Nazi Germany

• Totalitarian - Although this term is wrought with Cold War ideological implications, it was in fact coined in the 1920s. Broadly speaking, totalitarianism brackets Fascism and Communism together claiming a single mass party and official ideology control every aspect of the state. The main problem with this approach is that it does not allow for evolution and dynamism within a state. Also problematic is the competition for influence that exists in purported totalitarian regimes and a monolithic model that depicts all such regimes to be inherently similar despite obvious differences.
• Fascism - The truth is this term is thrown around far too loosely to be useful. When disgruntled democrats refer to the 2000 Florida vote as a "fascist coup" by George Bush, credibility vanishes regarding any link the term had with Adolf Hitler (especially considering when the all the votes were finally counted, Bush did indeed have more). Even when those intelligent enough not to make such moronic comparisons restrict its use to describe Italy and Germany during the 1930s, they do so somewhat superficially as Hitler's Germany and Mussolini's Italy were very different - the lack of the racial element in Italy being the most outstanding. Still, Fascism is more useful (albeit barely) than totalitarianism because Nazism fits within the context of European-wide radical nationalist and anti-socialist movements.
  • Marxist theories: Communists were the first to attempt to explain the Fascist phenomenon by defining it as the final stage of bourgeois capitalist rule. Thus, fascist mass movements were a product of capitalist manipulation and its leaders were simply tools of big business. Problem: completely ignores the role of Adolf Hitler. Marxists also downplay the rhetoric of national rebirth which would appear fundamental to any fascist movement.
  • Non-Marxist theories: Ernst Nolte saw Fascism as both anti-traditional and anti-modern ideology time-bound to the interwar period. Because he largely ignores socio-economic explanations, this approach has been criticized. Others have attempted to explain Fascism as a crisis of modernity through some peculiar path of Germany's development (the Sonderweg) or weak liberal and governing institutions in Italy.
• Unique phenomenon - The embodiment and creation of one Adolf Hitler. Equates Nazism with Hitlerism. An understandable reaction against Marxist theory, it is too restrictive in explaining the origins of Nazism and like totalitarian theory, does not allow for dynamism within the Third Reich.

The old Marxist interpretation that sees Nazism reared and controlled by capitalist interests has seen widespread scholarly rejection. However, to deny links between the two would be equally dogmatic. The industrial elite were clearly fed up with Weimar and were willing to accommodate a stronger executive that would restore order and profits. The Nazis were more accurately the last hope - rather than the first as the Marxists maintained - for big business.

• Tim Mason was the first Marxist to argue for a "primacy of politics" and the independence of National Socialist state to assert itself in 1966.
  
• Richard J. Overy is clearly representative of the dominant orthodoxy: "Over all the internal divisions within industry stood the authority and interests of the Nazi Movement itself. Industry was subordinate to the requirements of the party".

Subordinate does not mean unimportant. Ian Kershaw argues that it is dangerous to draw a false dichotomy between politics and economics. Instead, Kershaw suggests, it is best to see the Third Reich as an alliance of power-cartels comprised of the army, big business, the Nazis, and, beginning in 1936, an increasingly powerful secret police bloc. Although the Nazi bloc enhanced its position in this cartel during the late 1930s, policy was always linked. Facing a gigantic economic bottleneck due to rapid rearmament, Hitler began to rant about oppressed Germans in the Sudetenland and Danzig, a sentiment many in the army shared since Versailles. The proverbial ace in the hole for the "primacy of politics" crowd is the Final Solution, the programme to exterminate the Jews. Kershaw dances around this stating the Holocaust, although contradicting the aims of big business, was the consequence of a course set long ago that was in their interests - war and brutal conquest.

Pinning down Hitler's role in the Third Reich is not as simple as it may seem. The old consensus that Hitler was able to impose his will on the world and bend historical forces is straight out of Nazi propaganda (e.g. Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will) and has increasingly come under attack. Because National Socialist rule resembled anarchy and the key roles of other Nazis have been brought to historical attention, the "Hitleristic" interpretations are beset with problems. Moreover, this approach, often taken in Hitler biographies, makes it difficult to avoid personalizing complex historical issues; socio-economic matters simply cannot be reduced to byzantine aspects of Hitler's warped personality. This debate has taken a bitter tone because of the implications of the respective positions. Many feel that trivializing the central evil that was Hitler is morally unacceptable. Furthermore, Hitler's role naturally shapes one's perspective of how much complicity the typical German assumes in Hitler's brutal expansionist foreign policy and the Holocaust. The key issue surrounding the historical poles of "Master" and "weak dictator" lie in how much influence the individual has in shaping history. In short, can the Third Reich be explained chiefly by the personality, ideology, and will of Hitler or was Nazi Germany the product of historical forces with Hitler reacting to events rather than creating them?

