Wayne Geerling

Faces of Opposition: Juvenile Resistance, High Treason, and the People's Court in Nazi Germany

Analysis of the sixty-nine juveniles tried for high treason before the Peoples Court in Nazi Germany between 1933 and 1945, based on the available court records, finds that juvenile resistance in Nazi Germany possessed a distinct form and character; it was a phenomenon rather than an exceptional act. Juvenile resisters charged with high treason were typically working-class males of German ethnicity, motivated primarily by left-wing and religious beliefs, acting in small groups free of significant adult supervision and direction. Examination of the verdicts and sentencing of these juvenile resisters sheds light on how the Nazi justice system reacted to such serious internal resistance from its young.

Bringing the 'Dismal Science' to Life: Teaching Economics Through Multimedia

This article examines the pedagogical benefits of using multimedia in the teaching of economics at undergraduate level. It also provides an example from my own teaching to serve as a reference for lecturers interested in creating an interactive learning environment, which prompts genuine two-way discussion in the classroom and produces better learning outcomes for students. The final section ties in the use of multimedia with broader debates among economists about the appropriate level of government intervention in the economy. The paper concludes by arguing that the use of multimedia has strong pedagogical advantages in stimulating greater student engagement and helping to rectify the image of economics in the wider community. Lecturers interested in using multimedia in their teaching will find an extensive list of web resources at the end of this paper.

Sentencing, Judicial Discretion, and Political Prisoners in Pre-War Nazi Germany

The tools of econometric analysis and inferential statistics reveal that senior Nazi-era judges in pre-war Germany exhibited statistically significant levels of discretion in their sentencing of individuals convicted of high treason or treason. In fact, some of these judges, though appointed to the People’s Court to serve the Nazi state, were inclined to show relative leniency, within certain political limits, when taking into account the characteristics, backgrounds, affiliations, actions, and experiences of those whom they convicted. A modicum of judicial autonomy can co-exist with dictatorship so long as it enhances the efficiency of the courts and does not impugn the regime.

Bazinganomics: Economics of The Big Bang Theory

Bazinganomics.com is designed to provide instructors with clips, explanations, and lesson plans related to economics concepts from TV’s 2nd most-watched broadcast show of the 2014-2015 season, CBS’s The Big Bang Theory. The site contains approximately 100 clips. As the show continues to air (currently signed through the 2016-2017 season) the authors plan to increase the number of clips and lesson plans.

Impacts and Implications

Since the end of the Second World War, historical research on German and Austrian resistance has steadily expanded, deepened and enrichened our understanding of the phenomenon. Like all healthy fields of research, though, mysteries and gaps not only persist but are constantly being opened up. This book has sought to add to that accumulated knowledge by attempting to tease further insights from the archives with quantitative analysis. Its results have both cast light on a number of important existing debates and identified new areas of study that call for greater research. The various threads discovered in earlier chapters are brought together in this concluding chapter, and some of the key implications of our findings for the understanding of serious resistance activities in Nazi Germany are discussed. One new thing that emerges from this analysis is a framework that for the first time allows the objective evaluation of the impact of serious resistance to be made, an approach which with simple modifications could be easily extended to the study of dissent, opposition and nonconformity.

Hitler's Judges: Ideological Commitment and the Death Penalty in Nazi Germany

To what extent do judges in courts in authoritarian regimes merely implement the will of the state? What determines judges’ behaviour in such contexts? We address these questions by examining the role of judicial policy preferences in influencing whether judges in Nazi Germany sentenced defendants charged with serious political offences - treason and high treason - to death. Our findings lend support to the attitudinal model of judicial decision-making. Specifically, we find that judicial policy preferences, measured by the depth of the ideological commitment of the judge to the Nazi Party worldview, were an important determinant of whether judges imposed the death sentence. We also find that judges who were more ideologically committed to the Nazi Party were more likely to impose the death sentence on those who belonged to the most organised political opposition groups to the Nazi state, those whose acts of treason or high treason involved violent resistance against the state, and those with characteristics to which Nazism was intolerant.

Faces and Contexts

This chapter provides an overview of some of the key personal and environmental characteristics of those who participated in serious resistance to the Nazi regime. It reminds us that as a group they were more than just the politics to which they subscribed. Moreover, the chapter describes a range of interesting phenomena: inter alia, the steady aging of resisters over the course of the regime, especially during the war; the dominance of blue-collar labour in resistance movements; and the small, though disproportionate, contribution of foreigners, the stateless and people of partial Jewish ancestry in the struggle to undermine Hitler’s state from within. The chapter also demonstrates the meaningfulness of analysing resistance by stage of life and gender. In particular, its analysis highlights the distinctiveness of two often overlooked types of resistance: juvenile and female.

Crimes and Punishments

In this chapter, we turn our attention to another feature of the resister’s story, one that has typically been less scrutinised and certainly is not as well understood: their experience once they had been arrested and entered custody. It was there in the interrogation chambers, cells and court rooms of the Nazi regime that the personal consequences of their actions were to be first painfully brought to bear. The chapter begins with an outline of the nature and structure of the Nazi legal system and how it evolved to deal with the most serious of political crimes it confronted: treason and high treason. It then moves on to explore aspects of the reality of the resister’s actual engagement with that system. In particular, the chapter considers the length of time it took to get from arrest to sentence, the type of charges resisters were likely to face, the verdicts they could expect, the determinants of the sentence they were ultimately to receive and what role, if any, the discretion of the judge presiding over the case would play in that process. The chapter also investigates a critical choice that all resisters in custody, irrespective of their background or motivations, had to make, a choice that would directly impact their and their co-defendants’ fate: should they cooperate with the authorities or not?

Times and Places

In this chapter, our analysis of serious internal resistance to Hitler’s regime begins with an examination of the overall structure and composition of that resistance from the inception of Nazi rule in January 1933 through to the collapse of the German legal system in early 1945. The chapter seeks to answer two fundamental questions in particular, one temporal and one geographic: namely, how did the levels of serious resistance change across time and what regions were most active in this resistance? Along the way, a number of secondary issues are also considered: inter alia, can a distinct periodisation of resistance be identified, how did the different phases of the war impact resistance activities, did the intensity of such activities in any location merely reflect its population size, and is it more appropriate to talk of the commonality or distinctiveness of regional resistance experiences? The answers to such questions gleaned from quantitative analyses of the available data on treason, and high treason shed new light on, and challenge aspects of, our understanding of the path of serious resistance within Nazi Germany. The chapter offers a new periodisation of serious resistance in Nazi Germany.

Groups and Organisations

Despite the personal dangers involved, a remarkable number of Germans and Austrians chose to resist the Nazi regime. The aim of this chapter is to provide a succinct, yet comprehensive, overview of the myriad groups and organisations of differing political, religious and ethnic persuasions that took the fateful decision to resist the regime. The chapter identifies precisely when, where and with what frequency each of these groups carried out their serious resistance. While the chapter captures and highlights the amazing diversity of political and spiritual beliefs which provided the organisational context for, and motivation to, those who chose to engage in serious resistance, it also identifies the enduring importance of certain parties and groups – in particular, the Communist Party of Germany (Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands or KPD) and Social Democratic Party of Germany (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands or SPD) in Germany and the Communist Party of Austria (Kommunistische Partei Osterreichs or KPO) and Catholic-Conservative-Legitimist organisations in Austria – in that struggle to bring down Hitler’s regime from within.