Nazism

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Nazism (Nationalsozialismus, National Socialism) was the ideology and practice of the Nazi Party and of Nazi Germany.[1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8] It was a unique variety of fascism that involved biological racism and anti-Semitism.[9] Nazism presented itself as politically syncretic, incorporating policies, tactics and philosophies from right- and left-wing ideologies; in practice, Nazism was a far right form of politics.[10]

In post–World War I Weimar Germany, the Nazis were among a few right-wing political parties defining their ideology as National Socialism. In 1920, the Nazi Party published their 25-point National Socialist Program, the key tenets being: anti-parliamentarism, pan-Germanism, racism, anti-Semitism, collectivism, social Darwinism, eugenics, anti-communism, totalitarianism, and opposition to economic and political liberalism.[11][12][12][13][14]

To rescue Germany from the effects of the Great Depression, Nazism promoted an economic “Third Way”; a managed economy that was neither capitalist nor communist.[15][16] The far-right character of Nazism was established with the purging of the anti-capitalist Black Front and the Strasserists, leftist sub-groups of the Nazi Party. The social, political, cultural and economic ills of Weimar democracy proved critical to the ideologic consolidation of Nazism, and its successful electoral challenges to the Weimar Constitution of the Weimar Republic, which allowed the Nazi Party to legally assume power of German government in 1933.

Post-World War II Nazism (neo-Nazism) has adherents in several countries around the world, although it remains a fringe movement. The ideology, iconography, and literature of Nazism are now outlawed in Germany and some other European countries. In Europe and North America, the term Nazi and affiliated ideas and symbols denote and connote white supremacist racism.

Contents

Etymology

The term Nazi derives from the first two syllables of Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (National Socialist German Workers’ Party, NSDAP).[17] Members of the Nazi Party identified themselves as Nationalsozialisten (National Socialists), rarely as Nazis. The German term Nazi parallels the analogous political term Sozi, an abbreviation for a member of the Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (Social Democratic Party of Germany).[18][19] In 1933, when Adolf Hitler assumed power of the German government, usage of the term Nazi diminished in Germany, although Austrian anti-Nazis used it as an insult. [19]

Ideological roots

The ideological roots of Nazism derive from Romanticism, nineteenth-century idealism, and a biologic interpretation of Friedrich Nietzsche’s concepts of “breeding upwards” — towards the Übermensch (“Superman”). Such ideas, as espoused by the Ariosophe Germanenorden (German Order) and the Thule society much influenced Adolf Hitler’s world-view.

Phillip Wayne Powell writes that "in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, a powerful surge of German patriotism was stimulated by the disdain of Italians for German cultural inferiority and barbarism, which lead to a counter-attempt, by German humanists, to laud German qualities."[20] M.W. Fodor wrote in The Nation in 1936, "No race has suffered so much from an inferiority complex as has the German. National Socialism was a kind of Coué method of converting the inferiority complex, at least temporarily, into a feeling of superiority".[21]

Among the most significant ideological influence on the Nazis came from German nationalist figure Johann Gottlieb Fichte, whose works Hitler read, and whom was recognized by other Nazi members including Dietrich Eckart and Arnold Fanck.[22] In Speeches to the German Nation (1808), written amid Napoleonic France's occupation of Berlin, Fichte called for a German national revolution against the French occupiers, making passionate public speeches, arming his students for battle against the French, and stressed the need of the deed of action by the German nation to free itself.[23]

Fichte's nationalism was populist and opposed to traditional elites and spoke of the need of a "People's War" (Volkskrieg), concepts much like the those the Nazis adopted.[24] Fichte promoted German exceptionalism and stressed the need for the German nation to be purified, such as purging the German language of French words, a policy that the Nazis undertook upon rising to power.[25] Fichte was anti-Semitic and accused Jews in Germany of having been, and inevitably continuing to be a "state within a state" in Germany that Fichte claimed was a threat to German national unity.[26] Fichte promoted two options to address the Jewish problem, the first was creation of a Jewish state in Palestine to push the Jews to leave Europe.[27] The other option was violence against Jews, saying that this goal would be "To cut off all their heads in one night, and set new ones on their shoulders, which should not contain a single Jewish ideas".[28]

Another influence on Nazism was Arthur de Gobineau, a French racial theorist and aristocrat who blamed the fall of the ancien regime in France on racial degeneracy caused by racial intermixing that he claimed destroyed the purity of the "Aryan" race.[29] Gobineau's theories had a strong following in Germany when they were released.[30]

Another major influence was Houston Stewart Chamberlain, an English proponent of racial theory who supported notions of Germanic supremacy and anti-Semitism in Germany.[31] Chamberlain's work, Foundations of the Nineteenth Century (1899) praised Germanic peoples for creativity and idealism while claiming that the Germanic spirit was threatened by a "Jewish" spirit of selfishness and materialism.[32] Chamberlain went on in the book to use his thesis to promote monarchical conservatism while denouncing democracy, liberalism, and socialism.[33] The book became highly popular, especially in Germany.[34] Chamberlain stressed the need of a nation to maintain racial purity in order to prevent degeneration, and argued that racial intermingling with Jews should never be permitted.[35]

Ideology

Greater Germany in 1943

A large part of Nazi ideology is the racist belief in the superiority of the Aryan race Herrenvolk, a white supremacist master race abstraction of the Nordic, ethnic Germans found in pan-Germanism.[36] The Nazis claimed that the German nation represents the most racially pure Aryan people.[37] The Nazis advocated a strong, central government under the Führer, for defending Germany and the Volksdeutsche (ethnic Germans), against communism and Jewish subversion. To the end of establishing Großdeutschland (Greater Germany), the German peoples must acquire Lebensraum (living space) from Russia.[38] The Nazis advocated revolution to surpass the legacy of the French Revolution of 1789, which Nazis view as being detrimentally associated with Jewry, Freemasonry, liberalism, and materialism.[39]

Nazism: Adolf Hitler, the Führer of Nazi Germany.

The original National Socialists, the 1919 German Workers’ Party (DAP) said there would be no program binding upon them, thus rejecting any Weltanshauung. Nonetheless, when Adolf Hitler assumed command of its successor, the Nazi Party, political substance of Nazism concorded with his political beliefs — man and idea as political entity, the Führer.

Hitler had concluded that ethnic and linguistic diversity had weakened the Austro–Hungarian Empire, and had resulted in contemporary political dissent. He disliked democracy because it allowed political power to ethnic minorities and to liberal political parties, who “weakened and destabilized” the empire with internal division. Hitler’s cultural, historical, and political beliefs were tempered in combat during World War I; by Germany’s loss of the war, and by the Bolsheviks’ successful October Revolution of 1917 that installed Marxist communism in Russia. From 1920 to 1923, Hitler formulated his ideology, then published it in 1925–26, as Mein Kampf , a two-volume, biography and political letter-of-intent.[40]

During the 1920s and 1930s, Nazism was ideologically heterogeneous, comprising two sub-ideologies, those of Otto Strasser and of Hitler. As leftists, the Strasserites fell afoul of Hitler, who expelled Otto Strasser from the Nazi Party when he failed to establish the Black Front, an oppositional, anti-capitalist bloc, in 1930. The Strasserites who remained in the Nazi Party, mostly in the Sturmabteilung (SA), were assassinated in the Night of the Long Knives purge.

Fascism

Adolf Hitler (right) beside Benito Mussolini (left), the founder of fascism and dictator of Fascist Italy. Mussolini provided financial assistance to the Nazis prior to their rise to power.

