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Seven Hundred Bee posted:
quote:1. Depends on which Nazis. For some, especially the midlevel officials, it wasn't particularly important. For Hitler and the true ideological Nazis, it was everything. It was an essential product of their worldview. If you read Mein Kampf (which I wouldn't suggest), you'll see that anti-Semitism is fundamental to Hitler. The Madagascar Dream (exporting the Jews to Madagascar) was a pipedream from the start. They almost immediately realized that it was impractical, and improbable. Hitler encouraged its perpetuation as much to sow dissension among his subordinates (thus leading to competition) more than anything else. I'd argue that it was extremely important to midlevel officials, as they had a lot to gain (promotions) from publicly expressed anti-Semitism whether they believed in it or not. And the Madagascar Plan was a real plan that attracted attention for the same reasons. Sure it was never going to work while the Royal Navy was in existence, but in a state where everybody's working towards the Führer's plans, it made sense to overtly chart some waterways while your office supervisor was looking at you. I'm interested in the idea that Hitler encouraged it in order to increase competition though, as he was known for that. Any particular source you know of for that one? quote:2. A big part of it was an almost messianic belief in the ability of Hitler (and this belief extended to most Germans). Up until the final days, most Germans partially believed that Hitler had hidden, secret armies and wonder weapons that would rescue the German people. Large groups of Nazis also believed that it would possible to come to an accommodation with America, and help the West fight the Russians. And they kept going because systems develop a certain... momentum, and at some point, Nazi Germany had enough inertia to continue until it was forcefully destroyed.
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Apr 1, 2013 15:50
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Seven Hundred Bee posted:4. True, Hitler was pretty publicly reviled, but still, even in the end, you find diary entries from soldiers talking about how they've heard rumors about the wonder weapons and Hitler is going to save them all. The "Hitler Myth" was pervasive, and even three years of setbacks and slaughter hadn't completely eradicated it from the average German, and especially hadn't for the indoctrinated soldier. With that said, the biggest motivating factor for the average Wehrmact soldier was probably to head off the Russians as long as possible to give civilians more time to flee.
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Apr 1, 2013 18:28
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Cingulate posted:Beware my extensive Wikipedia knowledge! quote:How dangerous would it have been to speak out against the Final Solution for somebody like Speer, or at the mid level? Not against Nazi rule or anti-semitism, but against extermination of people in favour of something like the Madagascar plan? It probably wouldn't have been dangerous at all. During postwar crimes trials, every defendant tried to find precedents of Germans being harmed for speaking out against the Holocaust so they could use their own fear as a defense. They couldn't find any. Sure it probably would have wrecked your career, but you wouldn't have gone to jail for it. quote:Why is there so little direct evidence for the stated intent of mass extermination in the form of documents? For example, why is there no single document that says, "in this camp, we hope to be able to murder 8,000 Jews a day"? I assume during the later days of the war, when they could sense they would some day be brought to justice, it was prudent to try to hide the crimes, and even before, they tried to keep the total extent and nature of it hidden from the German public, or at least not in plain sight, but at least from what I am aware of, there is surprisingly little direct documentation by Nazis themselves of the intentional genocide and its scope (or maybe I'm just missing it). It's important to remember that the leaders of the Nazi party were a failed landscape artist who couldn't be bothered to get out of bed before 10, an unpublished writer, an agriculture student, and a morphine addict. While I was studying the Holocaust for my MA, I was constantly bewildered that these chucklefucks could get anything done. Edit: Not that I have anything against agriculture students or unpublished writers or struggling artists or morphine addicts; it's rather that none of the above lend themselves well to running a country. Kangaroo Jerk fucked around with this message at 18:34 on Apr 1, 2013 |
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Apr 1, 2013 18:29
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Namarrgon posted:I am interested in Hitler's court. Was there any formal system of succession for the Führer in place? I know how it ended up in practice (with the crazy guy who airdropped in Scotland as the first expected second in command if I recall correctly) but I wonder if the Nazi state had survived whether there were plans (or even laws already) for Hitler's succession. I'm not aware of any plans, but I could be mistaken. Hitler had a method of setting his subordinates against each other in order to prove their worth, foster competition as an end in itself, and keep everybody dependent on Hitler's good graces. And given that the Nazi party was a backbiting, chaotic incoherent mess a lot of the time, whoever was going to succeed Hitler was always going to be the guy with the sharpest claws. Unless you're losing a World War, in which case you stick some admiral with the position. Also, (cough)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FHnyQXyuTGY SlenderWhore posted:Why didn't anyone question why Hitler had brown eyes and brown hair? Most Germans have brown eyes and brown hair. The Nazis meant all the Nordic Übermensch stuff, but that was only ever maybe a goal to be worked toward, and IIRC it was only Himmler that took that part seriously. I mean, all of the top Nazis looked like poo poo. You had to go down to Heydrich to find somebody who looked good in a uniform, and you had to disregard that nose as well.
