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.
Influenced by what Clausewitz called the "remarkable trinity" - the government, the military and the people - David Jablonsky studies the interaction between Churchill, the British people and the army during World War II. He argues that the great British leader saw civilian supremacy as the rule in total war.
Sometime in the penultimate decade of the 20th century, the United States and its allies won the cold war. Once again in the current transition period, the primary questions revolve around the management of power and America's role in global politics. Once again there are the issues of change and continuity. In terms of change, the cold war set in train a blend of integrative and disintegrative forces and trends that are adding to the complex tensions of the current transition. The integrative force that increasingly linked global economies in the cold war, for instance, also holds out the spectral potential of global depression or, at the very least, nations more susceptible to disintegrative actions, as the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait demonstrated. In a similar manner, the advances in communications and transportation that have spread the results of medical and scientific discoveries around the world are countered by the malign transnational results of nuclear technology, the drug trade, terrorism, AIDS and global warming.
They are two of twentieth-century history’s most significant figures, yet today they are largely forgotten – Paul von Hindenburg and Erich Ludendorff, Germany’s First World War leaders. Although defeat in 1918 brought an end to their ‘silent dictatorship’, both generals played a key role in the turbulent politics of the Weimar Republic and the rise of the Nazis. Alexander Clifford, in this perceptive reassessment of their political careers, questions the popular image of these generals in the English-speaking world as honourable ‘Good Germans’. For they were intensely political men, whose ideas and actions shaped the new Germany and ultimately led to Hitler’s dictatorship. Their poisonous wartime legacy was the infamous stab-in-the-back myth. According to the generals, the true cause of the disastrous defeat in the First World War was the betrayal of the army by politicians, leftists and Jews on the home front. This toxic conspiracy theory polluted Weimar politics and has been labelled the beginning of ‘the twisted road to Auschwitz’. Hindenburg and Ludendorff’s political fortunes after the war were markedly different. Ludendorff inhabited the far-right fringes and engaged in plots, assassinations and conspiracies, playing a leading role in failed uprisings such as Hitler’s 1923 Beer Hall Putsch. Meanwhile Hindenburg was a vastly more successful politician, winning two presidential elections and serving as head of state for nine years. Arguably he bore even more responsibility for the destruction of democracy, for he and the nationalist right he led sought, through Hitler, to remould the Weimar system towards authoritarianism.
What is the Holocaust? Were Hitler and his executioners sadistic psychopaths? Were ordinary Germans morally culpable for murdering millions of innocent victims? This volume seeks to explore these and other ethical, cultural, and religious questions within a historical context. Beginning with the origin and growth of anti-Semitism, the book continues with a detailed account of the various stages of Nazi onslaught and concludes with a consideration of the legacy of the Holocaust in the modern world.Designed as a work for students in colleges and universities as well as the general reader, the volume contains 26 chapters which deal with a particular period. This is followed by discussion of the implication of the events of the Holocaust. Unlike other books on the subject, this study contains both a history of the Holocaust and extensive reflections about social, religious, and moral issues raised by the emergence of the Third Reich and its impact on subsequent history.Contains maps and illustrations related to the growth and development of Nazism and a lengthy bibliography for further study.
