The Nazis (fill in the cards which didnt save)

Kershaw, The Nazi Dictatorship: Problems and Perspectives of Interpretation, 2015 C1

Chapter 1 - Historians and the Problem of Explaining Nazism

• Notes that scholarship is often demanded to be simple and moral for Germany in modern day politics (e.g. Schmidt 1978 calling for ‘a clear contour’ of Nazism), though this is impossible to explain rationally.

  • Should historians seek to explain (historicise) or just record this. Difficult morally and practically - sources destoryed and the anti-beurocratic nature of government, esp. for Hitler himself. (Note: motivates the functionalist/intentionalist split (functionalists work from records, intentionalists from speeches))

• After a period of historicisation, split beween ‘history of society’ (e.g. Wehler) compared to traditional political histories (e.g. Hildebrand or Bracher), who had a greater focus on individual agency.

  • shows the political implication of those writing, and the debate of structualist and intentionalist.

• In both West and East, the history explicitly political (East formulating this as part of state formation, West focused on ‘anti-totalitarianism’ in constitution, came before Arendt’s ideas).

  • 1968, West, this ‘totalitarian’ framework is challenged through New left scholarship of e.g. Nolte which is responded to poorly by the traditional right. This is different, and less academic than the ‘history of society’ approach.

• Real moral element of the work here, which is that Historians have to constantly condemn.- e.g. Dawidowicz saying focus must be on emphasising the horror, but is this useful?

Kershaw Chapter 2 1989

This is looking at the ‘Essence of Nazism’ - Fascism, Totalitarianism, or Unique

3 camps - Fascism with ‘pecularity’ that led to its development, Totalitarianism, or ‘Unique’ Hitlerism idea.

• 2 key types of ‘pecularity’ theory - that of the Sonderweg or stunted development, or the Blackbourn counterargument of bourgeoise peculiarity. check what this pecularity is (military idea of the prussians?)

• This contrasts with the sui generis explanation of Nazism as ‘Hitlerism from Bracher, Hildrebrand, and Hillgruber.

  • Comparison becomes ‘trivialising’. note - comparison to previous chapter, this is why they react poorly to social history explanation, see as trivialising.

• Or the Totalitarianism concept, most beneficially articulated by Bracher as something which was a ‘revolutionary dynamic’ in the state and the total claim to rule through an exclusionary ideology.

  • Critiques of this encompassing the Cold War reality papering over differences, e.g. Mommsen showing that the nazi party and the Soviet Communist party were so different that merely calling them one party states was meaningless, and only relies on the form of rule rather than the ideas of the rule or economics.

  • Kershaw argues it has use to show the ‘total claim’ of a regime, which brought new behaviorus - acclamatory and oppositional. Any opposition became dissent since the regime was total.

• Fascist ideas as initially motivated by marxist critiques which emphasised fascists as teh ‘agents’ of capital, which Neuman falls into.

  • Or non-marxist ideas, like Nolte of methodological empathy. This noted it as a response to bourgeoise society and tradition, and therefore locked into its own time. Or modernisation of e.g. Barrington Moore which offers and analysis of how different patterns of modernisation produced different outcomes.

• On Uniqueness of Germany

  • Kershaw argues that the uniqueness of Hitler ‘restricts the vision and distorts the focus’ in explaining Nazism, deflects from other fascisms, and provides unsatisfctory explanation of nazi radicalism.

• Ultimately, we should see Nazism as a form of Nazism

  • 1) relationship to other fascisms is profound. 2) totalitarianism is limited only to the idea of hte ‘total claim’ and 3) perculiarity of Nazism is only comprehended within broader German socio-economic and ideological-political conditions, not just Hittler.

Ultimately, he sort of moves and accepts a middle ground of the Hitler pecularity with the Sonderweg idea. German fascism was unique, but all fascisms are unique, and this is because of the relationship of the ledaer and the outside factors that led to this.

Herzog, Hubris and Hypocracy, Incitement and Disavowal: Sexuality and German Fascism

• Traditional scholarship has emphasised the ‘sexless’ Nazi policy, and whether this idea is true or not. Hard to believe the extent to which historians view the state as repressive in such a popular dictatorship.

