the night. It is in this guise then, as modern history's deadliest maritime disaster, that the story of the Wilhelm Gustloff – if it is known at all – is remembered. Alongside a few history books, the drama of her sinking has spawned a film and a couple of German TV dramas. It also featured prominently in…

After the darkness and deprivations of the First World War, Weimar Germany came alive to the sounds of jazz and swing. By the mid-1930s, as the shadow of the swastika fell across the country, American-style jazz was all the rage. Naturally, though, given its association with blacks and Jews, the Nazis loathed jazz. Fearful its ‘jungle’ rhythms and improvised breaks would undermine Aryan morals and discipline, Hitler launched a blitzkrieg against this ‘degenerate music’. His propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, ordered the banning of jazz from radio broadcasts in 1935. Later, when the United States entered the war, Goebbels outlawed the selling and playing of American jazz records. Swing was officially verboten. Goebbels wasn't stupid, though. While officially condemning the music, he was quietly plotting to hijack its debauched appeal to…

On 18 April 1945, a 19-year-old theology student, Robert Limpert, decided to act to prevent the senseless destruction of the picturesque town of Ansbach, southern Germany. He had already taken big risks by circulating leaflets pleading for the surrender of the town without a fight. Now he went further, cutting communication wires to a Wehrmacht unit outside the town, but was spotted doing so by two boys from the Hitler Youth. Following arrest by the local police, he was brought before the local military commandant, a Luftwaffe colonel with a doctorate in physics – and a fanatical Nazi. The commandant immediately set up a three-man tribunal which lost no time in sentencing Limpert to death. As a noose was placed round his neck outside the town hall, the young man…

Hitler's egotism on the subject of philosophy spread to a fantasy that he himself was a great thinker. Indeed he came to regard himself as the ‘philosopher führer’. During the time when he was imprisoned in Landsberg am Lech in the south-west of the German state of Bavaria in 1924, Hitler claimed to have read many books. He read, he said, “everything he could get hold of”, including racist ideas from thinkers like Paul de Lagarde and Houston Stewart Chamberlain, as well as canonical philosophers like “Nietzsche [and]… Marx”. In his words: “I had but one pleasure: my books… I read and studied much.” It was in Landsberg, assisted by (his later deputy) Rudolf Hess, that he wrote Mein Kampf. In this he outlined his own atrocious ‘philosophy’. Albeit in…

“I had an almost apocalyptic vision that I was never able to forget. It seemed as if the Earth's surface were spreading out in front of me, like a hemisphere that suddenly splits apart in the middle, spewing out an enormous jet of water, so powerful that it touched the sky and shook the Earth.” Leni Riefenstahl, director of the propaganda film Triumph of the Will, describes hearing Hitler speak Stop for a moment and imagine Adolf Hitler. Picture him in your mind. Who do you see? I imagine you see a figure not unlike the portrayal of Hitler in the 2004 film Downfall. A shouting, aggressive, unhinged character. Bruno Ganz, who played the führer in that film, shook and screamed so much that one key scene from the movie has…

Within a week of being appointed chancellor, Hitler informed his ministers that “the next five years must be devoted to the rearmament of the German people” On 5 November 1937, Adolf Hitler summoned the inner circle of the Nazi Party to the Reich Chancellery in Berlin. Among those who arrived on the chilly winter's day were the commanders of the army, navy and air force, Reich war minister General Werner von Blomberg and foreign minister Konstantin von Neurath. “The aim of German foreign policy,” began Hitler, “is to make secure and to preserve the racial stock and to enlarge it. It is therefore a question of space.” That was only partially true, as his audience well knew, particularly the head of the air force, Hermann Göring. The previous year, Göring…

On 13 March 1943, Colonel Henning von Tresckow, a staff officer of Army Group Centre, was keenly awaiting a VIP visitor to his headquarters at Smolensk, western Russia. His visitor was Adolf Hitler, seeking to reinvigorate his battered armies following the crushing defeat at Stalingrad. Tresckow was planning to kill him. That spring morning, Tresckow drove to the airfield to meet Hitler. He participated in the conference where, according to a fellow officer, he appeared pale and distracted. At its close, he sought out his adjutant for moral support, asking, “Should we really do it?”. The reply was unequivocal. Though he had toyed with the idea of using reliable troops to tackle Hitler's security apparatus head-on, Tresckow had opted instead for a time bomb, which he hoped to smuggle onto…