NO EVENT IS MORE CRUCIAL to understanding the emergence of Nazism than Germany’s surrender to the Allies at 11 o’clock on 11 November 1918. Until the very end of World War I, wartime propaganda portrayed the undefeated Imperial German Army as invincible, giving no hint of the coming disaster on the Western Front. The anti-Hitler journalist Sebastian Haffner recalled that when he was eleven years old and saw the newspaper headline “Armistice Signed,” his “entire inner world . . . collapsed.”¹ Adolf Hitler, recuperating from partial blindness in a military hospital in Pasewalk, also recalled the trauma of defeat, later...

THOUGH HITLER’S FOLLOWERS CLAIMED that his appointment as chancellor on 30 January 1933 was “a national revolution,” his opponents, like the exiled writer Heinrich Mann (1871–1950), countered that “it was the violent suppression of a people that no longer dared to resist.”¹ Hermann Rauschning (1887–1982), former mayor of Danzig and one of the most influential defectors from Nazism in the 1930s, called it a “revolution of nihilism.”² Historians have been reluctant to apply the term revolution to the National Socialist regime since no social revolution occurred and because they view the National Socialists as “counterrevolutionaries” who were opposed...

FASHIONING HITLER’S PUBLIC IMAGE was a preoccupation of the Nazi Party from the early 1920s. He was one of the first politicians to make public use of the airplane, and he always traveled with his personal photographer, Heinrich Hoffmann, who documented him in a variety of flattering poses. Hoffmann shaped his subject’s image to fit the circumstances: in the 1920s, Hitler was the fervent, brown-shirted party leader with a resolute gaze; to appeal to voters in the 1930s, he was a man of the people; after 1933, he was most often the statesman; and during the war, he was the...

NAZI IDEOLOGY HAD ITS ROOTS in a broad array of völkisch, anti-Semitic, and pseudoscientific ideas put forward during the nineteenth century, including social Darwinism, eugenics, pan-Germanism, Aryan mysticism, and extreme nationalism. But it never developed a consistent or officially prescribed doctrine. Unlike Soviet Marxism, which relied on anonical Marxist-Leninist texts, or liberal democracy, which was based on the rule of law, the Nazi Party was more intent on publicly affirming National Socialism’s “worldview” than on putting forth a coherent statement of it. Despite Hitler’s frequent claim that “National Socialism is a worldview,” even the leading ideologues of the movement—like...

“RACE” HAD MULTIPLE MEANINGS in European science of the nineteenth century. On the one hand, it simply meant “all human beings,” but it also reflected an older, seventeenth-century notion of deep, unbridgeable divisions among human beings, marked by external (as well as unseen) qualities: skin color, facial structure, character, and intelligence. Charles Darwin’s (1809–82) mid-nineteenth-century claim to present the theoretical underpinnings of all biological development immediately had both scientific and popular resonance in Wilhelmine Germany. Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919) was Darwin’s major proponent in German science. He argued that “higher” species embodied each stage of their earlier, more primitive...

IN 1919, THE SHORT-LIVED GERMAN colonial empire, begun in 1883, was dissolved by the Treaty of Versailles. German colonies in Africa, the South Seas, and Asia were given over to the victorious powers, from Japan to Great Britain. All settlers were ordered removed (except for those in German Southwest Africa). Even though Prussia had established colonies in Africa (Great Friedrichsburg, now in Ghana) as early as 1682, the Reich chancellor, Otto von Bismarck (1815–98), had always opposed “foreign” colonies and had left the “scramble for Africa” (and everywhere else) to the French and British colonial empires. In 1883, the...

EUROPEAN ANTI-SEMITISM IS AS OLD as the early Christian church and as new as the racial science that emerged in early twentieth-century Vienna. If ancient writers also left occasional evidence of their dislike of Jews, theirs was a resentment that was never central to their self-definition as Romans or Greeks. With the rise of Christianity, however, came a new phenomenon: a teaching of contempt that made anti-Judaism part of Christian theology, as in Paul’s assertion in his letter to the Romans that Israel has to become Christian before the kingdom of God can arrive (Romans 11:25).

With the spread of...

THE EFFECT OF NAZI ATTITUDES toward the half million Jews in Germany was felt almost immediately after the National Socialists came to power. Many supporters (and detractors) had assumed that anti-Semitic vitriol was simply rhetoric that the party would abandon once in power. The official organization of Jews in Germany, the Central Verein, issued a statement calling for calm and declaring, “We do not believe our German fellow citizens will let themselves be carried away into committing excesses against the Jews.”¹ In March 1933, on the pretext that Jewish organizations abroad were boycotting German goods, the party organized an “anti-Jewish...

IF THERE WAS A LEGACY of the Protestant Reformation that became a hallmark of things “German,” it was the emphasis on education as a means of self-improvement. By the end of the nineteenth century, the Germans had invented everything from early childhood education (Friedrich Fröbel, 1782–1852, the creator of the kindergarten) to the modern university (Wilhelm von Humboldt, 1767–1835). Education was the path to Bildung, that impossible word that signified culture, knowledge, sophistication, and social status. Beginning with Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803), the eighteenth century saw a turn to an authoritarian notion of education as indoctrination in...

