Nazism



Nazism



"Nazi" redirects here. For the Sumerian deity, see Nazi (god).
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Nazism (Nationalsozialismus, National Socialism), is the ideology and practice of the Nazi Party and of Nazi Germany.[1][2][3] [4][5][6][7][8] It is a politically syncretic variety of fascism that incorporates policies, tactics and philosophies from right- and left-wing ideologies; in practice, Nazism is a far right form of politics.[9]

In post-World War I Weimar Germany, the Nazis were among 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, collectivism, social Darwinism, eugenics, anti-Semitism, anti-communism, totalitarianism, and opposition to economic and political liberalism.[10][11][11][12][13] Yet, by the 1930s, despite such intellectual bases, Nazism was not a specific ideology, but a conflation of ideas, concepts, and philosophies meant to realise the mythic ethnostate of GroíŸdeutschland (Greater Germany).

To rescue Germany from the socio-economic chaos established by the world-wide Great Depression, Nazism promoted a politico-economic "Third Way"; a managed economy, neither capitalist nor communist.[14][15] The far-right character of Nazism was established with the purging of the anti-capitalist Black Front and Strasserism, leftist Nazi sub-groups motivated by nationalist rancour towards Germany's conditions under the Treaty of Versailles, and a perceived internal Judí¦o-Bolshevist conspiracy that abetted military defeat. The defeat-induced 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 Deutsches Reich, 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. Due to Nazism's racism and antisemitism, the term Nazi and affiliated ideas and symbols (e.g. the Swastika, SS runes, SS uniforms) denote and connote white supremacist racism in Europe and North America.

Contents

Etymology

The term Nazi derives from the first two syllables of Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (National Socialist German Workers' Party).[16] 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).[17][18] 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.[18]

Ideology

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 It has been suggested that National Socialism be merged into this article or section. (Discuss)

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. Led by Adolf Hitler, the Nazis advocated a strong, central government, under the Fí¼hrer, for defending Germany, and the Volksdeutsche (ethnic Germans), against communism and Jewish subversion. To the end of establishing GroíŸdeutschland (Greater Germany), the German peoples must acquire Lebensraum (living space) from Russia, Joseph Stalin's Soviet Union of the 1930s.[19]

Greater Germany in 1943

The racist subject of National Socialism 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.[19] 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 Fí¼hrerprinzip (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.[19]

Nazism: Adolf Hitler, the Fí¼hrer of Nazi Germany.

Intellectually, Hitler little considered and questioned the empire of which he was a citizen; moreover, disliking its multi-cultural society, he concluded that ethnic and linguistic diversity had weakened the Austro-Hungarian Empire, thus the 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. In the 1920-23 quadrennium, Hitler formulated his ideology, then published it in 1925-26, as Mein Kampf , a two-volume, biography and political letter-of-intent.[20]

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 Hitler assumed command of its successor, the Nazi Party, the politico-ideologic substance of Nazism concorded with his political beliefs - man and idea as political entity, the Fí¼hrer.


Fascism

Roman fasces: the corpus of Government and People.

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.[21] Usually supported by the far right (military, business, Church), fascism is also historically anti-communist, anti-conservative and anti-parliamentary.[22]

The Italian fascists proposed a corporatist "organic state" that required uniting the classes of society, like a fasces. Moreover, because fascism exalted the state and the nation, Italian fascist ideology lacked racial theories and official racism. German Nazism, however, over-emphasized the Aryan race Herrenvolk concept until reducing the German state to mere means to an ideologic end. Furthermore, blond-blue-eyed-Aryanism was unpopluar 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.[23]

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.[24] Moreover, fascist and Nazi criminalities developed comparably, for example the coups d'état of Benito Mussolini's successful March on Rome and Adolf Hitler's failed Munich Beer Hall Putsch.

Ultra-nationalism

Nazi Germany was ideologically based upon the racially-defined Deutsche Volk (German People), which denied the limitations of nationalism.[25] 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 GroíŸdeutschland, 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 Fí¼hrer (One People, One Empire, One Leader).

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 GroíŸdeutschland.

