Ever since Donald Trump announced his candidacy for the US presidency in June 2015, journalists, scholars, and other commentators in the United States have attempted to explain his political success with the aid of historical analogies. In so doing, they have sparked a wider debate about whether the Nazi past helps to make sense of the US present. One group in the debate has contended that Trump's ascent bears a worrisome resemblance to interwar European fascism, especially the National Socialist movement of Adolf Hitler. By contrast, a second group has rejected this comparison and sought analogies for Trump in other historical figures from European and US history. This article surveys the course, and assesses the results, of the debate from its origins up to the present day. It shows that historians of Germany have played a prominent role in helping to make sense of Trump, but notes that their use of Nazi analogies may be distorting, rather than deepening, our understanding of contemporary political trends. By examining the merits and drawbacks of Nazi analogies in present-day popular discourse, the article recommends that scholars draw on both the German and American historical experience in order to best assess the United States's present political movement.

Historians have examined the Herero genocide in German South West Africa extensively. The role of the Prusso-German general staff has received only rudimentary treatment, however. The following study focuses on the actions of this institution and its chief. Evidence indicates that initially and with varying degrees of success the general staff was heavily involved in German military actions. After the Battle of Waterberg, however, the local military commander, Lieutenant General Lothar von Trotha, fought his own war. Meanwhile, the general staff gravitated toward a different role: shielding Trotha from criticism emanating from German civilian leaders and the public. The impulse to protect sprang not only from a harmony of views about the annihilation of the Herero, but also from an urge to preserve the prestige of the German military after unexpected losses at the hands of “African savages.” In fact, the Prusso-German general staff was complicit in, if not partly responsible for, the conduct of genocidal warfare in GSWA.

During the summer and fall of 1941, as they took part in Operation Barbarossa—the invasion of the Soviet Union—Wehrmacht personnel paused to reopen churches that had been shuttered by the communist regime. These events, which drew enormous crowds, brought together conquerors and conquered in a surprising display of shared faith before being halted by a directive from the Führer. This article addresses the question of why they took place at all, given the genocidal nature of the campaign in which they were embedded, as well as what they can tell us about the role of religion in the Wehrmacht, its relationship to Nazi ideology, and the nature of the military occupation. The reopening ceremonies, it is argued, were the spontaneous outcome of a number of interrelated factors, including Nazi rhetoric, the pent-up yearnings of Soviet Christians, and above all the vision of the invasion as a religious crusade against an atheist power adopted by many chaplains and soldiers. Although often overlooked, religion remained a powerful force in the Wehrmacht, one that could serve both to undermine and justify Nazi goals. Further, the reopenings demonstrate the army's capacity for flexibility in its dealings with the population, particularly during the war's opening months.

Following the passing of the “Law for the Prevention of Offspring with Genetic Diseases” in July 1933, sterilization became a means to tighten the borders of the German ethnic community against outsiders, including Sinti and Roma. For a while, Sinti soldiers were spared sterilization. After Himmler's Auschwitz decree of December 1942, they were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau. They escaped the extermination of other Sinti and Roma in the Zigeunerlager on the night of August 2, 1944, only because they represented a human shield deployable against advancing Russian troops. Still, the Reich insisted on sterilizing them and their families before placing them in front of enemy guns because they were still considered “internal enemies.” As a result, some forty Sinti men and boys were sterilized by Dr. Franz Lucas in the men's camp in Ravensbrück in January 1945. Focusing on their story challenges Lucas's portrayal as the victim of SS practices, a narrative that long benefitted from the testimony of non-Sinti prisoners. In addition, compensation agencies in Germany underestimated the ongoing effects of psychological trauma resulting from sterilization. Sinti victims who were subjected to an “expert assessment” of their blood purity before war's end underwent a renewed assessment of their productivity for German society after the war.

This article focuses on how Switzerland played a dual role in providing a sanctuary for retired left-wing radicals while serving as an armament source for the distribution of weapons and explosives throughout Europe in the 1970s. A significant part of the article delves into the case of the AKO (Anarchistische Kampforganisation), a Swiss anarchist group that supplied several European terrorist groups with weapons. The position of this group will be analyzed in the context of the transnational terrorist network as a way of assessing to what extent their cooperation with other groups was rooted in mutual ideological affiliations, and how closely the anarchist tradition, of which they were a part, related to the European framework of the New Left. The case of Petra Krause, one of the group's key figures, is latterly discussed, particularly her imprisonment in Switzerland and the campaign for her release, which mobilized a large number of supporters across Europe and contributed to the portrayal of Switzerland as a prison.

This article explores the competing visions of urban planning that influenced newly reunified Berlin's highly contested bid, undertaken between 1990 and 1993, to host the 2000 Olympic Games. The governing city parliament coalition, mainstream media, and private corporations embraced the Games as the key to Berlin's future. The Olympics would draw investors, reunify infrastructure, foster a common “Berlin” identity among newly reunited Berlin's residents, upgrade borderland spaces and eastern neighborhoods, and boost Berlin's prominence as a global city. Alternatively, numerous protesters from both East and West, proclaiming their right to provide meaningful input into the uses of urban space, staged creative protest actions highlighting the negative social, political, and environmental effects of the proposed Games on Berlin and its neighborhoods. Ultimately, supporters and opponents diverged on the matter of who had the right to determine the use of urban space: the city government and private corporations or city residents who believed they knew best what benefited their own neighborhoods. In the end, Berlin lost its bid to host the 2000 Olympic Games. Nonetheless, creative resistance efforts designed to offer democratic alternatives to growth- and investment-oriented urban planning and to protect residents’ rights to codetermine urban space, often emerging in response to planned mega-events and large development projects, persist more than two decades later, not only in Berlin but in other major metropolises around the globe.

Numerous past review articles by scholars of German history share ideas produced by the religious turn in historiography since the 1970s and 1980s. Although highlighting a still growing groundswell of work focused on the German Catholic minority, these essays typically express discomfort with the relation of their subspecialty to the rest of the discipline. Bemoaning the marginalization of Catholic history and the self-inflicted ghettoization of research narrowly focused on regional traditions, past reviewers have worried about the integration of Catholicism within a larger framework. These past articles summarize phases of research on German Catholicism that produced much scholarship and multiple conceptual frameworks through which to understand the enduring impact of the church. Scholars of the 1970s and 1980s pushed against the grain of Hans-Ulrich Wehler's Bielefeld School to prove that Catholicism contributed more to the liberal democratic development of Germany than had been previously assumed, and by the 1990s German Catholic research focused primarily on the social history of Catholicism. The field of German Catholic history underwent a period of uncertain change during the early 2000s. Many of the German-language monographs on the topic remained wedded to the milieu model, but some younger scholars responded to critiques of German Catholic history by studying women's history or deploying poststructuralist analysis.