IN 1933, JEWISH SCHOLARS and political opponents of the Nazis suffered an unprecedented loss of positions and livelihood at Germany’s universities. Of the 1,700 faculty members and 313 full professors who lost their jobs, 80 percent were removed on “racial” grounds. The rest were pacifists or had left-wing sympathies. The remaining members of the academic elite by and large uttered no word of protest when their Jewish and liberal colleagues were dismissed or when Jewish students were barred from admission to their universities.

The new regime had no coherent academic policy apart from a few slogans and did not appoint...

NAZI EDUCATION provided a “special” status to women as the bearers of the next generation of the “race.” Women had gradually been civilly emancipated in the various German-speaking states during the nineteenth century but were permitted to vote in the Weimar Republic as of November 1918. Women entered universities beginning in 1900 and were guaranteed access to the workplace. For Hitler, all of these advances grew out of the corruption of the German spirit by the Jews. He stated in 1934, “The word women’s emancipation is merely an invention of the Jewish intellect, and its meaning is informed by the...

DURING THE FRENCH REVOLUTION, there was a systematic attempt to wrest the “sacrament of marriage”—which linked husband, wife, and God—from the prerogatives of the Roman Catholic Church. Marriage was made a contractual and legal relationship under the supervision and acknowledgment of the state. In the German lands occupied by French revolutionary forces, such civil marriages were introduced in 1798. Under Otto von Bismarck, after 6 February 1875, only civil marriages were permitted in Prussia and then in imperial Germany. Bismarck, seeing Protestant Germany in a protracted struggle with the Catholic Church and Catholic states (the Kulturkampf), wanted to...

THE EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURY was the age of eugenics. “Improve the race!” was the cry in all the nations (from Germany to the United States to Japan) that accepted the primacy of “science” as the means of improving the lives of their citizens. In 1927, in his comments on the compulsory sterilization case of the “feebleminded” Carrie Buck of Virginia, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. wrote,

We have seen more than once that the public welfare may call upon the best citizens for their lives. It would be strange if it could not call upon those who already...

IF RACIAL HYGIENE STOOD at the center of the Nazis’ concern about how to improve the “race,” then human sexuality was the means to that end. Germany was the site for some of the first modern sexual liberation movements. Nudism had its roots in the 1890s in the German youth movement and became institutionalized as Free Body Culture (Freikörperkultur) as early as 1913. Nudism was to be found throughout Germany as a sign of a healthy concern with the body. The body only revealed itself when nude. The writer Franz Kafka (1883–1924), when he went to a nudist camp...

CERTAINLY, ONE OF THE HALLMARKS of the first half of the twentieth century was the invention (or discovery) of interiority.” To know what takes place within the soul, the mind, and heart of another individual or—perhaps more specifically—what takes place deep in the recesses of one’s own psyche has been a desire of human beings since the Greeks. Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) was one of the undisputed shapers of twentieth-century thought through his discovery of the unconscious. Trained as a neurologist at the University of Vienna, he developed “psychoanalysis,” which offered a threefold approach to understanding the human...

THE HISTORY OF THE RELATIONSHIP between Nazi Germany and the established German churches is complicated by the fact that the regime never clarified its relationship to Christianity. Some historians have argued that National Socialism was an anti-Christian movement that substituted its own “political religion” and pagan worldview for Christian doctrine. The view that the life of the Volk or the community rested on blood, race, and an active and vitalistic harmony with nature was ultimately a religious concept, even if it claimed scientific authority. Others, however, have called Nazism a pro-Christian movement, since most of the leading Nazis considered themselves...

IF BILDUNG (education, self-cultivation through culture) was one of the defining qualities of German society, then literature was its keystone. Before imperial Germany was created in 1871, the literary text was the strand that knit together Germans as a cultural, if not political, entity. Plays by Gotthold Lessing (1729–81) and Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805), novels by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) and Theodor Fontane (1819–98), and poetry by Novalis (1772–1801) and Annette von Droste-Hülshoff (1797–1848) reached into every town and principality and provided a common cultural vocabulary and quasi-national identity. In Wilhelmine Germany, culture was...

ONE OF THE GREAT DEBATES in nineteenth-century aesthetics was whether music or the visual arts were the greatest expression of the human spirit. This ancient struggle between ear and eye, as the thinkers of the nineteenth century framed it, rested on which medium could best present the abstractions of human thought and feeling. The supporters of music, such as the Viennese critic Eduard Hanslick (1825–1904), argued that music could represent the world both abstractly and realistically in the form of “program music.” Art, especially the newest art of photography, seemed limited to mirroring the world. Suddenly, from William Turner...