Nazism is a politically syncretic variety of fascism, which incorporates policies, tactics and philosophic tenets from left and right-wing politics. Italian fascism and German Nazism reject liberalism, democracy and Marxism.[41] Usually supported by the far right (military, business, Church), fascism is historically anti-communist, anti-conservative and anti-parliamentary.[42] The Nazis' rise to power was assisted by the Fascist government of Italy that began to financially subsidize the Nazi party in 1928.[43]

Hitler admired Benito Mussolini and the Italian Fascists, and after Mussolini's successful March on Rome in 1922, presented the Nazis as a German version of Italian Fascism.[44][45] Hitler endorsed Italian Fascism, saying that "with the victory of fascism in Italy the Italian people has triumphed [over] Jewry" and appraised Mussolini as "the brilliant statesman".[46] Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's chief propagandist, credited Italian Fascism with starting a conflict against liberal democracy, saying:

The march on Rome was a signal, a sign of storm for liberal-democracy. It is the first attempt to destroy the world of the liberal-democratic spirit[...] which started in 1789 with the storm on the Bastille and conquered one country after another in violent revolutionary upheavals, to let... the nations go under in Marxism, democracy, anarchy and class warfare...[47]

Hitler remained impressed by Mussolini and Fascist Italy for many years in spite of resentments towards Italy by other Nazis. During the period of positive outlook towards Fascist Italy, Hitler became an Italophile.[48] Hitler like Mussolini profoundly admired Ancient Rome, and repeatedly mentioned it in Mein Kampf as being a model for Germany.[49] In particular, Hitler admired ancient Rome's authoritarian culture, imperialism, town planning, and architecture, which were incorporated by the Nazis.[50] Hitler considered the ancient Romans to have been a master race.[51]

In an unpublished sequel to Mein Kampf, Hitler declared that he held no antagonism towards Italy for having waged war against Germany and Austria-Hungary in World War I, saying that Italy only became at war with Germany because of Germany's alliance with Austria Hungary which Italy had territorial claims on.[52] Hitler declared his sympathy to the Italians for desiring to regain Italian-populated lands held by Austria-Hungary, claiming it was naturally in Italians' national interest to wage war to regain those lands.[53]

Hitler made controversial concessions to gain Fascist Italy's approval and alliance, such as abandoning territorial claims on the Tyrol region of Italy that had a dense population of hundreds of thousands of Germans.[54] In Mein Kampf Hitler declared that it was not in Germany's interest to have war with Italy over South Tyrol.[55]

Nazism differs from Italian fascism in that it does not view a nation as being created and developed by a state, but that a nation is created and developed outside a state.[56] This difference is based upon the different histories of development of the German and Italian nations that formed the basis of Nazism's and Italian Fascism's respective nationalisms; the German national identity developed outside a state while Italian national identity developed through a state.[56] The Italian fascists proposed a corporatist "organic state" that required uniting the classes of society, like a fasces.

Nazism placed a greater emphasis on race and racial purity than Italian Fascism. However Italian Fascism like the Nazis held similar positions on race issues. Mussolini in his 1920 autobiography spoke of the importance of race to fascism, saying: "Race and soil are strong influences upon us all", and said of World War I: "There were seers who saw in the European conflict not only national advantages but the possibility of a supremacy of race".[57] In a 1921 speech in Bologna, Mussolini stated that "Fascism was born... out of a profound, perennial need of this our Aryan and Mediterranean race".<Neocleous, Mark. Fascism. Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. p. 35> Mussolini also warned of racial competition between the white race and coloured races such as in 1928:

[When the] city dies, the nation — deprived of the young life — blood of new generations — is now made up of people who are old and degenerate and cannot defend itself against a younger people which launches an attack on the now unguarded frontiers[...] This will happen, and not just to cities and nations, but on an infinitely greater scale: the whole White race, the Western race can be submerged by other coloured races which are multiplying at a rate unknown in our race.[58]

Many Italian fascists held anti-Slavist views, especially against neighbouring Yugoslav nations, whom the Italian fascists saw as being in competition with Italy, which had claims on territories of Yugoslavia, particularly Dalmatia.[59] Mussolini claimed that Yugoslavs posed a threat after Italy did not receive the territory along the Adriatic coast at the end of World War I, as promised by the 1915 Treaty of London. He said: "The danger of seeing the Jugo-Slavians settle along the whole Adriatic shore had caused a bringing together in Rome of the cream of our unhappy regions. Students, professors, workmen, citizens—representative men—were entreating the ministers and the professional politicians.[60] Italian fascists accused Serbs of having "atavistic impulses", and of being part of a "social democratic, masonic Jewish internationalist plot".[61] The fascists accused Yugoslavs of conspiring together on behalf of "Grand Orient masonry and its funds".

Nazism, however, emphasized the Aryan race Herrenvolk concept until reducing the German state to mere means to an ideologic end. Furthermore, blond-blue-eyed-Aryanism was unpopular with Italians, who are not such a volk; nonetheless, the Italian Fascist government exercised a variety of nationalist racism and genocide in its concentration camps, antedating Nazi Germany.[62]

The Israeli political scientist and historian Zeev Sternhell proposes that the varieties of fascism are unique, despite the schematic resemblance between Italian fascism and German Nazism — greater than resemblances among the Eastern Bloc Communist states of the Cold War, and among European liberal democracies.[63]

Militarism

Nazi militarism was based upon the belief that great nations grow from military power, and maintain order in the world. The Nazi Party exploited irredentist and revanchist sentiments, and cultural aversions to aspects of Modernism, (despite the Reich embracing modernism by their admiration for engine power), thus conflating nationalism and militarism into the ultra-nationalism necessary to establishing Großdeutschland.

Anti-communism

After Benito Mussolini’s National Fascist Party assumed power of the Italian government in 1922, Italian Fascism became a strong force against Marxist communism. Historians Ian Kershaw and Joachim Fest argue that in post-World War I Germany, the Nazis were one of many nationalist and fascistic political parties contending for the leadership of Germany’s anti-communist movement, and of the German state. During the late 1930s and the 1940s, several other anti-communist regimes and groups supported Nazism: the Falange in Spain; the Vichy regime and the Legion of French Volunteers against Bolshevism (Wehrmacht Infantry Regiment 638) in France; and the Cliveden set, Lord Halifax, and associates of Neville Chamberlain in Britain.[64]

Anti-capitalist rhetoric

Early Nazi rhetoric included anti-capitalism, especially anti-finance capitalism.[16] In attacking the ills of Weimar democracy, Adolf Hitler spoke of a “pluto-democracy” Jewish conspiracy that favoured liberal democratic parties in order to maintain the integrity of capitalism[65] Throughout his political campaigning, Hitler emphasized the background role of Jewish financiers in the ills of Weimar democracy.[66] In opposing finance capitalism, the Nazis emphasized a supposed "Jewish conspiracy" of bankers who controlled international finance, and thus the countries of the world.[67] Furthermore, a leftist faction of the Nazis attacked the corporation as the leading instrument of finance capitalism’s oppression of the worker (later, the faction was purged from the party).

The Nazis claimed that capitalism damages nations due to international finance, the economic dominance of big business, and Jewish influence.[68] They declared support for a form of socialism that is to provide for the nation: economic security, social welfare programs for workers, a just wage, honour for workers' importance to the nation, and protection from capitalist exploitation.[69] Nazism, however, rejected class conflict-based socialism and economic egalitarianism, favouring instead a stratified economy with classes based on merit and talent, retaining private property, and the creation of national solidarity that transends class distinction.[70]

In 1920, the Nazi Party published the National Socialist Program, an ideology that in 25 points demanded:

that the State shall make it its primary duty to provide a livelihood for its citizens . . . the abolition of all incomes unearned by work . . . the ruthless confiscation of all war profits ... the nationalization of all businesses which have been formed into corporations ... profit-sharing in large enterprises ... extensive development of insurance for old-age ... land reform suitable to our national requirements.[71]

During the 1920s, Nazi Party officials variously attempted either to change or to replace the National Socialist Program. In 1924, the Nazi Party economist theoretician Gottfried Feder proposed a new, 39-point program, retaining some old and introducing some new ideas.[72] Hitler did not directly mention the program in Mein Kampf; he only mentioned "the so-called programme of the movement".[73] Also during the 1920s, however, Hitler urged disparate Nazi factions to unite in opposition to "Jewish Marxism." [74] Hitler asserted that the "three vices" of "Jewish Marxism" were democracy, pacifism, and internationalism.[75]