• Race and Class were both useful to understnading Nazi sexual politics, though other things were also important e.g. queer theory.

• Many scholars (e.g. Mosse) have taken the Nazi claim to being traditional sexually at face value, but we need to look at the Positivist sexual qualities - inducements to hetersexuality both pre and post maritally, and the relationship this had to domination in the state.

• There being significant differences in the state’s relationship to sexuality, especially in relation to the deployment of anti-semitism in the relationship to sexuality. E.g. Ferdinand Hoffman, Nazi physician, very conservative despite how unpopular this conservatism was. Angry at the volume of condoms used in the state and blamed Jews for this (jewish Weimar doctors).

  • Warned people they could not be ‘good citizens of the Third Reich’ whilst still holding the liberalistic perspectives on sex.

• Though there as another strang - more inciting though equally as anti-semetic. This was a rare instance of continuing Weimar politics - e.g. Dr. Hans Endres, leading race theorist, in 1941 argued that younger Nazis ‘must become proud of their bodies’.

  • E.g. in SS journal this is pushed, calling those who would not ‘eager clerical moralists’

  • Though this was a push of noble nudity rather than titillating Weimar nudity. Catholics angry - e.g. Laros, preist and author of 1936 guide book, held them responisbel for loosening sexual mores.

• Arguing broad pro-sex policies could uneasily coexist with the violence of broad Nazi policeis - e.g. Schultz (sex writer) was also a supporter of externmination and theorised on homosexuals.

• Broadly the collection argues there is an uneasy question over the politics of sexuality in Germany. Some individuals perhaps realised themselves more whilst other suffered,

Kershaw 2015 Chapter 9 ‘Normality’ and Genocide: The Problem of Historicisation

• This is discussing the ‘history of the everyday’ which comes from Broszat in 1985, which was an outpouring of work led by Broszat on the everyday experience of life inf Nazi life. This reflects a need among young West Germans to understand this as a ‘social experience’, and something which had continuity before and after the nazi period.

  • Note, we would describe a lot of what Fritze does as this form.

• This was to bring about more attention to normal life and the application of normal historical methods, and at the most extreme to normalise this in historical consciousness. The hope was to show there were patterns of social normality that pre and post dated Nazism. This challenges traditional emphasis on the ideological aspects of Nazism.

  • Critique from Friedlander:

    • Centreing Nazism as just a part of broader modernisation (Kershaw suggests this is not borne out in research, with scholars like Recker centring Nazi character. we might centre e.g. Herzog as an example

    • Or Herbert’s work which showed the experience of foreign labourers, and how racist violence was broad across society.

  • Ultimate problem is that the criminality was so specific and serious that trying to seriously bring it into a more broad German whole is counterproductive and cannot be integrated. It was Kukla’s duality - a seemingly modern state overtaken through slave labour etc.

    • Issues broadly over the Nazi past being too present and belonging to everyone differently so ‘normal’ scholarship is hard, and the unique criminality of the regime.

• Best work is that of Puekert, which emphasises the idea of modernity not as a counterpoint to criminality, but instead as a framework from which the criminality can be explained, or rose from. Or indeed herzog, using more social history to emphasise the mutually existing frameworks of violence and modernity.

what?

Kershaw 2015 Chapter 10 Shifting Perspectives: Historiographical Trends in the Aftermath of Unification

Identifying 3 trends in Nazi historiography: the position of the Nazis in German state conception, Nazism and Modernity, and the end of Communism and totalitarian models.

Nazism and Modernity

• This coems from Zitelmann’s theory in 1987 that suggested that there was a middle ground between condemnation and apologism, which was that Hitler was looking forward to an advanced society. Violence was a means to the revolution, and thus Hitler should be seen as a ‘social revolutionary’.

  • Kershaw argues this is an uncharitable reading of Hitler, who was more focused on the racial politics than he suggested, not just as a means to an end.

radicalisation

• the debates over intentionalism-structuralism have been trancended, with a more accepted middle position that Hitler was decisive at importnat junctures and cumulative radicalisation as the key point.