Anti-capitalist rhetoric

Given its politically syncretic nature, Nazism appealed to every class of voter with custom-tailored politics promising social stability, employment, and national pride, in helping the Fí¼hrer and the Third Reich to establish the pan-German GroíŸdeutschland. Moreover, in opposing finance capitalism, the Nazis especially emphasized "the Jewish conspiracy" of bankers who truly controlled international finance, and thus the the countries of the world.[26]

Early Nazi rhetoric included anti-capitalism, especially anti-finance capitalism; [15] in attacking the ills of Weimar democracy, Adolf Hitler identified the "pluto-democracy" Jewish conspiracy that favoured liberal, democratic parties, in order to maintain the integrity of capitalism.[27] Furthermore, ideologically orthodox leftist Nazis attacked the corporation as the leading instrument of finance capitalism's oppression of the worker (later, they were purged from the party); nonetheless, throughout his politcal campaigning, Hitler emphasized the background role of Jewish financiers in the ills of Weimar democracy.[28] 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.[29]

Despite such demands, during the 1920s, Nazi Party officials variously attempted either to change or to replace the National Socialist Program. In 1924, the Party economist theoretician Gottfried Feder proposed a new, 39-point program, retaining some old and introducing some new ideas.[30] Hitler did not directly mention the program in Mein Kampf; he only mentioned "the so-called programme of the movement".[31] In 1927, expounding the Nazi Party's socialism, 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".[32]

Yet two years later, in 1929, Hitler corrected himself, saying that socialism was "an unfortunate word altogether" to have used; dissembling, he said: "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.[33] In 1930, Hitler further disambiguated the socialist misnomer matter, saying: "Our adopted term 'Socialist' has nothing to do with Marxian Socialism. Marxism is anti-property; true Socialism is not".[34] In 1931, during a confidential interview, to 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.[35]

In 1932, Nazi Party spokesman Joseph Goebbels said that the Nazi Party was a "workers' party", "on the side of labour, and against finance".[36]

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".[37]

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 naí¯ve 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.[38]

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.[39] [39] 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.[39] 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).[39]

Racism

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

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".[40] According to Terrence Ball and Richard Bellamy, The Myth of the Twentieth Century is the second-most important book to Nazism, after Mein Kampf.[41]

The Master Race: the Meyers Blitz-Lexikon (Leipzig, 1932) depicts German war hero Karl von Mí¼ller 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); few joined.

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.[42]

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 Endlí¶sung (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 Ví¶lkisch state; he praised their dispassionate destruction of congenitally-deformed infants in maintaining racial purity: [43][44] "Sparta must be regarded as the first Ví¶lkisch 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."[36]

Anti-homosexuality

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 Rí¶hm diminished, the Nazi Party purged the homophile clubs where gay, lesbian, and bisexual Berliners congregated, then outlawed academic and pornographic sexual publications, and organized homosexual societies, forcing the emigration of the likes of the actress and writer Erika Mann, and the novelist Richard Plaut. In March 1933, Kurt Hiller, the organizer of Magnus Hirschfeld's Institut fí¼r Sexualwissenschaft (Institute of Sex Research), was imprisoned to a concentration camp; the Nazi régime incarcerated some 100,000 homosexuals during the 1930s.[45]

On 6 May 1933, Hitler Youth of the Deutsche Studentenschaft attack on the Institute of Sex Research, and later publicly incinerated its library and archives, in the streets of the Opernplatz, destroying some 20,000 books and journals, and some 5,000 images. The Hitler Youth also seized the Institute's rosters of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender patients. During the book-burnings, Joseph Goebbels formally addressed a crowd of some 40,000 people.

Initially, Hitler had protected Rí¶hm from Nazis who considered his homosexuality a violation of the Party's anti-homosexual policy; when Rí¶hm proved a politically-viable challenger to his leadership of the Nazi Party, Hitler betrayed him. Hence, in 1934, with the Night of the Long Knives (30 June-2 July), Hitler assassinated every feasible Nazi political opponent; Ernst Rí¶hm's killing was justified because he was homosexual, and to suppress moral outrage in the Brownshirt Sturmabteilung (SA) ranks.

Schutzstaffel (SS) Chief Heinrich Himmler, also an initial supporter of Rí¶hm, defended him against charges of homosexuality, arguing they were the fabrications of a Jewish character-assassination conspiracy. After the Night of the Long Knives purge, Hitler promoted Himmler, who then zealously suppressed homosexuality, explaining that: "We must exterminate these people root and branch . . . the homosexual must be eliminated."[46] In 1936, Himmler established the Reich Central Office for the Combating of Homosexuality and Abortion; homosexuality was officially declared contrary to "wholesome popular sentiment", identifying gay men as "defilers of German blood"; as concentration camp prisoners, they wore a pink triangle idenfying them as such.[47][48]

