Author: Norbert Frei
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231507909
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 496
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Book Description
Of all the aspects of recovery in postwar Germany perhaps none was as critical or as complicated as the matter of dealing with Nazi criminals, and, more broadly, with the Nazi past. While on the international stage German officials spoke with contrition of their nation's burden of guilt, at home questions of responsibility and retribution were not so clear. In this masterful examination of Germany under Adenauer, Norbert Frei shows that, beginning in 1949, the West German government dramatically reversed the denazification policies of the immediate postwar period and initiated a new "Vergangenheitspolitik," or "policy for the past," which has had enormous consequences reaching into the present. Adenauer's Germany and the Nazi Past chronicles how amnesty laws for Nazi officials were passed unanimously and civil servants who had been dismissed in 1945 were reinstated liberally—and how a massive popular outcry led to the release of war criminals who had been condemned by the Allies. These measures and movements represented more than just the rehabilitation of particular individuals. Frei argues that the amnesty process delegitimized the previous political expurgation administered by the Allies and, on a deeper level, served to satisfy the collective psychic needs of a society longing for a clean break with the unparalleled political and moral catastrophe it had undergone in the 1940s. Thus the era of Adenauer devolved into a scandal-ridden period of reintegration at any cost. Frei's work brilliantly and chillingly explores how the collective will of the German people, expressed through mass allegiance to new consensus-oriented democratic parties, cast off responsibility for the horrors of the war and Holocaust, effectively silencing engagement with the enormities of the Nazi past.
Author: Norbert Frei
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231118821
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 497
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Book Description
Frei chronicles the denazification process in Adenauer's 1950s Germany. The stopping of punishment for Nazi crimes formed the crux of a policitcs of the past which, to a large degree, revoked the consequences of the previous political expurgation.
Author: Jeffrey Herf
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674416619
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 558
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Book Description
A significant new look at the legacy of the Nazi regime, this book exposes the workings of past beliefs and political interests on how--and how differently--the two Germanys have recalled the crimes of Nazism, from the anti-Nazi emigration of the 1930s through the establishment of a day of remembrance for the victims of National Socialism in 1996.
Author: David A. Messenger
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 081316057X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 327
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Book Description
Since the end of World War II, historians and psychologists have investigated the factors that motivated Germans to become Nazis before and during the war. While most studies have focused on the high-level figures who were tried at Nuremberg, much less is known about the hundreds of SS members, party functionaries, and intelligence agents who quietly navigated the transition to postwar life and successfully assimilated into a changed society after the war ended. In A Nazi Past, German and American scholars examine the lives and careers of men like Hans Globke—who not only escaped punishment for his prominent involvement in formulating the Third Reich's anti-Semitic legislation, but also forged a successful new political career. They also consider the story of Gestapo employee Gertrud Slottke, who exhibited high productivity and ambition in sending Dutch Jews to Auschwitz but eluded trial for fifteen years. Additionally, the contributors explore how a network of Nazi spies and diplomats who recast their identities in Franco's Spain, far from the denazification proceedings in Germany. Previous studies have emphasized how former Nazis hid or downplayed their wartime affiliations and actions as they struggled to invent a new life for themselves after 1945, but this fascinating work shows that many of these individuals actively used their pasts to recast themselves in a democratic, Cold War setting. Based on extensive archival research as well as recently declassified US intelligence, A Nazi Past contributes greatly to our understanding of the postwar politics of memory.
