scholarly journals Et spyd gennem myterne? Om at fortælle i arkitektur og udstilling om de nazistiske partidage i Nürnberg

1970 ◽  
pp. 90
Author(s):  
Søren Kjørup

“A ‘spear’ of glass and steel bores through the voluminous brick-walls and breaks the axiality” – this is the drastic description by the Austrian deconstructivist architect Günther Domenig of the main element of his eminent transformation of an unfinished Nazi congress hall to house a documentation centre and an exhibition about the huge Nazi party rallies in Nuremberg through the 1930s. The very exhibition, however – Faszination und Gewalt, which opened in 2001 – does not manage to fulfil its declared aim: “To throw a critical light onto the showcase of ‘The Third Reich’.” Why not? Maybe because the curators were so anxious that visitors might get seduced by seeing Nazi propaganda that they foregrounded the horrors that followed after the rallies (the Holocaust and the world war) instead of showing their downside while they were going on. And maybe because they were unable to free themselves from the image of the 1934 rally in Leni Riefenstahl’s propaganda “documentary” Triumph des Willens. 

Author(s):  
Pavel Gotovetsky

The article is devoted to the biography of General Pavlo Shandruk, an Ukrainian officer who served as a Polish contract officer in the interwar period and at the beginning of the World War II, and in 1945 became the organizer and commander of the Ukrainian National Army fighting alongside the Third Reich in the last months of the war. The author focuses on the symbolic event of 1961, which was the decoration of General Shandruk with the highest Polish (émigré) military decoration – the Virtuti Militari order, for his heroic military service in 1939. By describing the controversy and emotions among Poles and Ukrainians, which accompanied the award of the former Hitler's soldier, the author tries to answer the question of how the General Shandruk’s activities should be assessed in the perspective of the uneasy Twentieth-Century Polish-Ukrainian relations. Keywords: Pavlo Shandruk, Władysław Anders, Virtuti Militari, Ukrainian National Army, Ukrainian National Committee, contract officer.


1970 ◽  
Vol 23 ◽  
pp. 271-283
Author(s):  
Jarosław Robert Kudelski

German cultural institutions had been conducting preparations to secure their collections in the event of a war since mid-1930s. The Prussian State Library, the holdings of which included the most precious German manuscripts and prints, was one of those institutions. Air attacks carried out on the capital of the Third Reich triggered the decision to evacuate the collection to Thüringen, Brandenburg, Pomerania and Lower Silesia. Largest deposits had been located in the latter. The unique heritage items stored there included medieval manuscripts, prayer books, music autographs and newspaper yearbooks as well as letters and private documents of many prominent representatives of German culture and art. Those items were evacuated, among other places, to Fürstenstein (Książ) Gießmannsdorf (Gościszów), Gröditzburg (Grodziec), Grüssau (Krzeszów), Fischbach (Karpniki) and Hirschberg (Jelenia Góra). The evacuation was conducted in cooperation with the heritage conservator for Lower Silesia, professor Günther Grundmann. With his assistance, in the course of a few years, a unique collection was created in Lower Silesia. Towards the end of the war the collection was deprived of proper care, as the authorities lacked resources to secure it. This resulted in the destruction of some items during military actions. The remaining parts of the collection had been taken over by Polish officials and were transferred to library collections in Krakow, Warszawa, Olsztyn, Toruń, Lublin and Łódź.


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.


Author(s):  
Hannah Kost

Wilhelm Frick, the Minister of the Interior in the Third Reich, has never garnered the same notoriety as some of his Nazi peers—in spite of the fact that he played an instrumental role in Jewish persecution. From his co-authoring of the Nuremberg Laws to his involvement in the Third Reich’s police and concentration camps, Frick’s background in law, policing, and politics helped him become a lethal and influential tool for the Nazi Party. This paper argues that Frick served as a judicial architect of the Holocaust and facilitator of the Final Solution, who has—somehow—remained   largely unknown.


2021 ◽  
pp. 23-74
Author(s):  
Martha Sprigge

This chapter analyzes music by composers who participated in a widespread artistic preoccupation with Germany’s ruined cityscapes during and shortly after World War II. These first musical responses to the war—written at a time of great emotional, physical, and political uncertainty—had a significant impact on musical mourning practices in the Soviet Occupation Zone of Germany, which became the German Democratic Republic in 1949. The chapter focuses on three examples by composers who wrote musical responses to the air war and went on to have successful careers in East Germany. These composers had very different experiences in the Third Reich: Rudolf Mauersberger was a member of the Nazi Party; Hanns Eisler and Paul Dessau were political and religious exiles. Yet they each used music to make sense of wartime trauma, by transforming the aftermath of the bombing—the rubble—into an aesthetic object—or ruin.