In 1927, Hitler said: "We are socialists, we are enemies of today’s capitalistic economic system for the exploitation of the economically weak, with its unfair salaries, with its unseemly evaluation of a human being according to wealth and property instead of responsibility and performance, and we are determined to destroy this system under all conditions.”[76] Yet two years later, in 1929, Hitler backtracked, saying that socialism was “an unfortunate word altogether” and that “if people have something to eat, and their pleasures, then they have their socialism”. Historian Henry A. Turner reports Hitler’s regret at having integrated the word socialism to the Nazi Party name.[77] The Nazi Party’s early self-description as “socialist” caused conservative opponents, such as the Industrial Employers Association, to describe it as “totalitarian, terrorist, conspiratorial, and socialist”.[78]

In 1930, Hitler said: “Our adopted term ‘Socialist’ has nothing to do with Marxian Socialism. Marxism is anti-property; true Socialism is not”.[79] In 1931, during a confidential interview with influential editor Richard Breiting of the Leipziger Neueste Nachrichten, a pro-business newspaper, Hitler said:

I want everyone to keep what he has earned, subject to the principle that the good of the community takes priority over that of the individual. But the State should retain control; every owner should feel himself to be an agent of the State ... The Third Reich will always retain the right to control property owners.[80]

In 1932, Nazi Party spokesman Joseph Goebbels said that the Nazi Party was a “workers’ party”, “on the side of labour, and against finance”.[81]

Working class and middle class appeal

In 1922, to ensure German public perception of the Nazi Party as politically unique, Adolf Hitler discredited other nationalist and racialist political parties as disconnected from the mass populace, especially lower- and working-class young people:

The racialists were not capable of drawing the practical conclusions from correct theoretical judgements, especially in the Jewish Question. In this way, the German racialist movement developed a similar pattern to that of the 1880s and 1890s. As in those days, its leadership gradually fell into the hands of highly honourable, but fantastically naïve men of learning, professors, district counsellors, schoolmasters, and lawyers — in short a bourgeois, idealistic, and refined class. It lacked the warm breath of the nation’s youthful vigour.[82]

Despite many working-class supporters and members, the appeal of the Nazi Party to the working class was neither true nor effective, because its politics mostly appealed to the middle-class, as a stabilizing, pro-business political party, not a revolutionary workers’ party.[83][83] Moreover, the financial collapse of the white collar middle-class of the 1920s figures much in their strong support of Nazism, thus the great percentage of declared middle-class support for the Nazis.[83] In the poor country that was the Weimar Republic of the early 1930s, the Nazi Party realised their socialist policies with food and shelter for the unemployed and the homeless — later recruited to the Brownshirt Sturmabteilung (SA — Storm Detachment).[83]

Racism and ultra-nationalism

Further information: Nazism and race and Racial policy of Nazi Germany
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Alfred Rosenberg: Racialist theoretician of Nazism.

The racist subject of Nazism is Das Volk, the German people living under continual cultural attack by Judeo-Bolshevism, who must unite under Nazi Party leadership, and, per the spartan nationalist tenets of Nazism: be stoic, self-disciplined and self-sacrificing until victory.[38] Adolf Hitler’s political biography, Mein Kampf (My Struggle) formulates the Weltanshauung of Nazism with the ideologic trinity of: history as a struggle for world supremacy among the human races, conquered only by a master race, the Herrenvolk; the decisive, autocratic Führerprinzip (leader principle); and anti-Semitism as universal source of socio-cultural and economic discord.

The Jewish–Bolshevism conspiracy theory derives from anti-Semitism and anti-communism; Adolf Hitler first developed his worldview from living and observing Viennese life from 1907 to 1913, concluding that the Austro–Hungarian Empire comprised racial, religious, and cultural hierarchies; per his interpretations, atop were the “Aryans”, the ultimate, white master race, whilst Jews and Gypsies were at bottom.[38]

Fundamental to Nazism is the unification of every German tribe that was “unjustly” divided among different nation states The racialist philosophy of Nazism derived from the seminal white supremacist works of: the French Arthur de Gobineau (An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races; the Briton Houston Stewart Chamberlain (The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century); and of the American Madison Grant (The Passing of The Great Race: or, The Racial Basis of European History).

Their ideas were synthesized by the Reichstag Secretary, Alfred Rosenberg, in The Myth of the Twentieth Century, a pseudoscientific treatise proposing that: “[F]rom a northern centre of creation which, without postulating an actual submerged Atlantic continent, we may call Atlantis, swarms of warriors once fanned out, in obedience to the ever-renewed and incarnate Nordic longing for distance to conquer and space to shape”.[84] According to Terrence Ball and Richard Bellamy, The Myth of the Twentieth Century is the second-most important book to Nazism, after Mein Kampf.[85]

The Master Race: the Meyers Blitz-Lexikon (Leipzig, 1932) depicts German war hero Karl von Müller as an exemplar Nordic type of the Herrenvolk.

In establishing Nazi German racial superiority, Adolf Hitler defined “the Nation” as the highest creation of a race, and that that great nations were the creations of homogeneous populations of great races working together. These nations developed cultures that naturally grew from races with “natural good health, and aggressive, intelligent, courageous traits”. Whereas the weakest nations were those of “impure” or “mongrel races”, because they were disunited. Hitler claimed that lowest races were the parasitic Untermenschen (subhumans), principally the Jews, who were living lebensunwertes Leben (“life-unworthy life”) owing to racial inferiority, and their wandering, nationless invasions of greater nations, such as Germany — thus, either permitting or encouraging national plurality is an obvious mistake.

During World War II, when faced with occupying too much territory with too-few German soldiers, Nazism expanded the Master Race definition to include Dutch and Scandinavian men as superior, German-stock Herrenvolk, in order to recruit them into the Schutzstaffel (SS).

Nazi eugenics: “We Do Not Stand Alone” (1936).

Hitler argued that nations who could not defend their territories did not deserve a country. He said that “slave races”, such as the Slavic peoples, had less of a right to life than did the master races — especially concerning Lebensraum. He claimed that the Herrenvolk had the right to vanquish inferior indigenous races from their countries.[86]

Hitler argued that “races without homelands” were “parasitic races”, and that the richer the parasite race, the more virulent their parasitism. A master race could, therefore, easily strengthen themselves by killing the parasite races in the Heimat. The Herrenvolk philosophic tenet of Nazism rationalized Die Endlösung (the Final Solution), extermination of Jews, Gypsies, Czechs, Poles, the mentally retarded, the crippled, the handicapped, homosexuals and others deemed undesirable. During the Holocaust, the Waffen-SS, Wehrmacht soldiers, and right-wing paramilitary civilian militias killed some 11 million people in Nazi-occupied lands via concentration camps, prisoner-of-war camps, labor camps, and death camps, such as the Auschwitz concentration camp and the Treblinka extermination camp.

Schutzstaffel insigne Oblique, white Sig Runes on black.

In Germany, the master-race populace was realised by purifying the Deutsche Volk via (see: eugenics; the culmination was involuntary euthanasia of disabled people, and the compulsory sterilization of the mentally retarded. The ideologic justification was Adolf Hitler’s consideration of Sparta(11th c.–195 BC) as the original Völkisch state; he praised their dispassionate destruction of congenitally-deformed infants in maintaining racial purity:[87][88] "Sparta must be regarded as the first Völkisch State. The exposure of the sick, weak, deformed children, in short, their destruction, was more decent, and, in truth, a thousand times more humane, than the wretched insanity of our day, which preserves the most pathological subject."

