Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Introduction
- 1 Political Thought in the Age of Monarchy
- 2 Contested Democracies
- 3 The Third Reich
- 4 The Political Thought of the Exiles
- 5 Refounding the Democratic Order
- 6 From 1968 to the Eve of Reunification
- 7 Reunification and Globalisation
- Conclusion
- Glossary
- Biographical Notes
- Select Bibliography
- Index
3 - The Third Reich
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Introduction
- 1 Political Thought in the Age of Monarchy
- 2 Contested Democracies
- 3 The Third Reich
- 4 The Political Thought of the Exiles
- 5 Refounding the Democratic Order
- 6 From 1968 to the Eve of Reunification
- 7 Reunification and Globalisation
- Conclusion
- Glossary
- Biographical Notes
- Select Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The twelve years of the National Socialist Third Reich have received more scholarly attention than any other period of similar duration for the obvious reasons of the brutality of the regime, its novelty, its instigation of the Second World War and above all the Holocaust. Those same features have made the interpretation of the regime especially problematic and contentious. The facts that an explicit constitution was never written and that an authorised ideology was never sanctioned have hampered the efforts of later commentators, as they did the efforts of theorists supportive of the regime at the time, to make sense of what the regime actually was. This lack of explicit central direction was recognised by a National Socialist official, who noted that often people waited in vain for instructions on how to act:
Unfortunately, the same will be true in the future; but in fact it is the duty of everybody to try to work towards the Führer along the lines he would wish. Anyone who makes mistakes will notice it soon enough. But anyone who really works towards the Führer along his lines and towards his goal will certainly both now and in the future one day have the finest reward in the form of the sudden legal confirmation of his work.
In terms of the broader issues of political theory, the nature of the state, law, administration and the international order, this prescription captured the uncertainty which theorists were faced with but erred in suggesting that they would ever find final confirmation of their views.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Twentieth-Century German Political Thought , pp. 85 - 106Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2006