This book examines the effect the Verbotzeit had on the leadership structure and on the consequent position of the party within the völkisch movement. Looking primarily at Bavaria and North Germany it examines the failed attempts that were made to prevent Hitler from filling the leadership void within both the NSDAP (the National Socialist German Workers' Party) and the völkisch movement.
This book examines the effect the Verbotzeit had on the leadership structure and on the consequent position of the party within the völkisch movement. Looking primarily at Bavaria and North Germany it examines the failed attempts that were made to prevent Hitler from filling the leadership void within both the NSDAP (the National Socialist German Workers' Party) and the völkisch movement.
Though often depicted as a rapid political transformation, the Nazi seizure of power was in fact a process that extended from the appointment of the Papen cabinet in the early summer of 1932 through the Röhm blood purge two years later. Across fourteen rigorous and carefully researched chapters, From Weimar to Hitler offers a compelling collective investigation of this critical period in modern German history. Each case study presents new empirical research on the crisis of Weimar democracy, the establishment of the Nazi dictatorship, and Hitler’s consolidation of power. Together, they provide multiple perspectives on the extent to which the triumph of Nazism was historically predetermined or the product of human miscalculation and intent.
Scholars have long debated whether Heinrich Brüning, head of the German government from 1930 to 1932, was the 'last democratic chancellor'of the Weimar Republic or the trailblazer of the Nazi dictatorship. His memoirs (published in 1970) damaged his reputation badly by terming the restoration of monarchy the 'crux' of his policies. This 1998 book is the first scholarly biography of Bruning in any language and offers a systematic analysis of the economic, social, foreign, and military policies of his cabinet as it sought to cope with the Great Depression. With the help of newly available sources, it clarifies the peculiar distortions in the memoirs, showing that Chancellor Brüning intended to restore parliamentary democracy intact when the economic crisis passed. He was curbing the Nazi menace successfully when President Hindenburg, reactionary landowners, and army generals eager for massive rearmament made the disastrously misguided decision to topple him.
A groundbreaking book that gathers key wartime intelligence reports During the Second World War, three prominent members of the Frankfurt School—Franz Neumann, Herbert Marcuse, and Otto Kirchheimer—worked as intelligence analysts for the Office of Strategic Services, the wartime forerunner of the CIA. This book brings together their most important intelligence reports on Nazi Germany, most of them published here for the first time. These reports provide a fresh perspective on Hitler's regime and the Second World War, and a fascinating window on Frankfurt School critical theory. They develop a detailed analysis of Nazism as a social and economic system and the role of anti-Semitism in Nazism, as well as a coherent plan for the reconstruction of postwar Germany as a democratic political system with a socialist economy. These reports played a significant role in the development of postwar Allied policy, including denazification and the preparation of the Nuremberg Trials. They also reveal how wartime intelligence analysis shaped the intellectual agendas of these three important German-Jewish scholars who fled Nazi persecution prior to the war. Secret Reports on Nazi Germany features a foreword by Raymond Geuss as well as a comprehensive general introduction by Raffaele Laudani that puts these writings in historical and intellectual context.
