Richard J. Evans - The Third Reich in History and Memory

The Feminist Movement in Germany 18941933

The Feminists

Comrades and Sisters

Death in Hamburg

Rethinking German History

In Hitlers Shadow

Proletarians and Politics

Rituals of Retribution

Rereading German History

In Defence of History

Tales from the German Underworld

Telling Lies About Hitler

The Coming of the Third Reich

The Third Reich in Power

The Third Reich at War

Cosmopolitan Islanders

Altered Pasts

Published by Little, Brown

ISBN: 978-1-4087-0643-5

Copyright Richard J. Evans 2015

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.

Little, Brown

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CONTENTS

O ver the past fifteen years or so, since the end of the twentieth century, our understanding of Nazi Germany has been transformed in a variety of ways. This collection of previously published essays offers both a report on this transformation and a critical commentary on it. There have been several major changes in perspective that have informed research and writing. The first of these is the global turn in historical studies that has accompanied the globalisation processes in society, culture and the economy since the late twentieth century. Often seen against the long-term background of modern German history since the era of Bismarcks unification of the country in the nineteenth century, the Third Reich is now increasingly also viewed in a broader international, even global context, as part of the age of imperialism, its drive for domination building on a broader tradition of the German quest for empire. The neglected role of food supplies and food shortages in the Second World War can only be understood on a global level. Nazi policies in Eastern Europe drew heavily on Hitlers image of the American colonisation of the Great Plains. Companies like Krupp and Volkswagen were not merely or at times mainly German enterprises, they operated on a global scale. Several of the essays in this volume look at the dividends this new perspective has brought, and point up, too, some of its limitations.

This is linked to a shift of perception in historical studies that has increasingly placed the nation-state in a broader, transnational context, looking not only at how it related to other nation-states but also how it was affected by wider developments. Nazism, for example, appears in recent work as an ideology drawing on sources from many countries from Russia to France, Italy to Turkey, rather than being the culmination of exclusively German intellectual traditions, as used to be the case. Increasingly, historians have come to see the Nazi extermination of the Jews not as a unique historical event but as a genocide with parallels and similarities in other countries and at other times. Here again, a change of perspective has brought dividends, but it is also increasingly running up against problems of interpretation that some of the essays in this book seek to identify.

This applies even more to a third area of recent research, the work carried out on Nazi society. Over the past decade and a half, Nazi Germany has come to appear to growing numbers of historians as a political system that rested not on police terror and coercion but on popular approval and consent. Several of the essays in this book take stock of this work and argue that for all the advances in understanding it has brought, the time has come to remember that Nazi Germany actually was a dictatorship in which civil rights and freedoms were suppressed and opponents of the regime were not tolerated. Repression was carried out not just against social outsiders but also against huge swathes of the working classes and their political representatives. Prominent Jews in the Weimar Republic, notably Walther Rathenau, were not despised, marginal figures but enjoyed huge popular support and admiration, expressed in the national outpouring of grief on his death. Nazism, it should not be forgotten, was a tiny fringe movement until the very end of the 1920s. The regime had to work hard to get popular support once it came to power in 1933, and violence played as important a role as propaganda. Hitler and the propagation of his image to the German people were vital in winning people over, but recent research has advanced considerably our knowledge of the man behind the image, and this, too, is an essential part of understanding the Third Reich.

Perhaps the most remarkable change that has come about in historical work on Nazi Germany since the late twentieth century, however, has been the increasing intertwining of history and memory. It is now almost impossible to write about the Third Reich in the years of its existence, 193345, without also thinking about how its memory survived, often in complex and surprising ways, in the postwar years. The essays in this book examine how prominent industrial firms and individual businessmen who became involved, sometimes very heavily indeed, in the crimes of Nazism, tried to suppress the memory of their involvement after the war. Often the transformation of memory took on strange forms, as in the appropriation by Mexicans of the Volkswagen Beetle, originally the Nazi Strength-through-Joy Car, as a national icon in the late twentieth century. Sometimes, however, the growing need to confront the misdeeds of Nazism and expose the complicity and guilt of those who participated in them has led to crude and sweeping condemnation where historians should be making careful distinctions. The discovery of a wealthy businessmans concealment of his activities in the Third Reich has led to massive exaggerations about his implication in the worst crimes of the regime; the revelation, after decades of careful cover-ups, of the role professional diplomats played in the development of Nazi foreign policy has led to unsupported accusations that they actually drove on the extermination of the Jews rather than merely facilitating it (bad enough in itself, but not the same thing, and a thesis that implicitly lets the real guilty parties off the hook).

Nazi Germany found its climax and fulfilment and also experienced its eventual downfall in the Second World War, and here, too, there has been a change of perspective since the late twentieth century. The wars global scope and connections have now been recognised; there were not two separate wars, in East and West, but, rather, one war with multiple connections between the various theatres. Military history, as this volume shows, can be illuminating in itself, but also needs to be situated in a larger economic and cultural context. Wherever we look, whether at decision-making at the top, or at the inventiveness and enterprise of second-rank figures, wider contextual factors remained vital.

Finally, in recent years research has focused increasingly on postwar Germany, where the subterranean continuities with the Nazi era have become steadily more apparent. The ethnic cleansing of millions of undesirable citizens did not end with the Nazis but continued well into the years after the fall of the Third Reich, though this time directed against Germans rather than being perpetrated by them. Urban planners developed utopias that found expression in the Nazis idea of the de-urbanised city but also shared many of their assumptions with visions of the city in other parts of the world. And the growing campaign for the restitution of artworks looted by the Nazis or stolen from their original, often Jewish owners, addresses a problem that did not begin with the Third Reich and did not end with its demise. Here again, the long-term perspective helps us understand the problem at hand, which is also a problem of global dimensions. The extension of historical research into the postwar era has further strengthened the close mutual relations between history and memory. The essays collected here show, among other things, that memory needs to be subjected to the close scrutiny of history if it is to stand up, while historys implications for the collective cultural memory of Nazism in the present need to be spelled out with precision as well as with passion.