Ludendorff in the Third Reich

2021 ◽  
pp. 160-181
Author(s):  
Jay Lockenour
Keyword(s):  
Political Party ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
Concentration Camps ◽  
The Political ◽  
National Socialist ◽  
The Third ◽  
National Socialists ◽  
The Third Reich ◽  
The Many ◽  
The Impact

This chapter outlines Erich Ludendorff’s attacks, written in his paper, Ludendorffs Volkswarte, on Adolf Hitler, the National Socialists, and their new cabinet allies after the political party consolidated their power in the summer of 1933. It discusses the relations between Hitler and Ludendorff throughout the first two years of the Third Reich. Despite the many ideological similarities with Nazism, the chapter reveals how Ludendorff’s followers experienced persecution, including their lectures being banned at the last minute or disrupted by Sturmabteilung (SA) rowdies. Some Ludendorffers lost their jobs or chances for promotion because of their championing the Feldherr’s cause. Some spent time in jail or concentration camps because of their “subversive” belief in Deutsche Gotterkenntnis. The chapter then discusses Ludendorff’s Volkswarte as a “purely religious” journal after the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP) banned his paper and the Tannenbergbund. The chapter also mentions Ludendorff’s refusal to attend the festivities commemorating the Battle of Tannenberg. Ultimately, the chapter assesses the impact of Hitler and Ludendorff’s reconciliation on Germany.

scholarly journals Neurosciences in the Third Reich: from Ivory Tower to Death Camps

1999 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 132-138 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael I. Shevell
Keyword(s):  
Medical Practice ◽  
Physical Disabilities ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
Slippery Slope ◽  
Concentration Camps ◽  
The Political ◽  
Racial Hygiene ◽  
The Third ◽  
Political Conditions ◽  
The Third Reich

Abstract: It is commonly thought that the horrific medical abuses occurring during the era of the Third Reich were limited to fringe physicians acting in extreme locales such as the concentration camps. However, it is becoming increasingly apparent that there was a widespread perversion of medical practice and science that extended to mainstream academic physicians. Scientific thought, specifically the theories of racial hygiene, and the political conditions of a totalitarian dictatorship, acted symbiotically to devalue the intrinsic worth to society of those individuals with mental and physical disabilities. This devaluation served to foster the medical abuses which occurred. Neurosciences in the Third Reich serves as a backdrop to highlight what was the slippery slope of medical practice during that era. Points on this slippery slope included the “dejudification” of medicine, unethical experimentation in university clinics, systematic attempts to sterilize and euthanasize targeted populations, the academic use of specimens obtained through such programs and the experimental atrocities within the camps.

Ägyptologen im Dritten Reich: Biographische Notizen anhand der sogenannten „Steindorff-Liste“

2012 ◽  
Vol 5 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 120-247 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Schneider
Keyword(s):  
National Socialism ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
Second World War ◽  
National Socialist ◽  
The Third ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Third Reich ◽  
John Wilson ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Second World

Abstract The history of Egyptology in the Third Reich has never been the subject of academic analysis. This article gives a detailed overview of the biographies of Egyptologists in National Socialist Germany and their later careers after the Second World War. It scrutinizes their attitude towards the ideology of the Third Reich and their involvement in the political and intellectual Gleichschaltung of German Higher Education, as well as the impact National Socialism had on the discourse within the discipline. A letter written in 1946 by Georg Steindorff, one of the emigrated German Egyptologists, to John Wilson, Professor at the Oriental Institute Chicago, which incriminated former colleagues and exonerated others, is first published here and used as a framework for the debate.

Forschungen Zur Judenfrage: A Notorious Journal and Some of its Contributors

2007 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 395-415
Author(s):  
Reinhard Markner
Keyword(s):  
Third Reich ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
West Germany ◽  
Jewish Question ◽  
Theory Of Relativity ◽  
National Socialist ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Third Reich ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Many

AbstractAmong the many publishing ventures of the “Reichsinstitut für die Geschichte des neuen Deutschlands,” the journal Forschungen zur Judenfrage (1936–1944) has gained most notoriety. In its nine volumes, various aspects of the “Jewish question,” ranging from the Jews in antiquity to Albert Einstein's theory of relativity, were dealt with from a strictly National Socialist point of view. The ambitious project proved to be a failure even before the Third Reich collapsed. While some of the journal's contributors managed to pursue their academic careers in post-war West Germany, its founder, Walter Frank, committed suicide in 1945.

Nazifying Christmas: Political Culture and Popular Celebration in the Third Reich

2005 ◽  
Vol 38 (4) ◽  
pp. 572-605 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joe Perry
Keyword(s):  
Political Culture ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
National Socialist ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
Son Of God ◽  
The Third ◽  
National Socialists ◽  
The Third Reich ◽  
The Relationship

Radicalregimes revolutionize their holidays. Like the French Jacobins and the Russian Bolsheviks, who designed festival cultures intended to create revolutionary subjects, National Socialists manipulated popular celebration to build a “racially pure” fascist society. Christmas, long considered the “most German” of German holidays, was a compelling if challenging vehicle for the constitution of National Socialist identity. The remade “people's Christmas” (Volksweihnachten) celebrated the arrival of a savior, embodied in the twinned forms of the Führer and the Son of God, who promised national resurrection rooted in the primeval Germanic forest and the “blood and soil” of the authenticVolk. Reinvented domestic rituals, brought to life by the “German mother” in the family home, embedded this revamped Christmas myth in intimate moments of domestic celebration. An examination of “people's Christmas” across this spectrum of public and private celebration offers a revealing case study of National Socialist political culture in action. It illuminates the ways Germans became Nazis through participation both in official festivities and the practices of everyday life and underscores the complexity of the relationship between popular celebration, political culture, and identity production in the “Third Reich.”

