Totalitarianism: Last Years of a Resister in the Diocese of Berlin: Bernhard Lichtenberg's Conflict with Karl Adam and his Fateful Imprisonment

2001 ◽  
Vol 70 (2) ◽  
pp. 248-270
Author(s):  
Kevin Spicer

Among the priests of the diocese of Berlin who lived and served as parish ministers during the Third Reich, one individual stands out for his courage and willingness to risk his life and speak the Christian truth in a world often devoid of any gospel values. Monsignor Bernhard Lichtenberg (1875–1943) surpassed the other clergy of his diocese in his conscious efforts to challenge the perverse policies of the state in a consistent, profound manner. To defend the faith against encroachment by the state, Lichtenberg not only exhibitedResistenzby creating defensive barriers through his own ministry, but also publicly protested, in a rigorous manner, state actions that he deemed immoral and contradictory to Catholic values.

2003 ◽  
Vol 4 (6) ◽  
pp. 533-539
Author(s):  
Craig Smith

Article 1 is the Basic Law's crown. The concept of human dignity is this crown's jewel: an interest so precious that the state must affirmatively protect and foster its inviolability. This uniquely important status is evident from human dignity's prominence in the constitution, the early Federal Republic's pressing need to repudiate the Third Reich, the many judicial and scholarly exegeses of Article 1, and human dignity's unique claim to absolute protection. The success of the German legal construct of human dignity also is apparent from its influence on the European Union's Charter of Fundamental Rights. That document likewise begins with a provision nearly identical to the Basic Law's Article 1.


Author(s):  
John P. McCormick

This chapter traces Carl Schmitt’s attempt, in his 1932 book The Concept of the Political, to quell the near civil war circumstances of the late Weimar Republic and to reinvigorate the sovereignty of the German state through a reappropriation of Thomas Hobbes’s political philosophy. The chapter then examines Schmitt’s reconsideration of the Hobbesian state, and his own recent reformulation of it, in light of the rise of the “Third Reich,” with particular reference to Schmitt’s 1938 book The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes.


2016 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-15 ◽  
Author(s):  
Troy Paddock

This article examines the influence of Friedrich Ratzel’s idea of the struggle for space and its impact on cultural and national development depicted in German geography and history textbooks from the Wilhelmine era to the Third Reich. Ratzel’s concept of bio-geography conceived the state as a living organism that is the product of humanity’s interaction with the land and also facilitates humanity’s spread across the earth. German textbooks promoted a similar concept of the state in their portrayal of geography and history, the implications of which were appropriated by the National Socialists to support their geopolitical goals.


AJS Review ◽  
2004 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 381-383
Author(s):  
David Engel

Historians of the Third Reich have long noted that Nazi Germany's actions on the battlefield and occupation policies were governed both by conventional military and radical ideological considerations. Much attention has been devoted to the problem of separating the two strands analytically, to determining which actions and policies should be labeled as primarily one or the other and which elements within the regime thought and behaved mainly according to conventional versus ideological notions. In recent years it has become common to place German military operations before June 1941 under the “conventional” rubric and to date the “ideological” war from the invasion of the Soviet Union, which began in that month. On the other hand, whereas the German army was once widely thought to have constituted a bastion of conventional thinking even after the ideological war had been launched, scholars have increasingly implicated it in the perpetration of ideologically rooted crimes (particularly the murder of Jews on the eastern front).


1993 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 129-143
Author(s):  
Peter Mentzel

The Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes inherited a considerable number of Germans along with its ex-Habsburg territories when it was established in December 1918. The two most important German communities in inter-war Yugoslavia were the Germans of Slovenia and the Germans of the Vojvodina and Croatia-Slavonia, the so-called Donau Schwaben (Swabians). There were also scattered pockets of ethnic Germans in Bosnia-Hercegovina. The Yugoslavian ethnic Germans (Volksdeutsche), like the other Yugoslavian non-Slav minorities, were objects of discrimination by the Yugoslavian government. The Slovenian German community responded to this hostility by developing a virulent German nationalism which, after 1933, rapidly turned into Nazism. The Swabian community, on the other hand, generally tried to cooperate with the central government in Belgrade. The Swabians remained rather ambivalent toward the rising Nazi movement until the tremendous successes of the Third Reich in 1938 made Nazism irresistibly attractive. In the face of the government's anti-German policies, why did each of these German communities manifest such different attitudes towards the Yugoslav state during the inter-war period? This article will show how several factors of history, demography, and geography combined to produce the different reactions of the two groups.


2006 ◽  
Vol 66 (2) ◽  
pp. 390-416 ◽  
Author(s):  
CHRISTOPH BUCHHEIM ◽  
JONAS SCHERNER

Private property in the industry of the Third Reich is often considered a mere nominal provision without much substance. However, that is not correct, because firms, despite the rationing and licensing activities of the state, still had ample scope to devise their own production and investment profiles. Even regarding war-related projects, freedom of contract was generally respected; instead of using power, the state offered firms a number of contract options to choose from. There were several motives behind this attitude of the regime, among them the conviction that private property provided important incentives for increasing efficiency.


2019 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 55-77
Author(s):  
Piotr Szymaniec ◽  
Lech Kurowski

ECONOMIC POLICY OF THE THIRD REICH PRESENTED BY POLISH ECONOMISTS OF THE 1930S AND 1940SThe aim of this paper is to present Polish pre-war literature on Nazi economic policy and to compare Leopold Caro’s views with analyses of a well-known postwar economist, Paweł Sulmicki, presented in his doctoral thesis of 1946. The comparison of these two interpretations enables the authors to show not only the change of views on the totalitarian economy of Germany, but also the transformations that took place in the Polish theory of economics at that time. In terms of methodology, the work of Leopold Caro published in 1938 did not go beyond what the German historical school offered. Paweł Sulmicki, on the other hand, explained the processes taking place in the German economy from the point of view of the theory of multiplier which was relatively new at that time. Sulmicki did not explicitly state that the phenomena analyzed by him were paradoxes in the light of Keynesian theory, but he described the factors that led to the success of the economic policy at a low level of the multiplier.


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