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Apr 1, 2013 19:19
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Namarrgon posted:So essentially he went for an Alexandrian style of succession? That always works so well. Hey, Alexander's empire got split into pieces, and so did Germany. Hitler was just following the example of another great conqueror!
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Apr 1, 2013 19:26
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Shimrra Jamaane posted:Thats good since I just started reading the first part of his Third Reich Trilogy, which is apparently the definitive narrative account of the Nazis. Chiming in here. Evans is good people, and his trilogy was what formed my understanding of the Third Reich before I went to grad school. It's very well respected and is pretty much the current go-to for anyone wanting an accessible but scholarly primer on the subject. Kershaw's bio of Hitler, as said above, is also great. Tojai posted:I believe I read somewhere (Mein Kampf excerpt?) that Hitler really liked how the US had handled the Native Americans in terms of things like forced migrations and such. Was this actually the case, and was any inspiration taken from the Native American or any other historical genocides? What the issue is here, however, is whether the Final Solution (the point where the Holocaust went from disorganized, discrete incidents to a planned policy of extermination, though that definition leaves out some twists and turns) was something entirely planned by Hitler, or rather a process of escalation instigated by government workers looking to anticipate what they thought were Hitler's wishes. Historians today lean toward the second narrative. The OP brought up the theories of intentionalism and functionalism (what I more or less just described) earlier, along with your other question on Nazi occultism. I think they're both on the first page. As far as hating Christianity goes, it's hard to tell exactly. Hitler definitely didn't care for "love thy brother" or "turn the other cheek," and probably didn't identify as Christian, except when it suited him for public purposes. Kangaroo Jerk fucked around with this message at 03:01 on Apr 2, 2013 |
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Apr 2, 2013 02:50
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slackerbitch posted:What's your take on [Speer]? Do you think he was covering his rear end, so to speak, in case Germany lost? I know he played the "nice Nazi" card to save his own neck at Nuremberg, but I don't know that he would have seen that coming that far in advance. So was he angling for something else entirely? Amyclas posted:What was Nazi Germany's fiscal policy like after 1933? How much control did the party have over the central bank? Was it a purely political currency? Germany's international economic problem was a lack of foreign currency with which to import goods, which Tooze goes into in some great detail. Kangaroo Jerk fucked around with this message at 14:21 on Apr 2, 2013 |
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Apr 2, 2013 14:08
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MothraAttack posted:I'd agree from my experience. East Germany is still a bit of a hotbed, though. If I had a dollar for every dude in Thor Steinar I saw. It fits. West Germany went through the very real accounting for its actions as Bee said, while the DDR tended to blame everything on the Fascists that now somehow only existed in the West.
