scholarly journals A Devil of the Details: The Life and Crimes of Nazi Wilhelm Frick

Author(s):  
Hannah Kost

Wilhelm Frick, the Minister of the Interior in the Third Reich, has never garnered the same notoriety as some of his Nazi peers—in spite of the fact that he played an instrumental role in Jewish persecution. From his co-authoring of the Nuremberg Laws to his involvement in the Third Reich’s police and concentration camps, Frick’s background in law, policing, and politics helped him become a lethal and influential tool for the Nazi Party. This paper argues that Frick served as a judicial architect of the Holocaust and facilitator of the Final Solution, who has—somehow—remained   largely unknown.

1970 ◽  
pp. 90
Author(s):  
Søren Kjørup

“A ‘spear’ of glass and steel bores through the voluminous brick-walls and breaks the axiality” – this is the drastic description by the Austrian deconstructivist architect Günther Domenig of the main element of his eminent transformation of an unfinished Nazi congress hall to house a documentation centre and an exhibition about the huge Nazi party rallies in Nuremberg through the 1930s. The very exhibition, however – Faszination und Gewalt, which opened in 2001 – does not manage to fulfil its declared aim: “To throw a critical light onto the showcase of ‘The Third Reich’.” Why not? Maybe because the curators were so anxious that visitors might get seduced by seeing Nazi propaganda that they foregrounded the horrors that followed after the rallies (the Holocaust and the world war) instead of showing their downside while they were going on. And maybe because they were unable to free themselves from the image of the 1934 rally in Leni Riefenstahl’s propaganda “documentary” Triumph des Willens. 


Author(s):  
Thomas Kühne

This article looks at the mass destruction that raged Europe from 1914 to 1945. The trauma of 1918, Germany's defeat and dissolution, would not stop haunting nationalist Germans until the Third Reich collapsed; many Germans took the legend of the stab in the back as a matter of fact, according to which a Jewish-communist conspiracy had betrayed the national cause and sold out the otherwise victorious army. This article further traces the Holocaust that raged Europe and in particular Germany. The condition of the Jews and the treatment meted out to them by Hitler's forces is worth noting. The concentration camps to where most of the Jews were transported are vividly described in this article. It is impossible to estimate how many Germans, whether men or women, whether at the battle front or on the home front, knew about the Holocaust, and what exactly they knew.


Author(s):  
Michael I. Shevell

Abstract: It is commonly thought that the horrific medical abuses occurring during the era of the Third Reich were limited to fringe physicians acting in extreme locales such as the concentration camps. However, it is becoming increasingly apparent that there was a widespread perversion of medical practice and science that extended to mainstream academic physicians. Scientific thought, specifically the theories of racial hygiene, and the political conditions of a totalitarian dictatorship, acted symbiotically to devalue the intrinsic worth to society of those individuals with mental and physical disabilities. This devaluation served to foster the medical abuses which occurred. Neurosciences in the Third Reich serves as a backdrop to highlight what was the slippery slope of medical practice during that era. Points on this slippery slope included the “dejudification” of medicine, unethical experimentation in university clinics, systematic attempts to sterilize and euthanasize targeted populations, the academic use of specimens obtained through such programs and the experimental atrocities within the camps.


Author(s):  
Nitzan Shoshan

Abstract This article examines whether and how the figure of Adolf Hitler in particular, and National Socialism more generally, operate as moral exemplars in today’s Germany. In conversation with similar studies about Mosely in England, Franco in Spain, and Mussolini in Italy, it seeks to advance our comparative understanding of neofascism in Europe and beyond. In Germany, legal and discursive constraints limit what can be said about the Third Reich period, while even far-right nationalists often condemn Hitler, for either the Holocaust or his military failure. Here I revise the concept of moral exemplarity as elaborated by Caroline Humphry to argue that Hitler and National Socialism do nevertheless work as contemporary exemplars, in at least three fashions: negativity, substitution, and extension. First, they stand as the most extreme markers of negative exemplarity for broad publics that understand them as illustrations of absolute moral depravity. Second, while Hitler himself is widely unpopular, Führer-substitutes such as Rudolf Hess provide alternative figures that German nationalists admire and seek to emulate. Finally, by extension to the realm of the ordinary, National Socialism introduces a cast of exemplars in the figures of loving grandfathers or anonymous fallen soldiers. The moral values for which they stand, I show, appear to be particularly significant for young nationalists. An extended, more open-ended notion of exemplarity, I conclude, can offer important insights about the lingering afterlife of fascist figures in the moral life of European nationalists today.