Hitler was Master in the Third Reich

• Hitler had a fixed programme from the early 1920s until the last days in his Berlin bunker in 1945.
• Hitler's actions were steered by an unwavering ideology
• Because Nazi Germany was directed by Hitler, der Führer's ideology was manifested in German policy.

This "programmist" interpretation, although arguing for the absolute centrality of Hitler, does not reduce history to his personality. Instead, they depict Hitler as a man fanatically pursuing his goals manipulating the forces of history to serve his own ends. They do not argue that all can be explained through Hitler, but as Eberhard Jäckel contends, "...the essential political decisions were taken by a single individual, in this case by Hitler".

Key Scholars:

• Eberhard Jäckel
• Norman Rich
• Klaus Hildebrand
• Andreas Hillgruber

These approaches focus on either the problems of the Master Dictator interpretation (the largest being the downplaying of any other agency of change) or the undisputable chaos in the Nazi hierarchy, structural limitations imposed on Hitler, and input from other actors. Weak dictator may be something of a misnomer, a term Hans Mommsen used for emphasis, but in truth "structuralists" attempt to place Hitler in the Nazi system rather than single-handedly running it.

• Martin Broszat focuses on the administrative chaos of the Nazi regime. Rather than accept the 'programmist' interpretation that this was a conscious ploy on Hitler's part, Broszat said it was the natural result of Hitler's inability to regulate an organized government. The disintegration of a centralized government led to shifting factions where the dynamic was explosive because of the charismatic nature of the Nazi movement and the Darwinian competition between these cliques to interpret the vague and grandiose rantings Hitler made in the 1920s. Here, Broszat allows for a key role for Hitler, but has him sanctioning events that are moving out of control as the chaotic nature of National Socialism ineluctably spiraled into lawlessness and criminal brutality.
• Hans Mommsen goes a step beyond Broszat arguing that Hitler was first and foremost a propagandist, and thus his ideological statements should be seen as such rather than any plan. Mommsen specifically argues that the Final Solution cannot be simply reduce to the intentions of Hitler, but must be seen as the materialization of the complex structure of the Third Reich and the radicalization of policy. Mommsen sees Hitler as just one extreme element of the malevolence that was Nazi Germany.

A False Dichotomy? Ian Kershaw's massive biography of Hitler does a laudable job of avoiding the pitfalls of Hitlerocentric interpretations and instead arrives at something of a synthesis between the programmist and structuralist views. Kershaw contends that while Hitler's intentions are indispensable to explaining the Third Reich, the actual manner he could transform his will into reality was by no means straightforward. Kershaw finds no evidence that the German dictator desired a different governing structure - indeed Hitler loathed institutional bonds and bureaucracy preferring personal loyalty above all - or any directive he issued blocked or compromised thus a characterization that places him as "weak" is difficult to accept. Nevertheless, his distant style of leadership and hesitancy regarding critical decisions, undoubtedly necessary components of his charismatic style of authority that was more style than substance, make it equally problematic to see him as master of the Nazi Germany. To an extent, der Führer was a prisoner of his own Chinese fire drill and in the resulting entropy, the 'structural' components of the Nazi hierarchy were the ones actually interpreting Hitler's will and anticipating his desires. Kershaw calls this relationship "Working towards the Führer".

How one interprets Hitler's role in the Third Reich directly correlates in their interpretations of German foreign policy under the Nazi Era. Those that adhere to the weak dictator thesis reject the notion that Nazi foreign policy had clear contours unfolding in some Hitlerian scheme in favor of unclear and unspecific expansion resulting from the uncontrollable momentum of the Nazi movement. Hitler's fascination with Lebensraum is downplayed; his vitriolic ranting was for propaganda purposes long before it appeared as an attainable goal. The Third Reich's uncontrolled expansion was the consequence of forces pushing Hitler, a conveyance for domestic problems, and/or opportunism. In sum, one must look beyond Herr Hitler to understand Nazi foreign policy.

