Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-gb8f7 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-25T18:10:24.471Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Totalitarianism: Introduction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2009

Donald J. Dietrich
Affiliation:
A professor in the department of theology at Boston College.

Extract

Our understanding of the types and meaningful levels of resistance to Hitler's rule has broadened as more complex and reflective studies have unremittingly exposed the political, social, and cultural dynamics supporting the Holocaust and its significance for our culture. Analyses of how and why the Holocaust erupted in Nazi-controlled Europe have elicited studies on the tools and methods of terror in the Third Reich. The works of both Eric Johnson and Robert Gellately, for example, have helped crystallize our understanding of the phenomenon that individual Germans living out their hopes, fears, and, frequently, petty jealousies made operant the ideological and physical terror that empowered the Nazi oppression. The Gestapo and courts, of course, formally carried out the brutalization of society, but they were assisted by countless Germans in fulfilling the Nazi agenda.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Church History 2001

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1. Geyer, Michael and Boyer, John, “Introduction: Resistance against the Third Reich as Intercultural Knowledge,” in Resistance against the Third Reich, 1933–1990, edited by Geyer, Michael and Boyer, John (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 114;Google ScholarLarge, David Clay, ed., Contending with Hitler: Varieties of German Resistance in the Third Reich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).Google Scholar

2. Johnson, Eric, Nazi Terror: The Gestapo, Jews, and Ordinary Germans (New York: Basic Books, 1999);Google ScholarGellately, Robert, The Gestapo and European Society: Enforcing Racial Policy, 1–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990);CrossRefGoogle ScholarGellately, Robert, Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3. Mallmann, Klaus-Michael and Paul, Gerhard, “Allwissend, Allmächtig, Allgegenwärtig?: Gestapo, Gesellschaft, und Widerstand,” Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft 41 (1993): 984–99;Google ScholarGellately, Robert, “Situating the ‘SS-State’ in a Social-Historical Context: Recent Histories of the SS, the Police, and the Courts in the Third Reich,” Journal of Modern History 64 (1992): 338–65.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4. Kershaw, Ian, Popular Opinion and Political Dissent in the Third Reich: Bavaria, 1933–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983);Google ScholarKershaw, Ian, The “Hitler Myth”: Image and Reality in the Third Reich (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987).Google Scholar

5. Broszat, Martin, et al. eds., Bayern in der NS-Zeit, 6 vols. (Munich: Oldenbourg, 19771983);Google ScholarPeukert, Detlev, Die KPD im Widerstand: Verfolgung und Untergrundarbeit an Rhein und Ruhr, 1933–1945 (Wuppertal: Hammer, 1980);Google ScholarSchmädeke, Jürgen and Steinbach, Peter, eds., Der Widerstand gegen der Nationalsozialismus: Die deutsche Gesellschaft und der Widerstand gegen Hitler (Munich: R. Piper, 1985).Google Scholar

6. Goldhagen, Daniel Jonah, Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (New York: Vintage Books, 1996);Google ScholarBrowning, Christopher, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York: Harper Collins, 1998).Google Scholar

7. Rothfels, Hans, The German Opposition against Hitler (Hinsdale, Ill.: H. Regnery, 1948);Google ScholarHoffmann, Peter, The History of German Resistance, 1933–1945 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988);Google ScholarConway, John, “Coming to Terms with the Past: Interpreting the German Church Struggles, 1933–1990,” German History 16 (1998): 377–96.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

8. Bauer, Yehuda, “Overall Explanations, German Society and the Jews, or: Some Thoughts about Content,” in Probing the Depths of German Antisemitism: German Society and the Persecution of the Jews, 1933–1941, by Bankier, Bavid (New York: Berghahn Books, 2000), 318;Google ScholarBartov, Omer, “Defining Enemies, Making Victims: Germans, Jews, and the Holocaust,” American Historical Review 103 (1998): 771816.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

9. Nicosia, Francis and Stokes, Lawrence, eds., Germans against Nazism: Nonconformity, Opposition and Resistance in the Third Reich: Essays in Honour of Peter Hoffmann (New York: Berg, 1990);Google ScholarChandler, Andrew, The Moral Imperative: New Essays on the Ethics of Resistance in National Socialist Germany, 1933–1945 (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1998).Google Scholar

10. For an introduction to the study of resistance as moral history, see Geyer, Michael, “Resistance as Ongoing Project: Visions of Order, Obligations to Strangers, and Struggles for Civil Society, 1933–1990,” in Resistance against the Third Reich, eds. Geyer, and Boyer, , 325–50.Google Scholar

11. Geyer, , “Resistance” in Resistance against the Third Reich, eds. Geyer, and Boyer, , 349–50;Google ScholarHuyssen, Andreas, “After the Wall: The Failure of German Intellectuals,”; New German Critique 52 (1991): 109–43.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

12. Bracher, Karl Dietrich, “Demokratie und Ideologie im Zeitalter der Machtgreifungen,” Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 31 (1983): 124.Google Scholar

13. Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, “After Ten Years: A Reckoning Made at New Year 1943,” in letters and Papers from Prison (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1972).Google Scholar

14. Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, Ethics (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1965), 55ff.Google Scholar

15. Klemperer, Klemens von, “Church, Religion, and German Resistance,” in The Moral Imperative, Chandler, 5456.Google Scholar

16. Barnett, Victoria, Bystanders: Conscience and Complicity during the Holocaust (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1999), 175;Google ScholarVolf, Miroslav, Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation (Nashville, Term.: Abingdon, 1996).Google Scholar