Nazi anti-homosexual laws did not much persecute lesbians, because they considered female homosexuals easier to persuade or to compel to conformity with the heterosexual mores of patriarchy; nonetheless, lesbians remained a cultural threat to Nazi Germany's family values, and so, often were legally identified as anti-social elements. (See: Black triangle (badge), Persecution of homosexuals in Nazi Germany and the Holocaust)

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."[49][50] To demoralize Poland, the Nazis killed almost 16 per cent of the Polish Catholic clergy; 13 of 38 Bishops were sent to concentration camps.[51][52] These actions, and the closing of churches, seminaries and other religious insitutions, almost succeeded in exterminating the Polish clergy.[53]

In pro-Nazi countries, fascist anti-clericalism was unofficial, and was usually manifested in the arrests of select clergy via false charges of immorality, [54][55] 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.[56][57] 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 Fí¼hrer ("One People, One Empire, One Leader").[58] [59]

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.[60] 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.[61] 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.[62] Dietrich Eckart, an associate of the Thule Society, coached Adolf Hitler as a public speaker, and Hitler later dedicated Mein Kampf to Eckart.[63] 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.[64] In contrast, SS Chief Heinrich Himmler was much interested in the occult.[58]

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 Stí¼rmer, which described Luther's treatise as the most radically anti-Semitic tract ever published.[65] [66]

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."[67] 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.[68] Nonetheless, Prof. Diarmaid MacCulloch said that On the Jews and Their Lies was the blueprint for Kristallnacht.[69]

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 manÅ“uvred 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."[70]

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 .[71] 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.[72] 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.[73][74] In 1942, Hitler privately said: "I absolutely insist on protecting private property ... we must encourage private initiative".[75]

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.[76]

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.[77]

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.[78] 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.[71]

Ideologic 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 Rí¶hm, 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).[79][80]

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).

Anti-communist support

Spanish fascism: Falange Española de las J.O.N.S.
British fascism: British Union of Fascists.

After Italian Prime Minister Benito Mussolini's National Fascist Party (Partito Nazionale Fascista) assumed Italian government in 1922, Italian Fascism became a respectable, politically realistic opposition to Marxist Communism - especially after the Fascist Blackshirt suppression of Communist and anarchist parties and movements, who had destabilized post-Great War Italy with strikes and factory occupations.

Mussolini's success fomented fascist political parties forming throughout Europe. Historians Ian Kershaw and Joachim Fest propose that, in post-war Germany, Hitler's 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, ideologically sympathetic countries supported Nazism; the Falange in Spain, Vichy France, and the Legion of French Volunteers against Bolshevism (Wehrmacht Infantry Regiment 638), and, in Britain, the Cliveden set, Lord Halifax, and associates of Neville Chamberlain, who sympathized with Nazism and perceived Nazi Germany as the defence against Bolshevism.[81]

Ideologic roots and variants

Rudolf von Sebottendorff: bust by German sculptor Hanns Goebl

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 íœbermensch ("Superman"). Such ideas, as espoused by the Ariosophe Germanenorden (German Order) and the Thule society much influenced Adolf Hitler's world-view; to that pseudo-intellectual base, he incorporated populist policies, such as limiting profits, abolishing rents, and generous social benefits - but only for German gentiles.

In the Tree of Hate (1985), Phillip Wayne Powell reports 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."[82] M.W. Fodor claimed 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".[83]

During the 1920s and 1930s, Nazism was ideologically heterogeneous, comprising two sub-ideologies, those of Otto Strasser and of Adolf 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 remaining in the Party, mostly of the Sturmabteilung (SA), were assassinated in the Night of the Long Knives purge, including Gregor Strasser, Otto's brother.

History

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The "Dagger-stab-in-the-back Legend": A Jew dagger-stabbing the German Army in the back. The capitulation was fault of an unpatriotic populace, Socialists, Bolsheviks, the Weimar Republic, and the Jews. (1919)

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") [84] 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 Ví¶lkisch movement and their politics of Romantic nationalism for establishing a GroíŸdeutschland were strong.[85][86] The seminal ideas of Nazism originated in the German cultural past of the Ví¶lkisch (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.[87]

Origin

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).[88][87] 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.[87][89] On 24 February 1920, the DAP was renamed the National Socialist German Workers' Party, against Hitler's preferred "Social Revolutionary Party" name.[87] [90][91] Later, in consolidating his control of the NSDAP, Hitler ousted Drexler from the party and assumed leadership on 29 July 1921.[87][91]

Ascension

Ní¼rnberg, Reichs Party Day: Nazi Party Leader Adolf Hitler and SA Leader Ernst Rí¶hm, 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 GroíŸdeutsches Reich (Greater German Reich). In 1934, its first year in power, the Nazi Party announced that the Dritte Reich was to be a Tausendjí¤hriges Reich (Thousand Year Empire); but lasted only twelve years.