Kershaw, 2015, Chapter 3 Politics and economics of the Third Reich

Broad Argument

• Saying that Liberal (Political Primacy) and Marxist (economic primacy) explanations are overly reductionist in reality, and there is an important middle ground recognising the importance of both, though the reducing power of industry over time,

• Accepting a broad historiographical consensus on the fact that the Nazi regime was the ‘last hope’ of German industry, rather than the ‘first choice’ in absence of Capitalist upheaval. Had a role, structurally implicated, but not in control of the Nazis.

• Various scholarship emphasising the collaboration on the politics and economy of the Nazi State (e.g. Petzina and the 4 year 1936 plan working with IG Farben or Milward who shows that the ecoomy was broken until 1942 and rationalisation under Speer, economy therefore not subordinated to politics)

• Mason most sig - 1966 argues that from 1936 onwards, politics became increasingly independent of the economy, to the point of directly contradicting this. Various peices of evidence - e.g. growth of State role in economy for itself (e.g. determining orders for industry).

• Kershaw critiquing the liberal-bourgeoise construction of a state bereft of economics - e.g. from Overy, suggesting that they imply too much logic of the state.

• Another model - that of the Power Cartel - e.g. Neumann or Volkmann. Neuman’s formulation showing the nuances in the sate, and important to show the peculiarity of the Nazi formulation, and the growing position of the Nazi regime within this balance.

Early Relations 1933

• Army supports party in return for recognition and rearmourment, catalyst for all collection of interests. Though industry not totally onboard with Kalashnikov economy, crushing of left increased support. Increased power of Schacht in central bank in 1934 econ crisis.

1936 Crisis

• Clash between consumptive and rearmourment concentration. Split of industry weakened their demands, whilst nazis centralised power. 4 year plan reflected this. Milward shows this was the clear demonstration of limited economic power.

Post 1936

• Economic crisis pushes them into war by confirming Hitler’s intention to go to war. Big business more ambivalent about war in the Wast, often striving for improved relations. More role in Stalin-Hitler pact than the war itself. But they accept the possibility of free labour once it is there.

Invasion / Extermination of Jews

• Economic considerations important to the expansion of the regime (e.g. Oil in Soviet territory), but this was not for industry but a tactical consideration fo the regime. Ideology, Economic necessity, and industrial interest were all mutually reingorcing.

• Demonstration of primacy of politics comes from extermination of jews. 1941 Ministry for occupied territories notes that econmoic considerations are to be regarded as ‘fundamentally irrelvant’. Though Kershaw argues this was the end to a policy which had been supported by industry - e.g. in the use of free labour.

Ultimately, mamoth profits of Industry (4x between 1928-39) were not an acccident. The real break was 1944 when Hitler approves deportations of 1m workers from France over the advice of Speer.

Fritze, Life and Death in the Third Reich, 2008 Intro

Broad Argument

• Life in Nazi Germany is entwined with the reality of death in the state, and there was not a level of denial that was reasonable. Violence was taken from the ground up (e.g. included in Dwinger’s Death in Poland as well as the top-down.

• Nazi’s concept of state was both very vulnerable and very aggressive, the state perceived itself as self-defence through books like Dwinger’s which centre German suffering. German life can only be secured through the destruction of non-Germans. They perpetrated onto others what they thought they had experienced.

  • Arguing that most Germans were no coersed but instead active willing participants in Nazism, through diaries and letters - e.g. letters of Social Democratic workers in Peine explaining their own ‘adjustment’ to Nazi conditions. The conversion and Nazi creation fashioned individuals into the state.

  • This clashes with traditional historiography which emphasises Germans as being separate to Nazis, and the ‘everyday life’ historians who show a level of collaboration as people negotiate their own benefits. This is focused on the process of becoming a Nazi

• Can do and must do. They have the power to defeat the lower class and must do for personal security.

• This was done through the policy of ‘becoming’ a Nazi using camps and race-minded constructions. The suffering of Weimar made Germans more willing to accept the violence of new beginnings. Increasing belief this was the solution turned people into racial visions of themselves rather than class-based ones.

  • Using diaries and letters to show this - ‘capture something of the conversations Germans had with one another’ - e.g. Durkefalden, who captured the conversion of fellow Social Democrat workers.

