Ostmark

2021 ◽  
pp. 268-287
Author(s):  
Helen Roche

Following Austria’s annexation by the Third Reich, the NPEA authorities were eager to pursue every opportunity to found new Napolas in the freshly acquired territories of the ‘Ostmark’. In the first instance, the Inspectorate took over the existing state boarding schools (Bundeserziehungsanstalten/Staatserziehungsanstalten) at Wien-Breitensee, Wien-Boerhavegasse, Traiskirchen, and the Theresianum. Secondly, beyond Vienna, numerous Napolas were also founded in the buildings of monastic foundations which had been requisitioned and expropriated by the Nazi security services. These included the abbey complexes at Göttweig, Lambach, Seckau, Vorau, and St. Paul (Spanheim), as well as the Catholic seminary at St. Veit (present-day Ljubljana-Šentvid, Slovenia). This chapter begins by charting the chequered history of the former imperial and royal (k.u.k.) cadet schools in Vienna, which were refashioned into civilian Bundeserziehungsanstalten by the Austrian socialist educational reformer Otto Glöckel immediately after World War I. During the reign of Dollfuß and Schuschnigg’s Austrofascist state, the schools were threatened from within by the terrorist activity of illegal Hitler Youth cells, and the Anschluss was ultimately welcomed by many pupils, staff, and administrators. August Heißmeyer and Otto Calliebe’s subsequent efforts to reform the schools into Napolas led to their being incorporated into the NPEA system on 13 March 1939. The chapter then treats the Inspectorate’s foundation of further Napolas in expropriated religious buildings, focusing on NPEA St. Veit as a case study. In conclusion, it outlines the ways in which both of these forms of Napolisation conformed to broader patterns of Nazification policy in Austria after the Anschluss.

2021 ◽  
pp. 73-110
Author(s):  
Gojko Barjamovic

The history of empire begins in Western Asia. This chapter tracks developments in the second and first millennia BCE as imperial control in the region became increasingly common and progressively more pervasive. Oscillations between political fragmentation and imperial unification swung gradually toward the latter, from just a few documented examples in the third millennium BCE to the more-or-less permanent partition of Western Asia into successive imperial states from the seventh century BCE until the end of World War I. The chapter covers about a dozen empires and empire-like states, tracing developments of territoriality and notions of imperial universality using Assyria ca. 2004–605 BCE as a case study for how large and loose hegemonies became the normative political formation in the region.


Author(s):  
Elliot Neaman

This chapter discusses the life and work of Ernst Jünger, who was part of a strain in modern German conservatism that tested the limits of modernity and Enlightenment rationality. He catapulted to fame as a young man on the basis of his World War I memoirs, In Storms of Steel, which made him part of the antidemocratic forces of the Weimar Republic, but he retreated into the inner emigration during the Third Reich. After 1950 he lived a reclusive life but published a stream of essays and books and an impressive diary that chronicled almost four decades of life with sharp observations on a wide range of topics. He was a cultural pessimist who thought that the rise of a unifying planetary technology and the loss of local culture meant that we were entering into a posthistorical world of fragmentation, and new forms of cultural and political tyranny.


Author(s):  
Anselm Doering-Manteuffel

Breaking the Law as a Norm: Contours of Ideological Radicalism within the Nazi Dictatorship. This article analyzes the relationship between Nazi legal experts’ efforts to create a canon of constitutional law for the Third Reich and the ideological radicalism characteristic of Hitler and the SS-state. The attempts of legal professionals to establish “völkisch” constitutional law emerged out of the staunch anti-liberalism that had spread throughout Germany since the end of World War I. However, this “völkisch” constitutional law bore no resemblance to rational European legal thought. It not only proved to be ineffective for this reason, but also because the ideological radicalism that reigned supreme in the Third Reich sought to break the law and let lawlessness rule.


2020 ◽  
pp. 426-440
Author(s):  
Barbara Stelingowska

The article undertakes the topic of forced population displacement seen through the eyes of a child from Zamojszczyzna along with war-time fates of Polish families deported duringthe Second World War. The history of Zamojszczyzna lands is composed of tragic experiences of people forced out of their family households, imprisoned in the transit camps, deported to be involuntary labourers in the Third Reich, or murdered in concentration camps KL Auschwitz and KL Lublin (Majdanek). The survivors had to carry on throughout their lives with an indelible mark left by war-time childhood reflected by the name “a Child of Zamojszczyna” (the said status was granted to persons who were prisoners of the transit camps in Zamość and Zwierzyniec [solely children until the age of fourteen] and those imprisoned in concentration camps [for at least one day]).


2020 ◽  
pp. 61-90
Author(s):  
Michael Geheran

This chapter discusses the Nazi seizure of power from 1933 to 1935. The chapter extends the argument that Jewish veterans used their record of fighting to counter antisemetic attacks into the early years of the Third Reich, demonstrating that Hitler's seizure of power in 1933 did not bring “social death” for the Jewish Frontkampfer. The reign of terror the Nazis unleashed on Jews, Communists, and other groups stood in marked contrast to their failed attempts to marginalize Jewish ex-servicemen, whose record of service in the front lines in World War I enabled them to claim and negotiate a special status in the new Germany. Jewish veterans did not break with their identity as Germans, and continued to demand recognition of their sacrifices from the German public as well as the Nazi Party.


