This chapter addresses the nexus between racism and return migration in the early 1980s, which marked the peak of anti-Turkish racism. As the call “Turks out!” (Türken raus!) grew louder, policymakers debated passing a law that would, in critics’ view, “kick out” the Turks and violate their human rights. During this “racial reckoning,” West Germans, Turkish migrants, and observers in Turkey grappled with the nature of racism itself. Although West Germans silenced the language of “race” (Rasse) and “racism” (Rassismus) after Hitler, there was an explosion of public discourse about those terms. Ordinary Germans, moreover, wrote to their president expressing their concerns about migration, revealing both biological and cultural racism. The simultaneous rise in Holocaust memory culture (Erinnerungskultur) is crucial for understanding this racial reckoning. While many Germans warned against the mistreatment of Turks as an unseemly continuity to Nazism, the emphasis on the singularity of the Holocaust offered Germans a way to dismiss anti-Turkish sentiment. Turkish migrants fought against this structural and everyday racism with various methods of activism. Turks at home, including the government and media following the 1980 military coup, viewed these debates with self-interest, lambasting German racism in the context of the 1983 remigration law.

Here, I deal with the issue of Hitler’s belief in Jesus’ divinity and show that, in contrast to what modern scholarship has thus far claimed about this question, Hitler did indeed refer to Jesus as divine on many occasions throughout his life. He even spoke of Jesus as the Son of God. I argue that Hitler’s views cannot be explained away by claiming that his words were simply clever propaganda intended to draw Christians into the NSDAP. The particularities of Hitler’s religious views and his interpretation of Jesus were simply too odd for them to act effectively as a propaganda tool designed to gain the sympathies of mainstream Christians. This chapter builds on an article that was published in the Journal of Religious History in June 2021.

The conclusion that Hitler was genuinely inspired by Jesus in his antisemitic struggle against the Jews thus cannot be avoided. Hitler viewed Jesus as the original Aryan warrior who had begun an apocalyptic battle against the Jews, but who had been killed before he had had a chance to finish the job. Historians must start taking Hitler’s (and the other leading Nazis’) religious beliefs seriously if we wish to fully understand how Hitler and his followers could be so morally convinced that what they were doing was the right thing – indeed, the “good” thing – to do. It adds significantly to our understanding not only of how Hitler could sway so many Germans to do what he wanted, but also of how the Nazis’ ultimate crime – the Holocaust – was possible to undertake in one of Europe’s most “civilized” and culturally and economically developed nations. Hitler thought he was following in the footsteps of Jesus – an alleged Aryan warrior who had dedicated his life to fighting the Jews – and that the National Socialists had a duty to finish what he was convinced Jesus had started: the eradication of theof the Jewish people from the face of the earth.

In the last empirical chapter, I show the many ways in which Hitler’s belief in Jesus as an Aryan warrior turned Jesus into a moral/ethical, religious, and ideological role model for the Nazis. Hitler’s selective interpretation of Jesus’ life and mission meant that the latter was seen as an Aryan hero and combatant against the Jews. The story of how Jesus had cleared the Temple grounds of moneylenders was one of Hitler’s favorite images and one that he constantly brought up as an example for every Nazi to follow. The National Socialists were considered to be the true heirs and followers of Christ; but while the Jews had prevented Jesus from fulfilling his divine mission by killing him, the Nazis would indeed succeed in destroying the Jews and thus completing Jesus’ divine mission on earth. The chapter stresses the important point that Hitler believed his genocidal war on the Jewish people to be a mission sanctioned and proscribed by God.

Why is yet another book about Hitler necessary? Has not Hitler, the Third Reich, and National Socialism already been sufficiently mapped and described so that another book about these historical phenomena cannot but be superfluous? Judging by the constant stream of new books on the topic every year, the obvious answer is “no.” There does not seem to be a limit for the number of books that can be produced and consumed. The market appears to be insatiable. Granted, not every book written has been either necessary, or helpful when it comes to increasing our understanding of this part of our common history. Nonetheless, there may be a more interesting question to be answered here, namely: Are there aspects of this topic that have not yet been given quite the attention in the literature that they deserve? The answer to this question is an equally obvious “yes.” There are many issues and aspects of National Socialism that are in need of further research. Among them is the topic of this book: Hitler’s and National Socialism’s relationship to the central figure of Christianity – Jesus Christ.

This chapter deals with the two main sources of inspiration for Hitler’s religiosity, namely Houston Stewart Chamberlain and Dietrich Eckart. The latter was the man who acted as his ideological and religious teacher and father figure during the early 1920s, the self-proclaimed Catholic Dietrich Eckart. I argue that it was Eckart who was largely responsible for having introduced Hitler to the religious views that he came to have and express for the rest of his life. I focus on the fictive dialogue between Hitler and Eckart as laid out in Eckart’s book Der Bolschewismus von Moses bis Lenin (Bolshevism from Moses to Lenin) from 1923, which presents the National Socialist idea of Jesus in great detail. I argue that the reason why Eckart knew Hitler’s religious beliefs, including his views of Jesus, so well was that he in fact was the source of these beliefs. Furthermore, Houston Stewart Chamberlain’s ideas about the Aryan Jesus gave Hitler the foundation for his belief in Jesus as a viscious antisemite who became the role model for himself personally and for the National Socialist movement as a whole.