• Relying on the construction of the Germans as suffering since 1914 and seeking the construction of a new polity, and turned to the Nazis as a group who combined youthful politics with populism and racism, in a ‘parallel ascendency’ to the Communists. The improving labour market in 1933/34 brought ‘broad legitimacy’ to the regime.

  • They equated individual suffering with external groups - e.g. Jews.

• Because traditional explanations, like class or material depravation, only go so far to explaining why people had faith in the regime, we must take the Nazi appeal and language seriously - the idea of race. Connect to Kershaw’s Chapter 1 point that this cannot be rationalised.

  • The Nazis were genuinely able to inclulate people into their thinking - the continual discussion of 1918 as aconstruction, e.g. Remarque’s diary - identified personal suffering with the collective faith of the nation. This was through especially the radio - people believed themselves to be active individuals in the regime.

Fritze, Life and Death in the German Reich, 2012, Chapter 3

Broad Argument

• Writing and receiving letters distinguished Germans from jews by 1941. Nazi imperial project was the context in which the Holocaust existed - colonisation was the same as genocide. The Holocaust was the product of german ambition rather than defeat.

• There was a deliberate destruction of testimony of Jewish experience - Private papers of detainees fuelled a constant fire in Auschwitz. This is in contrast to the huge archive of German soldier letters.- e.g. 40bn peices of communication between home and front over the course wof the war. Therefore by 1941 there was a simple act of writing to delineate Germans from Jews.

  • The letters that the Germans were sending were self-consciously placing themselves inside the Nazi propoganda story. E.g. using the person of Neuhaus in 1941 writing an explicitly ‘documentary letter’ to his wife on these grounds. This pattern only stopped in 1943 as the war started to turn.

  • They continued to fight, but only as ‘Germans’ rather than ‘nazis’ from 1944.

  • This is important evidence of the quality, and limits, of ideological conditioning of the Nazis.

• Hitler had 2 overarching goals, though not a master plan. This was Germanisation of the East and a ‘final solution’ to the problems of the Jewish question. Specifics were improvised but these were constant goals. ‘Russia is our Africa’.

  • Hitler told his generals in 1933 - within weeks of taking power - that his goals were reconstruction of the armies and living space in the East. Since no plan, no natural borders of ambition.

• Example in Poland - there was no overarching master aim, but instead an aim of brutality, this was e.g. SS Einsatzgruppen behind military lines killing intellectual leadership. Inflated ideas of local violence (e.g. 1939 a few hundred killed, escalated to 60k) justified huge reprisals. Poland disappeared into ‘ethnic mush’. This was part of ideology of self defence in intro.

• Positivist ethnic constructions (replacing locals with ethnic Germans) meant expulsions of locals - e.g. by end of 1940 500k ethnic Germans registered for resettlement from the East. This meant also the removal of locals - 8m moved without preparation.

  • Locals encouraged to see this genocide as part of settlement - e.g. Jewish ghetto in Lodz popular stop for German tourists.

• Holocaust happens then as part of imperial project, as part of continual sequence of policy - first is reservations, then Madagascar, then removal eastwards, then murder from mid-late 1941.

  • From 1940, and the Madagascar plan, the scale of continental solution was clear. When this becomes impossible in 1941, there is a move from ‘there and then’ to ‘here and now’.

  • Radicalising policy - defeats made them keen to do so earlier, and victory escalated the challenge.

• This was aided by the Wehrmacht in teh Babi Yar - More than 30k Jews gather after Wehrmacht print posters in Kiev and shot with army aid. Many soldiers volunteer to join SS executions. Ideology as essential - SS shooters testified in 1958 they thought they were helping the future populations.

  • Local perpetrators essential, largely sicne German power seemed perminent - e.g. Dutch police collaborating with 107k Jews transported. When Germany began to lose, stopped collaborating.

