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In early March 2019, Professor Elizabeth Drummond and the students in HIST 4273 Nazi Germany traveled to Berlin, where they spent a week visiting “sites of memory” related to Nazism and the Holocaust. During these visits, they considered the process of Vergangenheitsbewältigung, analyzing how Germans have themselves grappled with the history of Nazism in museums,…

Science in Nazi Germany would be coopted and molded into a source of support for the regime and its ideologies. Racial ideology seeped into a field that was supposed to function on empirical data and scientific observation. The expansion of racial science, eugenics, was a natural step for the Nazi regime; back in the early…

Within the Third Reich’s first few years, the arts and literature received a great amount of regulation and change in policies. In 1933 after becoming chancellor of Germany, Adolf Hitler and the Nazis sought to create a “coordination” [Gleichschaltung] of German culture and literature as part of the ideological and racial awakening of their newly…

Examining Nazi laws and lawyers may seem like a futile exercise in contradiction. How could a tyrannical regime, characterized by arbitrary rule, which used merciless violence to enforce a system of terror have laws? Nevertheless, lawyers played a key role in codifying Nazi tyranny and terror. In 1933 Hitler began a system of gleichschaltung, or co-ordination, in which all of German life was brought under Nazi party control. The legal profession was no exception.

“Most sensed what was to come. Some knelt down with raised hands before the director of the institution, Dr. Lonauer, and begged him not to send them away. Nothing helped them.” Worker in the Niedernhart Mental Institute (Poore, 121) “The poor, good fellow, who never hurt anyone, and whose biggest pleasure was giving presents to…

This interpretation of the Jewish encounter and response to anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany will provide the reader with insight into the daily lives of Jews living within German territory between the years of 1933-1945. The Jewish encounter with anti-Semitism is multi-layered and encompasses the personal experiences of millions; various themes of displacement, violence, exclusion, isolation, etc. are present…

It is very common when evaluating Hitler’s rise to power to view it from today’s perspective, knowing that his actions led to genocide. Because of our current knowledge, one popular question is, “How could anyone follow such a leader?” Germany had suffered a political and economic downfall as a result of signing of the Treaty…

It is a common misinterpretation that German businesses succumbed to the Nazi state with policies forced upon them. However, in many cases, from heavy industry to financial institutes, businesses cooperated in fulfilling the Nazi regime’s wishes. Although German businesses were not directly controlled by the Nazi regime, they willingly collaborated in the government’s goals of…

The Nazi regime believed that the future of the Nazi state rested in the hands of the youth. A sense of community was incredibly important to the stability of the regime and there was a special effort to reach out to young people. The government wanted to control the intellectual, physical, and moral formation of…

Nazi Germany’s radical views on German racial superiority extended into all spheres of society, including the cultural sphere. This zealotry led the Nazi government to attempt to create a new culture, including a new aesthetic that aimed to instill Nazi values on the population. This aesthetic affected many aspects of the cultural sphere, including what…