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This book is the culmination of more than three decades of meticulous historiographic research on Nazi Germany by one of the period's most distinguished historians. The volume brings together the most important and influential aspects of Ian Kershaw's research on the Holocaust for the first time. The writings are arranged in three sections-Hitler and the Final Solution, popular opinion and the Jews in Nazi Germany, and the Final Solution in historiography-and Kershaw provides an introduction and a closing section on the uniqueness of Nazism. Kershaw was a founding historian of the social history of the Third Reich, and he has throughout his career conducted pioneering research on the societal causes and consequences of Nazi policy. His work has brought much to light concerning the ways in which the attitudes of the German populace shaped and did not shape Nazi policy. This volume presents a comprehensive, multifaceted picture both of the destructive dynamic of the Nazi leadership and of the attitudes and behavior of ordinary Germans as the persecution of the Jews spiraled into total genocide.

In Prevail until the Bitter End, Alexandra Lohse explores the gossip and innuendo, the dissonant reactions and perceptions of Germans to the violent dissolution of the Third Reich. Mobilized for total war, soldiers and citizens alike experienced an unprecedented convergence of military, economic, social, and political crises. But even in retreat, the militarized national community unleashed ferocious energies, staving off defeat for over two years and continuing a systematic murder campaign against European Jews and others. Was its faith in the Führer never shaken by the prospect of ultimate defeat? Lohse uncovers how Germans experienced life and death, investigates how mounting emergency conditions affected their understanding of the nature and purpose of the conflagration, and shows how these factors influenced the people's relationship with the Nazi regime. She draws on Nazi morale and censorship reports, features citizens' private letters and diaries, and incorporates a large body of Allied intelligence, including several thousand transcripts of surreptitiously recorded conversations among German prisoners of war in Western Allied captivity. Lohse's historical reconstruction helps us understand how ordinary Germans interpreted their experiences as both the victims and perpetrators of extreme violence. We are immersively drawn into their desolate landscape: walking through bombed-out streets, scrounging for food, burning furniture, listening furtively to Allied broadcasts, unsure where the truth lies. Prevail until the Bitter End is about the stories that Germans told themselves to make sense of this world in crisis.

This is a thematically arranged text illustrating popular resisitance to Nazism in Germany from 1930-1945, and the affect of Nazism on everyday life. The book combines a lucid, synthesized analysis together with a wide selection of integrated source material taken from pamphlets, diaries, recent oral testimonies, correspondence and more. Different chapters focus on social groups and activities, such as youth movements, religion, Jewish Germans, and the working classes.

The Third Reich met its end in the spring of 1945 in an unparalleled wave of suicides. Hitler, Goebbels, Bormann, Himmler and later Göring all killed themselves. These deaths represent only the tip of an iceberg of a massive wave of suicides that also touched upon ordinary lives. As this suicide epidemic has no historical precedent or parallel, it can tell us much about the Third Reich's peculiar self-destructiveness and the depths of Nazi fanaticism. The book looks at the suicides of both Nazis and ordinary people in Germany between 1918 and 1945, from the end of World War I until the end of World War II, including the mass suicides of German Jews during the Holocaust. It shows how suicides among different population groups, including supporters, opponents, and victims of the regime, responded to the social, cultural, economic and, political context of the time. The book also analyses changes and continuities in individual and societal responses to suicide over time, especially with regard to the Weimar Republic and the post-1945 era.

This article examines the experiences of German Jewish men who defied their deportations and instead tried to subsist in the underground in Nazi Germany during the years of the Holocaust. The author takes a gendered perspective analyzing some of the gender-specific challenges that German Jewish men faced, as well as coping strategies these men developed to overcome them. This article argues that German Jewish men, like women, used distinctly gendered survival strategies. These included the disguising of their Jewish identities through the forging of military papers and adapting military-male behaviors; the masquerading of their physical male constitution qua assuming a female appearance; and the endorsing of their male status in the men-deprived social landscape of wartime Germany, using German women as protective shields.

This article reconsiders the first comprehensive history of German film, Oskar Kalbus's two-volume Vom Werden deutscher Filmkunst (On the Rise of German Film Art, 1935) in terms of its contemporary reception in Nazi Germany and in light of a newly surfaced third volume. This is the first article dedicated to a work that scholars have long cited, though rarely without suspicion. The newly surfaced typescript for Der Film im Dritten Reich (Film in the Third Reich, 1937) confirms the author's National Socialist sympathies, but at the same time it highlights by contrast the virtues of the two published volumes.

A wealth of recent research in comparative politics examines how spatial variation in historical conditions shapes modern political outcomes. In an article in the American Political Science Review, Homola, Pereira, and Tavits argue that Germans who live nearer to former Nazi concentration camps are more likely to display out-group intolerance. Clarifying the conceptual foundations of posttreatment bias and reviewing the historical record on postwar state creation in Germany, we argue that state-level differences confound the relationship between distance to camps and out-group intolerance. Using publicly available European Values Survey data and electoral results from 2017, we find no consistent evidence that distance to camps is related to contemporary values. Our findings have implications for literatures on historical persistence, causal inference with spatial data, Holocaust studies, and outgroup tolerance.

Fritz Todt created a program of lectures for German engineers in 1941. This 'Speaker System' was designed to enhance technical training, spread Todt's Deutsche Technik ideology and prepare for technocratic Nazi control of postwar Europe. The Speaker System illustrates the tension inherent in the 'ideological-pragmatic synthesis' that was the Third Reich. Due to deteriorating wartime conditions and to Albert Speer's shift to a 'total war' footing, the Speaker System faded away after 1943. Lectures were on the whole apolitical, with the ideological thrust varying widely between regions. Many speakers were not members of the Nazi Party or its engineering affiliate, demonstrating the regime's wartime shift to technological pragmatism. Fritz Todt's ideological vision proved secondary to the core Nazi goals of conquering Lebensraum and destroying the Jews.

Nazi ideology appropriated many traditions of thought, syncretistically combining them to justify German’s racial superiority. This belief stems from Volkist thought, with its concept of the Aryan/Germanic superman, racial purity and the connection to ‘blood-and-earth’. Ancient art, which was the formal basis for the architecture and sculpture of the Third Reich, was also treated as an expression of Germanic culture.The article discusses how Nazi ideology attempted to combine the volkist concept of Germanicness with the legacy of ancient art, and use both to legitimise the idea of racial superiority justifying the practice of conquest, annihilation and subjugation of other peoples. The juxtaposition of classicist artistic concepts with the shaping of a “Germanicˮ nature also reveals the total dimension of the indoctrination of its own citizens to participate in the construction of a new “orderˮ.

The monograph highlights the aspects of the international law qualification of the actions and omissions of Germany towards Poland and Poles during World War II. The study tries to prove that in the years 1939–1945 Germany was obliged to observe the norms of international law in its relations with Poland, and especially the non-treaty prohibitions not to initiate aggressive war or to commit the crime of genocide. The review describes the hypothesis and aims of the monograph and evaluates its substance, form, and argumentation.