Because the programmists see the dictator as the pillar the National Socialism, they contend the best way to understand Nazi foreign maneuvering is to understand Hitler. Mein Kampf is taken as a literal explanation of Hitler's very serious and revolutionary designs. Gerhard Weinberg asserts that Hitler represented a diplomatic revolution because of the discontinuity and unquestionable new dynamism in German foreign policy after 1933. This revolutionary aspect of Hitler, the significance of racist ideology, is another common thread that links all the programmists. They argue the quest for Lebensraum, the irrational attack against the USSR, the counter-productive economic policies in the conquered lands in the East, and the unprecedented Holocaust make it impossible to view Nazi foreign policy as a derivation of some ideological metaphor.

A loaded issue that tends to rear up emotional excess when interpretations don't square with subjective guidelines, a good portion of the literature devoted to the Holocaust is beset with opinion rather than fact. The Goldhagen controversy shows this at its ugliest. After Goldhagen wrote a bad book damning the whole German race, the historical community, rightly, rallied together to explain to the world why his sensationalistic trash should be ignored. The problem was by inundating the press and TV talk shows with such enmity until they turned blue in the face, the smooth Goldhagen and his easy answer to a vexing historical problem looked very appealing. That said, sifting through the polemics does offer the student of history numerous excellent works of the Holocaust; it is just a matter of effort and evaluating the source.

The first point of controversy is whether of not the Holocaust is comparable to other mass murders and genocides in human history or is it so unique that any comparison trivializes it - the so called "black box" as one scholar calls it. If a scholar thinks the Holocaust is comparable to Pol Pot's Cambodian Hell or the Turkish systematic slaughter of the Armenians, then Hitler, National Socialism, anti-Semitism, WWII, and other factors critical to explaining the seemingly unexplainable lose their essentialness. Not surprisingly, most historians who study the Holocaust advocate it is a singular event.

The historiography is one again divided between intent (Hitler's will) and structure (historical forces). The conventional and dominant approach, intent, starts and ends with Adolf Hitler. The German dictator strived for the Final Solution from some early date (pre-war Vienna, his recovery from gassing at Pasewalk in 1918 are most commonly cited) and the evolution of anti-Semitic policies were steps towards the goal of worldwide extermination. This interpretation has appeal because there is an unwavering constancy in Hitler's fanatical hatred for the Jews from his beerhall days in the early 1920s until he penned his Political Testament in burning Berlin wishing for "the conquest of territory in the east". It also explains the seemingly unexplainable. As Walter Hofer states: "It is simply incomprehensible how the claim can be made that the National Socialist race policy was not the realization of Hitler's Weltanschauung (world view)".

Hofer's jab was also a critique aimed at the structural approach, which underlines no central plan existed. Rather Nazi policy was a series of increasingly radicalized improvisations and ad hoc responses to the chaos that was Nazi Germany along with the failures of deportation and the war with the Soviet Union. Mommsen specifically argues that while Hitler knew and approved of the Final Solution, stating he ordered it contradicts his tendency to put off crucial decisions and allow events to shape their own course. Mommsen posits that while Hitler ranted about killing the Jews, these fanatical utterances could only come about by others looking to further their own agenda, be it sycophantism, power, or whatever. Broszat argues a similar line citing the failures of deportation and the local initiative taken to liquidate Jews which received approval from above. Structuralists do not remove Hitler from the equation, but the implications of their arguments extend culpability to sections of the non-Nazi German elite in the army, industry, and bureaucracy.

Kershaw again offers a synthesis, one that appears satisfactory given the evidence. He notes that Hitler's role was vague in the 1930s initiatives, the Nuremberg Laws and "Crystal Night" (Goebbels's pet project). Kershaw also concludes that forced emigration was in fact the plan until the war made this option unrealistic and impossible to implement. The debate on the timing of the order, if there ever was one (anywhere from Spring 1941-Spring 1942), for the Final Solution is complicated and at best circumstantial; it would appear as if it is forever lost to history. Kershaw instead posits that there was no single decision, but several cumulative stages towards extermination. Hitler's precise role remains hidden, but he certainly provided the impetus and approved of events - probably his most important contribution was the chaotic framework of the Nazi regime he established and his charismatic rather than bureaucratic style of rule. In short, Nazi Germany was "working towards the Führer". Kershaw's conclusion allows for mass killing to be applied on an ad hoc basis, but its origins do not emerge from local initiative. Instead, decisive steps and direction was provided from a loose alliance of power blocs within the Nazi regime.