Nazi cultural perception of the Jews, based upon the anti-Semitic The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, emphasized that Jews throve on fomenting division among Germans, and among nation-states. Yet Nazi anti-Semitism was also physical and racial. Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels said: “The Jew is the enemy and destroyer of the purity of blood, the conscious destroyer of our race ... As socialists, we are opponents of the Jews, because we see, in the Hebrews, the incarnation of capitalism, of the misuse of the nation’s goods.”[81]

Nazi Germany was ideologically based upon the racially-defined Deutsche Volk (German People), which denied the limitations of nationalism.[89] The Nazi Party and the German people were consolidated in the Volksgemeinschaft (People’s Community), a late-nineteenth-century neologism defining the citizens’ communal duty is to the Reich, rather than to civil society, the citizen-nation basis of Nazism; the socialism would be realized via common duty to the volk, by service to the Third Reich in establishing Großdeutschland, the embodying locus of the peoples’ will. Hence, Nazism encouraged ultra-nationalism, to establish a world-dominating, Aryan Volksgemeinschaft. The précis of this central tenet of Mein Kampf is the motto Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer (One People, One Empire, One Leader).

Opposition to homosexuality

Further information: Persecution of homosexuals in Nazi Germany and the Holocaust
Homophobia: Berlin Memorial to Homosexual Victims of the Holocaust; Totgeschlagen—Totgeschwiegen (Struck Dead—Hushed Up)

In late February 1933, as the moderating influence of Ernst Röhm — the homosexual leader of the Sturmabteilung (SA) — diminished, the Nazi Party purged the homophile clubs, where gay, lesbian and bisexual Berliners congregated. It also outlawed academic and pornographic sexual publications. In March 1933, Kurt Hiller, the organizer of Magnus Hirschfeld's Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (Institute of Sex Research), was imprisoned to a concentration camp. On 6 May 1933, Hitler Youth members attacked the Institute of Sex Research and publicly incinerated its library and archives in the streets. They destroyed some 20,000 books and journals, as well as some 5,000 images. They also seized the Institute’s rosters of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender patients.

Initially, Hitler had protected Röhm from Nazis who considered his homosexuality a violation of the Party’s anti-homosexual policy. When Röhm proved to be a politically-viable challenger to Hitler's leadership of the Nazi Party, Hitler ordered that he be assassinated in 1934, along with other Nazi political opponents. This purge became known as the Night of the Long Knives. In order to suppress outrage in the SA ranks, the Nazi leaders justified Röhm’s killing on the basis that he was homosexual.

Schutzstaffel (SS) Chief Heinrich Himmler, initially a supporter of Röhm, defended him against charges of homosexuality, arguing they were the fabrications of a Jewish character assassination conspiracy. After the Night of the Long Knives, Hitler promoted Himmler, who then zealously suppressed homosexuality, saying: "We must exterminate these people root and branch ... the homosexual must be eliminated.”[90] In 1936, Himmler established the Reich Central Office for the Combating of Homosexuality and Abortion. The Nazis officially decalared that homosexuality was contrary to "wholesome popular sentiment", identifying gay men as "defilers of German blood". The Nazi régime incarcerated some 100,000 homosexuals during the 1930s.[91] As concentration camp prisoners, homosexual men were forced to wear pink triangle badges.[92][93]

Nazi anti-homosexual laws did not persecute lesbians much because the Nazis considered female homosexuals easier to persuade or to compel to conformity with the heterosexual mores of patriarchy. Nonetheless, the Nazis considered lesbians to be a cultural threat to family values, and legally identified them as anti-social. Concentration camp prisoners who were lesbian were forced to wear black triangle badges.

Church and state

Further information: Religious aspects of Nazism, Religion in Nazi Germany, and Positive Christianity
On the Jews and Their Lies, by Martin Luther, Wittenberg, 1543

Hitler extended his rationalizations into a religious doctrine supported by his criticism of traditional Roman Catholicism. In particular, and closely related to Positive Christianity, he objected to Catholicism because it was not the religion of an exclusive race and its culture. Simultaneously, the Nazis integrated to Nazism the community elements of Lutheranism, from its organic pagan past. Hitlerian theology integrated militarism by proposing that his was a true, master-religion, because it would create mastery by avoiding comforting lies. About religions that preached love, tolerance, and equality “in contravention to the facts”, Hitler said they were false, slave religions, and that the man who recognized said “truths” was a “natural leader”, whilst deniers were “natural slaves”; hence, slaves, especially the intelligent, continually hindered their masters with false religions.

Although the “National Socialist leaders and dogmas were basically, uncompromisingly antireligious”, Nazi Germany usually did not directly attack the Churches, the exceptions being clerics who refused accommodation with the Nazi régime. Martin Bormann, a prominent Nazi official, said: "Priests will be paid by us and, as a result, they will preach what we want. If we find a priest acting otherwise, short work is to be made of him. The task of the priest consists in keeping the Poles quiet, stupid, and dull-witted."[94][95] To demoralize Poland, the Nazis killed almost 16 per cent of the Polish Catholic clergy; 13 of 38 Bishops were sent to concentration camps.[96][97] These actions, and the closing of churches, seminaries and other religious institutions, almost succeeded in exterminating the Polish clergy.[98]

In pro-Nazi countries, fascist anti-clericalism was unofficial, and was usually manifested in the arrests of select clergy via false charges of immorality,[99][100] and secret harassment by Gestapo and SD agents provocateur. A notable case was that of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Lutheran Pastor and theologian who fought Nazism in the German Resistance.[101][102] Nonetheless, the Nazis often used the Church to justify their politics, by using Christian symbols as Reich symbols, and, in other cases, replacing Christian symbols with Reich symbols, Nazism thus conflated Church and State as an ultra-nationalist political entity — the Nazi Germany embodied in the motto Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer (“One People, One Empire, One Leader”).[103][104]

Julius Streicher

Several of the founders and leaders of the Nazi Party were members of the Thule-Gesellschaft (Thule Society), who romanticized Aryan race superstitions with ritual and theology.[105] Originally, derived from the Germanenorden, the Thule Society shared the racist superstitions of Ariosophy that were common to such pan-German groups; Rudolf von Sebottendorf, and a man named Wilde, lectured the Thule Society on occultism.[106] Generally, the society’s lectures and excursions comprised anti-Semitism and Germanic antiquity, yet it is historically notable for having fought as a paramilitary militia against the Bavarian Soviet Republic.[107] Dietrich Eckart, an associate of the Thule Society, coached Adolf Hitler as a public speaker, and Hitler later dedicated Mein Kampf to Eckart.[108] The DAP was initially supported by the Thule Society — but Hitler quickly excluded them in favour of a mass movement political party, by denigrating their superstitious approach to politics.[109] In contrast, SS Chief Heinrich Himmler was much interested in the occult.[103]

Regarding the persecution of Jews, the contemporary, historical perspective is that in the period between the Protestant Reformation and the Holocaust, Martin Luther's treatise On the Jews and their Lies (1543), exercised a major and persistent intellectual influence upon the German practice of anti-Semitism against Jewish citizens. The Nazis publicly displayed an original of On the Jews and their Lies during the annual Nuremberg rallies, and the city also presented a first edition of it to Julius Streicher, the editor of Der Stürmer, which described Luther’s treatise as the most radically anti-Semitic tract ever published.[110][111]

Protestant Bishop Martin Sasse published a compendium of Martin Luther’s writings shortly after Kristallnacht; in the introduction, he approved of the burning of synagogues and mentioned the coincidental date: “On November 10, 1938, on Luther’s birthday, the synagogues are burning in Germany.” He urged Germans to heed the words “of the greatest antisemite of his time, the warner of his people against the Jews.”[112] Theologian Johannes Wallmann, however, said Luther’s anti-Semitic tract exercised no continual influence in Germany, that it was mostly ignored during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.[113] Nonetheless, Prof. Diarmaid MacCulloch said that On the Jews and Their Lies was the blueprint for Kristallnacht.[114]

Economics

Further information: Economy of Nazi Germany

Regarding international finance, Nazism postulated an international banking Jewish conspiracy headed by a cabal of financiers responsible for the Great Depression. The Nazis claimed that controllers of the cabal, who had manœuvred themselves into economically controlling the United States and Europe, were a powerful Jewish élite. The Nazis believed that the cabal was integral to a greater, long-term Jewish conspiracy, wherein Jews would establish global domination via the New World Order. The banks that the cabal allegedly controlled exerted political influence upon nation-states by granting or withholding credit.