Kershaw, The Uniqueness of Nazism, 2004

Broad Argument

• This is arguing that the uniqueness of Nazism cannot be shown through ‘fascism’ or ‘totalitarianism’, with a claim to similarity resting on war and gencide. But that this uniqueness is not explained by Hitler specifically, but also the way in which he ruled - a charasmatic authority combined with an advanced state, which generated ‘cumulative radicalisation’

• Historigraphical survey:

  • Early explanations suggest that Germany’s militaristic culture turn to fascism (e.g. AP Taylor, The Course of German history) or Godhagen as a modern version. Both of these dont bring you anywhere. German counter-narrative is the Sonderweg, which is challenged by Blackbourn in 1984 who stresses the similarities of German history to other places. Post this, scholarship emphasises the importance of WW1 and the ‘crisis of classical modernity’.

• Kershaw accepts Nazism as a form of fascism, and Totalitarianism as having some form of explanatory power, but having distinctive identities (e.g. focus on Race). Broszat has already pushed the difficulty of placing Nazism into any individual boz.

• An important uniqueness of nazism was war and Genocide, this was both Holocaust but also the intent to ‘racially restructure’ the entire European continent. Kershaw rejects mere intentionalist Hitlerism. note, this links with Fritze who argues that war and genocide was the ‘constitutive’ part of the regime.

  • Kershaw forumulates both Intentionalist (Hildebrand and Bracher) and Structuralist (Broszat or Mommsen) as either a psycho-historical reductionism or writing Hitler out. Both were needed - the important thing was centralising Hitler within a context of the state.

• So this is a) cumulative radicalism - Dictatorships normally mediate after taking power, e.g. Stalin’s USSR though in Germany violence simply spiraled, which can only be explained through initiatives from below, and a state responding to calls for greater violence in line with Hitler’s writings - working towards the Fuhrer.

  • This was combined with increased capacity for violence given the technological nature of the state, and the ‘technocrats of power’ e.g. Reinhard Heydrich. It was a breadth of complicity.

• Important within this is a Weberian Charismatic Authority - there were ‘irrational hopes and expectations of salvation projected onto one man). Personal leadership brought natioanl salvation from 1918. This was more far-reaching than any other cult of personality.

  • E.g. compare to Stalin, which was ‘pseudo-religious’, and only in the person not the state, compared to the Fuhrer cult which was intrinsic to the regime.

  • Note: Therefore a state in acute crisis - both highly rational and modern, but brought toward fundamentally irrational goals. E.g. Wannsee Conference

• This uniquely flourished in Germany - a concept of race as identity in long-running Volkish movement, resentment of Versailles, and anti-bolshevism. E.g. Books like Decline of the West in 1918 meant Nazis could latch onto more respectable ideas of decline, meant scapegoating politics could be spreat at elite and popular levels. And the 14y of Bessel’s ‘latent civil war’ through street violence brought a mass movement to the party. Youth in the universities accepting these Volkish ideas.

• Hitler therefore essential and unique, but working off of a pre-set Overton window of ideas. The institutionalisation of these ideas is what brought mass participation in genocide, not national character.

Wildt, Volkgemeinschaft, 2014

Broad Argument

• the VGS should not been understood as a real social reality, not as propoganda, but instead an important social practice. This is directly against Mommsen who suggests this was just a Goebells propoganda movement. We should also be aware (beyonf what Kershaw is) that the VGS was not just a single idea, but differing depending on the person.

• Broadly, noting there was an extensive pre-nazi history to the term - this came from from the idea of the German Gemeinschaft which was promoted during the first world war as part of mobilisation - e.g. Wilhelm II’s 1914 promotion that there were ‘simply Germans’.

  • This came from the long history of German separation into various states, meaning a racial delineation often made more sence than a statist definition. This was initially an assimilationist term rather than an exclusionary / genocidal conception.

  • Over Weimar, almost all parties advocating some form of Volkish policy - e.g. Social Democrats appealing for unity across the VGS on his first day as president

  • This was because it was a ‘politics of promise’ - it brought people faith in the future.

  • Connect this to the ‘everyday barbarity’ of the Nazis in Kershaw Chapter 9

• This work as based off the 1970s work of Broszat focused on the fact that even if the Nazi propoganda was unrealistic, it did not stop it from being an important thing to those who consumed the media.

  • The appeal to mobilisation and modernisation within the term legitimated the party in the eyes of the youth and those newly urbanised, e.g. the armarments boom in e.g. Rostock where population exploded over the 30s - 4k to 325k in the aircraft industry. This is from Bajohr’s work studying.