“GERMAN MUSIC, especially that of the nineteenth century, celebrated the greatest victories in the whole world; it was this branch of the arts that secured the exemplary international reputation of German art and German artists in a way that no other branch of the arts did.” Apart from the redundant use of the word German, it is hard to dispute these words spoken by the distinguished composer Richard Strauss (1864–1949) at the opening of the Reichsmusikkammer (Reich Music Chamber) in February 1934. However, the same cannot be said for his admiration of Hitler or the new regime’s attitudes toward...

A GREAT DEAL OF THE POPULAR CULTURE of Nazi Germany lacked the heavy-handed ideology, mythologizing, and pseudoclassical forms of representation embodied in the officially sanctioned architecture, painting, and music. For the vast majority of Germans, the most ubiquitous face of Nazi culture was the less overtly political entertainment offered on radio and above all in film, though these media were hardly devoid of ideological motifs. This distinction was in part an expression of class: art, theater, opera, and classical music appealed to elite tastes; cinema, radio, sports, and travel had a much broader appeal. Film was especially popular, with cinema...

THE CURSE OF HIGH CULTURE was that its favorite medium, drama, already seen by Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805) as a means of educating the sensibilities of the public, could reach only a very limited audience. In 1889, the Berlin theatrical critic Otto Brahm (1856–1912) created the Freie Volksbühne (Free People’s Theater) to make available to the masses very inexpensive theater tickets for the new “naturalistic” dramas. Even with this (limited) attempt, at best thousands of urban dwellers visited a given “serious” play. The theater attempted to become part of mass culture, but it rarely succeeded. Only the more popular...

ZIONISM, WHICH HAD ALREADY BECOME A POTENT FORCE in Germany by the 1910s, argued that only a return to a Jewish homeland (and Palestine was eventually the only option accepted) would assure the Jews the stability of a “peoplehood” as well as a national state. After the first months of the Nazi “revolution,” German Zionists accurately predicted that there was no future for Jews in Germany. One of these, Robert Weltsch (1891–1982), editor of the Jüdische Rundschau, the journal of the Zionistische Vereinigung für Deutschland (Zionist Organization for Germany), published his admonition of 1 April 1933—the day of...

DURING THE WEIMAR REPUBLIC, nationalists were divided between romantic anticapitalists who yearned nostalgically for a preindustrial, premodern past and the wing of the German Right that embraced technology, total mobilization, and the figure of the soldier of labor (the “Worker” in the famous essay by the novelist Ernst Jünger). The Nazis incorporated both of these elements, combining attacks on the corrupting influence of commercial civilization with the promotion of “German” labor, technology, and “rationalization” (a catchword of the 1920s meaning “scientific” approaches to management and efficient production). Typical of the regime’s fetish for productivity was the Four-Year Plan, announced in...

BEFORE 1933, ADOLF HITLER could be counted as something of an admirer of the United States for its productive power and size. As a continental power, America represented for him the ideal ratio of population and territory; he attributed American productivity not to industrial output per se but to the economic potential afforded by its size and living space. At the same time, he reiterated his statement in Mein Kampf that the Jews were “the controlling masters of the producers in a nation of one hundred and twenty millions; only a single great man, [Henry] Ford, to their fury, still...

IN 1933, ALL INDEPENDENT SPORTS and free-time associations were subject to “coordination” (Gleichschaltung) to implement their complete Aryanization and subordination to the Führer principle. After 30 January 1934, sports were overseen by the Nationalsozialistischer Reichsbund für Leibesübungen (German Reich League for Physical Education), headed by the Reichsportführer (Reich sports leader), Hans von Tschammer und Osten—though other Nazi organizations like the Deutsche Arbeitsfront (German Labor Front) and the Hitler Youth had competing sports associations. After a brief period during which “wild” (unaffiliated) sports groups continued to exist, the reorganization of German sports led to the disbanding and prohibition of all...

The Berliners had a slang word for it, an adaptation of the very high-class French word amusement, pronounced in the working-class neighborhoods of Berlin as “amusmang.” Certainly, the master of Amusmang in the 1920s was the popular artist Heinrich Zille (1858–1929), whose caricatures of working-class Berliners at play was a source of amusement for all. Zille’s take on the world was funny, and most people who saw his work got the point: being poor did not make you less than human; indeed, it gave you a certain ironic way of seeing the world. The annual “Zille Ball” at the...

NAZI IDEOLOGY CONCEIVED of the opposition between Aryans and Jews as a world-historical battle for racial supremacy. A racially pure Germany demanded, as Hitler’s chief ideologist Alfred Rosenberg (1893–1946) wrote in his 1930 Myth of the Twentieth Century, the radical removal, indeed elimination, of the Jews. Only through such an apocalyptic event could Germany again become a “healthy” nation. Upon reading Rosenberg in 1942, the Jewish philologist Victor Klemperer, living with his non-Jewish wife, saw the tract as an almost comic commentary on the time: “Only Nordic man has true religion, true artistic genius, true science, is truly able...