Nazi ideology did not arrive in 1933 fully formed. It was assembled over half a century from existing materials: nineteenth-century pseudo-scientific racial theory, the older Christian theological hostility to Judaism, the political antisemitism of the late nineteenth century, the trauma of the First World War, the inter-war fear of revolutionary communism, and a particular German strand of nationalist thought going back to the Romantic period. The pages in this section cover the ideological history that produced the regime, the propaganda apparatus that broadcast its doctrines, and the question that has dominated post-war Holocaust scholarship: how did ordinary people, raised in a civilised European country, become the men and women who carried out the killing?
What is here
Who Were the Nazis covers the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP) as an organisation: when it was founded, what it believed, who joined, how it grew, what its internal structure was. The page sets out the basic facts that the rest of this section assumes.
Germany’s Fear of Revolutionary Communism covers the post-1918 German experience of communist uprisings, the Spartacist insurrection in Berlin in 1919, the Munich Soviet Republic of 1919, and the running fear of a German Bolshevik revolution that became the central organising fear of inter-war German conservative politics. The fear of communism is the half of the Nazi ideological story that gets less attention than the antisemitism but is, on the documentary record, equally important. The Nazi movement presented itself, throughout its rise to power, as the only effective bulwark against communism. Many Germans who voted for Hitler in the early 1930s were voting for an anti-communist government, not specifically for the antisemitic programme.
From Ideology to Policy to Murder covers the path from the rhetorical antisemitism of the early Nazi movement to the legal antisemitism of the Nuremberg Laws to the operational antisemitism of the killing programme. The path was not a straight line. It moved in stages, with detours and reversals, and it depended at each stage on the active cooperation of large parts of the German civil service, the legal profession, the medical profession, the military, and the wider population.
The Churches and Theological Antisemitism covers the long Christian theological tradition of hostility to Judaism, from the early church fathers through medieval blood libels through Martin Luther’s 1543 tract On the Jews and Their Lies through the modern period. The page also covers the wartime conduct of the German Catholic and Protestant churches, including the German Christian movement that aligned itself with the Nazi regime and the Confessing Church under Bonhoeffer that opposed it.
The Role of Propaganda covers the Nazi propaganda apparatus under Joseph Goebbels: the films, the radio broadcasts, the press, the rallies, the schools, the camps for the Hitler Youth, and the use of mass entertainment to embed Nazi ideology in everyday German life. The page covers the central case of Der Sturmer, Julius Streicher’s antisemitic weekly newspaper, the films Jud Suss and The Eternal Jew, the rallies at Nuremberg, and the wider apparatus that produced the cultural environment in which the Holocaust became possible.
Ordinary People Who Became Killers covers the question that has dominated Holocaust scholarship since Christopher Browning’s 1992 book on Reserve Police Battalion 101. How did ordinary German men, mostly middle-aged reservists drafted into police battalions, come to participate in the shooting of Jewish women and children at the edges of pits in occupied Eastern Europe? The page covers Browning’s argument, the contrasting argument by Daniel Goldhagen in Hitler’s Willing Executioners, and the wider research on the social psychology of mass killing under conditions of state authorisation.
What this section is for
The Holocaust was not the work of demons. It was the work of ordinary people in a particular historical situation, given a particular ideological permission to do what they did. The men in the killing units, the clerks who administered the deportation lists, the doctors who selected on the camp ramps, the railway officials who scheduled the trains, the neighbours who took over the empty Jewish-owned shops, were not, in the great majority of cases, monsters. They were ordinary people who had been formed by a particular culture and who, when the moment came, did what the culture had been preparing them to do.
This is not an excuse. The men and women who carried out the Holocaust chose to do so, often under conditions in which refusal was possible and, in some documented cases, was practised. What the ideology produced was not a population of compelled victims of the state but a population of cooperative participants. Understanding why is the work of the pages in this section.