It first seemed to be a simple, if fantastic, deal: Blut gegen Waren, Jewish blood in exchange for goods. On 18 May 1944 two emissaries flew into Intanbul on special missions for high Nazi authorities. The first, Joel Brand of the Jewish Rescue Committee in Budapest, explained that he came with a proposal from Adolf Eichmann. If the Allies provided Nazi Germany with ten thousand trucks for use exclusively on the eastern front, as well as large quantities of tea, coffee, cocoa, soap, and assorted war materiel, Eichmann and Germany would spare the lives of approximately eight hundred thousand Jews then in German-occupied Hungary. But Brand's travel companion, Andrea Gyorgy (alias Bandi Grosz), a Jewish convert to Catholicism and a smuggler as well as agent for several intelligence services, claimed that he had a separate and more complicated mission: to contact Allied authorities and initiate peace negotiations between Nazi Germany and the West at the expense of the Soviet Union. After brief discussions with Jewish officials in Istanbul, Brand and Gyorgy separately crossed the border into British-held Syria, trying to reach Palestine. Suspicious of both men and both offers, British officials arrested them and sent them to intelligence headquarters in Cairo for extensive interrogation, which kept them out of action.

While in recent years a great deal has been written to clarify Germany's medical past, the picture is not yet complete in several important respects. In the realm of the sociology of medicine, for example, we still do not know enough about physicianpatient relationships from, say, the founding of the Second Empire to the present. On the assumption, based on the meager evidence available, that this relationship had an authoritarian structure from the physician on downward, did it have anything to do with the shape of German medicine in the Weimar Republic and, later, the Third Reich? Another relative unknown is the role of Jews in the development of medicine as a profession in Germany. Surely volumes could be written on the significant influence Jews have exerted on medicine in its post-Wilhelmian stages, as well as the irreversible victim status Jewish doctors were forced to assume after Hitler's ascension to power

This article analyzes the interplay between Nazi cultural politics and regional identity in the Palatinate region of Germany through the lens of the Ludwig Siebert program. Created by Bavarian Minister-President Ludwig Siebert in the early 1930s to stimulate the regional construction industry, this program involved the conservation of medieval castles and ruins in Bavaria and the Palatinate. The renovation of these monuments, which had been central to the cultural memory and identity of Pfälzers since at least the nineteenth century, proved to be effective in mobilizing the local populace for Siebert's aims and, consequently, for the goals of the Nazi regime. Because its melding of cultural politics and regional identity helped to stabilize the regime in the Palatinate during its early years, the Siebert program provides a particularly illustrative microhistorical case study of the Nazi regime's mechanisms for creating the Volksgemeinschaft in the provinces. By focusing on the Palatinate town of Annweiler, which sits at the foot of the storied Trifels castle, a favored renovation project of Siebert's, this article offers a closely observed demonstration of these mechanisms at work.

The representative form of government is in a somewhat difficult situation today. Ever since Jean-Jacques Rousseau judged in 1762 that “à l'instant qu'un Peuple se donne des Réprésentans, il n'est plus libre, il n'est plus,” representative government has been exposed to a steady stream of harsh criticism. The number of critics eventually increased to include Marxists, communitarians, and radical democrats. On the other hand, it is a matter of fact that over the last decades, representative systems were developed in, or at least formally adopted by, the vast majority of nations. For example, more than 140 out of the nearly 200 world's states formally have parliaments associated in the Inter-Parliamentary Union. Institutions such as parliaments and parties, and procedures such as elections and legislation form a ubiquitous and at the same time heavily disputed part of the present political landscape.

A jubilee is the perfect time for a critical stocktaking, and this essay uses the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of Central European History (CEH), the leading American journal of the history of “German-speaking Central Europe,” to explore the changing representations of women and gender in this journal since its founding in 1968. The declared aim of CEH was, according to the founding editor, Douglas A. Unfug, to become a “broadly rather than narrowly defined” journal that covers “all periods from the Middle Ages to the present” and includes, next to “traditional approaches to history,” innovative and “experimental methodological approaches.” As Kenneth F. Ledford, the third CEH editor (after Unfug and Kenneth D. Barkin), wrote in 2005, the journal should simultaneously reflect and drive “the intellectual direction(s) of its eponymous field.”

