Repression

Mapping Intimacies ◽

10.5406/illinois/9780252041068.003.0007 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Alexander Prusin

Keyword(s):

Racial Stereotypes ◽

Guerrilla Warfare ◽

Officer Corps ◽

Nazi Ideology ◽

Police Functions

Focuses on the German anti-guerrilla warfare in Serbia in 1941. Although German military and civil officials did not consider the Serbs as ideological enemies solely on the basis of race, the outbreak of resistance elevated racial stereotypes to the forestage of occupation policies, particularly since the Germans did not have enough troops to suppress the resistance. In comparison to Poland or Ukraine, where maintaining security was the prerogative of Himmler’s SS and police, his forces in Serbia were too small for such a task. As a result, it was the Wehrmacht, which assumed the essentially police functions. The German officer corps’ commitment to the Nazi ideology ensured that it perceived its task through political prism and applied unrestricted terror as the most effective method for crushing the resistance.

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Afterword

10.5406/illinois/9780252040009.003.0007 ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

Ralph M. Leck

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

Sexual Politics ◽

Gender Politics ◽

Modern History ◽

Officer Corps ◽

Nazi Ideology ◽

Cultural Affinity

This concluding chapter discusses how underlying the choice of Ulrichs as a symbol of resistance to Prussian–Nazi politics resulted to growing popular recognition of sexual politics as a vital feature of modern history. In this vein, Minister Einem's expulsion of homosexuals from the German officer corps reveals the cultural affinity between the rise of mass armies in the nineteenth century and the construction of modern masculinity. This affinity was a core cultural–political continuity between Prussian authoritarianism and the Nazi dictatorship. Indeed, the aspect of Nazi ideology that most closely resembled the fascist archetype was its gender politics. The choice of Ulrichs as a replacement for Einem, then, symbolizes rising acknowledgment that reactionary sexual politics was the greatest moral–cultural appeal of fascist populism.

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The Wehrmacht and National Socialist Military Thinking

War in History ◽

10.1177/0968344515614049 ◽

2017 ◽

Vol 24 (3) ◽

pp. 336-361 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

David Stahel

Keyword(s):

World View ◽

Criminal Activity ◽

Second World War ◽

World War ◽

Officer Corps ◽

National Socialist ◽

Profound Impact ◽

Nazi Ideology ◽

Anglo American ◽

Second World

This article argues that Nazi ideology had a profound impact upon the German officer corps in the Second World War not just for their well-established complicity in criminal activity, but also in their approach to warfare. This article demonstrates that Nazi ideology radicalized pre-existing notions of the German military ethos and conceptions of war, leading to an often irrational world view in which impractical, and even impossible, military undertakings could be ‘rationally’ explained, accepted, and understood. At the same time, seventy years after the war, a National Socialist influence upon German military thinking has seldom been discussed in the proliferation of Anglo-American operational histories.

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