    • Or indeed the concept of working for the racial whole, and taking pride in the ‘high-quality German work’ this represented - e.g. Qualitatsarbeit, as Ludtke suggests people took happiness and pride in working for this collective.

• Importantly this was a structural inequality when compared to the Socialist versions of equality. This was through drawn barriers between arbitrary groups (e.g. who was a proper german and who was not) E.g. boy who was half jewish was not excluded before the war, but they were not allowed to be blood brothers and excluded (comes from Meyer). Link to Kershaw’s cumulative radicalism points.

  • This was a powerful and convincing form of violence because everybody could take part and so there was no individual responsibility - Collective violence engaged and built up the collective whole. E.g. example of throwing rocks at Synangogues.

• This freed up ‘enabling spaces’ for professionals - e.g. Medical professionals engaging in sterilising or exterminating indivudals or e.g. tax collectors being able to engage in arbitrary actions against them.

  • inclusion and genocidal actions were the same rather than separate (they were inherent) note this works as a form of everyday history of nazi germany whilst still focusing on victims (given it was a part of the construction)

    • Massive participation - e.g. 2/3 of the population by 1939 part of some form of Nazi controlled group. 90% of functionaries worked on a voluntary basis.

• This work, like Kershaw, moves beyond the functionalist/intentionalist debate - it moves the state to the level of the indivdual.

Overy, The Dictators, 2004

• one explanation for the similarities between the Soviets and Nazis was the ‘cult of science’ from Todorov, and the hope to organise society over objective scientific principles. Individuals<Whole.

  • German verion was the ‘Biological sciences’ to the economic sciences of the Soviets.

  • But this was a fundamental rejection of liberalism on the part of both groups.

• The internal justification was saving the great form of Europe from the inevitable movement of Bolshevism and anarchy. This comes from Hans Mehringer in 1938.

• Science gave them the rational legitimacy, history demonstrated the necessity of revolutionary transformation like the French. They did not recognise the importance of the individual, and they viewed the parties that they created as being sacrosaint. Therefore any threat was very significant. This was the exaggeration of the power and importance of the perceived enermy of the state compared to the streng th of the state itself. This was the invoking of the 1918 crisis in Germany.

  • All this created a deeply manichaean understanding of reality and a dichotomy between freiend and foe in the state. This is why violence was praised at every level in society.

• The solution to getting buy in was the creation of an ideal of success within the state. Control of the media and control of isolation where no alternative idea was allowed. Endless consumption of the ideas of the state - per German Philologist Klemperer suggested this made people ‘unconsciously’ Nazi. There was a degree of truth in all the language which people could latch onto.

  • This does not mean everyone was a nazi, but that most people were passive to the state. Most people were broadly apathetic, but this was enough. The myths of the regime were just accepted at face value.

• It was an ideology of rebirth and radicalism, where social support facilitated its conception and identification.

Kershaw, 2015, Chapter 4 Hitler: Master or Weak Dictator

• The discussion of intentionalist/functionalist (or was Hitler a weak dictator) is not strictly academic, but reflects moral and political considerations (see Chapter 1). The lines of this debate are between Intentionalists like Normal Rich and Functionalists like Hans Mommsen (he is the one who suggested he was ‘in some aspects’ a weak dictator).

Intentionalist Position

• This is at its worst trying to engage in psycho-historical explanations (homosexuality), but this is a problematic argument - even if Hitler was insane, unclear why his policies were followed through by non-insane individuals. Wehler ‘Does our understanding of National Socialist Policeis really depend on whether Hitler had only one testicle?’

• More reasonably, this is Bracher, Hillgruber etc. This suggests there was a ‘program’. e.g. bracher suggesting that Hitler’s ideology and pivotal role undermined the power of the liberal democratic Weimar. The antagonism between agencies is indicative of his omnipotence. Or Hilldebrand - the absolute centrality of the ‘hitler factor’.

Functionalist position

• This all comes from Neumann and Fraenkel, and is best represented by e.g. Mommsen’s civil service analysis. Emphasises the ‘multidimensional power structure’ of which Hitler was only a single important example.