2015 ◽  
Vol 48 (4) ◽  
pp. 498-522 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric Kurlander

AbstractOver the past two decades, a number of scholars have called into question the existence of any meaningful relationship between Nazism and the occult. This article paints a different picture. First, virtually all Nazi leaders appeared to recognize the widespread popularity of occult practices and “border-scientific” thinking across the German population and within the Nazi Party itself. Second, although Adolf Hitler's Reich Chancellery, Joseph Goebbels’s Propaganda Ministry, and even Heinrich Himmler's Gestapo consistently advocated anti-occult policies or pro-enlightenment campaigns during the first six years of the Third Reich, most Nazi officials worked to differentiate between popular or commercial occultism, which they deemed ideologically “sectarian,” and acceptable “scientific” occultism, which was generally tolerated and intermittently sponsored by the regime. Third, the regime's reticence to eradicate even popular or commercial occultism—indicated by the fact that the environment for professional debunkers became more hostile with the outbreak of World War II––reflected the popularity of supernatural and border-scientific thinking within the German population. Indeed, whereas some Nazis intervened on the side of occultism for reasons of public opinion, many did so because they truly believed in its “scientific” value.


2017 ◽  
Vol 26 (4) ◽  
pp. 259-267
Author(s):  
Susan Benedict ◽  
Linda Shields ◽  
Colin Holmes ◽  
Julia Kurth

Eugenics underpinned the Nazi race theories which saw the murder of over 10 million people from “undesirable” groups, including Sinti (referred to in Nazi times as “Gypsies”), during the Holocaust. Eva Justin, from Dresden, completed a doctoral dissertation which examined a group of Sinti children of St Josef’s Home in Mulfingen, Germany. She aimed to prove the racial inferiority of these children; her work was done with no informed consent, and the children were sent to Auschwitz after her experiments. The study was supported by senior Nazis, supervised by Nazi “scientists” and examined by committed Nazis. We argue that her work was biased, poorly designed, and ultimately unethical, but was in keeping with methods of the emerging disciplines of anthropology and racial hygiene, in Germany and other countries, at the time. It is not possible to say that her work caused the children to meet their deaths (of the 39 children she included, only four survived); however, she did reinforce the Nazi racial theories. It is unfortunate that one of the first nurses in the world to receive a PhD did so through research attempting to prove that a group of children were “racially inferior” in support of National Socialism.


Author(s):  
Й. Шнелле

В данной статье рассматриваются отношения "Мусават", бывшей правящей партии Азербайджанской Республики и наиболее активной партии азербайджанских эмигрантов, с Третьим Рейхом в довоенный период. В 1933–1939 гг. Германия сыграла большую роль для партии «Мусават» в поисках союзников в борьбе против СССР. Мусаватисты некоторое время сотрудничали с Антикоминтерном в области антикоммунистической пропаганды и в 1939 г. были под покровительством Внешнеполитического управления НСДАП. Тем не менее положение «Мусават» в Германии оставалось неустойчивым вплоть до начала Второй мировой войны, надежды этой партии на эффективную поддержку со стороны Берлина не оправдались. The article examines relations between «Musavat», the former leading party of the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic and the most active party of Azerbaijan immigrants, and the Third Reich during the pre-war period. In 1933–1939 Germany helped the party in search for anti-Soviet allies. Members of «Musavat» collaborated with the Anti-Comintern in Anti-Bolshevik Propaganda activities in 1939, they were under the NSDAP Office of Foreign Affairs protection. Never the less «Musavat» party haven’t gained a steady position till the beginning of the Second World War, it’s hopes for effective help and support from Berlin were not realized.


Author(s):  
Nitzan Shoshan

Abstract This article examines whether and how the figure of Adolf Hitler in particular, and National Socialism more generally, operate as moral exemplars in today’s Germany. In conversation with similar studies about Mosely in England, Franco in Spain, and Mussolini in Italy, it seeks to advance our comparative understanding of neofascism in Europe and beyond. In Germany, legal and discursive constraints limit what can be said about the Third Reich period, while even far-right nationalists often condemn Hitler, for either the Holocaust or his military failure. Here I revise the concept of moral exemplarity as elaborated by Caroline Humphry to argue that Hitler and National Socialism do nevertheless work as contemporary exemplars, in at least three fashions: negativity, substitution, and extension. First, they stand as the most extreme markers of negative exemplarity for broad publics that understand them as illustrations of absolute moral depravity. Second, while Hitler himself is widely unpopular, Führer-substitutes such as Rudolf Hess provide alternative figures that German nationalists admire and seek to emulate. Finally, by extension to the realm of the ordinary, National Socialism introduces a cast of exemplars in the figures of loving grandfathers or anonymous fallen soldiers. The moral values for which they stand, I show, appear to be particularly significant for young nationalists. An extended, more open-ended notion of exemplarity, I conclude, can offer important insights about the lingering afterlife of fascist figures in the moral life of European nationalists today.


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