Deutsches Volk–Deutsche Arbeit: German People, German Work, the alliance of worker and work. (1934)

Nazi economic practice first concerned the immediate domestic economy of Germany, then international trade. To eliminate Germany’s poverty, domestic policy was narrowly concerned with four major goals: (i) elimination of unemployment, (ii) rapid and substantial re-armament, (iii) fiscal protection against resurgent hyper-inflation, and (iv) expansion of consumer-goods production, to raise middle- and lower- class living standards. The intent was correcting the Nazi-perceived short-comings of the Weimar Republic, and to solidify domestic support for the Nazi Party; between 1933 and 1936, the German (Gross National Product) annually increased 9.5 per cent, and the industrial rate increased 17.2 per cent.

The expansion propelled the German economy from depression to full employment in less than four years. Public consumption increased 18.7 per cent, and private consumption increased 3.6 per cent annually. Historian Richard Evans reports that before the outbreak of World War II in 1939, the German economy "had recovered from the Depression faster than its counterparts in other countries. Germany’s foreign debt had been stabilized, interest rates had fallen to half their 1932 level, the stock exchange had recovered from the Depression, the gross national product had risen by 81 per cent over the same period . . . Inflation and unemployment had been conquered."[115]

Private property

Private property rights were conditional upon the economic mode of use; if it did not advance Nazi economic goals, the state could nationalize it .[116] Nazi government corporate takeovers, and threatened takeovers, encouraged compliance with government production plans, even if unprofitable for the firm. For example, the owner of the Junkers aeroplane factory refused the government’s directives, whereupon the Nazis occupied the factory and arrested Hugo Junkers, but paid him for his nationalized business. Although the Nazis privatised public properties and public services, they also increased economic state control.[117] Under Nazi economics, free competition and self-regulating markets diminished; nevertheless, Adolf Hitler’s social Darwinist beliefs made him reluctant to entirely disregard business competition and private property as economic engines.[118][119] In 1942, Hitler privately said: “I absolutely insist on protecting private property ... we must encourage private initiative”.[120]

To the proposition that businesses were private property in name but not in substance, but, in Ther Journal of Economic History article “The Role of Private Property in the Nazi Economy: The Case of Industry”, Christoph Buchheim and Jonas Scherner counter that despite state control, business had much production and investment planning freedom — yet acknowledge that Nazi German economy was state-directed.[121]

Centralization

Agricultural and industrial central planning was a prominent feature of Nazi economics. To tie farmers to the land, selling agricultural land was prohibited; farm ownership was nominally private, but discretion over operations and residual income were proscribed. That was achieved by granting business monopoly rights to marketing boards, to control production and prices with a quota system. Quotas also were established for industrial goods, such as pig iron, steel, aluminium, magnesium, gunpowder, explosives, synthetic rubber, fuels, and electricity. A compulsory cartel law was enacted in 1936, allowing the minister of economics to make existing cartels compulsory and permanent, and compel industries to form cartels, where none existed, although disestablished by decree, by 1943, they were replaced with more authoritarian economic agencies.[122]

Finance

In place of ordinary profit-incentive determining the economy, financial investment was regulated per the needs of the state. The profit incentive for businessmen remained, but was greatly modified: “Fixing of profits, not their suppression, was the official policy of the Nazi party”; however, Nazi agencies replaced the profit-motive that automatically allocated investment, and the course of the economy.[123] Nazi government financing eventually dominated private financial investment, which the proportion of private securities issued falling from over half of the total in 1933–34 to approximately 10 per cent in 1935–38. Heavy business-profit taxes limited self-financing of firms. The largest firms were mostly exempt from taxes on profits, however, government control of these were extensive enough to leave “only the shell of private ownership”. Taxes and financial subsidies also directed the economy; the underlying economic policy — terror — was incentive to agree and comply. Nazi language indicated death or concentration camp for any business owner who pursued his own self-interest, instead of the ends of the State.[116]

Ideological competition

The German Revolution of 1918–19: Freikorps soldiers and Communist revolutionary prisoner, Bavaria.

After World War I, German Nazism and Bolshevik communism emerged as the two main political contenders for the government of Germany, especially because the Weimar Republic government was unstable. What became the Nazi movement arose from far right business and political resistance to the Bolshevik-inspired insurgencies occurring in Germany during the post-war political instability. Moreover, because the Russian Revolution of 1917 legitimised Leninism, Vladimir Lenin’s interpretation of Marxism, which inspired many German socialists. To suppress the 1919 Spartacist uprising general strike in Berlin, and the Bavarian Soviet Republic in Munich, the Weimar Republic government used Freikorps (Free Corps), right-wing paramilitary groups composed of ex-soldiers. Many Freikorps leaders, including Ernst Röhm, later became Nazi Party leaders.

Nazism successfully competed for voters against communism because Nazism appealed to the anti-Bolshevik German establishment — by promising socio-economic stability — and to the working class — by promising jobs. The Nazis particularly appealed to the lumpenproletariat, whom leftists had dismissed as politically inconsequential. Nazi pro-labour rhetoric appealed to workers disaffected with capitalism, by promoting profit limitations, rent abolition, and increased social benefits (for German gentiles, only), whilst simultaneously proposing a politico-economic model that divested Marxist socialism of ideologic tenets dangerous to capitalism, i.e. class struggle, dictatorship of the proletariat, and worker-controlled means of production. Sociologist Michael Mann defined fascism as a “transcendent and cleansing nation statism through paramilitarism”, with the word transcendent denoting the abolishment of social classes, in order for the birth of a new, organic, and pure people: all classes are abolished by transition, all “others” (approximately two-thirds of the German populace).[124][125]

The simplistic Nazi electoral rhetoric, effected with simple campaigns, and a reactionary ideology incorporating pan-Germanism, deceived the Nazi Party’s conservative German establishment allies into underestimating the Nazis’ political strength, ability to govern and continued existence as a political party. The populism, anti-Communism, and anti-capitalism of Nazism gave it a popular strength greater than that of traditional conservative parties, such as the DNVP (German National People’s Party).

History

 This article may contain improper references to self-published sources. Please help improve it by removing references to unreliable sources where they are used inappropriately. (August 2009)
The “Dagger-stab-in-the-back Legend”: A Jew dagger-stabbing the German Army in the back. Germany's defeat in WWI was blamed on an unpatriotic populace, Socialists, Bolsheviks, the Weimar Republic, and the Jews. (1919)

Prior to its adoption by the Nazi Party, the term national socialism was coined by French intellectual Maurice Barrès. His rejections of pluralism, individualism and materialism was based on a combination of the anti-Semitism of the counter-revolutionary right, and the socialism, nationalism, and republicanism of the anti-liberal left, in nineteenth-century France.[126] Historian Robert Toombs sees this amalgamation exemplified in General Georges Ernest Boulanger, a general and politician popular among both royalists and the urban left.[127]

On 5 January 1919, the locksmith Anton Drexler, and five other men, founded the Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (DAP — German Workers' Party), the predecessor of the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP — National Socialist German Workers’ Party).[128][129] In July 1919, the Reichswehr intelligence department despatched Corporal Adolf Hitler, as a Verbindungsmann (police spy) to infiltrate and subvert the DAP. His oratory so impressed the DAP members, they asked him join the party, and, in September 1919, the police spy Hitler became the party's propagandist.[128][130] On 24 February 1920, the DAP was renamed the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, against Hitler’s preferred “Social Revolutionary Party” name.[128] Later, in consolidating his control of the NSDAP, Hitler ousted Drexler from the party and assumed leadership on 29 July 1921.[128]

The post-war crises of Weimar Germany (1919–33) consolidated Nazism as an ideology: military defeat in the First World War (1914–18), capitulation with the Treaty of Versailles, economic depression, and the consequent societal instability. In exploiting, and excusing, the military defeat, Nazism proffered the political Dolchstosslegende (“Legend of the Dagger-stab in the Back”) [131] claiming that the Imperial German war effort was internally sabotaged, by Jews, socialists, and Bolsheviks. Proposing that, because the Reichwehr’s defeat did not occur in Germany, the sabotage included a lack of patriotism among their political antagonists, specifically the Social Democrats and the Ebert Government, whom the Nazis accused of treason.