• Broszat moves this debate further by emphasising the ‘Hitler State’ 1969 - that the chaos in the state is neither chance nor ‘divide and rule’ but instead an inability to rule the Party-State. Hitler was more important as a ‘symbolic’ position to sanction the push from various groups (e.g. conservative forces) rather than formulating policy. His ideology e.g. Lebenstraum were ideological metaphors rather than true policy. Darwinian rivalry brought people into a fractured system to ‘interpret’ the Fuhrer’s will.

  • Mommsenn takes a more extreme position, saying we cannot separate Hitler’s intentions from policy and there was no overarching aim, but instead a spiralling radicalism. Hitler was not always the most radical.

Kersaw position.

• On the weakness of governmental chaos

  • There was clear chaos in government - e.g. Frick (interior minister) continually denied rationalising government policy via ‘Reich Reform’ by Hitler who sided with Gauleiter who prevented this, and continual absences and lack of written information. Kershaw argues this neither shows weakness nor ‘divide and rule’. This is a leader content with chaos, and needs this for his ‘Fuhrer-authority’ as the myth of aloof leader. We may question why Kersaw denied ‘divide and rule’, though he gives evidence of ministers using their immediate connection to pass laws.

• On his decisons being ignored

  • This is from Peterson The Limits of Hitlers Power that decisions are continually ignored or returned back on themselves - e.g. 1935 Hitler agreed to a unified wage structure for building workers, then orders an ‘indefinate further deliberation’ in order to keep Labour minister onside. Kersaw argues that no important examples are given by Peterson that were ignored - the limits were against the idea of ‘total power’, not significant power, and unclear what his domestic policy idea was anyway.

• On Socio-Economic factors

  • This is Mason’s argument that Hitler was continually and constantly limited by structural factors of the working class who had to be kept happy by expansion, but this was tense with a fear of short-term sacrifices. Huge ‘social imperialist gamble’. E.g. 1938 refusal to raise food prices despite Ministry of Food demands because of worker impact. Had to go to war due to worker demands. Though, West German critics suggest underrated autonomous demands.

Kershaw conclusion

• Hitler neither ‘master’ nor ‘weak’, since structure and intention in many instances line up interest - e.g. in terms of war. 1935 Hitler declared vague aim of ‘re-arm’ and then structures create the war, but not directly at Hitler intends. This is essentially an ‘Overton window’ argument that Hitler decides the broad strokes of policies, and structures create the specifics.

• This was since personal loyalty was a principle of government - there was more focus on connection rather than institutional authorty - loyalty principle since Party management pre 1933. These structures were superimposed over the beurocracy, rather than replacing them. This releases destructive impulses.

Bessel, 2003, Functionalists vs Intentionalists: The Debate 20 years on

The debate (which largely was prompted in the late 70s by the Cumberland conference) was largely solved at an academic level with new archives in the East, which shows the mutual importance of local activites in the Holocaust and central decisionmaking.

The decline of Marx as a historical paradigm

• Much of Mason’s work was at least partially informed by a Marxian idea that structures were the engines of history and could be rationalised, with individual intention limited significantly by those structures. This has since declined.

• They were also more concerned with domestic politics, rather than the holocaust or the development of racial policies. Note: This is what Kershaw C10 talks about with more ‘everyday politics’

The real debate is a moral one, e.g. with Bracher arguing that to not consider this Hiterism is to relativise his evil. These moral debates have continued in many ways to the present, and therefore the debate in many ways is not yet dead.

Burleigh as the heir of intentionalism

• as an example of continuing debate, this is Burleigh’s The Third Reich (2000) as an example. He contends that to focus on structures is not what nazim cares about, and this is a ‘racial rather than a class society’ which made theories is not heuristic. Says that historians should take a moral stance.

Neumann, Behemoth, 1942

Broad Argument

• Various points, but the most important one is the formulation of a multipolar state that was inherently infighting and chaotic. Comes from a legal / economic perspective rather than anything else, and written at a period with imperfect information.

• This is a good example of the Marxist structural explanation of the Nazi state - this is at least partially animated by capital, and used legal formulatiosn to get to the functionalist position in many ways.

Weird random things (not essential to know)

• Bringing the explanation that the Nazi state was a racial whole because of the development of German city states, and the necessary idea of violence because of this supremacist ideology.

