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EXPLAINING THE THIRD REICH: ETHICS, BELIEFS, INTERESTS

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 November 2008

DEVIN O. PENDAS
DEVIN O. PENDAS*
Affiliation:
Department of History, Boston College
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Extract

In recent years, the historiography of Nazi Germany has taken what Neil Gregor has called a “voluntarist turn.” By this, Gregor means that the recent literature on Nazi Germany has emphasized “that the panoply of organizations actively involved in occupation and murder, the number of German men and women who actively participated in these crimes, and the range of places in which they committed them, was much, much greater than has hitherto been acknowledged.” In the first instance this voluntarist turn has meant an increased stress on the centrality of Nazi criminality and atrocity to the regime, not as one feature, but as the central characteristic, of the Third Reich. Alongside this, however, has come an increased insistence that these criminal policies were both widely known at the time and broadly popular among Germans. As Saul Friedländer has put it, “the everyday involvement of the population with the regime was far deeper than has long been assumed, due to the widespread knowledge and passive acceptance of the crimes, as well as the crassest profit derived from them.” In short, then, the most recent trend among historians of the Third Reich is to insist that people believed in the Nazi project, including its criminal aspects.

Type
Essays
Information
Modern Intellectual History , Volume 5 , Issue 3 , November 2008 , pp. 573 - 596
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2008

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References

1 Neil Gregor, “Nazism—A Political Religion? Rethinking the Voluntarist Turn,” in idem, ed., Nazism, War and Genocide: Essays in Honour of Jeremy Noakes (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2005).

2 Ibid., 6.

3 Friedländer, Saul, “The Wehrmacht, German Society, and the Knowledge of the Mass Extermination of the Jews,” in Bartov, Omer, Grossmann, Atina, and Nolan, Mary, eds., Crimes of War: Guilt and Denial in the Twentieth Century (New York: New Press, 2002), 28Google Scholar.

4 Hans-Ulrich Wehler remains the staunchest defender of this position. See Wehler, Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte, vol. 4, 1914–1949 (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2003), esp. 675–843.

5 For arguments in this vein see Fritzsche, Peter, Germans into Nazis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998)Google Scholar.

6 See e.g. Reuth, Ralf Georg, Goebbels: Eine Biographie (Munich: Piper, 2000)Google Scholar.

7 One particularly congent example of this approach is Herf, Jeffrey, The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda during World War II and the Holocaust (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Belknap, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 Goldhagen, Daniel Jonah, Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (New York: Knopf, 1996), 23–4Google Scholar.

9 Bauer, Yehuda, Rethinking the Holocaust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 96Google Scholar.

10 Mosse, George L., The Crisis of German Ideology: Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1964), 1Google Scholar.

11 Steigmann-Gall, Richard, The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, 1919–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Page references are given in the text.

12 For Steigmann-Gall's assessment of the difficulty of using church membership statistics as a reliable gauge of actual piety see HR, xv.

13 Koonz, Claudia, The Nazi Conscience (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Belknap, 2003)Google Scholar. Page references are subsequently given in the text.

14 Pettegrew, John, ed., A Pragmatists Progress? Richard Rorty and American Intellectual History (Lanham, MD: Rowan and Littlefield, 2000), 5Google Scholar.

15 Perhaps the paradigmatic expression of this older literature is Conway, John S., The Nazi Persecution of the Churches, 1933–1945 (London: Weidenfield & Nicolson, 1968)Google Scholar. The revisionist literature is enormous. The best starting points would be Bergen, Doris L., The Twisted Cross: The German Christian Movement in the Third Reich (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996)Google Scholar; Gerlach, Wolfgang, And the Witnesses Were Silent: The Confessing Church and the Jews (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000; first published 1996)Google Scholar; and Klee, Ernst, Die SA Jesu Christi. Die Kirchen im Banne Hitlers (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch, 1989)Google Scholar.

16 Heschel, Susannah, Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998)Google Scholar.

17 For one recent assertion of the scientific quality of Nazi race thinking see Weikart, Richard, From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18 For a particularly persuasive effort to work out the logic of Nazi anticapitalist anti-Semitism see Postone, Moishe, “Anti-Semitism and National Socialism,” in Rabinbach, Anson and Zipes, Jack, eds., Germans and Jews since the Holocaust: The Changing Situation in West Germany (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1986), 302–14Google Scholar.

19 See, for instance, Cecil, Robert, The Myth of the Master Race: Alfred Rosenberg and Nazi Ideology (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1972)Google Scholar; Poise, Robert, National Socialism and the Religion of Nature (New York: St Martins, 1986)Google Scholar; or, more recently, Poewe, Karla, New Religions and the Nazis (New York: Routledge, 2006)Google Scholar.

20 At least some knowledgeable readers have remained decidedly unpersuaded by Steigmann-Gall's reading in this regard. See e.g. the critical comments in Irving Hexham, “Inventing ‘Paganists’: A Close Reading of Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich,” Journal of Contemporary History 42 (Jan. 2007), 59–78.

21 Breitman, Richard, The Architect of Genocide: Himmler and the Final Solution (New York: Knopf, 1991)Google Scholar.

22 See, for instance, the largely negative responses (by Doris Bergen, Manfred Gailus, Ernst Piper, and Irving Hexham) in the Journal of Contemporary History 42 (Jan. 2007). Steigmann-Gall's response can be found as “Christianity and the Nazi Movement: A Response,” Journal of Contemporary History 42 (April 2007), 185–211.