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Apr 2, 2013 17:15
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Cowslips Warren posted:Other than Oskar Schlinder, who else is remembered for saving people from the war machine, to the extent he did, or close to? As it was difficult and unrewarding to hide anybody, and you could be rewarded for turning people in, you generally had to be a special type of person to be capable of doing it. Nechama Tec, in her When Light Pierced the Darkness, argues that those who sheltered Jews were generally social misfits, people who were outcasts for some reason or another. Only they could be unpersuaded by social pressures to turn people in. They didn't care about the approval of those around them, so could follow their conscience if they happened to have one. These sorts of people were often hermits as well, which made it easier since they lived out in the boonies. One town in France stands out for similar reasons: the Huguenot town of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon. Rural, hillbilly Protestants in a Catholic country, the townspeople had a long tradition of giving the rest of France the finger. This jibes with Tec's theory that those who acted contrary to prevailing social norms were more likely to be rescuers. There's also the Danish underground, which was tipped off by Werner Best, the German ambassador to Denmark, that there was going to be a roundup of all Jews in Denmark in 1943. At the beginning of the war Denmark had folded to Germany for entirely pragmatic, geographical reasons, and was rewarded with a "most favored subject" sort of status in which German police couldn't go around breaking down doors, local government still ran things, and so on. This allowed for a lot of Jews to be sheltered and eventually brought over to Sweden (officially neutral but supporting Germany in the early years, and then wavering toward the Allies by '43, at least enough to take in Jews). Best's motivations are still unclear - was he an ok guy, or just angling for Allied brownie points at a point where he knew his country was going to lose the war? Probably more the latter than the former in my opinion. Edit: D'oh, forgot Raoul Wallenberg. Swedish diplomat in Hungary who handed out fake Swedish passports to Hungarian Jews like candy. Eventually captured by the Soviets, who thought he was a spy, and died suspiciously in prison. Turned out much later that he really was working with the OSS, and that some of his financial support used to save Jews came from the US government. Kangaroo Jerk fucked around with this message at 04:35 on Apr 7, 2013 |
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Apr 7, 2013 04:26
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Shimrra Jamaane posted:That German diplomat who tipped off the leader of the Danish Jewish community was personally involved with several Einsatzgupen massacres in the East to the tune of tens of thousands of killed. He alerted the Danes because his orders to purge Denmark of Jews were vague enough to allow him to just let them all run to Sweden. He did it because he was lazy and didn't want to spend the effort to arrange the shipments to Auschwitz. Ha, I didn't know that bit. Doesn't surprise me in the least, though. Thanks.
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Apr 8, 2013 23:14
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Gabriel Pope posted:He wasn't bad, just not good enough to hack it as a pro. He definitely suffered from wobbly lines and uneven perspective, which are particularly bad traits to have when you're mostly interested in architectural paintings and cityscapes (he was worse at human figures.) He was also pretty lazy at it. In Kershaw's biography, Hitler's former business partner/roommate said he didn't bother to actually paint enough for the two of them to make it. He mostly painted landscapes and local landmarks for tourists, and was sort of a low-rent Thomas Kinkade-style artist.
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Apr 12, 2013 10:51
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Paxicon posted:Thanks for the replies, but I was kind of looking for specific feuds between top officials and how they were resolved John Madden's arms would fall off before even he could explain the ins and outs of Nazi pecking order bullshit. I mean, who was in charge of what at what time was vaguely delineated and could sort of be drawn out, but it's not like there was any system for it.
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Apr 14, 2013 03:58
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Radio Talmudist posted:Really informative topic, thank you for posting this! There's some stuff on the Nazi economy upthread. In short, he didn't. The preceding posts are worth a look. And yes, what little he did do for the economy depended on him starting a war. JaggyJagJag posted:I have two questions that I feel mainstream history books and academia tend to sweep under the rug, or ignore. I don't know much about organized Jewish sexual slavery in the camps, but Nazi leadership was schizoid to the extreme, and concentration camps were their own lawless fiefdoms, especially the Zwangsarbeitslager (forced labor camps). People bartered with what they had to trade, and women from all over had sex to offer for food, decent shoes, better work assignments, and other things necessary for survival. Barely any laws from Germany were enforced. I'm not sure that they ever did. Nazi ideology held that the war with fellow Germanic and other Western European peoples was mostly a misunderstanding that would blow over once Germany was triumphant. There weren't any laws to replace baguettes with Brötchen or anything.