scholarly journals Yrjö Kilpinen: Finnish Composer and German Lieder in the 1930s

2012 ◽  
Vol 25 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 171-186
Author(s):  
James Deaville
Keyword(s):  
Political Ideology ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
The Political ◽  
German Language ◽  
Musical Aesthetics ◽  
National Socialist ◽  
The Third ◽  
Considerable Success ◽  
Compositional Technique ◽  
The Third Reich

The Lieder of Finnish composer Yrjö Kilpinen (1892-1959) provide an interesting opportunity to study the interaction of national identity and musical aesthetics in National Socialist Germany. His German-language songs, above all to texts by Christian Morgenstern, enjoyed considerable success in Germany of the 1930s. Kilpinen's own political sympathies made him a model for Nazi ideologists, even as a non-German composing in the quintessentially German musical genre of the Lied. Reviews of his Lieder in the German-language press expound on the "Nordic" qualities of the work of this "Aryan" composer. Closer examination of the Lieder urn den Tod reveals a stark, at times heavy-handed compositional technique, which well suited the political ideology of the Third Reich.

The Language of Ideology: Lingual Manipulation of Readers in German Literature of the Third Reich

2005 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven Michael Press
Keyword(s):  
German Literature ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
National Socialist ◽  
Critical Studies ◽  
The Third ◽  
Historical Argument ◽  
Underlying Basis ◽  
The Third Reich ◽  
Post War ◽  
German People

In recognizing more than just hyperbole in their critical studies of National Socialist language, post-war philologists Viktor Klemperer (1946) and Eugen Seidel (1961) credit persuasive words and syntax with the expansion of Hitler's ideology among the German people. This popular explanation is being revisited by contemporary philologists, however, as new historical argument holds the functioning of the Third Reich to be anything but monolithic. An emerging scholarly consensus on the presence of more chaos than coherence in Nazi discourse suggests a new imperative for research. After reviewing the foundational works of Mein Kampf (1925) and Myth of the Twentieth Century (1930), the author confirms Klemperer and Seidel’s claim for linguistic manipulation in the rise of the National Socialist Party. Most importantly, this article provides a detailed explanation of how party leaders employed rhetorical language to promote fascist ideology without an underlying basis of logical argumentation.

Issues Surrounding the Development of the Neo-Nazi Scene in East Berlin

2000 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 45-50 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric Brothers
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
German Democratic Republic ◽  
Democratic Republic ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
Communist Regime ◽  
The Political ◽  
Social Culture ◽  
East Berlin ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Third Reich

The rise of neo-Nazism in the capital of the former German Democratic Republic (GDR) was not inspired by a desire to recreate Hitler's Reich, but by youthful rebellion against the political and social culture of the GDR's Communist regime. This is detailed in Fuehrer-Ex: Memoirs of a Former Neo-Naxi by Ingo Hasselbach with Tom Reiss (Random House, New York, 1996). This movement, however, eventually worked towards returning Germany to its former 'glory' under the Third Reich under the guidance of 'professional' Nazis.

Hitler, for Example: Registers of National Socialist Exemplarity in Contemporary Germany

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-29
Author(s):  
Nitzan Shoshan
Keyword(s):  
National Socialism ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
Moral Values ◽  
Moral Life ◽  
Far Right ◽  
National Socialist ◽  
Moral Exemplars ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
The Third Reich

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.

Exploiting Hitler’s Magic

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric Kurlander
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
National Socialist ◽  
Book Of Revelation ◽  
Objective Reality ◽  
The Third ◽  
Political Campaigning ◽  
The Third Reich ◽  
The Masses ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter illustrates how the National Socialist Workers' Party (NSDAP) appropriated supernatural ideas in order to appeal to ordinary Germans, enlisting the help of occultists and horror writers in shaping propaganda and political campaigning. By exploiting the supernatural imaginary, Hitler tied his political mission into something out of the Book of Revelation, as one ‘divinely chosen’ to create the Third Reich. The chapter then looks at three case studies. The first assesses Hitler's approach to politics through his reading of Ernst Schertel's 1923 occult treatise, Magic: History, Theory, Practice. The second considers the NSDAP's propaganda collaboration with the horror writer, Hanns Heinz Ewers. The third delves into the relationship between the NSDAP and Weimar's most popular ‘magician’, Erik Hanussen. In coopting Schertel's magic, enlisting Ewers, and forming an alliance with Hanussen, the Nazis diverted the masses from objective reality and toward the coming Third Reich.

An inability to mourn? The German Federal Republic and the Nazi past

2003 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 551-572
Author(s):  
FRISO WIELENGA
Keyword(s):  
Third Reich ◽  
German Federal Republic ◽  
National Socialist ◽  
National Socialists ◽  
Western Germany ◽  
The Third Reich ◽  
Nazi Past ◽  
Post War ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Probing Questions

Commonly, the second half of the 1960s is considered to be the period in which Western Germany actually started dealing with its National-Socialist past. The youth of that time is said to have opened the discussion and to have broken taboos by asking the elder generation probing questions and by exposing the careers of former National-Socialists in the politics and society of post-war Germany (the FRG). I make clear that this picture is very one-sided and I also give an overview on the different ways Western Germany coped with this past between 1945 and the end of the 1980s. Of course, these ways differed strongly over the years, but the ‘Third Reich’ has always remained present in German historical awareness and is branded into German identity – for better or for worse.

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