Nazi Germany's New Aristocracy
Nazi Germany's New Aristocracy

Author: Herbert F. Ziegler

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2014-07-14

Total Pages: 202

ISBN-13: 1400860369

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The first book-length presentation on the social origins of the prewar SS leadership, this volume offers a complete picture of the men who, between 1925 and 1939, joined the vanguard of National Socialism and rose to the rank of SS-Führer. Herbert Ziegler reveals that the Black Order was composed of people from all walks of life. Young Gymnasium and university graduates rubbed elbows with former gardeners, mechanics, and office clerks, while "old fighters" of the pre-1933 Nazi movement climbed the ladder of SS ranks alongside those who did not find their enthusiasm for Hitler's new order until after the Nazi seizure of power. Within the confines of Heinrich Himmler's new knighthood was created a people's community in microcosm, furnishing many a recruit a vehicle for upward social mobility. Moving beyond earlier explanations of who provided the support for National Socialism, Ziegler describes practices within the SS that were akin to a democracy of personnel selection and that resulted, by 1939, in a leadership corps characterized by social heterogeneity rather than homogeneity. Taking advantage of the detailed information contained in the thousands of SS personnel files located at the Berlin Document Center, and using the tools of statistical analysis, he also probes the connections between social reality and the ideological credos and promises of the Third Reich. Originally published in 1990. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Nazis and Nobles
Nazis and Nobles

Author: Stephan Malinowski

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2020-12-10

Total Pages: 497

ISBN-13: 0198842554

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The first ever in-depth study of the role played by the nobility in the Nazi rise to power in interwar Germany, this is a fascinating portrait of an aristocratic world teetering on the edge of self-destruction.

Hitler's Girl
Hitler's Girl

Author: Lauren Young

Publisher: HarperCollins

Published: 2022-08-23

Total Pages: 236

ISBN-13: 0062936751

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

A timely, riveting book that presents for the first time an alternative history of 1930s Britain, revealing how prominent fascist sympathizers nearly succeeded in overturning British democracy—using the past as a road map to navigate the complexities of today’s turn toward authoritarianism. Hitler’s Girl is a groundbreaking history that reveals how, in the 1930s, authoritarianism nearly took hold in Great Britain as it did in Italy and Germany. Drawing on recently declassified intelligence files, Lauren Young details the pervasiveness of Nazi sympathies among the British aristocracy, as significant factions of the upper class methodically pursued an actively pro-German agenda. She reveals how these aristocrats formed a murky Fifth Column to Nazi Germany, which depended on the complacence and complicity of the English to topple its proud and long-standing democratic tradition—and very nearly succeeded. As she highlights the parallels to our similarly treacherous time, Young exposes the involvement of secret organizations like the Right Club, which counted the Duke of Wellington among its influential members; the Cliveden Set, which ran a shadow foreign policy in support of Hitler; and the shocking four-year affair between socialite Unity Mitford and Adolf Hitler. Eye-opening and instructive, Hitler’s Girl re-evaluates 1930s England to help us understand our own vulnerabilities and poses urgent questions we must face to protect our freedom. At what point does complacency become complicity, posing real risk to the democratic norms that we take for granted? Will democracy again succeed—and will it require a similarly cataclysmic event like World War II to ensure its survival? Will we, in our own defining moment, stand up for democratic values—or will we succumb to political extremism?

Marriage and Fatherhood in the Nazi SS
Marriage and Fatherhood in the Nazi SS

Author: Amy Carney

Publisher: University of Toronto Press

Published: 2018-06-12

Total Pages: 323

ISBN-13: 1487515618

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

From 1931 to 1945, leaders of the SS, a paramilitary group under the Nazi party, sought to transform their organization into a racially-elite family community that would serve as the Third Reich’s new aristocracy. They utilized the science of eugenics to convince SS men to marry suitable wives and have many children. Marriage and Fatherhood in the Nazi SS by Amy Carney is the first work to significantly assess the role of SS men as husbands and fathers during the Third Reich. The family community, and the place of men in this community, started with one simple order issued by SS leader Heinrich Himmler. He and other SS leaders continued to develop the family community throughout the 1930s, and not even the Second World War deterred them from pursuing their racial ambitions. Carney’s insight into the eugenic-based measures used to encourage SS men to marry and to establish families sheds new light on their responsibilities not only as soldiers, but as husbands and fathers as well.

Go-Betweens for Hitler
Go-Betweens for Hitler

Author: Karina Urbach

Publisher: OUP Oxford

Published: 2015-07-24

Total Pages: 402

ISBN-13: 0191008672

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This is the untold story of how some of Germany's top aristocrats contributed to Hitler's secret diplomacy during the Third Reich, providing a direct line to their influential contacts and relations across Europe — especially in Britain, where their contacts included the press baron and Daily Mail owner Lord Rothermere and the future King Edward VIII. Using previously unexplored sources from Britain, Germany, the Netherlands, the Czech Republic, and the USA, Karina Urbach unravels the story of top-level go-betweens such as the Duke of Coburg, grandson of Queen Victoria, and the seductive Stephanie von Hohenlohe, who rose from a life of poverty in Vienna to become a princess and an intimate of Adolf Hitler. As Urbach shows, Coburg and other senior aristocrats were tasked with some of Germany's most secret foreign policy missions from the First World War onwards, culminating in their role as Hitler's trusted go-betweens, as he readied Germany for conflict during the 1930s — and later, in the Second World War. Tracing what became of these high-level go-betweens in the years after the Nazi collapse in 1945 — from prominent media careers to sunny retirements in Marbella — the book concludes with an assessment of their overall significance in the foreign policy of the Third Reich.