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Apr 19, 2013 00:47
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ArchangeI posted:It should be noted that it was perfectly legal (minus the streetfighting), though. It wasn't a coup and it wasn't a revolution. He was appointed in accordance with the constitution. Right. For those reading the thread who are a little confused, it goes like this. Weimar Germany had had crippling inflation soon after WWI for various reasons, including the financial/foreign policy of the dominant party at the time, the left-moderate Social Democrats. In the midst of the Depression, many Germans were leery of trusting the SPD again. The (also moderate) Catholic Center Party was fading in importance, and radical conservative parties (such as the NSDAP/Nazis) were growing in size along with support for the Communist Party (KPD). The rich and the middle class were generally scared of the KPD and voted moderate or conservative in one way or another; the working poor generally supported the KPD or the SPD. The Nazis for their part declare that they're not really a political party since parties split the German nation into social classes when everybody should be working together to further the German people as a whole. Plus, democracy is for the weak anyway. Due to having a bunch of political parties who won't work together, the German Reichstag (Congress) is deadlocked and laws don't get passed, which is around the time that the President of Germany and his advisers decide to just start ruling by decree since they never liked this whole democracy idea anyway. Okay, it's July 1932. The NSDAP get 37% of the vote, the SPD 22%, the KPD 14%, and the Center Party get 12%. This means that between NSDAP and KPD supporters, over 50% of Germany was now voting for a party that had declared in their platform that democracy was useless and had to be replaced. This is important to remember: at this point a (slight) majority of Germans had given up on democracy. The Nazis have a plurality, so Hitler gets to be chancellor, right? Nope. He needs a majority. Hitler calls bullshit (and he sort of has a point) because it's a strong plurality. The Reichstag is still useless and Hindenburg and his buddies continue ruling by decree. Flash-forward to November 1932. New elections. The Nazis are flat broke, the Depression has bottomed out, and cracking heads in the street only takes you so far, so their vote drops to 33%. SPD drops down to 20%. The KPD rises in popularity to 17%, further freaking out German moderates and conservatives. One of Hindenburg's autocratic conservative buddies, worried about the Communists potentially taking over, gets Hindenburg to let Hitler be Chancellor as long as his cabinet doesn't have too many Nazis in it. After all, what's the worst that can happen? Thirteen years later, Europe is a smoking pile of rubble. So yeah, every step of Hitler's rise to power was legal (aside from the street fights). More Germans voted for the NSDAP than for any other party during both elections 1932, and we can blame Franz von Papen, Hindenburg's buddy, for striking the deal that let Hitler become Chancellor with a mere plurality. Kangaroo Jerk fucked around with this message at 02:27 on Apr 21, 2013 |
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Apr 21, 2013 02:23
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PittTheElder posted:I just wanted to chime in here and point out that that these events aren't that close in time. While hyper-inflation certainly contributed to a loss in faith in the SPD, the hyper-inflationary period was 1921-1924. Hitler had tried to launch the Beer Hall Putsch in '23, and was tossed in jail for it until '24. But I think it needs saying that the economy had begun to improve in the later half of the 20's, the diplomatic situation was settling down a little bit, and the NSDAP were still trying to rebuild. Things were getting a little bit better, although there was plenty of this stuff I agree, actually. I intentionally skipped over the seizure of the Ruhr and the resulting hyperinflationary strategy to make a long story short. But! The earlier disappointing economic tactics of the SPD did not help their electoral chances during the second economic crisis, the Great Depression. Once bitten, twice shy.