Although most students of contemporary German history, especially of the National Socialist period, are aware of the United States Document Center at Berlin (BDC) and its general holdings, that archive is not being exploited to its potential. This is primarily because the Document Center was created and organized for the political purpose of compiling information on the activities of individual Nazis. For this reason, the holdings lend themselves most readily to the study of individual involvement and to quantitative research on the personnel of various groups and agencies of the Third Reich. Unfortunately, this same organizational arrangement makes it extremely difficult and time-consuming to pursue a non-biographical or non-quantitative research problem. Nevertheless, the collections contain information to be found nowhere else—information on institutional, political, social, and economic problems which go well beyond the scope of an individual's involvement or beyond the sociological data which might be compiled from the personnel files. Unfortunately, there are no adequate finding aids for the Document Center, and a general vagueness of knowledge about the full extent of its holdings seems to plague even veteran users and the document center personnel themselves.

Every historian studying the emigration of Europeans to the United States discovers during such research that there was not only a crossing of the Atlantic westward, but a return movement from the United States to Europe as well. In 1842 Charles Dickens in his American Notes wrote about his experiences on a ship traveling from America to England: “We carried in the steerage nearly a hundred passengers: a little world of poverty. … Some of them had been in America but three days, some but three months, and some had gone out in the last voyage of that very ship in which they were now returning home. Others had sold their clothes to raise the passage-money, and had hardly rags to cover them; others had no food, and lived upon the charity of the rest. … They were coming back, even poorer than they went.”

Most historians are aware that the charge of usury belongs to the standard arsenal of both traditional anti-Judaism and modern forms of anti-Semitism (if indeed one accepts the validity of this distinction). More recently, historians and scholars of literature have considered the way in which usury was a powerful simile—the usurer as Jew—and as such central to the cultural history of learned and popular forms of anti-Semitic prejudice. In the essay that follows, I do not intend to further document the history of this prejudice in the realm of print culture. Rather, I will explore the way in which its central assumption (namely that Jews and Christians possessed radically different and religiously specific conceptions of work and trade) configured, entered into, and also obfuscated rural relations between Christians and Jews.

“All, therefore, who consider themselves Christians may be absolutely certain that we are all equally priests.”1 With this declaration Martin Luther categorically repudiated the Catholic understanding of priesthood as a holy estate with indelible marks bestowed at consecration. According to the reformers all Christians, in principle, have the same authority in word and sacrament, but only those authorized by the respective community of believers may wield it. This assessment not only reflected certain irregularities within the clergy but also signified a completely new definition of the priesthood. It cannot be understood outside the context of existing contemporary criticism—not only from reformatory circles—of the state of numerous parishes who suffered under poorly educated, morally unacceptable (from a contemporary point of view) or indeed absent clergymen. The Catholic Church's answer to this challenge, therefore, had two aims: plans for far-reaching reforms were intended to renew the image of priests and, primarily, to provide effective pastoral care. Polemical theological debates against Protestants and discussions within the Catholic Church were intended not only to strengthen the certainty of the fundamental essence of priestly identity but also to facilitate a differentiation of Catholic from Protestant understanding. The decisions of the Council of Trent also touched both areas. At the 23rd session both the theological basis of the sacrament of consecration and the plans to reform the rules concerning the bishops' obligatory residence in their parishes were debated.2

On 27 February 1943 in Nazi Germany the Gestapo brutally arrested more than ten thousand Jewish men and women. Martin Riesenburger, later the Chief Rabbi of the German Democratic Republic, recalled that day as “the great inferno.” This large-scale raid marked the beginning of the final phase of the mass deportations, which had been under way since October 1941. Also interned in Berlin were people who, according to NS terminology, lived in so-called mixed marriages. But new documents show that no deportation of this special group was planned by the Gestapo. In the past decade, in both the German as well as the American public, quite a bit of attention has been paid to the fact that non-Jewish relatives publicly demonstrated against the feared deportation of their Jewish partners. The scholarly literature as well has pictured this protest as a unique act of resistance that prevented the deportation of these Jews living in mixed marriages. The fact that during this raid an untold number of Jews, both women and men, fled and went underground has so far been ignored. Since we still know much too little, the following article will discuss all the events of the spring of 1943 and their background.