Using the “stab in the back” legend, the Nazis accused German Jews, and other populaces it considered non-German, of possessing extra-national loyalties, thereby exacerbating German anti-semitism about the Judenfrage (the Jewish Question), the perennial far right political canard popular when the ethnic Völkisch movement and their politics of Romantic nationalism for establishing a Großdeutschland were strong.[132][133] The seminal ideas of Nazism originated in the German cultural past of the Völkisch (folk) movement and the superstitions of Ariosophy, an occultism that proposed the Germanic peoples as the purest examples of the Aryan race, whose cultures feature runic symbols and the swastika. From among the Ariosophs, only the Thule-Gesellschaft (Thule Society) in Munich, features in the origin of Nazism; they sponsored the DAP.[128]

Ascension and consolodation

Nürnberg, Reichs Party Day: Nazi Party Leader Adolf Hitler and SA Leader Ernst Röhm, August 1933.

The votes that the Nazis received in the 1932 elections established the Nazi Party as the largest parliamentary faction of the Weimar Republic government. Adolf Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor of Germany on 30 January 1933, and his subsequent consolidation of offices and their consequent dictatorial powers established the Third Reich (Dritte Reich), denoting Nazi Germany as the historical successor to the First Reich of the Holy Roman Empire (962–1806), and to the Second Reich of the German Empire (1871–1918). Under Nazism, Germany bore two official names, the Deutsches Reich (German Reich) and Großdeutsches Reich (Greater German Reich). In 1934, its first year in power, the Nazi Party announced that the Dritte Reich was to be a Tausendjähriges Reich (Thousand Year Empire); but lasted only twelve years.

The Reichstag fire on 27 February 1933, was Adolf Hitler’s raison d’état for suppressing his political opponents. The following day, 28 February, he persuaded Weimar Republic President Paul von Hindenburg to grant him, as German Chancellor, an emergency-powers decree suspending civil liberties and the governments of the German federal states. On 23 March, with an Enabling Act (four-year Presidential decree-law power circumventing the Reichstag), the Reichstag conferred dictatorial powers to Chancellor Adolf Hitler, who subsequently personally managed the political emergencies of the German State, by decree. Moreover, then possessing virtually absolute power, the Nazis established totalitarian control; they abolished labour unions and political parties; and imprisoned their political opponents, first at wilde Lager, improvised camps, then in concentration camps. Nazism had been established, yet the Reichswehr remained impartial, Nazi power over Germany remained virtual, not absolute.

Having eliminated the political enemies of his Government and his party, Hitler then purged his rivals from the Nazi Party, especially the allies of Ernst Röhm, leader of the Sturmabteilung (SA), and of Gregor Strasser, leader of the Nazi left wing. In 1934, to ensure the Nazi Government of the Reichswehr’s support, for a coup d’État, they were assassinated during the Night of the Long Knives (30 June–2 July) purges; later, upon the death of President Von Hindenburg, on 2 August 1934, as President and Chancellor of Germany, Adolf Hitler possessed virtually absolute power; yet the Reichswehr was not yet formally obeisant.

In culturally consolidating Nazism as the German way of life, the Hitler government effected the national Nazi boycott of Jewish businesses (1 April 1933), three months upon assuming power; earlier, the Hindenburg Government had haphazardly practiced official anti-Semitism, but the Nazi Nuremberg Laws of 1935 established legal, systematic persecution of the Jews. For international public consumption, visible anti-Semitism was minimised during the 1936 Summer Olympics, but fully reinstated afterwards. In 1936, Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan concorded the Anti-Comintern Pact, countering the foreign policies of the Soviet Union, which, in turn, became the basis for their Tripartite Pact with Italy, the foundation of the Axis Powers.

World War II

Main article: World War II
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Nazism destroyed: Flag of the USSR over the Reichstag . (Yevgeny Khaldei)

The Nazis were determined to retrieve the territories that Germany ceded as per the Treaty of Versailles, to establish Großdeutschland (Greater Germany). This included the Free City of Danzig, to which Poland had limited rights, as per the treaty. When diplomacy failed to secure Danzig, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union (USSR) signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact on 23 August 1939. In 1939, France and the United Kingdom declared war on Germany in response its attack on Poland. Simultaneously, the USSR attacked Poland from the east. Poland was disestablished, and the war among Germany, France and the UK continued.

In 1940, Nazi Germany attacked and defeated the French and British continental forces in France, then occupied the country. The Battle of Britain (July–October 1940) followed and stalled, so Germany then attacked east, believing that when the USSR was vanquished, the UK would sue for peace with Germany. In 1941, Germany and its Axis allies attacked the USSR with Operation Barbarossa (22 June–5 December 1941). Despite initial successes, the Red Army repelled them. After the Battle of Stalingrad (17 July 1942–2 February 1943), the USSR counter-attacked, repelled the Axis invaders from Russia, then progressed west to Germany. On 6 June 1944, the Anglo–American Normandy Invasion landed Allied armies in France, heading east to meet the Red Army in vanquishing Nazi Germany at the Battle of Berlin (16 April–2 May 1945).

Denazification

Main article: Denazification

After Nazi Germany was defeated in World War II, The Allied countries embarked on a campaign to rid German and Austrian society, culture, press, economy, judiciary, and politics of any remnants of Nazism. They removed those involved from positions of influence and disbanded or rendered powerless the organizations associated with the Nazi regime.

Nazism in popular culture

Further information: Adolf Hitler in popular culture and Nazi chic
The New Adventures of Hitler (Crisis No. 48, Stephen Yeowell)

In popular American culture, the terms Nazi, Führer, fascist, Gestapo, and Hitler, are terms of abuse used in describing authoritarian people; hence the American usages grammar Nazi and Feminazi, (see Godwin’s Law of Nazi Analogies). Moreover, the blackletter typefaces Fraktur and Schwabacher are associated with Nazi propaganda, despite the Nazis having proscribed them in 1941.[134][135] In cinema, the Indiana Jones series offers Nazi villains; and the video game website IGN declared Nazis as the most memorable video game villains.[136]