Consolidation

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 Rí¶hm, 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'í‰tat, 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.

Foreign responses

Three grim-faced men walk through a hallway
Neville Chamberlain and Adolf Hitler, at the Bad Gí¶desberg meeting, 23 September 1938.

From the mid-1930s, the British and French governments generally appeased the Nazi régime and its rearmament breaching of the Treaty of Versailles. Despite Anglo-French criticism of Nazi treaty breaches, Germany established totalitarian and anti-Semitic public policies. Especially in Britain, the appeasement of Nazism was partly based upon the erroneous presumption that Adolf Hitler would not precipitate a second world war; despite already having served notice in Mein Kampf, wherein he explicitly commits to such a revanchist war.

Later, when Nazi militarism could not be ignored, the militarily-unprepared British and French continued their appeasement of Nazism. Winston Churchill noted that appeasement worsened the Nazi German threat:

You were given the choice between war and dishonour. You chose dishonour, and you will have war. If you will not fight for the right when you can easily win without bloodshed; if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not too costly, you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds are against you, and only a precarious chance of survival. There may even be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than live as slaves.

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)

As revanchists, the Nazis were determined to retrieve the territories Germany ceded per the Treaty of Versailles, to establish GroíŸdeutschland (Greater Germany), which would comprise the Free City of Danzig, to which Poland had limited rights per the treaty. When diplomacy failed to secure Danzig, the Nazis and the USSR signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact (23 August 1939) for aiding Nazi Germany in a war with Poland. In 1939, France and the United Kingdom declared war on Germany in response its (westwards) 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, 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 Nazi 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 Nazi Germany. On 6 June 1944, the Anglo-American Normandy Invasion landed Allied armies in France, heading east en route to meeting the Red Army in vanquishing the Third Reich at the Battle of Berlin (16 April-2 May 1945).

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, Fí¼hrer, 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. [92][93] In cinema, the Indiana Jones series offers Nazi villains; and the video game website IGN declared Nazis as the most memorable video game villains.[94]


