A striking number of accounts stress the continuity between the foreign policy of Wilhelmine and Nazi Germany. Hitler was simply a more virulent nationalist and militarist, so some sort of revisionist expansion was inevitable in German foreign policy. The Nazis, however, were a fundamentally different type of right-wing force. Hitler dismissed the very existence of humanitarian ethics as a mere social construction and illusion, refusing even the typical scorn more traditional German nationalists expressed vis-à-vis its wartime adversaries. Hitler’s regime explicitly redefined the national community not as a cultural and linguistic entity but as a biological one. Rather than a continuation of previous tendencies in German nationalism, it was a decisive moral break and led to a wholly different basis for, and type of, international aggression. Hitler dismissed the ambitions of Weimar nationalists of the Wilhelmine variety, whose only interest was to rail against the injustices of the Versailles Treaty and demand the return of lost German lands that were rightly hers. For Hitler, no one had any right to any piece of territory; one simply took it. As a consequence, he defined fundamentally different foreign policy goals than his contemporaries and predecessors: the creation of Lebensraum to provide for Hitler’s growing population.

The final phase of Vichy’s dealings with Rome brought the sharpest divergence in its relations with the two Axis governments. The full occupation of France ended the last vestiges of French sovereignty. However, the power relationship between Vichy and Rome evolved very differently to that between Vichy and Berlin. Vichy’s negotiations between the conflicting demands of the German and Italian authorities were, characterised by opportunism, not fully appreciated when focusing exclusively on the German occupation. Whereas Vichy chose to work with Rome to offset Berlin’s demands on the Service du Travail Obligatoire, it resolutely chose collaboration with Berlin over the opportunities afforded by Rome when it came to the treatment of Jews. Vichy’s willing collaboration with Nazi anti-Semitic policies saw it oppose the Italian attempts to prevent the deportation of Jews in their occupation zone. The fall of Mussolini ended the prospect of any fruitful cooperation with Italy. With growing internal pressure from French collaborationist forces to engage in a more radical and ideological form of collaboration, Vichy’s alignment with Nazi Germany finally became definitive.

This chapter suggests that two key dimensions of French policy towards Italy before July 1940 presaged that developed by Vichy in the period thereafter. The first was an underestimation of the significance of ideology in Mussolini’s actions. The second was an overestimation of the French ability to control and manipulate the Italian government. The two strands led to an erroneous belief that the French government might be able to drive a wedge between Mussolini and Hitler and that the former might be induced to act as a moderating force on the latter. The armistice negotiations of June 1940 not only sealed the overwhelming domination of Germany but they also inaugurated an ambiguous relationship between Italy and France. The relatively moderate Italian terms were at odds with Mussolini’s ambitions and sent mixed signals about Italian intentions. The armistice negotiations sowed the seeds of a future French strategy of seeking to play the Germans off against the Italians, but it also marked the start of a French delusion about how much could be achieved from trying to divide the Axis.

Chapter 1 provides a snapshot of the situation of military chaplains in Germany on the eve of Hitler’s coming to power. The central point is that German chaplains’ support of Hitler and the Nazi movement was predictable but not inevitable. The chapter opens with a parade of Stormtroopers into the Garrison Church in Potsdam. Pastors of the military congregation there actively promoted antidemocratic causes and, by 1932, they and most of their Protestant and Catholic counterparts explicitly backed Hitler. Factors that explain this outcome include the lost war, which put chaplains in a precarious position. Many lost their jobs and became preachers for hire. Defeat in 1918 put chaplains and church leaders on the defensive, because they were part of the home front that was said to have betrayed the military. The role of history, tradition, and myth in shaping the chaplaincy is discussed, as well as the entrenched place of antisemitism in the German military. Also noted are the legacies of colonialism and white supremacy that provided narratives of Christian righteousness. By 1933, significant personal ties had been established between top chaplains and military and Nazi leaders.

Typically, the success of a general is thought to be measured in their professionalism and military achievements, however this is only partly true of the German Wehrmacht. As the letters reveal, the panzer generals were very much aware that their career success was determined by gaining public prominence and attaching oneself to battlefield triumph. This consumed a remarkable amount of their time and, in no small part, helped shape the direction of their campaigns. Propaganda companies operating at the front become engines for self-promotion, which transformed the achievement of the formation into the achievement of the individual. The most successful practitioners of this media campaign, like Guderian, became indivisible with the all-conquering German Panzertruppe in the East, while others who commanded similar sized forces, like Hoepner, proved far less successful. One of the consequences of such military celebrity, which was unique to the German Wehrmacht, was the autograph-hunting children who sent countless requests to the generals and often received favourable responses. The culture of public acclaim and mutual support fed the National Socialist ethos of front and Heimat united in struggle.