See also

References

Bibliography

Notes

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  2. ^ National Socialism Microsoft Encarta Online Encyclopedia 2007. Archived 2009-11-01.
  3. ^ Walter John Raymond. Dictionary of Politics. (1992). ISBN 155618008X p. 327.
  4. ^ National Socialism The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition. 2001-07.
  5. ^ Fritzsche, Peter. 1998. Germans into Nazis. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
  6. ^ Kele, Max H. (1972). Nazis and Workers: National Socialist Appeals to German Labor, 1919–1933. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press.
  7. ^ Payne, Stanley G. 1995. A History of Fascism, 1914–45. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press.
  8. ^ Eatwell, Roger. 1996. “On Defining the ‘Fascist Minimum,’ the Centrality of Ideology”, Journal of Political Ideologies 1(3):303–19; and Eatwell, Roger. 1997. Fascism: A History. New York: Allen Lane.
  9. ^ Neocleous, Mark. Fascism. Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA: University of Minnesota Press, 1997 p. 23.
  10. ^ Fritzsche, Peter. 1998. Germans into Nazis. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press; Eatwell, Roger, Fascism, A History, Viking/Penguin, 1996, pp. xvii-xxiv, 21, 26–31, 114–140, 352. Griffin, Roger. 2000. "Revolution from the Right: Fascism," chapter in David Parker (ed.) Revolutions and the Revolutionary Tradition in the West 1560-1991, Routledge, London.
  11. ^ Davies, Peter; Dereck Lynch (2003). Routledge Companion to Fascism and the Far Right. Routledge, p. 103. ISBN 0415214955.
  12. ^ a b Hayek, Friedrich (1944). The Road to Serfdom. Routledge. ISBN 0415253896.
  13. ^ Hoover, Calvin B. (March 1935). “The Paths of Economic Change: Contrasting Tendencies in the Modern World”, The American Economic Review, Vol. 25, No. 1, Supplement, Papers and Proceedings of the Forty-seventh Annual Meeting of the American Economic Association, pp. 13–20.
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  15. ^ The Nazi Economic Recovery, 1932-1938 R. J. Overy, Economic History Society.
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  17. ^ The German name of the Nazi Party ("National-Socialist German Workers’ Party") is the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, pronounced German pronunciation: [natsjoˈnaːlzotsiaːˌlistiʃə ˈdɔytʃə ˈarbaitɐparˌtai] (Arbeiter "worker").
  18. ^ The term Sozi (/zoːtsi/) is short for the German word Sozialdemokrat (pronounced /zo'tsjaːldemoˌkraːt/), meaning social democrat.
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  23. ^ Ryback, Timothy W. Hitler's Private Library: The Books That Shaped His Life. New York; Toronto: Vintage Books, 2010. p. 129
  24. ^ Ryback, Timothy W. Hitler's Private Library: The Books That Shaped His Life. New York; Toronto: Vintage Books, 2010. p. 129
  25. ^ Ryback, Timothy W. Hitler's Private Library: The Books That Shaped His Life. New York; Toronto: Vintage Books, 2010. p. 129
  26. ^ Ryback, Timothy W. Hitler's Private Library: The Books That Shaped His Life. New York; Toronto: Vintage Books, 2010. p. 129
  27. ^ Ryback, Timothy W. Hitler's Private Library: The Books That Shaped His Life. New York; Toronto: Vintage Books, 2010. p. 130.
  28. ^ Ryback, Timothy W. Hitler's Private Library: The Books That Shaped His Life. New York; Toronto: Vintage Books, 2010. p. 130
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  32. ^ Stackelberg, Roderick; Winkle, Sally Anne. The Nazi Germany sourcebook: an anthology of texts. London, England, UK: Routledge, 2002 p. 11.
  33. ^ Stackelberg, Roderick; Winkle, Sally Anne. The Nazi Germany sourcebook: an anthology of texts. London, England, UK: Routledge, 2002. p. 11.
  34. ^ Stackelberg, Roderick; Winkle, Sally Anne. The Nazi Germany sourcebook: an anthology of texts. London, England, UK: Routledge, 2002. p. 11.
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  62. ^ Enzo Collotti, Race Law in Italy, in: Christoph Dipper et al., Faschismus und Faschismen im Vergleich, Vierow 1998. ISBN 3-89498-045-1.
  63. ^ cf. Roger Griffin, The Blackwell Dictionary of Social Thought, “International Fascism”, 35f., and Anthony Paxton, Anatomy of Fascism, London 2004, p. 218, and Stanley Payne, A History of Fascism 1914–1945, University of Wisconsin Press 1995, p. 14.
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  74. ^ "They must unite, he [Hitler] said, to defeat the common enemy, Jewish Marxism." A New Beginning, Adolf Hitler, Völkischer Beobachter. February 1925. Cited in: Toland, John (1992). Adolf Hitler. Anchor Books. p. 207. 
  75. ^ Cited in: Kershaw, Ian (2008). Hitler, the Germans, and the Final Solution. Yale University Press. p. 53. 
  76. ^ Hitler’s speech on May 1, 1927. Cited in: Toland, John (1992). Adolf Hitler. Anchor Books. pp. 224–225. 
  77. ^ Henry A. Turner, German Big Business and the Rise of Hitler, Oxford University Press, 1985. p. 77.
  78. ^ Turner, Henry Ashby (1985). German Big Business and the Rise of Hitler. Oxford University Press. p. 114. ISBN 0195034929. 
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  85. ^ Ball, Terence and Bellamy, Richard (2003). The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century Political Thought, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-56354-2
  86. ^ “BBC - History - Hitler and 'Lebensraum' in the East” (history), www.bbc.co.uk, 2004, webpage: Lebensraum.
  87. ^ Hitler, Adolf (1961). Hitler's Secret Book. New York: Grove Press. pp. 8–9, 17–18. ISBN 0394620038. OCLC 9830111. "Sparta must be regarded as the first Völkisch State. The exposure of the sick, weak, deformed children, in short, their destruction, was more decent and in truth a thousand times more humane than the wretched insanity of our day which preserves the most pathological subject." 
  88. ^ Mike Hawkins (1997). Social Darwinism in European and American Thought, 1860–1945: nature as model and nature as threat. Cambridge University Press. pp. 276. ISBN 052157434X. OCLC 34705047. http://books.google.com/books?id=SszNCxSKmgkC&pg=PA276&dq=Hitler%27s+Secret+Book+sparta&ie=ISO-8859-1&sig=q5g40V7M6bHFNX8pm4ZD65FxH6s#PPA276,M1. 
  89. ^ Called “transnational” Michael Mann, see references.
  90. ^ Plant, 1986, p. 99.
  91. ^ Bennetto, Jason (1997-11-01). "Holocaust: Gay activists press for German apology". The Independent. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4158/is_/ai_n14142669. Retrieved 2008-12-26. 
  92. ^ The Holocaust Chronicle, Publications International Ltd., p. 108.
  93. ^ Plant, Richard, The Pink Triangle: The Nazi War Against Homosexuals, Owl Books, 1988, ISBN 0-8050-0600-1.
  94. ^ Davidson, Eugene. The Trial of the Germans Originally published: New York : Macmillan, 1966. Republished by University of Missouri Press, 1997. p. 527. <googlebooks.com>
  95. ^ "Nuremberg Trial Proceedings Vol. 7" (Feb 8, 1946) The Avalon Project Documents in Law, History and Diplomacy Accessed: 2008-10-25. <http://avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/02-08-46.asp>
  96. ^ Piotrowski, Tadeusz. Poland's Holocaust: Ethnic Strife, Collaboration with Occupying Forces and Genocide in the Second Republic, 1918-1947 McFarland, 1998. NC. p. 28. <googlebooks.com>
  97. ^ Bergen, Doris L. War and Genocide: A Concise History of the Holocaust p. 105. Published by Rowman & Littlefield, 2003 <googlebooks.com>
  98. ^ "The Trial of German Major War Criminals, Sitting at Nuremberg, Germany" (January 8, 1946) The Nizkor Project <http://www.nizkor.org/hweb/imt/tgmwc/tgmwc-04/tgmwc-04-29-02.shtml>: For example, "Entire 'Kreise' (districts) remained thus completely deprived of clergy. In the city of Poznan itself the spiritual care of some 200,000 Catholics remained in the hands of not more than four priests."
  99. ^ Holy War "TIME" May 31, 1937 <http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,847866,00.html>>: '[Hitler] had long been lining up "evidence" to prove that German Catholic monasteries were hotbeds of immorality. In a climactic, triumphant effort to squelch Catholicism on Aryan soil he threw all the immorality trials into the courts at the same time. He hoped that wholesale convictions would destroy the prestige of the Catholic Church for good, that the Reich's 2,000,000 or so Catholic children would be transformed without a hitch into little Brown Shirts.'