Hitler's True Believers
Hitler's True Believers

Author: Robert Gellately

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2020

Total Pages: 465

ISBN-13: 0190689900

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Nazi ideology drove Hitler's quest for power in 1933, colored everything in the Third Reich, and culminated in the Second World War and the Holocaust. In this book, Gellately addresses often-debated questions about how Führer discovered the ideology and why millions adopted aspects of National Socialism without having laid eyes on the "leader" or reading his work.

High Society in the Third Reich
High Society in the Third Reich

Author: Fabrice D'Almeida

Publisher: Polity

Published: 2008-12-22

Total Pages: 313

ISBN-13: 0745643116

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This book is the first systematic study of the relations between German high society and the Nazis. It uses unpublished archival material, private diaries and diplomatic documents to take us into the hidden areas of power where privileges, tax breaks, and stolen property were exchanged. Fabrice D'Almeida begins by examining high society in the Weimar period, dominated by the old imperial aristocracy and a new republican aristocracy of government officials and wealthy businessmen. It was in this group that Hitler made his social debut in the early 1920s through the mediation of conservative friends and artists, including the family of the composer Richard Wagner. By the end of the 1920s, he enjoyed wide support among socialites, who played a significant role in his access to power in 1933. Their adherence to the Nazi regime, and the favors they received in return, continued and even grew until defeat loomed on the horizon. D'Almeida shows how members of German high society sought to outdo each other in showing zealous support for Hitler, how the old elites starting with the Kaiser's sons partied alongside parvenus, and how actors, aristocrats, SS technocrats, and diplomats came together to form a strange imperial court. Women also played a role in this theatre of power; they were persuaded that they had gained in dignity what they had lost in civil rights. There emerges a fascinating and disturbing picture of a group that allowed nothing - not war, the plundering of Europe, nor the extermination of peoples - to alter their cynical enjoyment of pleasures: hunting, regattas, the opera, balls, dinners and tennis. More than a study of a class or a chronicle, this book lifts the veil that has concealed a society that used secrecy to protect itself. High Society in the Third Reich makes an important and unique contribution to the current reevaluation of the extent to which German society, including German high society, was responsible for Hitler's accession to power and the crimes that were committed by his regime.

Who Voted for Hitler?
Who Voted for Hitler?

Author: Richard F. Hamilton

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2014-07-14

Total Pages: 682

ISBN-13: 1400855349

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Challenging the traditional belief that Hitler's supporters were largely from the lower middle class, Richard F. Hamilton analyzes Nazi electoral successes by turning to previously untapped sources--urban voting records. This examination of data from a series of elections in fourteen of the largest German cities shows that in most of them the vote for the Nazis varied directly with the class level of the district, with the wealthiest districts giving it the strongest support. Originally published in 1982. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Royals and the Reich
Royals and the Reich

Author: Jonathan Petropoulos

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2008-08-12

Total Pages: 545

ISBN-13: 0199713197

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Princes Philipp and Christoph von Hessen-Kassel, great-grandsons of Queen Victoria of England, had been humiliated by defeat in World War I and, like much of the German aristocracy, feared the social unrest wrought by the ineffectual Weimar Republic. Jonathan Petropoulos shows how the princes, lured by prominent positions in the Nazi regime and highly susceptible to nationalist appeals, became enthusiastic supporters of Hitler. Prince Philipp, son-in-law to the King of Italy, became the highest-ranking prince in the Nazi state and developed a close personal relationship with Hitler and Hermann Göering. Prince Christoph was a prominent SS officer and head of the most important intelligence agency in the Third Reich. In return, the princes made the Nazis socially acceptable to wealthy, high-society patrons. Prince Philipp even introduced Göering to Mussolini at a critical stage in the Nazi Party's development and later served as a liaison between Hitler and the Italian dictator. Permitted access to Hessen family private papers and the Royal Archives at Windsor Castle, Petropoulos follows the story of the House of Hesse through to its tragic denouement--the princes' betrayal and persecution by an increasingly paranoid Hitler and prosecution and denazification by the Allies.

European Elites and Ideas of Empire, 1917-1957
European Elites and Ideas of Empire, 1917-1957

Author: Dina Gusejnova

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2016-06-16

Total Pages: 393

ISBN-13: 1107120624

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Explores European civilisation as a concept of twentieth-century political practice and the project of a transnational network of European elites. This title is available as Open Access.