The social psychology of this century reveals a major lesson: often it is not so much the kind of person a man is as the kind of situation in which he finds himself that determines how he will act. – Stanley Milgram, 1974 After world war two, many people wondered what kind of people did it take […]
We had talked in class last week about the trouble and hesitance of some of the soldiers in battalion 101. How when it came to shooting Jews, they either opted out or turned to drinking and other means to forget about their actions. Some didn’t want to admit to what they had done, and I […]
The video Mein Krieg was a very powerful film of the Eastern Front in WWII. The film shows a few survivors from the German army filming what they saw and talked about their experiences. In Mein Krieg, some of the film shows kids from the Hitler Youth program as well. In those films and what […]
In April of 1045, American troops of the 4th Armored Division of the 3rd Army were the first of the American troops to discover a concentration camp. This camp was called Ohrdruf and was a subcamp of Buchenwald, a larger camp in the area.1 In the late of 1944, around 10,000 prisoners were being housed […]
For a different course, I had to examine an article about a topic of my liking. I chose to look at doctors in Nazi Germany and their role. The article from the other class really reminded me of the topics we were discussing in class this week. The article spoke about the practices that doctors […]
It is easy to think about the individuals who took part in the murder of the Jews as mindless killers. We tend to forget that these people were humans and had feelings about what they were doing. Not everyone agreed with Nazi ideology, and many did not agree with the orders they received. As we […]
The reading that we did for Tuesday about the Death Camps was certainly a hard pill to swallow, and definitely one of the more emotional topics I have ever read about before. It was certainly sickening to read accounts, and try my best to understand how someone could have what seems to be absolutely no […]
For my final project I read Primo Levi’s book Survival in Auschwitz. I had just started reading the book and was reading the author’s preface and I was extremely taken back by something that he said. ” It was my good fortune to be deported to Auschwitz only in 1944, that is, after the German […]
Anti-Semitism is not unique to Nazi Germany as we’ve learned throughout this semester. Anti-Semitism was also thriving right here in the good ol’ U.S. of A. From class, we know that Anti-Semitism existed in plenty of other places in the pre-war age. However, it is important to note that Anti-Semitism did not stop with the […]
The final solution that the Nazi’s implemented to annihilate the Jewish people was an ideology that Hitler believed need to happen in order for the Aryan race to succeed in their mission.[1] Hitler and the Nazi’s believed that as the war was going on this was the only way for them to rid the Jewish […]
Operation Barbarossa, or better known as the Nazi Germany invasion of the Soviet Union took place on June 22nd, 1941. The tactics in invading the Soviet Union was justified by the Nazis quest for power, Hitler believed that his growing race of Aryans would need space, therefore the Soviet Union would be suitable. The Nazi’s […]
The documents that we read for this week were certainly eye-opening and definitely disgusting as to even fathom how Jews were treated and not thought of as humans. The documents started off of course with anti-Semitism and the protection of German blood, which of course the Jewish were not considered as. What first struck me […]
In class, when we were talking about the bombing raids in Germany, specifically Dresden, I was reminded about my time in Germany when some of the staff of the University of Kassel took the international students to a nearby city of Göttingen. The reason they took us there was to give us the opportunity to […]
For this week we read a lot of interesting stuff, but what really interested me most was the short bit that we read about Hitler’s Bunker, which made me want to look a little bit more into information about this Bunker and what else I would be able to find. I personally found Hitler’s Bunker […]
Hitler Youth had a huge impact on the German youth during the Nazi regime. Reading Spielvogel and Redles they discuss the way the Hitler youth gave a sense of comradery amongst them, but also had hardships for parents and other adult authorities. So why was this so great yet so detrimental for families involved in […]
I have already done a post about Hitler Youth and how children were put into groups that essentially taught children all they could about how to be the perfect Aryan and how to be the perfect Nazi for the party. We made me of course think about what kids were taught in school, which made […]
On the topic of propaganda and Hitler’s war efforts during class, I was reminded of a documentary that I watched this past week. It was a documentary about the Atlantic Wall that Hitler built on the west coast of Europe to stop the Allied forces from making a landing and gaining a foothold in Europe. […]
This week we talked a lot about art and that being looked down upon for being modern. A nazi viewpoint looked at modern Jewish art/music as bad. The new look on things wasn’t approved because it was almost seen as defiant. New wasn’t a good thing, it expressed new ideas which meant individualism. And the […]
This week’s reading in Sax and Kuntz about the roles of women in the Volksgemeinschaft actually was interesting to read and analyze because this was truly how women were seen in the eyes of Nazi Germany. I find this very interesting because although these roles were more or less traditional womanly duties in most societies […]
