Ian Kershaw

‘Working Towards the Führer.’ Reflections on the Nature of the Hitler Dictatorship

The renewed emphasis, already visible in the mid-1980s, on the intertwined fates of the Soviet Union and of Germany, especially in the Stalin and Hitler eras, has become greatly intensified in the wake of the upheavals in eastern Europe. The sharpened focus on the atrocities of Stalinism has prompted attempts to relativise Nazi barbarism – seen as wicked, but on the whole less wicked than that of Stalinism (and by implication of Communism in general). The brutal Stalinist modernising experiment is used to remove any normative links with humanising, civilising, emancipatory, or democratising development from modernisation concepts and thereby to claim that Hitlers regime, too, was – and intentionally so – a ‘modernising dictatorship’. Implicit in all this is a reversion, despite the many refinements and criticisms of the concept since the 1960s, to essentially traditional views on ‘totalitarianism’, and to views of Stalin and Hitler as ‘totalitarian dictators’. There can be no principled objection to comparing the forms of dictatorship in Germany under Hitler and in the Soviet Union under Stalin and, however unedifying the subject matter, the nature and extent of their inhumanity. The totalitarianism concept allows comparative analysis of a number of techniques and instruments of domination, and this, too, must be seen as legitimate in itself.

Hitler and the Uniqueness of Nazism

Though nazism can be located as a form of fascism or type of totalitarianism, these generic concepts inadequately account for what was singular about a regime which unleashed such devastating inhumanity — a terrible war of annihilation and the worst genocide the world has yet experienced. So this article suggests an answer located in a unique combination of forces embodied in Hitler’s dictatorship: the extraordinary power of ‘charismatic authority’, drawing on distinctive ideological traits in German political culture, coupled with the bureaucratic capacity of a highly modern state system.

War and Political Violence in Twentieth-Century Europe

This article takes the obvious link between war and political violence in twentieth-century Europe to ask three questions. Did the cause of such a massive upsurge in violence have roots extending beyond the technologies of modern warfare? What shapes the relative propensity of states and societies towards violence? And what is specifically ‘modern’ (other than the technology of destruction) about mass killing in the twentieth century? It finds answers in the use of popular sovereignty to justify unprecedented ethnic conflict, in a mix of ingredients linked to political culture and contested state legitimacy, and in the role of bureaucracy and technology in the orchestration of large-scale and state-sponsored violence.

Improvised Genocide? The emergence of the ‘Final Solution’ in the ‘Warthegau’

The ‘Warthegau’—officially the ‘Reichsgau Wartheland’, with its capital in Posen (Poznan)—was the largest of three areas of western Poland annexed to the German Reich after the defeat of Poland in 1939. In the genesis of the ‘Final Solution’ it plays a pivotal role. Some of the first major deportations of Jews took place from the Warthegau. The first big ghetto was established on the territory of the Warthegau, at Lodz (which the Nazis renamed Litzmannstadt). In autumn 1941, the first German Jews to be deported at the spearhead of the combing-out process of European Jewry were dispatched to die Warthegau. The possibility of liquidating ghettoised Jews had by then already been explicitly raised for the first time, in the summer of 1941, significantly by Nazi leaders in the Warthegau. The first mobile gassing units to be deployed against the Jews operated in the Warthegau in the closing months of 1941. And the systematic murder of the Jews began in early December 1941 in the first extermination camp—actually a ‘gas van station’—established at Chelmno on the Ner, in the Warthegau.

Review Article : How Necessary is a 'Historicization' of the Third Reich? A Survey of Some Recent Publications on Nazism

Martin Broszat, Die Machtergreifung Der Aufstieg der NSDAP und die Zerstorung der Weimarer Republik , Munich, Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1984; 242 pp., DM 9.80. English translation: Hitler and the Collapse of Weimar Germany, translated with a Foreword by V.R. Berghahn, Leamington Spa, Berg, 1987; ix + 157pp.; £18.00 hardback, £5.95 paperback. David Abraham, The Collapse of the Weimar Republic Political Economy and Crisis , New York and London, Holmes & Meier, revised 2nd edn 1987; 1iii + 352pp.; US

Reply to Smith

45.00 hardback, US

Reviews : Wolfgang Benz et al., Miscellanea: Festschrift fur Helmut Krausnick zum 75 Geburtstag, Stuttgart, Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1980. 222pp. DM 38

17.50 paperback. Thomas Childers, ed., The Formation of the Nazi Constituency 1919-1933 , London, Croom Helm, 1986; viii + 263pp £25 00. Detlef Muhlberger, ed., The Social Basis of European Fascist Movements, London, Croom Helm, 1987, 356pp.; £25.00. Michael Laffan, ed., The Burden of German History 1919-45 , London, Methuen, 1988; xii + 209pp.; £14 95. Hans-Ulrich Thamer, Verfuhrung und Gewalt Deutschland 1933-1945, Berlin, Siedler Verlag, 1986; 837pp.; DM 98.Norbert Frei, Der Fuhrerstaat. Nationalsozialistische Herrschaft 1933 bis 1945, Munich, Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag,, 1987; 267pp., DM 12.80. Wolfgang Wippermann, ed., Kontroversen um Hitler , Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp, 1986; 306pp.; DM 20 00. Eberhard Jackel, Hitlers Herrschaft. Vollzug einer Weltanschauung Stuttgart, Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1986; 183pp.; DM 19.80. Rainer Zitelmann, Hitler. Selbstverstandnis eines Revolutionars , Stuttgart, Klett-Cotta, 1987, x + 485pp.; DM 102.Johannes Tuchel and Reinold Schattenfroh, Zentrale des Terrors. Prinz-AlbrechtStrasse 8: Hauptquartier der Gestapo, Berlin, Siedler Verlag, 1987; 317pp.; DM 29.80. Hans-Jurgen Doscher, Das Auswartige Amt im Dritten Reich Diplomatie im Schatten der ’Endlosung’ ,Berlin, Siedler Verlag, 1986; 333pp ; DM 45 Ernst Klee, Was sie taten was sie wurden Artze, Juristen und andere Beteiligte am Krankenoder Judenmord, Frankfurt am Main, Fischer, 1986; 355pp , DM 16 80 Bernt Engelmann, In Hitler’s Germany Everyday Life in the Third Reich , London,

Hitler, 1889-1936: Hubris

I thank Steve Smith for his characteristically thoughtful and shrewd comments on my piece. And I am glad to note that he finds himself ‘in broad agreement’ with what I wrote.

The Nazi Dictatorship: Problems and Perspectives of Interpretation

into twentieth-century German history. Krausnick’s own published work contributed in no small way to putting the Institut on the map. He is best known in this country for the short but perceptive book German History /933-/945 (London 1959), which the first General Secretary of the Institut, Hermann Mau, had begun but had been unable to complete before his untimely death in 1952, and which first appeared in German in 1956, and above all for his documentation of ’The Persecution of the Jews’ in the Anatomy of the SS-State (London 1968). These works were however accompamed, as the list of 94 publications shows, by a constant stream of articles documenting above all aspects of Nazi anti-Jewish policy, the German Resistance to Hitler, the Wehrmacht, and German foreign policy. The list is not yet completed. His major documentation of the SS-Einsatzgruppen is due out later this year. It is, therefore, wholly fitting that the members of the Institut’s staff who worked under Krausmck, together with two of his pupils, have put together this col-