This question is perhaps the most difficult to answer and attain a sort of historical consensus because:

• There are fundamental disagreements about the very nature of Nazism, specifically its social aims.
  • Distinguishing the ends from the means of its social goals.
  • Should social ideology be seen as serious intent or manipulative propaganda?
• Constructing a balance-sheet for social change in Nazi Germany has many pitfalls.
  • Regime lasted only 12 years, half of which was WWII - an enormous agent of change in its own right.
  • Separating long-term changes already underway from those directly responsible under the Nazis is difficult since Nazi plans often led to very different outcomes
• A problem with definitions.
  • What is a revolution? Must it be positive/progressive?
  • Modernization is an imprecise term and has implicit linkage to an archetype (Britain). This clouds more than clarifies.

Social Reaction: The standard Marxist view. Marxists impatiently maintain that National Socialism was a capitalistic dictatorship and genuine social revolution can only come about via the proletariat. They assert that because Nazism destroyed working-class organizations and was backed by a repressive police state, the Third Reich was blatantly counter-revolutionary. This interpretation has several problems. First, the regime received unquestionable broad and active support. Second, research has undermined the backward-looking nature of Nazism's mass movement and instead emphasizes the strong motivation for radical social change and undeniable modern aspirations. Finally, Germany in 1953 was a far different society than Germany in 1933. The social development that occurred under the Nazis would appear to be a legitimate question.

Social Revolution: This argument mainly stresses the clean break with tradition by the Nazis and a strong push towards modernity. This thesis borrows heavily from the concept of modernization, a creation of American social science. Ralf Dahrendorf felt National Socialism was the social revolution that was "missing" in Imperial Germany history because the Nazis destroyed traditional class alignments and broke anti-liberal elements that could threaten its totalitarian claim. By leveling all social strata to an equalizing status, Nazism inadvertently paved the way for a liberal-democratic society that was to become the Federal Republic of Germany. Detlev Peukert agrees that a more "modern" society arose after the war, but this was due to the incredibly destructive nature of Nazism rather than any social revolution. In practice, this position is not too dissimilar from Dahrendorf's; the point of contention being the means rather than the ends. The problem with this approach lies in its ambiguity. Crudely put, it basically posits since German society changed from 1933-1945, the Nazis must have done something to cause this.

Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang Wippermann's The Racial State: Germany 1933-1945 goes a long way towards providing a satisfactory analysis to this question that is not couched in ambiguity. Directly confronting the modernization question, the authors contend social (modern) and racial (amodern) policies are two sides of same coin and therefore cannot be separated; the Nazis wanted a racially based social order with modern and anti-modern characteristics. In this respect, they expand on Thomas Saunders's contention that Nazism itself was revolutionary in terms of its racial purification ideology instead of classic socio-economic terms. Although this 'barbarous utopia' has its roots in the Social Darwinism in 19th century, it can't be accurately labeled as reactionary because the Nazis desired a future society based on race and thus replacing the existing class structure rather than returning to some imagined old order. Burleigh and Wippermann are highly critical that Nazism arose because of some model of modernization because not all societies remotely resemble Nazi Germany - accepting such an argument no longer makes the crimes of the Nazi Regime singular in their horror or brutality since they now become the consequence of a modernization model. The key argument to take away from Burleigh and Wippermann is the idea of a racial state is fundamental to understanding National Socialism.

Naturally, with the defeat of diabolic Hitler, it has become fashionable for persons to claim they were never in cahoots with the Nazis and resisted them at every possible opportunity, be they in Vichy France, Croatia, or Germany. Resistance to Hitler had also become a badge of legitimacy during the Cold War era, whether by the Communists who boldly claim they were the only group that was against Hitler from the beginning (as if that inconvenient period from August 1939 - June 1941 somehow never happened) and conservatives in Germany who pointed to the 20 July 1944 bomb-plot (better late than never?). Undoubtedly Erwin Rommel was acting patriotically and heroically, whether or not this embodied Adenauer's FRG as post-war Germans claimed is another matter entirely that would come under historical scrutiny in the 1960s. The impetus for this proved to be the scholarly breakdown of the totalitarian vision of Nazism and social historians analyses on the everyday life of non-elites.