See also


References

Bibliography

Notes

  1. ^ National Socialism Encyclopí¦dia Britannica.
  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. ^ 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.
  10. ^ Davies, Peter; Dereck Lynch (2003). Routledge Companion to Fascism and the Far Right. Routledge, p.103. ISBN 0415214955.
  11. ^ a b Hayek, Friedrich (1944). The Road to Serfdom. Routledge. ISBN 0415253896.
  12. ^ 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.
  13. ^ Morgan, Philip (2003). Fascism in Europe, 1919-1945. Routledge, p. 168. ISBN 0415169429.
  14. ^ The Nazi Economic Recovery, 1932-1938 R. J. Overy, Economic History Society.
  15. ^ a b Francis R. Nicosia. Business and Industry in Nazi Germany, Berghan Books, p. 43.
  16. ^ The German name of the Nazi Party ("National-Socialist German Workers' Party") is the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, pronounced German pronunciation: [natsjoˈnaËlzotsiaËËŒlistiʃə ˈdÉ”ytʃə ˈarbaitÉparËŒtai] (Arbeiter "worker").
  17. ^ The term Sozi (/zoËtsi/) is short for the German word Sozialdemokrat (pronounced /zo'tsjaËldemoËŒkraËt/), meaning social democrat.
  18. ^ a b Franz H. Mautner (1944). "Nazi und Sozi". Modern Language Notes 59 (2): 93-100. doi:10.2307/2910599. 
  19. ^ a b c Ian Kershaw, Hitler: A Profile in Power, (London, 1991, rev. 2001), first chapter.
  20. ^ Ian Kershaw, 1991, chapter I.
  21. ^ Ernst Nolte, Der Faschismus in seiner Epoche (Fascism in its Epoch), Mí¼nchen 1963, ISBN 3-492-02448-3.
  22. ^ Laqueuer, 1996 p. 223; Eatwell, 1996, p. 39; Griffin, 1991, 2000, p. 185-201; Weber, [1964] 1982, p. 8; Payne (1995), Fritzsche (1990), Laclau (1977), and Reich (1970).
  23. ^ Enzo Collotti, Race Law in Italy, in: Christoph Dipper et al., Faschismus und Faschismen im Vergleich, Vierow 1998. ISBN 3-89498-045-1.
  24. ^ 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.
  25. ^ Called "transnational" Michael Mann, see references.
  26. ^ Bealey, Frank; et al. (1999). Elements of Political Science. Edinburgh University Press, p. 202.
  27. ^ Frank Bealey & others. Elements of Political Science (Edinburgh University Press, 1999), 202.
  28. ^ William Kessler (Dec., 1938), "The German Corporation Law of 1937", The American Economic Review Vol. 28, No. 4: 653-662 
  29. ^ Lee, Stephen J. (1996), Weimar and Nazi Germany, Harcourt Heinemann, p. 28.
  30. ^ Henry A. Turner, German Big Business and the Rise of Hitler, Oxford University Press, 1985. p. 62.
  31. ^ Turner, Henry A. (1985). German Big Business and the Rise of Hitler, Oxford University Press, p. 77. ISBN 0195034929.
  32. ^ Hitler's speech on May 1, 1927. Cited in: Toland, John (1976). Adolf Hitler. Doubleday. p. 306. 
  33. ^ Henry A. Turner, German Big Business and the Rise of Hitler, Oxford University Press, 1985. p. 77.
  34. ^ Carsten, Francis Ludwig (1982).The Rise of Fascism, 2nd ed. University of California Press, p.137. Quoting: Hitler, A., Sunday Express, September 28, 1930.
  35. ^ Calic, Edouard (1968). Ohne Maske (Without a Mask), Frankfurter Societí¤ts-Druckerei, pp. 11, 32-33. Translated by R.H. Barry as Unmasked: Two Confidential Interviews with Hitler in 1931., London: Chatto & Windus, 1971. ISBN 0701116420. Hitler's confidential 1931 interviews were with Richard Breiting, editor of the Leipziger Neueste Nachrichten. Cited in: Bel, Germí  (2006). Against The Mainstream: Nazi Privatization In 1930s Germany, Research Institute of Applied Economics 2006 Working Papers 2006/7, p. 14. Also cited in Richard Pipes, Property and Freedom, 1998, p.416; which is cited in Richard Allen Epstein, Principles for a Free Society, De Capo Press, p. 168. ISBN 0738208299.
  36. ^ a b Goebbels, Joseph; Mjí¶lnir (1932). Die verfluchten Hakenkreuzler. Etwas zum Nachdenken. Munich: Franz Eher Nachfolger. English translation: Those Damned Nazis.
  37. ^ Turner, Henry Ashby (1985). German Big Business and the Rise of Hitler. Oxford University Press. p. 114. ISBN 0195034929. 
  38. ^ Burleigh, Michael. 2000. The Third Reich: A New History. New York, USA: Hill and Wang. pp. 76-77.
  39. ^ a b c d Burleigh, 2000. p. 77.
  40. ^ Alfred Rosenberg: Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts. Eine Wertung der seelisch-geistigen Gestaltenkí¤mpfe unserer Zeit, 1-34. Aufl., Mí¼nchen 1934
  41. ^ Ball, Terence and Bellamy, Richard (2003). The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century Political Thought, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-56354-2
  42. ^ "BBC - History - Hitler and 'Lebensraum' in the East" (history), www.bbc.co.uk, 2004, webpage: Lebensraum.
  43. ^ 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 Ví¶lkisch 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." 
  44. ^ 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. 
  45. ^ 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. 
  46. ^ Plant, 1986, p. 99.
  47. ^ The Holocaust Chronicle, Publications International Ltd., p. 108.