Author: Charles Williams
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0471437670
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 609
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Book Description
Critical Acclaim for ADENAUER "A gripping narrative . . . brings to life an intriguing historical figure . . . an enthralling perspective on the processes that shaped the postwar world." --Daily Telegraph (London) "Charts the ironies of Adenauer's complicated life. This is the story of a marathon man, but it is narrated at the pace of a sprinter and with the elegance of a hurdler."--The Times (London) "Lucid and engaging. This is a well-researched and elegantly written volume which deserves a wider readership than the purely political."--The Herald (Glasgow) "A highly readable, thoroughly reliable, intelligently critical life-and-times. . . . This portrait does justice to a man who is often invoked as a prophet of a United States of Europe, but who was in truth the greatest of German patriots."--Literary Review (London) "Well-researched and admirably written . . . reveals Adenauer the man--with all his authority and strength, his persistence and endurance, and his streak of ruthlessness and political cunning."--The Independent (London) THE LAST GREAT FRENCHMAN "Knowledgeable, lucid . . . the best English biography of de Gaulle."--The New York Times Book Review "Charles Williams has matched a great subject by something near to a great book."--Daily Telegraph (London)
Author: Frederick Taylor
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1608193829
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 531
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Book Description
The collapse of the Third Reich in 1945 was an event nearly unprecedented in history. Only the fall of the Roman Empire fifteen hundred years earlier compares to the destruction visited on Germany. The country's cities lay in ruins, its economic base devastated. The German people stood at the brink of starvation, millions of them still in POW camps. This was the starting point as the Allies set out to build a humane, democratic nation on the ruins of the vanquished Nazi state-arguably the most monstrous regime the world has ever seen. In Exorcising Hitler, master historian Frederick Taylor tells the story of Germany's Year Zero and what came next. He describes the bitter endgame of war, the murderous Nazi resistance, the vast displacement of people in Central and Eastern Europe, and the nascent cold war struggle between Soviet and Western occupiers. The occupation was a tale of rivalries, cynical realpolitik, and blunders, but also of heroism, ingenuity, and determination-not least that of the German people, who shook off the nightmare of Nazism and rebuilt their battered country. Weaving together accounts of occupiers and Germans, high and low alike Exorcising Hitler is a tour de force of both scholarship and storytelling, the first comprehensive account of this critical episode in modern history.
Author: Susan Neiman
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 0374715521
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 280
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Book Description
As an increasingly polarized America fights over the legacy of racism, Susan Neiman, author of the contemporary philosophical classic Evil in Modern Thought, asks what we can learn from the Germans about confronting the evils of the past In the wake of white nationalist attacks, the ongoing debate over reparations, and the controversy surrounding Confederate monuments and the contested memories they evoke, Susan Neiman’s Learning from the Germans delivers an urgently needed perspective on how a country can come to terms with its historical wrongdoings. Neiman is a white woman who came of age in the civil rights–era South and a Jewish woman who has spent much of her adult life in Berlin. Working from this unique perspective, she combines philosophical reflection, personal stories, and interviews with both Americans and Germans who are grappling with the evils of their own national histories. Through discussions with Germans, including Jan Philipp Reemtsma, who created the breakthrough Crimes of the Wehrmacht exhibit, and Friedrich Schorlemmer, the East German dissident preacher, Neiman tells the story of the long and difficult path Germans faced in their effort to atone for the crimes of the Holocaust. In the United States, she interviews James Meredith about his battle for equality in Mississippi and Bryan Stevenson about his monument to the victims of lynching, as well as lesser-known social justice activists in the South, to provide a compelling picture of the work contemporary Americans are doing to confront our violent history. In clear and gripping prose, Neiman urges us to consider the nuanced forms that evil can assume, so that we can recognize and avoid them in the future.
Author: Konrad H. Jarausch
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 140082527X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 395
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Book Description
Broken glass, twisted beams, piles of debris--these are the early memories of the children who grew up amidst the ruins of the Third Reich. More than five decades later, German youth inhabit manicured suburbs and stroll along prosperous pedestrian malls. Shattered Past is a bold reconsideration of the perplexing pattern of Germany's twentieth-century history. Konrad Jarausch and Michael Geyer explore the staggering gap between the country's role in the terrors of war and its subsequent success as a democracy. They argue that the collapse of Communism, national reunification, and the postmodern shift call for a new reading of the country's turbulent development, one that no longer suggests continuity but rupture and conflict. Comprising original essays, the book begins by reexamining the nationalist, socialist, and liberal master narratives that have dominated the presentation of German history but are now losing their hold. Treated next are major issues of recent debate that suggest how new kinds of German history might be written: annihilationist warfare, complicity with dictatorship, the taming of power, the impact of migration, the struggle over national identity, redefinitions of womanhood, and the development of consumption as well as popular culture. The concluding chapters reflect on the country's gradual transition from chaos to civility. This penetrating study will spark a fresh debate about the meaning of the German past during the last century. There is no single master narrative, no Weltgeist, to be discovered. But there is a fascinating story to be told in many different ways.