Most Germans still know the story. One day in October 1906, the 57-year-old ex-convict Wilhelm Voigt dressed himself in the uniform of a Prussian captain, assembled from several second-hand stores. So equipped, Voigt intercepted two squads of soldiers who were going off duty, and ordered the soldiers to accompany him to the town hall of the Berlin suburb of Köpenick. There, claiming to act on “All-Highest command,” Voigt arrested the mayor and other town officials, and had the town's cash handed over to him in two large sacks. He departed with the money and sent the officials in a car to the police station at Berlin's Neue Wache, guarded by several of the soldiers. Only at the Neue Wache did the officials learn that the “All-Highest” had not in fact ordered their arrest.

In the final months of World War II, more than a million German children took to the roads in search of family and home. Although the majority returned home with little institutional support, hundreds of thousands of other German children could not. Some were orphaned; others remained in camps, children's homes, or foster families in areas that no longer belonged to Germany. Most challenging for authorities were those who were alone and too young to know their own names. This article explores the struggle to locate, identify, and provide for missing, lost, and displaced German children after 1945. It argues that despite a general agreement that children were in peril, Allied denazification policies and the decision by the UN Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) not to help “enemy children” compromised care for children. The division of Germany and the onset of the Cold War further handicapped efforts to aid children by preventing the creation of a unified search service. Yet, despite the many postwar impediments, the effort to care for these children was remarkably successful in the end.

Reporting on the results of the 1935 World Population Conference hosted in the capital of the “new Germany” for members of the nation's medical community, the renowned racial anthropologist and director of the prestigious Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institut für Anthropologie, menschliche Erblehre und Eugenik (KWIA), Eugen Fischer (1874–1967), commented on the significance of a new type of physician, one whose duties were intricately linked with the goals of the Nazi state. Just as the house doctor of old was able to prevent and recognize when an individual patient was in imminent medical danger by having carefully watched over his charge—intervening when necessary—so, too, must the Erbarzt (genetic doctor) do the same for the entire Volk by overseeing, and, if need be, managing, the hereditary lineages of all its composite members. This not merely entailed evaluating the trajectory of genetic diseases in different segments of the German population, but it also demanded something equally important. “As getreuer Ekkehardt [loyal Ekkehardt] with his hand on the pulse of the life of his Volk,” Fischer commented, the genetic doctor had to supervise its racial purity. This was to ensure that its racial essence—the presupposition of all cultural and mental attributes of the Volk—was inherited unchanged.

The notion that Hitler's Third Reich was a monolithic and efficient dictatorship has by now been safely buried, although it may persist in the popular imagination. This essay is intended as a contribution to the newer phase of the historical postmortem on National Socialism, the attempt to trace the precise mechanism of decision-making and internal policy-diversion in the Third Reich. Distortion of policy, as the result of disagreements among leaders or of bureaucratic sabotage, is a feature common to all modern political systems. In the grim context of the Third Reich, all attempts to distort or divert policy which tended to ameliorate inhuman aspects of Hitler's rule have been dignified by the term “resistance.” This study will show that successful local resistance was possible, even to the SS, perhaps the most powerful political force in the wartime Reich. The inquiry has its juridical aspects, since admission of the existence of successful resistance to policies and organizations declared by international and German courts to have been criminal, resistance even by those who accepted the basic premises of the regime, implies a varied distribution of criminal guilt. This distribution will not be attempted here, but the judicial analogy should not be forgotten. The historian is relieved of the responsibility of passing sentence, but, like the judge, he is concerned with more than the determination of individual actions. An understanding of the political system of Hitler's state requires as well an investigation of motivation.

