The British Legation in Prague


Book Description

This book analyses the issue of Czech-German relations within Czechoslovakia between 1933 and 1938. Following Adolf Hitler’s accession to the office of Chancellor, the German minority in Czechoslovakia began to progressively mobilise and gradually radicalise such that the majority of them supported the Sudeten German Party in the 1935 elections and played a large part in the end of the First Czechoslovak Republic three years later.




Hitler's Crusade


Book Description

In the early hours of 22 June 1941 units of the Wehrmacht began to pour into the Soviet Union. They were embarking on an undertaking long planned by Adolf Hitler. Since the 1920s National Socialist doctrine had largely been determined by an intense hatred and hostility towards not only the Jews but also towards Bolshevism. This ideology, Lorna Waddington argues, had been identified by Hitler and his acolytes as the political poison concocted by the Jews in an attempt to impose, as he saw it, their own tyrannical domination across the globe. This impressively researched book provides a sustained and detailed analysis of this crucial dimension to Hitler's Weltanschauung, exploring several new avenues, including the little-known activities of the Antikomintern, as well as offering fresh interpretations and new insights on well-documented events. Engaging a wide range of archival sources and supported by a voluminous secondary literature Waddington charts the origins and development of Hitler's crusade against international Bolshevism from his earliest political activities until deep into the Second World War. Focussing on the function of anti-Bolshevism in Nazi ideology, foreign policy and external propaganda, Waddington traces the links inferred by Hitler between the purported forces of 'World Jewry' and revolutionary socialism. She explains why by the mid-1920s anti-Bolshevism had become a central tenet of Nazi ideology and examines the nature and function of anti-Bolshevism as manifested in German external propaganda. We discover how, despite the shifting sands of international diplomacy, Hitler's foreign policy throughout the 1930s and early 1940s remained firmly fixed on the eventual destruction and spoliation of the USSR, the avowed ideological enemy and the epicentre of supposed 'Jewish Bolshevism'. 'Hitler's Crusade' provides the definitive analysis of Hitler's attitude towards Bolshevism, the destruction of which he was still describing in early 1945 as the raison d'être of the Nazi movement.




The Third Reich and Yugoslavia


Book Description

The Third Reich and Yugoslavia focuses on economic and political affairs between the Third Reich and Yugoslavia before Germany attacked in April 1941. It observes the relations between the two countries primarily from an economic perspective, with the political dimension forming a backdrop within which the economy operated. Perica Hadzi-Jovancic challenges the conventional scholarly wisdom which recognises economics as mainly being a tool of German foreign policy towards Yugoslavia. Instead, he successfully places economic dealings on both sides within the broader context of both the German economic and financial plans and policies of the 1930s, as well as the existing trading ties between the two countries as they had been developing since the 1920s. At the same time, through detailed analysis of unpublished archival material, Hadzi-Jovancic explores the shared political relations from a new perspective; one from which there is a much deeper understanding of Yugoslavia's motives and the resulting implications for the other great powers and the wider regional framework. The book concludes that, contrary to the traditional view in historiography and despite the dependency of Yugoslavia's foreign trade on the German market at the dawn of the Second World War, Yugoslavia maintained both its economic and political agency in the shadow of the Third Reich. It was only international political developments beyond Yugoslavia's control in the years ahead that lead to a more receptive stance towards German demands.




Hitler's Religion


Book Description

A book to challenge the status quo, spark a debate, and get people talking about the issues and questions we face as a country!




German Reich 1933–1937


Book Description

Executive editor: Wolf Gruner; English-language edition prepared by: Caroline Pearce and Dorothy Mas This volume documents the persecution of the Jews in the German Reich between 1933 and 1937. The documents illustrate the ways in which the Jews in Germany were thrown out of their jobs and excluded from public institutions and public life, and how the Nuremberg Laws reduced the status of German Jews to second-class citizens and set out to sever the ties between Jewish and non-Jewish Germans. It documents the political calculations and strategy of the Nazi ruling elite in relation to antisemitic measures, and the local outbreaks of violence and terror against the Jewish population. It also illustrates the widespread indifference of non-Jewish Germans. In 1935 the Berlin rabbi Joachim Prinz described how the circumstances for the Jewish population had changed: ‘The Jew’s lot is to be neighbourless. We would not find it all so painful if we did not have the feeling that we once did have neighbours.’ Learn more about the PMJ on https://pmj-documents.org/