  100. ^ Trial of German Major War Criminals (Volume 3) Dec. 17, 1945. The Nizkor Project <http://www.nizkor.org/hweb/imt/tgmwc/tgmwc-03/tgmwc-03-21-16.html>"The struggle against the Church did, in fact, become ever more bitter, there was the dissolution of Catholic organisations; ...the systematic defamation, by means of a clever, closely organised propaganda, of the Church, the clergy . . . in the summer of 1942, 480 German-speaking ministers of religion were known to be gathered there; of these, 45 were Protestants, all the others Catholic priests. In spite of the continuous inflow of new internees, especially from dioceses of Bavaria, Rhenania and Westphalia, their number, as a result of the high rate of mortality, at the beginning of this year did not surpass 350. Nor should we pass over in silence those belonging to occupied territories (esp. in predominantly Catholic Poland), Holland, Belgium, France (among whom the Bishop of Clermont), Luxembourg, Slovenia, Italy and Hungary. Many of those priests and laymen endured indescribable sufferings for their faith and for their vocation".
  101. ^ The Trial of German Major War Criminals (Volume 1) Nov. 21, 1945 The Nizkor Project <http://www.nizkor.org/hweb/imt/tgmwc/tgmwc-01/tgmwc-01-02-04.html> >: "A most intense drive was directed against the Roman Catholic Church. After a strategic Concordat with the Holy See, signed in July, 1933, in Rome, which never was observed by the Nazi Party, a long and persistent persecution of the Catholic Church, its priesthood and its members, was carried out...Priests and bishops were laid upon, riots were stimulated to harass them, and many were sent to concentration camps."
  102. ^ Nizkor Nazi Conspiracy & Aggression Volume II, Criminality of Groups and Organizations, The Geheime Staatspolizei (Gestapo) & Sicherheitsdienst The Nizkor Project <http://www.nizkor.org/hweb/imt/nca/nca-02/nca-02-15-criminality-06-07.html>: '(2) The GESTAPO and the SD were primary agencies for the persecution of the churches. The fight against the churches was never brought out into the open by the GESTAPO and the SD as in the case of the persecution of the Jews. The struggle was designed to weaken the churches and to lay a foundation for the ultimate destruction of the confessional churches after the end of the war. (1815-PS) [. . . .] The notes on the speeches delivered at this conference indicate that the GESTAPO considered the church as an enemy to be attacked with determination and "true fanaticism."...'
  103. ^ a b Steigmann-Gall 2003.
  104. ^ Johnson, Eric A. Nazi Terror: The Gestapo, Jews, and Ordinary Germans Basic Books, 2000. NY pp. 234-235 <googlebooks.com>
  105. ^ Goodrick-Clarke 1985: 149 and 2003: 114.
  106. ^ per the diary of Johannes Hering; Goodrick-Clarke (2002), Black Sun, pp. 116-17.
  107. ^ Goodrick-Clarke (2002), pp. 114, 117.
  108. ^ Goodrick-Clarke 2002: 117.
  109. ^ Goodrick-Clarke (1985), pp. 150–51.
  110. ^ Scholarship for Martin Luther’s 1543 treatise, On the Jews and their Lies, exercising influence on Germany’s attitude:
    • Wallmann, Johannes. “The Reception of Luther’s Writings on the Jews from the Reformation to the End of the 19th Century”, Lutheran Quarterly, n.s. 1 (Spring 1987) 1:72–97. Wallmann writes: “The assertion that Luther’s expressions of anti-Jewish sentiment have been of major and persistent influence in the centuries after the Reformation, and that there exists a continuity between Protestant anti-Judaism and modern racially oriented anti-Semitism, is at present wide-spread in the literature; since the Second World War it has understandably become the prevailing opinion.”
    • Michael, Robert. Holy Hatred: Christianity, Antisemitism, and the Holocaust. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006; see chapter 4 “The Germanies from Luther to Hitler,” pp. 105–151.
    • Hillerbrand, Hans J. “Martin Luther,” Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2007. Hillerbrand writes: “[H]is strident pronouncements against the Jews, especially toward the end of his life, have raised the question of whether Luther significantly encouraged the development of German anti-Semitism. Although many scholars have taken this view, this perspective puts far too much emphasis on Luther and not enough on the larger peculiarities of German history.”
  111. ^ Ellis, Marc H. “Hitler and the Holocaust, Christian Anti-Semitism”, Baylor University Center for American and Jewish Studies, Spring 2004, slide 14. Also see Nuremberg Trial Proceedings, Vol. 12, p. 318, Avalon Project, Yale Law School, April 19, 1946.
  112. ^ Bernd Nellessen, “Die schweigende Kirche: Katholiken und Judenverfolgung,” in Büttner (ed), Die Deutchschen und die Jugendverfolg im Dritten Reich, p. 265, cited in Daniel Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners (Vintage, 1997)
  113. ^ Wallmann, Johannes. “The Reception of Luther’s Writings on the Jews from the Reformation to the End of the 19th Century”, Lutheran Quarterly, n.s. 1, Spring 1987, 1:72-97
  114. ^ Diarmaid MacCulloch, Reformation: Europe's House Divided, 1490–1700. New York: Penguin Books Ltd, 2004, pp. 666–667.
  115. ^ Evans, The Third Reich in Power, 1933–1939, Penguin Press, 2005, p. 409)
  116. ^ a b Peter Temin (November 1991), Economic History Review, New Series 44, No.4: 573–593 
  117. ^ Guillebaud, Claude W. 1939. The Economic Recovery of Germany 1933-1938. London: MacMillan and Co. Limited.
  118. ^ Barkai, Avaraham 1990. Nazi Economics. Ideology, Theory and Policy. Oxford Berg Publisher.
  119. ^ Hayes, Peter. 1987 Industry and Ideology IG Farben in the Nazi Era. Cambridge University Press.
  120. ^ Hitler, A.; transl. Norman Cameron, R. H. Stevens; intro. H. R. Trevor-Roper (2000). "March 24, 1942". Hitler’s Table Talk, 1941–1944: His Private Conversations. Enigma Books. pp. 162–163. ISBN 1929631057. 
  121. ^ Christoph Buchheim (27Jun2006), "The Role of Private Property in the Nazi Economy: The Case of Industry", The Journal of Economic History: 390–416 
  122. ^ Philip C. Newman (August 1948), "Key German Cartels under the Nazi Regime", The Quarterly Journal of Economics Vol. 62, No. 4: 576–595 
  123. ^ Arthur Scheweitzer (Nov., 1946), "Profits Under Nazi Planning", The Quarterly Journal of Economics Vol. 61, No. 1: 5 
  124. ^ Hannah Arendt, Elemente der Ursprünge totalitärer Herrschaft = The Origins of Totalitarianism, New York 1952, Bern 1955.
  125. ^ Michael Mann, Fascists, CUP 2004, p. 13.
  126. ^ Sternhell.
  127. ^ Tombs pp. 85, 114
  128. ^ a b c d e “February 24, 1920: Nazi Party Established” (history), Yad Vashem, The Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority, 2004, webpage: YV-Party.
  129. ^ “Nazi Party” (overview), Encyclopædia Britannica, 2006, Britannica.com webpage: Britannica-NaziParty.
  130. ^ “Australian Memories of the Holocaust” (history), Glossary, definition of Nazi (party), N.S.W. Board of Jewish Education, New South Wales, Australia,HolocaustComAu-Glossary
  131. ^ “Lexicon: Dolchstosslegende” (definition), www.icons-multimedia.com, 2005, webpage: DolchSL.
  132. ^ “Florida Holocaust Museum - Antisemitism - Post World War 1” (history), www.flholocaustmuseum.org, 2003, webpage: Post-WWI Antisemitism.
  133. ^ “THHP Short Essay: Who was the Final Solution” Holocaust-History.org, July 2004, webpage: HoloHist-Final: notes that Hermann Göering used the term in his order of July 31, 1941 to Reinhard Heydrich of Reich Main Security.
  134. ^ NAZI and Fraktur.
  135. ^ "Schwabach SPD". Spd-schwabach.de. http://www.spd-schwabach.de/content/service/schrift/. Retrieved 2009-02-27. 
  136. ^ "IGN: Top 10 Tuesday: Most Memorable Villains". Cube.ign.com. 2006-03-07. http://cube.ign.com/articles/694/694410p1.html. Retrieved 2009-02-27. 

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