In the writing of the German Reformation, there has long been a strong association between urban history and the evangelical movement. The sentiment has been around since the days of Leopold von Ranke (1795–1886), but it was the publication of Bernd Moeller's Imperial Cities and the Reformation (1962) that turned the rather casual notion into a research paradigm. Moeller imagined the Reformation in terms of the medieval cityscape. “It is important to recognize,” he wrote, “that the Reformation was introduced almost everywhere according to the forms prescribed by the city constitution, and that it had its foundation in the city's communal mentality.” Constitutionally, there was a clear filiation of development to account for the later Protestant church. Throughout the medieval period urban communes had been securing rights and privileges extending the claims and functions of local sovereignty, from the regulation of the immediate economy, the control of taxation, and the administration of lesser jurisdiction, to the guardianship of parish religion. In a similar manner, when Moeller spoke of the collective mentality of the German city, he did so in order to draw attention to the norms and values of urban governance and the similar reserve of norms preached in early evangelical theology. In its origins, the Imperial city was characterized as a political association, bound by oath, joined by common will, created in order to preserve the peace. The urban values underwriting this myth of community were those that placed collective welfare above the interests of the individual—concord, unity, justice, love, peace, and the common good (Gemeinnutz). Further legitimation of the communal ideal was provided by the medieval affinity to imagine the city in terms of a sacral corporation (corpus Christianum), with the religious standing of each member of the union bearing upon collective salvation. Little separates this cast of mind from evangelical theology and its stress on brotherly love, peace, and the community of believers. God's Word, to use the phrasing of the town clerk of Nördlingen, heals the divisions of the commune as it heals the divisions of the soul.

The Kapp-Lüttwitz Putsch, hastily begun on March 13, 1920, and ingloriusly ended with the resignation of Dr. Wolfgang Kapp on March 17, has already been the subject of significant study. The details of the putsch itself, the character of the conspirators, and their motives, the positions taken by the political parties and leaders, and the reasons for its failure are fairly Well known. It is generally agreed that the circle of conspirators had too narrow a social base and was too divided in its purposes to be successful. In essence, it was a revolt of unemployed reactionary East Elbian officials like Kapp himself and his “Minister of the Interior,” Traugott von Jagow, disgruntled conservative military officers, the most important of whom was Freiherr von Lüttwitz, and military adventurers like Colonel Max Bauer, Major Pabst, and Captain Ehrhardt. Where Kapp sought far-reaching constitutional and political changes, Lüttwitz strove for more short-term goals, i.e., reconstruction of the cabinet to give it an “expert” character, new elections, and a larger army. The Kapp regime was doomed because of the refusal of the government bureaucracy to serve it and because of the general strike called by the trade unions on March 14.

As Albert Hirschman has recently observed, critics and advocates of a capitalist, market economy are forever reinventing the wheel, repeating arguments made by their forebears decades and sometimes centuries ago. Take the following observations of a social critic—let his name, for the moment, remain a mystery—as he casts his gaze upon the cultural influence of the market. New forms of capitalist economic organization, he observes, have led to the disappearance of the link between ownership of property and civic responsibility. Men are so involved in acquisition, he laments, that they no longer have time for political concerns and public life. He sees an eclipse of civic virtue, a diminishing willingness to sacrifice private concerns for the public good. Changes in social structure brought about by capitalist development are no less worrisome. The process of the market is leading to the replacement of once-independent producers by men who are mere specialized cogs in a productive machine. The cultural consequences of capitalism are cause for despair. The ever-shifting, international fashions on which the market thrives are destroying authentic, indigenous culture. New forms of capitalist merchandising prosper by arousing novel desires, creating tastes for consumer goods which people do not really need, and leading to excessive expenditure which is bankrupting the economy. Most pernicious are unprecedented marketing techniques which undermine the steadying influence of the family by invading the household itself.

The extent to which German big business aided Hitler in his rise to power is still a matter of controversy. For Marxists, or at least those who follow the Moscow line, there is no problem, since they regard Nazism as a manifestation of the monopoly stage of capitalism. Non-Marxists, however, are widely divided. Some have reached conclusions similar to those of the Marxists; others have exonerated the capitalists. Most have concluded that big business gave some support to the Nazis but have not specified its extent or significance. In part, this wide range of opinion is the result of ideological differences. But just as importantly, the evidence on which existing studies of the subject rest is scanty, sometimes ambiguous, and often of questionable validity. Few aspects of National Socialism have been so inadequately researched. Even the most basic facts remain in doubt, and before any further general interpretations can usefully be put forward toward a resolution of the controversy, it is necessary to return to the fundamental task of setting the record straight. A great deal more evidence is available for this purpose than is generally recognized, enough, in fact, to clear up many disputed issues and produce more than a few surprises. A case in point is that of Emil Kirdorf, long universally regarded as an early and loyal backer of Hitler and National Socialism in the camp of big business.