2019 ◽  
Vol 28 (1 ENGLISH ONLINE VERSION) ◽  
pp. 5-16
Author(s):  
Konrad Graczyk

The article concerns the attitude of the occupation administration of the Third Reich introduced in Upper Silesia in September 1939 to the issue of income tax for 1939. The article discusses the analysis of Polish legislation and jurisprudence in the field of tax law carried out by German officials, the proposed regulation, its motives and the final solution. The considerations concerning Polish income tax were preceded by the presentation of analogous measures taken by Germany in connection with the incorporation of Austria and the Sudetenland.


2008 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 109-134
Author(s):  
David Bathrick

AbstractThe period prior to the 1970s has frequently been portrayed internationally as one of public disavowal of the Jewish catastrophe politically and cinematically and as one in which there was a dearth of filmic representations of the Holocaust. In addition to the Hollywood productionsThe Diary of Anne Frank(1960), Stanley Kramer’sJudgment at Nuremberg(1961) and Sidney Lumet’sThe Pawnbroker(1965), one often spoke of just a few East and West European films emerging within a political and cultural landscape that was viewed by many as unable or unwilling to address the subject. This article takes issue with these assumptions by focusing on feature films made by DEFA between 1946 and 1963 in East Berlin’s Soviet Zone and in East Germany which had as their subject matter the persecution of Jews during the Third Reich.


Author(s):  
Nicholas Attfield

The epilogue contributes to efforts to map continuities in musical thought between the Weimar and Nazi eras, and deals with issues of advocacy. There was not the straightforward rise to influence that is sometimes implied. Walter Abendroth had to overcome Pfitzner’s cantankerousness and fast-fading relevance. Heuss’s work was paraded by Fritz Stege in both the Zeitschrift für Musik and Rosenberg’s Kampfbund für deutsche Kultur (‘Combat League for German Culture’). The Austrian musicologist Robert Haas encountered resistance against the project that, above all, symbolized his intended mediation of the Nazi party, the Austrian National Library, and the International Bruckner Society: the ‘complete edition’ of the composer’s scores. Gustav Wyneken transformed his image of Halm from the cosmopolitan socialist and impassioned music critic of the early 1920s and emphasized Halm’s place in the national pantheon of ignored symphonic composers. Halm became the latest composer-leader in a tradition of syntheses towards which his own work on the ‘third culture’ had pointed.


2021 ◽  
pp. 46-64
Author(s):  
Edward B. Westermann

This chapter evaluates the significance of ritual and symbolism to the construction and manifestation of power under National Socialism. It underlines the importance of practices such as the mammoth party rallies at Nuremberg, the universal displays of the swastika on flags, pins, and armbands and the ubiquitous use of “Heil Hitler” as the standard greeting of the Third Reich under the Nazi regime. The chapter also contends that the creation of Nazi power was accomplished in no small measure by the use of ritual, and, in fact, ritual in the Third Reich served as an expression of “social power” that extended into virtually all aspects of German society. These celebratory events of Nazi power involved daily acts of verbal or physical humiliation of Jews, communists, and socialists, as well as organized and exemplary episodes of abusive behavior. Ultimately, the chapter studies the symbiotic relationship between violence, competition, and male comradeship and how it became manifest in the actions, rituals, and celebratory practices of Nazi paramilitary organizations through acts of humiliation by SS and policemen on the streets, in the concentration camps, and in the killing fields.


Author(s):  
George R. Mastroianni

Chapter 9 examines social-psychological approaches to understanding the Holocaust. Since Stanley Milgram’s obedience experiments were published in the early 1960s, social-psychological formulations based on obedience and social influence have dominated the psychology of the Holocaust. There is also a significant critical literature that challenges some of the findings and interpretation of Milgram and Phillip Zimbardo as they apply to the Holocaust. Social cognition is the study of thinking as situated in a social milieu and offers a fruitful framework for considering the ways Germans thought about one another during the Third Reich. Modern approaches to prejudice and racism, especially the study of unconscious or implicit biases, may provide insight into anti-Semitic attitudes prevalent in Germany (and elsewhere) during the Nazi years.


2010 ◽  
Vol 45 (3) ◽  
pp. 628-648 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christian Goeschel

Too often histories of the concentration camps tend to be ignorant of the wider political context of nazi repression and control. This article tries to overcome this problem. Combining legal, social and political history, it contributes to a more thorough understanding of the changing relationship between the camps as places of extra-legal terror and the judiciary, between nazi terror and the law. It argues that the conflict between the judiciary and the SS was not a conflict between ‘good’ and ‘evil’, as existing accounts claim. Rather, it was a power struggle for jurisdiction over the camps. Concentration camp authorities covered up the murders of prisoners as suicides to prevent judicial investigations. This article also looks at actual suicides in the pre-war camps, to highlight individual inmates’ reactions to life within the camps. The article concludes that the history of the concentration camps needs to be firmly integrated into the history of nazi terror and the Third Reich.


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