Polityka podatkowa nazistowskich Niemiec — zarys problematyki

Taxes constitute an integral part of the state economic policy, regardless of the political system or dominant ideology. It is therefore not surprising that they were an essential tool for achieving the goals of Nazi Germany, of both fiscal and non-fiscal nature. The purpose of the paper is to examine in scientific terms the issues of (i) the use of taxes by the governments of Nazi Germany to increase budget revenues necessary to achieve political and military goals, as well as (ii) the Nazis’ recognition of public levies as a form of specific economic oppression serving the implementation of the state’s policy towards the Jewish population in Germany.

Monuments for deserters: A particularity of German memory culture

This paper examines the changing face of deserters in Germany and the gradual entry of monuments dedicated to them into German memorial culture. The multiple changes in the perception of the Wehrmacht (united armed forces of Nazi Germany from 1935-1945) deserters during the last 70 years from cowards and traitors to (anti-)heroes to victims is the result of generational shifts and changed political contexts. Deserters from the Wehrmacht were a taboo subject for a long time. Over the course of the past thirty years, their story has been reappraised. It now has a visual presence in the form of counter monuments which challenge notions of traditional heroic military virtues and the place of resistance in modern political German culture. Counter-monuments, which had their origins in Germany in the 1980s, were always intended to be provocative, for they sought to disrupt a discourse that had become anachronistic, even unbearable in the eyes of many. Whether they will continue to have a presence, whether further deserter monuments will be built, or whether a future retrospective evaluation will show these monuments to have been an ephemeral and singular phenomenon, is still uncertain.

LAW ART

The paper argues that Thomas Wolfe’s novella I Have a Thing to Tell You was written to enable his readers to construct the reality of discrimination against Jews in Nazi Germany in the period surrounding the Berlin Olympic Games of 1936. Wolfe’s intention was to record faithfully an episode that took place on a train in Germany in early September 1936, which brought home to him more forcibly than any other personal experience the reality of Nazi oppression. Through this story Wolfe wanted to engage his readers in a narrative discourse, to reveal the truth as he saw it, and to ask his readers to make a metaphoric transference from this one example of Nazi oppression to whatever land or ruler tried to imprison people physically or spiritually. The “thing to tell” was both a protest against abridged or denied civil rights and a testimony of his commitment to expose man’s inhumanity to man.

Teaching about Fascism(s): The Relationship between Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany in East German, West German, and Italian Textbooks, 1950–60

The parallels and interconnections between Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany are not merely a matter of contemporary scholarly interest, but also were and still are a charged political and societal question. Through an analysis of discourse in school history textbooks, this article analyzes how scholars, students, teachers and state authorities perceived these parallels and interconnections during the immediate postwar period. The paper investigates how the earliest history textbooks – published in the post-fascist successor states of East Germany, West Germany, and Italy between 1950 and 1960 – evaluated the relationship between Mussolini's Italy and Hitler's Germany during the 1930s. The 1930s are key because they began with Mussolini as the senior fascist dictator; over the course of the decade – with the war in Ethiopia, the Spanish Civil War, the passage of anti-Semitic racial laws, and the creation of the Pact of Steel – Hitler's Germany eclipsed Mussolini's Italy as the preeminent fascist power. By looking at postwar textbooks’ representations of the Fascist Italy–Nazi Germany relationship during the 1930s, we can see that the postwar post-fascist states often blamed each other for the emergence of the especially imperialist, racist and violent elements of fascism. Thus, this article illustrates how educational materials marshalled deflection strategies during the long process of Vergangenheitsbewältigung.