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Apr 24, 2013 00:15
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Nazis took whatever religion and pseudo-science they could to justify their hatred. Consistency in anything was never a hallmark of the party. And nearly nobody who follows a religion or denomination thereof knows anything about that religion's theology. They know what they're told. And to answer the question from earlier, Jewishness was decided by blood, as being Jewish was considered a race by the Nazis, not a religion. That's why some people who were only part-Jewish survived.
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Apr 24, 2013 10:51
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ArchangeI posted:I would disagree, on the account of the massive efforts the Nazis made to ensure they covered their actions legally. If you look at the hoops they jumped through to make killing German citizens legal, you can see that the Nazis were very conscious of the constitution, even though there was no institution that could conceivably challenge them. That's a good point. Even the original anti-Jewish boycotts and Kristallnacht pissed off ordinary Germans who were willing to look the other way during the mistreatment of Jews, as both were open, state-sponsored violence. I think you may be conflating German leanings toward constitutionalism and democratic ideals with the desire for a well-ordered society, however. I'm not entirely sure myself if Germans were tired of democracy as a concept itself by 1932, or if they were just tired of the crappiness of the Weimar Republic, reparations, the Depression, etc. and were desperate enough to want a change, any change at all. This whole mini-discussion is getting into Sonderweg territory. Anyone want to take sides on that one?
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Apr 27, 2013 20:48
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Pekinduck posted:Forgive me if this has been answered before but if the Nazis really wanted to stay neutral with the Soviet Union would that actually work or would the Soviets just join the allies anyway. Well, that brings up the whole "If they'd stayed neutral they wouldn't have been the Nazis," but maybe. Really, the whole point of WW2 from Hitler's perspective was to take land from Eastern Europe. He wouldn't have been content with 2/3 of Poland.
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May 5, 2013 00:43
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Konstantin posted:How much privilege did having "good" genetics get you in Nazi Germany? If you were the prototypical blue-eyed blonde, did you get tangible benefits or favoritism from the government and military because of this, beyond what "ordinary" Germans got? Nothing that I know of, but here's some tidbits from Burleigh and Wippermann's The Racial State: Newlywed German couples could get loans that would be payable if (a) the couple had kids and propagated the German race, and (b) the woman quit her job, and (c) the couple were physically examined to prove they had no genetic disorders (46) Abortions, while encouraged for non-Germans and the handicapped, were made illegal for German women (249) Mothers got financial kickbacks depending on how many kids they had (252) Also, Hitler Youth groups often camped near League of German Girls campsites, and the two groups were encouraged to "socialize." (Dagmar Herzog's Sex After Fascism, but not sure of the page number.) So Hitler and the Nazis wanted lots of German kids, but they didn't care much about what they looked like as long as they were healthy. I seem to recall reading an off-hand remark by Himmler that his selection process for SS candidates would one day be so exacting that they'd end up with only blue-eyed blonds, but as a whole that preference gets a lot more press than it's deserved. I mean Christ, look at the top Nazis. Ugly fuckers, all of them, except maybe Speer and Goering in 1915.
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May 7, 2013 21:43
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Cowslips Warren posted:Was there any real thing as the Madagascar plan, to move all the Jewish people from Germany there, or was it just a lie/clusterfuck/rumor from the start? It was definitely a plan that was being worked on, but it didn't get very far. For it to work the Germans would have had to have dealt with the Royal Navy. Since that was a no-go, the plan was abandoned in favor of enslavement and the Final Solution.
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Jun 17, 2013 03:33
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Doctor Malaver posted:That Heydrich guy barely survived the assassination attempt and then heavily wounded by a grenade ran after the assassins with his pistol. He was a horrible man and you sort of start believing in God only so that there would be hell for people like him - but still that was a badass thing to do. Any other examples of personal courage among Nazi leaders? Well, Hitler stood up to the Czechs, Poles, French, Russians, British, Americans, and occasionally the Italians. That's all pretty badass. Too bad the war he started reduced Germany to ashes. Also I think Joe and Magda Goebbels win the record for speediest killing of their own children. Sadly the Nazis lost the "speediest genocide" record to the Hutus of Rwanda in 1994. Seriously dude.