  • Within this, antisemitism holding a special place because of the pseudo-anticapitalist messaging that the state held, and the late 19thC association of Jews with capitalism.

  • And the need to ‘purify’ the blood of the German race, and individuals who were not ayrian were in some ways commiting some kind of crime against the nation itself, by weakening the national or racial whole.

• Suggesting there is an economic part to the Aryanisation of the economy - it stimulates the monopolosation of businesses into ‘productive economy’.

  • Economy was in a transitory measure into a freer market - they start to engage in ‘regimented’ economy in order to boost production. It was a process of ‘mutual cooperation’ - government relied on big business, who relied on government.

• Formulating the rise of the Nazis as in response to the structural failings of the Weimar republic - with a capitalist empowered catholic Centre party. This pushed the indivudals into an undemocratic monopolisation of the eocnomy. The social democrats could therefore only focus on social issues, becoming the left’s ‘social fascists’ and therefore unpopular. The Nazis were there only a ‘counter revolution’

  • We get too much ‘social strife’ in the democratic system though why this is true is unclear and as such you get overt failure of the centre to maintain power - e.g. the 1931 enabling act.

  • Industry, who motivated economic policy, were the enging of economic policy. This allowed the president, whose power increased as the Reichstag’s power decreased take control, leveraging the power of young men whose power as the military declined more radical and anti-communist.

Ideology

• Arguing that the key part of ideology was the hostility to other ideologies which were in turn hostile of imperial war to maximise industrial capacity, with an ideology of only broad goals.

• Hitler was seen as the ‘leader’ - people worked toward him, with only an unimportant cabinet, and power invested solely in the man of Hitler rather than the office, due to his ‘sueprhuman qualities’.

  • This charisma / power came fundamentally from the ‘racial people’.

• The ideology fed on historical tendency of antisemitism from Martin Luther and the visions of Jews driving the nation, esepcially in the Bismarkian economic crisis of the 1870s where the conservative party in Germany parroted these views.

Aryanisation of the economy

• As proof of the industrial leading nature of the state, the suggestion that Aryanisation of the economy was a policy for industrialists due to monopolisation rather than just antisemitism or German enrichment.

• There was no economic agency and the state did not excersise their ‘totalitarian’ power over the economy to any significant degree.

  • The economic policies were mutually reinforcing in terms of the state (not the party) hwich had coalescing interests with the government.

On Expansion

• The masses were only kept onside with the significant expansionary foreign policy.

General thesis

• Arguing that the state is only kept together with fear and pursuit of profits, with the 4 intances fighting signficantly among each other (e.g. the State, the Party, the Industry, and the Army). Arguing there was broadly some independence of each (e.g. Party is reliant on the non-Nazi beurocracy, the Army has independent rationality, etc). Governing happens only beause of ‘compromises’ between the leadership of the 4 sections of the state. party power increases during the war as the beurocracy is eroded by the party, turning more into a dual industry/party state - e.g. Auschwitz.

Evans, 2005

On seizing power

• This is engaging in immediate and intense violence agaisnt those who opposed Hitler as he takes power, e.g. the 1933 Enabling Act which brought him power to act against alternative political parties.

• There was not the total level of buy in for many cases - after the Rohm purge in 1934 many individuals in the state questioning the actions of Hitler.

• Hitler coming to the centre of both of Fraenkel’s Dual State - the normative and prerogative as the person of Hitler, not his role, was combining both party leader and President.

  • Officially, party primacy ensured in the 1933 Law for Guarantees of the Unity of Party and State. Though this does not rationalise the state, and individuals (e.g. Borrman) can ensure their own personal power - forming a personal office that rivals the Chancellory.

On Buy in

• People are personally fearful of what is going on to the degree of not questioning repression against others - people are aware of the Gestapo and Dachau, and want to protect themselves. Sig, only 20k Gestapo in total - most of their info is given to them by others, especially the normative police. It was the unpredictable nature of denunciation. uses example of German woman who wrote on her fear of being denounced in her dreams. Many acquiesced out of pure fear of the alternative if someone denounced them. There was not - in reality - many denunciations, but it was the perceived level of them.

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