23 Gailus, Manfred, Protestantismus und Nationalsozialismus. Studien zur nationalsozialistischen Durchdringung des protestantischen Sozialmilieus in Berlin (Köln: Böhlau, 2001)Google Scholar.

24 In this, Koonz's approach differs markedly from an earlier generation of scholarship that stressed the role of overt propaganda in the National Socialist regime. See e.g. Bramsted, Ernest K., Goebbels and National Socialist Propaganda, 1925–1945 (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1965)Google Scholar.

25 Koonz is, of course, not the first scholar to point to the importance of Hitler's public myth, as opposed to the private reality of Hitler the man, for the history of the Third Reich. Seminal in this regard is Kershaw, Ian, The “Hitler Myth”: Image and Reality in the Third Reich (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987)Google Scholar.

26 This emphasis on mid-level bureaucracy in formulating policies and procedures that would become genocidal is a recurring theme in the recent literature on Nazi Germany. See inter alia Herbert, Ulrich, Best: Biographische Studien über Radikalismus, Weltanschauung und Vernunft, 1903–1989 (Bonn: Dietz, 2001)Google Scholar; Lozowick, Yaacov, Hitler's Bureaucrats: The Nazi Security Police and the Banality of Evil (London: Continuum, 2000)Google Scholar; and Wildt, Michael, Generation des Unbedingten. Das Führungskorps des Reichssicherheitshauptamtes (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2002)Google Scholar.

27 This anti-Semitic scholarship is also the theme of Steinweis, Alan E., Studying the Jew: Scholarly Antisemitism in Nazi Germany (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

28 Aly, Götz, Hitlers Volksstaat. Raub, Rassenkrieg und nationaler Sozialismus (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 2005)Google Scholar. Subsequent page references are given in the text. Translations are my own.

29 Sewell, William H. Jr, “Whatever Happened to the ‘Social’ in Social History,” in Scott, Joan W. and Keates, Debra, eds., Schools of Thought: Twenty-Five Years of Interpretive Social Science (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 209–26Google Scholar. This kind of social history remains much more common in Germany, of course, exemplified most prominently, though by no means exclusively, in the so-called Bielefeld School.

30 Schoenbaum, David, Hitler's Social Revolution: Class and Status in Nazi Germany, 1933–1939 (New York: Norton, 1966)Google Scholar.

31 For a useful introduction to the popular debates in Germany see Jody K. Biehl, “How the Germans Fell for the ‘Feel-Good’ Fuehrer” Spiegel-OnlineInternational, http://www.spiegel.de/international/0,1518,347726,00.html (accessed 27 May 2007).

32 See, for example, Johannes Bähr, Rezension von: Aly, Götz, Hitlers Volksstaat. Raub, Rassenkrieg und nationaler Sozialismus, Frankfurt a.M.: S. Fischer, 2005Google Scholar, in sehepunkt 5 (2005), Nr. 7/8 (15 July 2005), http://www.sehepunkte.historicum.net/2005/07/8192.html (accessed 27 May 2007).

33 Baten, Jörg and Wagner, Andrea, “Autarky, Market Disintegration, and Health: The Mortality and Nutritional Crisis in Nazi Germany, 1933–1937,” Economics and Human Biology 1/1 (2003), 1–28CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

34 Adam Tooze, “Doch falschggerechnet—weil falsch gedacht,” TAZ, 16 March 2005. A fuller version of this critique can be found on Tooze's webpage: http://www.hist.cam.ac.uk/academic_staff/further_details/tooze-aly.pdf (accessed 29 Aug. 2007).

35 Tooze, “Doch felschgerechnet,” TAZ.

36 This critique is made forcefully in Armin Nolzen, Rezenzion von: Götz Aly, Hitlers Volksstaat. Raub, Rassenkrieg und nationaler Sozialismus, Frankfurt a.M.: S. Fischer, 2005, in sehepunkt 5 (2005), Nr. 7/8 (15 July 2005), http://www.sehepunkte.historicum.net/2005/07/8193.html (accessed 27 May 2007).

37 See, for instance, Kershaw, Ian, Popular Opinion and Political Dissent in the Third Reich, Bavaria 1933–1945 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983)Google Scholar. One should also note Peter Longerich's brilliant recent dissection of the whole idea of public opinion in the Third Reich: Longerich, P., “Davon habe wir nichts gewusst!” Die Deutschen und die Judenverfolgung, 1933–1945 (München: Siedler, 2006)Google Scholar.

38 For a interesting analysis of this phenomenon, albeit in an admittedly quite different context, see Frank, Thomas, What's the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2004)Google Scholar.

39 See e.g. Bayly, C. A., The Birth of the Modern World 1780–1914: Global Comparisons and Connections (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004)Google Scholar; or Geyer, Michael and Holscher, Lucian, eds., Die Gegenwart Gottes in der modernen Gesellschaft: Tranzendenz und religiöse Vergemeinschaftung in Deutschland (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2006)Google Scholar.

40 Herf, Jeffrey, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984)Google Scholar.

41 Steinweis, Studying the Jew, 64–91.