Rethinking the Weimar Republic


Book Description

“McElligott's impressive mastery of an enormous body of research guides him on a distinctive path through the dense thickets of Weimar historiography to a provocative new interpretation of the nature of authority in Germany's first democracy.” Sir Ian Kershaw, Emeritus Professor of Modern History at the University of Sheffield, UK This study challenges conventional approaches to the history of the Weimar Republic by stretching its chronological-political parameters from 1916 to 1936, arguing that neither 1918 nor 1933 constituted distinctive breaks in early 20th-century German history. This book: - Covers all of the key debates such as inheritance of the past, the nature of authority and culture - Rethinks topics of traditional concern such as the economy, Article 48, the Nazi vote and political violence - Discusses hitherto neglected areas, such as provincial life and politics, the role of law and Republican cultural politics




The Triumph of the Dark


Book Description

In this magisterial narrative, Zara Steiner traces the twisted road to war that began with Hitler's assumption of power in Germany. Covering a wide geographical canvas, from America to the Far East, Steiner provides an indispensable reassessment of the most disputed events of these tumultuous years. Steiner underlines the far-reaching consequences of the Great Depression, which shifted the initiative in international affairs from those who upheld the status quo to those who were intent on destroying it. In Europe, the l930s were Hitler's years. He moved the major chess pieces on the board, forcing the others to respond. From the start, Steiner argues, he intended war, and he repeatedly gambled on Germany's future to acquire the necessary resources to fulfil his continental ambitions. Only war could have stopped him-an unwelcome message for most of Europe. Misperception, miscomprehension, and misjudgment on the part of the other Great Powers leaders opened the way for Hitler's repeated diplomatic successes. It is ideology that distinguished the Hitler era from previous struggles for the mastery of Europe. Ideological presumptions created false images and raised barriers to understanding that even good intelligence could not penetrate. Only when the leaders of Britain and France realized the scale of Hitler's ambition, and the challenge Germany posed to their Great Power status, did they finally declare war.




The Churches and the Third Reich


Book Description

This second volume of The Churches and the Third Reich, the last which the author lived to write, covers the year 1934. This year, which saw the birth of the Confessing Church and the great Synods of Barmen and Dahlem, was the year of disillusionment, in which all the hopes of 1933 were shattered one by one. The gripping narrative of the first volume is continued as in addition to the rise of a legitimate church opposition we see how the German Christians overreached themselves by seeking, without Hitler’s approval and against the law, to set up a Reich Church fully coordinated with the state. Meanwhile, the Roman Catholic Church was running into increasing difficulties as it tried to cope with the problems left unresolved on the conclusion of the Concordat. Like the first, this volume has many illustrations.




Nazism and the Radical Right in Austria, 1918-1934


Book Description

Part of the "Danish Humanist Texts and Studies" series, this work presents a comparative analysis of the two most important radical right-wing movements in Austria during the inter-war period: Heimwehr and NSDAP. It examines the movements from their emergence until they respectively came in to the power apparatus (Heimwehr) and forbidden (NSDAP).




Coming Home to the Third Reich


Book Description

During the 1930s, Germany's industrialization, rearmament and economic plans taxed the existing manpower, forcing the country to explore new ways of acquiring Aryan-German labor. Eventually, the Third Reich implemented a return migration program which used various recruitment strategies to entice Germans from Canada and the United States to migrate home. It initially used the Atlantic Ocean to transport German-speakers, but after the outbreak of World War II, German civilians were brought from the Americas to East Asia and then to Germany via the Trans-Siberian Railway through the Soviet Union. Germany's attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941 ended this overland route, but some Germans were moved on Nazi ships from East Asia to the Third Reich until the end of 1942. This book investigates why Germans who had already established themselves in overseas countries chose to migrate back to an oppressive and authoritarian country. It sheds light on some aspects of the Third Reich's administration, goals and achievements associated with return migration while also telling the individual stories of returnees.