Early on in the First World War Sering was preparing for Germany to be starved by a British Blockade. Erich Keup was an early key contributor to Sering’s thinking about Eastern Europe during the war. Immanuel Geiss and the Border Strip story, the Wartheland, food security, blockades, submarines, and Tirpitz are all discussed, along with the slaughter of the pigs. The inner colonial thinkers suddenly saw Germany as full and turned their sights to the newly conquered East of 1915. Sering’s journey through Poland and Latvia in 1915 was followed by plans for the settlement of two million Germans in Latvia and Courland. Sering then journeyed east in 1916. The Kingdom of Poland, German freedom, Adolf Harnack, Friedrich Meinecke, Ernst Troeltsch, and Otto Hintze are all covered here. Sering discussed the colonial potential of Belarus in the 1917 edited volume Western Russia and its Importance in the Development of Central Europe. Anti-semitism is discussed, along with Schwerin and Lindequist in the East. Schwerin very close to Ludendorff. It then covers Ober Ost, War Land on the Eastern Front, Liulevicius, Brest-Litovsk, a massive German colonial empire in the Eastin 1918, and Sering’s visit to Kiev. Land and people became race and space. The period ended in defeat.

Within weeks of the Great War’s outbreak, American Jews rushed to send relief for Jews caught in the crossfire of crumbling empires. To aid Jewish war sufferers, American Jews founded the Joint Distribution Committee. To move aid in wartime, American Jews worked with the US government, the largest neutral power. Cash aid traveled to Jews in war zones through the US diplomatic pouch and family connections. Preexisting Jewish organizations in Europe delivered the monies. The war promoted the growth of new American charitable organizations, and these organizations took their American visions abroad to help others, with the support of the US government, which had no government programs like USAID in place at the time. American Jews joined America’s expanding state at the critical juncture of the war, wandering into the center of American foreign policy and less official humanitarian relief initiatives to carry out basic relief to Jews abroad. They became more “American,” while relying on the Jewish diasporic network and immigrant practices.

This chapter retraces the mindset with which troops arrived in East Prussia by examining the behavioural patterns they carried over from the Eastern Front. Most of these men had previously fought in the Soviet Union, and the actions of the troops who fell back into German territory reveals that their frame of reference had been barbarised by their years of war on the Eastern Front. The wider implications of this calloused outlook for what constituted normality – the ‘lowered resting heart-rate of the Wehrmacht soldier’ – were evident during the defence of East Prussia. With the war’s call for the annihilation of ‘sub-humans’, the majority of orders on the Eastern Front encompassed civilians, and it was thus the soldiers’ perception of civilians that had undergone the greatest perversion. This altered attitude towards civilians ensured that the Wehrmacht was increasingly prepared to include German civilians in the defence of their home soil. For the majority of troops East Prussia was the last in a series of defensive battles and the retreat onto German soil did not necessarily signify a change in day-to-day behaviour. As a result, soldiers had little motive, and even less opportunity, to alter their frame of reference.

World War II differed from preceding wars on account of the fact that the mass killing of civilians was a strategic objective of the war. Nowhere did Axis forces kill more enemy civilians than in the occupied territories of the Soviet Union. This chapter gauges the nature of Nazi violence by illuminating the impact that German killings of Soviet civilians had on the Soviet war effort. Germany’s war against the Soviet Union rested on a transgression of the moral norms of humanism, which Nazi leaders purposely disavowed to justify the promotion of a particularist racial ethic and the mass annihilation of racial foes. Both the moral provocation that defined the Nazi project and its cruel effects for people who were defined as antithetical to the “Aryan race” registered profoundly with Soviet observers. They seized on the nature of German violence to build a moral case about their own war effort, expressed in the antithesis between “Soviet humanity” and “fascist barbarism.” This narrative, replete with detailed information about German atrocities, was paramount in mobilizing Soviet people to fight Nazi Germany. While Stalin disavowed universal ideals after the war, this did not diminish their wartime vitality and reach, or the Soviet Union’s decisive contribution to the defeat of Nazi Germany.

This chapter re-examines the relationship in wartime Nazi Germany between private views and more widely voiced opinions and rumours that circulated informally and were picked up by the regime's monitoring agencies. It argues that views increasingly commonly voiced in wartime concerning Allied air raids and the regime’s murder of the Jews constituted a form of wartime ‘public opinion’ that influenced the regime’s calculations about propaganda strategy. In examining the intersections between publicly and privately expressed views, the chapter argues, firstly, that private moral thinking was strongly influenced by publicly formulated arguments about Germany’s defence and national survival, and, secondly, that private moral sentiments coloured widely expressed responses to the regime’s attempts to manage public opinion.

This chapter critiques the way in which historians of National Socialism have dealt with the topic of private life, highlights recent new developments in the historiography that can be built on, and shows how concepts of privacy and the private drawn from sociology and political theory can usefully be applied and tested in relation to developments under the Nazi dictatorship.