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Jun 28, 2013 01:06
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Cast_No_Shadow posted:I don't quite get this vein of discussion. We all know (I hope) and accept (I hope) that certain sections of the Nazi party (by this I mean probably most if not all of those in charge rather than tarring huge swaths of the German population with the brush) committed utterly deplorable acts. What I think you're missing is that Hitler did not take over Germany and half of Europe by himself. He may have been the driver (German pun!) but he didn't build the car. Most historians with some academic training have learned to reject the idea that "great men" ("great" in the sense of powerful, not morally righteous) are what drive history. We tend to look at social reasons instead - Germany's economic circumstances in the late 20s and early 30s, the amount (or lack thereof) of anti-Semitism in Germany, disillusionment in democratic principles across Europe, advances in military technology, eugenic philosophies, etc. when we look at the Nazis and WWII. In this perspective, top Nazi leaders are recognized as gifted propagandists, but generally poor leaders. Edit: Recognizing specific Nazis' particular gifts is something that we're generally uncomfortable with for other reasons, too. I've met plenty of people who were enamored with Nazis and the Waffen-SS, Panzers, those swishy Hugo Boss uniforms, etc. Academics who study this stuff have to compete with those people who write books like "Hitler's Death Tanks" and produce crappy, exploitative documentaries for the History Channel. People who aren't academics tend to think we're creepy because we study this stuff, because they associate us with the creeps. For us to talk about which Nazis might have been extra-competent at whatever they were doing makes us feel creepy. Plus, what does it matter? What narrative can justify this path of research? "Hans Milchwasser, an "old fighter" of the NSDAP, was a talented dogcatcher in Freiburg." Who cares? Unless a person is expressly trying to redeem Nazis in general in the public eye, there's no reason to catalog which Nazis were really good at what. Kangaroo Jerk fucked around with this message at 02:09 on Jun 28, 2013 |
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Jun 28, 2013 01:59
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mistakes during the war and intentionally created a
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Thanks for the clarification. What you're asking does make some sense. I think part of WWII historians' attitude toward Hitler might be due to a wish to differentiate themselves from the more common "Hitler was a total genius, guys" belief. Occasionally we may swing too far in the opposite direction. Thinking more seriously about things though, it's still hard to really describe what Hitler was really good at aside from propaganda. His utter ruthlessness - the willingness to have von Papen's aide killed during the Night of Long Knives, to defang the SA and make the NSDAP less scary by backstabbing Röhm, to go for the gusto directly after the Reichstag burning, starting the drat war, going through the Ardennes forest in 1940s - was instrumental in getting Hitler as far as he did, but it all fell apart at the end, didn't it? He ran Germany for 12 years. That's not even as much time as Napoleon III, or even Louis XVI. And he left Germany as a smoking crater. Its international reputation was shattered for decades and still hasn't fully recovered. Europe's near-destruction was pretty much the reason for America's ascendance to superpower, and later hyperpower status, at the expense of any European claims to the same. Any competencies held by Germans, Nazi or not, bolstered the Nazi war effort, which if successful would have resulted in millions more murders of innocents. Sure, there might be some lieutenant somewhere who saved twenty of his soldiers from aerial bombardment by sheltering them with his body or something. But that would have enabled those survivors to kills more Brits, Russians, or Americans. Or Jews. You can't really separate the moral taint of National Socialism from any personal acts of heroism, bravery, or organizational competence. My classical (and military) history is horribly incomplete so I can't speak to Caesar's battlefield prowess. But I know enough about Napoleon to tell that he was truly a truly gifted general for his time. There's a ton of really amazing stuff that he did on the political front as well. Generally speaking though, the top Nazis were rubbish. If you like Ian Kershaw (and you should, he's a great historian), then check out his recent book The End. He does a great job in his chapters on Speer - describes how drat good Speer was at saving Germany's industrial capacity while simultaneously calling him out on his careerism and general moral failings. http://www.amazon.com/The-End-Defiance-Destruction-1944-1945/dp/0143122134
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Jun 28, 2013 03:05
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MothraAttack posted:They were marked as "asocials" and put into concentration camps. And coincidentally now counted as "employed" for the purpose of German economic statistics!