One of the vexing issues to the resistance debate is what actually constitutes resistance. Broszat, head of the Bavaria Project, argued that Resistenz (roughly passive dissent) should be included within the broad framework of Widerstand (conventional active opposition). Broszat argued that the concept of Resistenz would help explaining the actual effects of actions that blocked or altered the Nazi's intentions. This was necessary as the German populace was not automatons and while the Nazis strived for total control of society, they were met with numerous blockages. Not surprisingly, a number of scholars rejected Resistenz as failing to give the Heil Hitler salute while being indifferent to Auschwitz is a farce. It would appear that in order to understand Broszat's concept, one must understand his intentions. Broszat does not mean that Resistenz by itself could fundamentally alter Nazi ideology or preventing Germany from waging a war of annihilation, rather he was trying to explain the Nazi failure to totally penetration society. From a societal perspective, Broszat would argue Resistenz forced the Nazis to adopt a different course and were undoubtedly influenced from below; something the traditional totalitarian model does not allow. While this may be true, another weakness of this concept is that it takes no account of motivation. A worker may be striking simply for larger pay and not out of any distaste for the ruling regime.

Once getting beyond the definition of resistance, a number of points warrant attention:

• The Nazi Regime was a brutal police state that knew no boundaries when smashing political or ideological enemies. The Concentration Camp appears to be an effective instrument eliciting passivity and cooperation, however resentful that may have been.
• Once the Nazis consolidated their power, the only realistic challengers to Hitler's power were the elite.
• The Regime's stunning economic and foreign policy successes disarmed critics and broadened Nazi appeal beyond just the Party members. Picking up where Time left off when the magazine named Hitler as "Man of the Year" for 1938, Joachim Fest provocatively asserts that had Hitler been assassinated in 1938, "few would hesitate to call him one of the greatest of German statesmen, the consummator of Germany's history."
• After the fortunes of war turned against the Nazis, "negative bonds" (Allied demand for unconditional surrender, fear of Russian brutality, the fact many had already thrown their lot with the Nazis during the glory years) between state and society were reinforced.

• Omer Bartov, Hitler's Army: Soldiers, Nazis, and War in the Third Reich (1992). Title of book says it all. Bartov contends the Wehrmacht accepted and fanatically fought for Nazi ideology. Bartov believes any view that depoliticizes the soldier cannot adequately explain his brutality nor his tenacity in the face of defeat long after massive casualties destroyed "primary-group" loyalties. Lingering problems with Bartov's work are the absence of any positive ideals (Fritz's Frontsoldaten is superior in this respect) and his uniform treatment of the millions of soldiers within the Army (e.g. Mommsen).
• Richard Gellately, Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany (2001). Seeking to discover how and why a social consensus backed Hitler, Gellately rejects the notion that terror alone could have maintained the Third Reich. Instead, he argues that consent and coercion were intertwined; the Gestapo had lots of help from everyday Germans and terror was targeted against individuals that arose little sympathy - deviants, criminals, anarchists, etc. Gellately states that the Nazi police and terror machine received broad societal support to combat enemies of the regime and the persecution of what were deemed unsavory elements in German society. Gellately's most important contribution is the demonstration that the Nazi regime made no effort to keep it citizens in the dark about its brutal practices, rather the Party sought to score propaganda points for cleansing society. He attempts to draw the connection between the "flood of denunciations" and the lack of resistance to the everyday German's complicity in the Nazi crimes. For Gellately it would seem as if the Germans did not know, it was because they choose not to.
• Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men: Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (1992). Examining the history of an "Order Police" battalion, Browning debunks the notion that the perpetrators of mass shootings and deportations had to be coerced. The commander of this battalion excused his men from this gruesome task if they were not up to it, but the majority did so anyway. Browning does not accept Goldhagen's over-simplistic analysis that they represented some unique Germanic evil and instead posits these were average men, just like the rest of humanity, and circumstance warped them into doing the inhumane. Cowardice, alcohol, loyalty to battalion, fear, indoctrination, and the guilt about forcing others to do their excruciatingly difficult task compelled the otherwise reluctant to commit crimes against humanity. Browning does not let these men off the hook, but his cogent explanation compels the reader beyond facile "us" Vs. "them" arguments and the monocausality of Goldhagen.