Antiquity ◽  
2002 ◽  
Vol 76 (291) ◽  
pp. 209-218 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Maischberger

The history of the archaeological disciplines in Germany during the Nazi era can be considered as a locus classicus of nationalist interpretation and misuse of the past. For some time now, various efforts have been made to enhance our understanding of this period, including several aspects related to archaeology and cultural politics. Most studies have been carried on by modern historians, but also archaeologists have engaged in historiographical research on their own discipline. Some freqiiently cited works like Bollmus (1970) Kater (1974) and Losemann (1977) are still fundamental for our understanding of important aspects of Nazi cultural politics as well as the involvement of traditional institutions into the dictatorial system.


1992 ◽  
Vol 25 (4) ◽  
pp. 425-443 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Mckibben

The emergence of the Independent Socialist party (USPD) in Germany during World War I had momentous and long-reaching consequences. Organized as a group of dissenters within the established German Social Democratic party (SPD), independent socialism grew into a movement that split Germany's working class into two, then three, warring factions. The result was a struggle for supremacy among socialist party factions to which subsequent writers have attributed the “failed” revolution of November 1918, a Weimar Constitution that alienated rather than satisfied German workers, and ultimately the inability of German Socialists to present a unified front against the ultimate threat to German democracy: Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich.


2021 ◽  
pp. 197-220
Author(s):  
Helen Roche

The very first Napolas which were founded at Potsdam, Plön, and Köslin, as well as those which were subsequently founded at Naumburg, Oranienstein, Bensberg, Berlin-Spandau, and Wahlstatt, were deliberately established on the premises of the former Prussian cadet schools, which had been refashioned as civilian ‘State Boarding Schools’ (Staatliche Bildungsanstalten/Stabilas) after World War I, in accordance with the Treaty of Versailles. To an extent, the NPEA authorities deliberately wanted to resurrect the tradition of the Royal Prussian Cadet Corps at the Napolas, but in a new, Nazified guise. This chapter explores the extent to which the former cadet-school Napolas retained or regained their militaristic Prussian spirit, and examines continuities between the Prussian cadet schools, the Stabilas, and the NPEA. It begins by chronicling the demise of the cadet schools and their resurrection as civilian state schools, more or less dedicated to upholding the Weimar Republic, during the aftermath of World War I. It then goes on to chart the rise of revanchist sentiment and the formation of illegal Hitler Youth cells at the Stabilas during the early 1930s, before analysing the process of Napolisation which took place in 1933–4 in greater detail. In conclusion, the chapter sites the Napolas’ Janus-faced attitude towards the cadet-school tradition within existing debates regarding the affinities (or otherwise) between Prussianism and National Socialism, and the degree of continuity which existed between the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich.


Author(s):  
Panikos Panayi

In Germany, World War II does not usually form a distinct and compact period, as it does in other states, such as Great Britain, the United States, or Russia. The most recognized phases in the history of 20th-century Germany are the Kaiserreich (1890–1919), the Weimar Republic (1919–1933), the Third Reich (1933–1945), divided Germany (1945–1989), and reunified Germany (after 1989). World War II usually receives attention as part of the history of the Third Reich. On the other hand, historians of the war often approach the conflict from a German-centered perspective. Some differences exist between German and Anglo-American historians, with the former, especially those who work on local history, more likely to examine World War II as a distinct period, although some recent major works have begun to buck this trend in Anglo-American scholarship. In recent years, the multivolume Clarendon history Germany and the Second World War, translated from the German Das Deutsche Reich und der Zweite Weltkrieg, has helped to unify the Anglo-American and German perspectives. Some of the publications included in this article, however, view the war in Germany as part of the wider history of the Third Reich. From the outset, Nazi Germany, and World War II within it, has given rise to a vast literature, which began as the Nazis rose to power and has continued unabated until the present. This article can therefore only provide the briefest of introductions to this enormous historiography by outlining the key publications in these areas: General Overviews; Push to War; Invasion of Eastern Europe; Bombing of German Cities; Economic Mobilization; Genocide; Foreign Workers and Prisoners of War; Local History; Women; Children; Repression and Resistance; Religion; Propaganda; and Defeat.


2010 ◽  
Vol 43 (4) ◽  
pp. 581-591 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric D. Weitz

Years later, after the catastrophes of the Third Reich and World War II, Arnold Zweig remembered how he had returned home from another disaster, World War I. “With what hopes had we come back from the war!” he wrote. Zweig recalled not just the catastrophe of total war, but also the élan of revolution. Like a demon, he threw himself into politics, then into his writing. “I have big works, wild works, great well-formed, monumental works in my head!,” he wrote to his friend Helene Weyl in April 1919. “I want to write! Everything that I have done up until now is just a preamble.” And it was not to be “normal” writing. The times were of galloping stallions and wide-open furrows, and talent was everywhere. War and revolution had drawn people out of the confining security of bourgeois life. “The times have once again placed adventure in the center of daily life, making possible once more the great novel and the great story.”


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