Adolf Hitler was sworn in as chancellor of the Weimar Republic just before noon on January 30, 1933. Before taking office, the Nazi leader had consented to an alliance with a conservative party in which the latter would hold most of the cabinet seats in the new government. While their coalition would not enjoy a majority in the Reichstag, there had been minority governments and cabinets before this one. And the chancellorship Hitler was assuming was not the most powerful office under the Weimar Constitution; that position was held by Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg, who had soundly defeated Hitler in the presidential election the previous year. The Field Marshal, in fact, retained authority to dismiss the chancellor and his new government at any time. In all respects, the ritual surrounding Hitler’s oath complied with the formalities of the Weimar Constitution as they had been performed by previous chancellors as they took office. In these respects, the event that ushered Hitler and the Nazi Party into power appeared to be nothing more than another round in the play of parliamentary politics. However, that evening, tens of thousands of uniformed storm troopers, men of the SS (Schutzstaffel, Hitler’s Praetorian guard), and other members of right-wing paramilitary organizations marched through the streets of Berlin in celebration.1 As they saluted the new chancellor, there was no doubt that they embraced his assumption of power as a new founding for the German state.

‘The Sea of Language’ is the first chapter of Volume 1 of a two-volume work entitled Quand Freud voit la mer: Freud et la langue allemande (When Freud Sees the Sea: Freud and the German Language). The author, as writer and translator, explores how the founding tenets of Freudian psychoanalysis are not concepts that happen to have been framed in German, but were derived from the way German parts of speech are rooted in the body and thus grounded in the German language itself, which is not a language of abstraction, as French admirers of German philosophy tend to believe, but of the body in space and in motion, a language of the common people going about their everyday life. The author’s study of the essence of German takes him from poetry to philosophy to the ‘ultimate perversity’: the language of the Third Reich, which he briefly envisages as a return of the repressed within the German language, possibly intuited by Freud. Through his analysis of German, he illustrates how the character of a language can lend itself to perverse manipulation and how individuals can find themselves rejected by the Mother tongue that had so far nurtured them.

The Weimar Republic, established in Germany at the end of World War I, was not a success and led to the rise of radical politics and the birth of the Nazi party. The racial antisemitism of Nazi ideology is discussed, as is Hitler’s control of Germany and his quest for a “Final Solution” to the so-called Jewish problem, leading to the creation of ghettos, Einsatzgruppen (killing squads), concentration camps, and the killing centers of the Holocaust.

From the last quarter of the nineteenth century on, the name Bayreuth has stood for the realization of a new kind of musical theater developed by Richard Wagner, which ever since has been recognized as a major contribution to the world’s cultural heritage. For Strauss, both Wagner and Bayreuth were profoundly influential. In his early years, he believed he could see in it the fulfilment of his aesthetic ideals, and accordingly, he sought closeness to the milieu of the idolized “Master.” With increasing maturity, however, it became clear to him that although Wagner was one of the fixed stars in his musical and dramatic thinking, the “Wahnfried ideology” would remain foreign to his nature. As early as his time in Weimar, the “cult of Wagner” seemed to be something alien to Strauss, something he would overcome. In juxtaposition to the formative Bayreuth episode in Strauss’s early years, his two short engagements in 1933–34 take on the dubious appearance of a moral lapse.

Not every investigation into Nazi criminality resulted in a prosecution, much less a conviction. This chapter tells the story of one case that failed to make it to trial. Taking a micro-history approach, the chapter examines the murder of an individual Jew, Dr. Hans Hannemann, in Berlin in the closing days of World War II. Hannemann was killed after being turned over to the SS by a group of local civilians, who appear to have been motivated by anti-Semitic beliefs and the fear that he could be a Russian spy. After the war, local authorities launched an investigation into his death. Despite compiling considerable evidence that various local individuals were implicated in Hannemann’s murder, the prosecutor in the case, Wilhelm Kühnast, dropped the charges on the grounds that “so much time had passed” since the killing. This resulted in a modest political scandal, and Kühnast was arrested by the Soviets, under pressure from East German communists. He subsequently escaped to West Berlin and resumed his life. The Kühnast scandal shows how East German communists used Nazi trials as a litmus test for political reliability and also how the Cold War poisoned the prospects for justice in many Nazi cases.

This chapter will present both a history of the concentration camp and a consideration of why this institution is so important to modern consciousness and identity. Briefly tracing the concentration camp’s origins in the colonial wars of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it then stresses the significance of World War I, which saw the internment of civilians and POWs on a large scale. It then examines the Nazi camp system and the Stalinist “Gulag” and compares the totalitarian countries’ use of camps with those of other, neglected settings, such as the American internment of Japanese-American citizens during World War II, Franco’s camps during and after the Spanish Civil War, Britain’s use of camps for Jewish DPs in Cyprus trying to reach Palestine after World War II, and the colonial powers’ resort to camps during the wars of decolonization, such as in Kenya. By offering a survey of the history of concentration camps in a global setting, the chapter is then able to engage with the philosophical literature dealing with the question of what the camps tell us about the nature of the modern world.

In 1935, many Jews who self-identified as German found they were no longer classified as such under the Nuremberg Laws, which specified that all four grandparents must be Aryan and deprived Jews of the right to own wealth, to work in various professions, and to marry non-Jews. Kálmán, Straus, Gilbert, and Abraham all left Germany to avoid Nazi persecution. Others who faced no immediate threats were not unaffected by events: Künneke found that his wife was categorized as a ‘Mischling’ (a German-Jew hybrid in the Nazi pseudoscience of race) and was dismissed from his post for being unwilling to divorce her. Several well-known artists involved with operetta perished in concentration camps. Operettas of the Third Reich era did not travel to Britain and America the way they had done in the past.