Author: Mary Fulbrook
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019068125X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 694
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Book Description
Winner of the Wolfson History Prize 2019 Shortlisted for the 2019 Cundill History Prize From the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. to the "stumbling stones" embedded in Berlin sidewalks, memorials to victims of Nazi violence have proliferated across the globe. More than a million visitors as many as killed there during its operation now visit Auschwitz each year. There is no shortage of commemoration of Nazi crimes. But has there been justice? Reckonings shows persuasively that there has not. The name "Auschwitz," for example, is often evoked to encapsulate the Holocaust. Yet focusing on one concentration camp, however horrific the scale of the crimes committed there, does not capture the myriad ways individuals became tangled up on the side of the perpetrators, or the diversity of experiences among their victims. And it can obscure the continuing legacies of Nazi persecution across generations and across continents. Exploring the lives of individuals across a spectrum of suffering and guilt each one capturing one small part of the greater story Mary Fulbrook's haunting and powerful book uses "reckoning" in the widest possible sense: to reveal the disparity between the extent of inhumanity and later attempts to interpret and rectify wrongs, as the consequences of violent reverberated through time. From the early brutality of political oppression and anti-Semitic policies, through the "euthanasia" program, to the full devastation of the ghettos and death camps, then moving across the post-war decades of selective confrontation with perpetrators and ever-expanding recognition of victims, Reckonings exposes the disjuncture between official myths about "dealing with the past" and the fact that the vast majority of Nazi perpetrators were never held accountable. In the successor states to the Third Reich East Germany, West Germany, and Austria prosecution varied widely and selective justice was combined with the reintegration of former Nazis. Meanwhile, those who had lived through this period, as well as their children, the "second generation," continued to face the legacies of Nazism in the private sphere - in ways often at odds with those of public remembrance and memorials. By following the various phases of trials and testimonies, from those immediately after the war through succeeding decades and up to the present, Reckonings illuminates the shifting accounts by which both perpetrators and survivors have assessed the significance of this past for subsequent generations, and calibrates anew the scales of justice.
Author: Shelley Baranowski
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1118936884
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 680
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Book Description
A Deep Exploration of the Rise, Reign, and Legacy of the Third Reich For its brief existence, National Socialist Germany was one of the most destructive regimes in the history of humankind. Since that time, scholarly debate about its causes has volleyed continuously between the effects of political and military decisions, pathological development, or modernity gone awry. Was terror the defining force of rule, or was popular consent critical to sustaining the movement? Were the German people sympathetic to Nazi ideology, or were they radicalized by social manipulation and powerful propaganda? Was the “Final Solution” the motivation for the Third Reich’s rise to power, or simply the outcome? A Companion to Nazi Germany addresses these crucial questions with historical insight from the Nazi Party’s emergence in the 1920s through its postwar repercussions. From the theory and context that gave rise to the movement, through its structural, cultural, economic, and social impacts, to the era’s lasting legacy, this book offers an in-depth examination of modern history’s most infamous reign. Assesses the historiography of Nazism and the prehistory of the regime Provides deep insight into labor, education, research, and home life amidst the Third Reich’s ideological imperatives Describes how the Third Reich affected business, the economy, and the culture, including sports, entertainment, and religion Delves into the social militarization in the lead-up to war, and examines the social and historical complexities that allowed genocide to take place Shows how modern-day Germany confronts and deals with its recent history Today’s political climate highlights the critical need to understand how radical nationalist movements gain an audience, then followers, then power. While historical analogy can be a faulty basis for analyzing current events, there is no doubt that examining the parallels can lead to some important questions about the present. Exploring key motivations, environments, and cause and effect, this book provides essential perspective as radical nationalist movements have once again reemerged in many parts of the world.