  48. ^ Plant, Richard, The Pink Triangle: The Nazi War Against Homosexuals, Owl Books, 1988, ISBN 0-8050-0600-1.
  49. ^ Davidson, Eugene. The Trial of the Germans Originally published: New York : Macmillan, 1966. Republished by University of Missouri Press, 1997. p. 527. <googlebooks.com>
  50. ^ "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>
  51. ^ 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>
  52. ^ Bergen, Doris L. War and Genocide: A Concise History of the Holocaust p. 105. Published by Rowman & Littlefield, 2003 <googlebooks.com>
  53. ^ "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."
  54. ^ 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.'
  55. ^ 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, Holland, Belgium, France (among whom the Bishop of Clermont), Luxembourg, Slovenia, Italy. Many of those priests and laymen endured indescribable sufferings for their faith and for their vocation".
  56. ^ 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."
  57. ^ 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."...'
  58. ^ a b Steigmann-Gall 2003.
  59. ^ Johnson, Eric A. Nazi Terror: The Gestapo, Jews, and Ordinary Germans Basic Books, 2000. NY pp. 234-235 <googlebooks.com>
  60. ^ Goodrick-Clarke 1985: 149 and 2003: 114.
  61. ^ per the diary of Johannes Hering; Goodrick-Clarke (2002), Black Sun, pp. 116-17.
  62. ^ Goodrick-Clarke (2002), pp. 114, 117.
  63. ^ Goodrick-Clarke 2002: 117.
  64. ^ Goodrick-Clarke (1985), pp. 150-51.
  65. ^ 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."
  66. ^ 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.
  67. ^ Bernd Nellessen, "Die schweigende Kirche: Katholiken und Judenverfolgung," in Bí¼ttner (ed), Die Deutchschen und die Jugendverfolg im Dritten Reich, p. 265, cited in Daniel Goldhagen, Hitler's Willing Executioners (Vintage, 1997)
  68. ^ 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
  69. ^ Diarmaid MacCulloch, Reformation: Europe's House Divided, 1490-1700. New York: Penguin Books Ltd, 2004, pp. 666-667.
  70. ^ Evans, The Third Reich in Power, 1933-1939, Penguin Press, 2005, p. 409)
  71. ^ a b Peter Temin (November 1991), Economic History Review, New Series 44, No.4: 573-593 
  72. ^ Guillebaud, Claude W. 1939. The Economic Recovery of Germany 1933-1938. London: MacMillan and Co. Limited.
  73. ^ Barkai, Avaraham 1990. Nazi Economics. Ideology, Theory and Policy. Oxford Berg Publisher.
  74. ^ Hayes, Peter. 1987 Industry and Ideology IG Farben in the Nazi Era. Cambridge University Press.
  75. ^ 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. 
  76. ^ Christoph Buchheim (27Jun2006), "The Role of Private Property in the Nazi Economy: The Case of Industry", The Journal of Economic History: 390-416 
  77. ^ Philip C. Newman (August 1948), "Key German Cartels under the Nazi Regime", The Quarterly Journal of Economics Vol. 62, No. 4: 576-595 
  78. ^ Arthur Scheweitzer (Nov., 1946), "Profits Under Nazi Planning", The Quarterly Journal of Economics Vol. 61, No. 1: 5 
  79. ^ Hannah Arendt, Elemente der Ursprí¼nge totalití¤rer Herrschaft = The Origins of Totalitarianism, New York 1952, Bern 1955.
  80. ^ Michael Mann, Fascists, CUP 2004, p. 13.
  81. ^ Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope, 1966, p. 619.
  82. ^ Powell, Phillip Wayne (1985). Tree of Hate. Vallecito, Calif.: Ross House Books. p. 48. ISBN 0465087507. 
  83. ^ Fodor, M.W. (1936-02-05). "The Spread of Hitlerism". The Nation. New Deal Network. p. 156. http://newdeal.feri.org/nation/na3656.htm. Retrieved 2008-04-05. 
  84. ^ "Lexicon: Dolchstosslegende" (definition), www.icons-multimedia.com, 2005, webpage: DolchSL.
  85. ^ "Florida Holocaust Museum - Antisemitism - Post World War 1" (history), www.flholocaustmuseum.org, 2003, webpage: Post-WWI Antisemitism.
  86. ^ "THHP Short Essay: Who was the Final Solution" Holocaust-History.org, July 2004, webpage: HoloHist-Final: notes that Hermann Gí¶ering used the term in his order of July 31, 1941 to Reinhard Heydrich of Reich Main Security.
  87. ^ 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.
  88. ^ "Nazi Party" (overview), Encyclopí¦dia Britannica, 2006, Britannica.com webpage: Britannica-NaziParty.
  89. ^ "Australian Memories of the Holocaust" (history), Glossary, definition of Nazi (party), N.S.W. Board of Jewish Education, New South Wales, Australia,HolocaustComAu-Glossary
  90. ^ "Hitler Youth" (history), The History Place, 1999, HPlace-HitlerYouth
  91. ^ a b Kriegsverbrechen der alliierten Siegermí¤chte ("War Crimes of Allied Powers"), Pit Pietersen, ISBN 3-8334-5045-2, 2006, page 151, GoogleBooks-Pietersen
  92. ^ NAZI and Fraktur.
  93. ^ "Schwabach SPD". Spd-schwabach.de. http://www.spd-schwabach.de/content/service/schrift/. Retrieved 2009-02-27. 
  94. ^ "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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