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Jul 4, 2013 00:59
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Slip Slap posted:That all makes sense of course. I suppose that is something you almost can't believe could be coming your way and wouldn't accept as truth. It's not straying at all - these are legit psychological and sociological questions. On your last question: the Germans who administered the camps "hired" other prisoners, Polish, German, or often Jewish, to keep the others in line. Others were forced to do so. Being a Kapo could easily break your soul. Picture being twenty years old and being sent to a camp along with your mother, father, and brother. If you accept the offer to become a Kapo, you've got pull within the camp's prisoner community and can approach the Germans on closer to even terms. You can score extra rations for your family, edit the death lists to keep your family and townspeople off them, and take anybody's coat or shoes if they look warmer than yours. Of course all the other Jews hate you. Because you're stealing bread from out of their mouths, their friends and families' mouths. You have to keep the numbers on the death lists matching up, so you swap the name of a woman from some other town for your mom's. She had kids too. And you're literally stealing the clothes off of others' backs. You're told to kill fellow Jews by the Camp Elders, which were the Kapos on the top of the food chain and were often highly corrupt. And you kill those other Jews because you need to maintain your own privileges. And sooner or later another prisoner scowls at you and calls you a bastard, so you break his teeth in order to not appear soft in front of the people you're tasked to keep in line. You've become as bad as the SS. Maybe even worse, because at least they have an excuse: they're Nazis. And eventually all you have left is your German-given authority, which can be revoked at any time. And if you survive the war by being an accessory to genocide? You're a pariah for the rest of your life. Unless you end it. This degradation of the soul is one of the worst things about the Holocaust, and it's what I spent most of my time researching while a grad student. It's fascinating, but horribly dark. MothraAttack posted:And yeah, anyone interested in the psychology of it should, as has been suggested, check out Ordinary Soldiers by Christopher Browning. In it you'll learn about the PTSD, alcoholism and depression attendant with mass killing, of which almost anyone is capable, according to Browning's research. It's a great book, and one of the most influential on our understanding of the Holocaust. (It's also titled Ordinary Men, at least in English). Kangaroo Jerk fucked around with this message at 20:55 on Sep 29, 2013 |
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Sep 29, 2013 20:49
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Mr. Sunshine posted:No, it's titled simply "Reinhard Heydrich" and written by the norwegian author Knut Kristofersen. Ugh. All or one of the above, depending on who you're talking to. Some people use the term "Holocaust" to refer specifically to the extermination of Jews, some include Roma, some include Poles, Russians or other Slavs, some differentiate between the Final Solution (planned, methodical genocide) and everything before the Wannsee Conference. Given functionalist theory, it's usually useful to differentiate between persecution and outright elimination, as one was not necessarily the intentional precursor to the other. Any of the above are "acceptable" to me, but this is the sort of thing that gets groups angry at each other. Extent of victimization can become competitive.
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May 21, 2014 02:43
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Nice to see this thread still exists. I've read both Evans and Kershaw, and would suggest reading Evans first for an excellent overview, then start Kershaw for more in-depth coverage of Hitler and how Nazism worked. Feel free to sample MK, but don't start until after you've read Evans. The important thing is not to emphasize MK's importance too much - that way lies "Great Man Syndrome," which derails study of Nazi Germany way too much and you don't want to be a part of it if you're truly trying to figure all this poo poo out. It's not just all about Adolf's failed art career. 
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Dec 5, 2014 16:53
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