It’s no surprise that Jud Suss is seen as a very offensive Nazi propaganda film. However, it is worth noting that the Nazis didn’t only use film to give the Jews a bad name in Germany but also used other forms of media. One of the most popular forms, and the easiest to produce and […]
Nothing is seen without a bias and those with power know it. That is why the entertainment industry has been so crucial in politics. Whether or not we have been aware of their persuasions, the continuous subtle or not so subtle portrayals are still intriguing. As I watched Jud Suss it was hard not to enjoy […]
I think Hitler’s link back to nature was particularly interesting. His support of Darwin and “survival of the fittest” was seen over and over again in his speeches and talks. Hitler believed in a class division. He knew one had to be on top and then others to follow below it. And with this idea […]
While reading chapter 5 in Hitler and Nazi Germany, I came a crossed something that really hit home with me. It was the idea that Hitler though of himself as a “great simplifier”. He prided himself on that fact that he could take very complicated ideas and put them into small enough words that everyone […]
This week I am going to go a bit conspiracy theorist about Hitler and the Nazi ideology, because that is all I could think about on Tuesday when we were discussing the confusing nature of Nazi ideology in class. It is definitely safe to say that Hitler was not a stupid man, kind of crazy, […]
Shortly after the Berlin Olympics in 1936 Kristallnacht occurred. Kristallnacht was horrendous but when put into perspective it is not nearly as bad as the death camps that come in a few short years. My question that I kept thinking was how did Germany hide it so well that the rest of the world who […]
A popular genre in modern fiction is the dystopia story: where society is perfect because the secret police have my children and Big Brother is watching to make sure I say it is. In retrospect, its interesting to think about how the people in that fictional world would let such a thing happen. Surely you […]
I know we’ve talked a great deal about Von Hinenburg in class, but as I was going through the documents in the reading for Thursday, I found it very interesting that he signed off on the decrees and acts that were mentioned. His name was always the first to sign as “The Reich President.” I find […]
Hugo Boss: The Man Behind the Uniform Hugo Boss was a fashion designer born in Germany in 1885. In 1923 he founded his own clothing company, Hugo Boss. In the beginning this company began producing jackets and shirts, adding raincoats and sportswear shortly after. Despite the promising outlook of the company the effects of the […]
A point of interest to me is the Reichstag fire, naturally being in a History of Nazi Germany class we all know what the Reichstag fire is, but I personally wanted to take a closer look into the trial that followed afterward. After the fire occurred there were three hearings that followed, among the three […]
Hitler’s belief that the German race was threatened by those who were of lower racial status helped the Nazi party succeed in convincing “real” Germans that their way of governing was needed to bring Germany back to prominence. He said that the dilution of the true German was taking place because of intermarriages with inferior […]
Why did Anti-semitism spread so rapidly in Germany with the rise of Hitler? This question has always bothered me because the simple answer would be, “because they are different.” However that is not the case as we discussed in class, from our readings, and research done over the years in other classes. Religion, Nationalism and […]
Joseph Goebbels was a fanatical member of the Nazi party. Goebbels’ importance to the Nazi party is not explained enough in history classes. Goebbels wholeheartedly believed everything Adolf Hitler told him. In some of Goebbels’ journal entries, it would appear that Goebbels is pinning all of his hopes on the ascension of Hitler and the Nazi […]
Through all the talk of how Hitler and the Nazi party came to power, it fascinates me how just how many things had to go the way they did. If Hitler got into the academy of art, he wouldn’t have gone into politics. If he had been fatally wounded in WWI, the story would have […]
I am many things. I am a woman. I am young. I am creative. I am fairly intelligent. I am an avid reader. I am a coffee enthusiast. I am a bit of a hippie. I am blonde and even have blue eyes. Do you know what I am not? A Nazi. We, as a […]
While reading the novel Survival in Auschwitz I realized that this was a hard novel to read through. This novel had many aspects of dehumanization. In this novel, both the Nazi soldiers had dehumanizing qualities and so did the Poles, Jews, Prison of War Americas, Greeks, and many other people. The Nazi soldiers had to look at […]
The idea of blitzkrieg the Germans brought into the beginning of World War II is very fascinating. This was a new doctrine of lightning warfare that orthodox German commanders still had skepticism about[1], even on the eve of the invasion of Poland. The Germans had grouped together their panzer, or tank division and punched gaping holes […]
For me… words are not enough, images are not enough, songs are not enough, history is not enough. Nothing will be enough to describe what happened around and in WWII, only the lesson. Will we listen? Do we really know? Many people finally, or should I say for the first time, have an insight of […]