Populism is unlikely to be effective where the masses are already incorporated into well-established programmatic parties. However, this chapter shows that deep socioeconomic crises can disrupt those political linkages, providing an opening for populism. The sudden rise of Hitler’s Nazi Party in the early 1930s provides the main narrative for this chapter. Long frustrated in both his armed and electoral attempts to gain power, the fallout of the Great Depression in 1929 and Germany’s own banking crisis of 1931 shocked many Germans, especially on the right, out of their existing political affiliations. Hitler, the master demagogue, was ready to take advantage through a sophisticated propaganda machine. In most other cases across interwar Europe, the populist strategy was ineffective. Less severe crises left most the populace embedded in their existing ties to bureaucratic and patronage-based parties.

In a succinct and highly readable text, Alan E. Steinweis presents a synthesis of classic and recent research on the origins, development, and downfall of Nazi Germany. Rooted in nationalism and racism, and commanded by a charismatic leader, the Nazi movement created a populist and authoritarian alternative to a democratic republic plagued by unemployment and political fragmentation. A one-party dictatorship was achieved quickly after Hitler became chancellor in January 1933. In the years before World War II, the Nazi regime achieved popularity by restoring Germany to great-power status and by presiding over an economic recovery fueled by rearmament. Simultaneously the regime set in place an apparatus of coercion to marginalize Jews and other groups deemed objectionable by Nazi ideology, as well as to quell domestic opposition to the declared goals of the German “People’s Community.” Nazi ideology formed the basis for Germany’s goals and actions in World War II, which aimed at German hegemony and a racial transformation of Europe. Despite considerable internal dissent and some active resistance, the Nazi regime mobilized German society behind the war effort. In the end, Nazism was defeated from the outside by a superior military alliance.

Churchill’s art has remained marginal to the study of his legacy in the twentieth century and yet he was in correspondence with some of the most highly regarded painters of the period, and was successfully presented and reviewed. The chapter explores Churchill’s relationship with art: his encounter with painting, his mentors and influences, painting, politics and the tension between tradition and modernism in the art of his age, the reception of his works, and the question of the amateur versus the professional artist.

Chapter 2 focuses on Hans Pfitzner’s Symphony in C♯ minor, a reworking of his 1925 String Quartet Op. 25, at its Berlin premiere in March 1933. This case study illuminates how National Socialist values, particularly to do with monumentality, gained traction within symphonic aesthetics. Liberal sociological theorisations of the symphony such as Paul Bekker’s (1918) seemed increasingly absurd as politics shifted and Enlightenment narratives about sovereignty reached breaking point. For instance, due to Nazi threats of violence, just days before the Berlin performance of Pfitzner’s new symphony the Philharmonie had seen the cancellation of Walter’s regular concert, precipitating his political exile. I read the Pfitzner concert’s critical reception in parallel with both Bekker’s symphonic utopianism and emerging Nazi symphonic aesthetics, exploring Pfitzner’s symphony as caught between these two symphonic poles. I pay attention to how discourses of public and private space associated with the symphony and chamber music allow a clear view of fascist reformulations of subjectivity and space in this context marked by Walter’s persecution.

Chapter 2 analyzes the origins and growth of the Nazi movement against the general background of the history of the Weimar Republic, 1918–33. Weimar had to overcome numerous challenges: a lack of German experience with parliamentary democracy; an association with the hated Treaty of Versailles; the fragmentation of the German polity; the monetary inflation of the early 1920s; and the massive levels of unemployment during the Great Depression. The last of these factors fueled the popularity of the forces at the ideological extremes – the Nazi Party and the Communist Party – which rejected the Republic altogether, making the formation of parliamentary majorities more difficult, in turn resulting in the use of presidential emergency powers to govern the country. The Nazi Party (NSDAP) began as a revolutionary organization but turned to an electoral strategy after its failed coup (putsch) of 1923. Although its electoral support remained low before 1930, it developed under Hitler into a movement of highly motivated members and activists. After an electoral breakthrough in 1930, the NSDAP became Germany’s largest party in the July 1932 election. It did not enjoy a parliamentary majority, however, and Hitler’s appointment to the chancellorship was ultimately made possible by support from German conservatives who saw the NSDAP as an anti-Communist bulwark.

Chapter 7 examines the foreign policy of Nazi Germany during the 1930s, as well as the events of World War II from September 1939 through early 1941. Hitler did not see revision of the Treaty of Versailles as an end goal of policy, but rather as a pretext for pursuing a far more ambitious program geared toward the waging of war and the conquest of “living space” (Lebensraum). He issued reasonable-sounding demands for ethnic self-determination of German minorities in Czechoslovakia and Poland, and claimed to want peace even after telling his own military leaders that war would be necessary to achieve his aims. After annexing Austria in March 1938 with little pushback from other countries, Germany isolated Czechoslovakia, first annexing the Sudetenland in September 1938 and then destroying Czechoslovak statehood a few months later. The non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union opened the way for an attack on Poland on September 1, 1939, bringing Britain and France into the war. Germany defeated and partially occupied France in 1940 while British forces fled the continent. The German people supported the restoration of their country’s military power and the dismantling of the Treaty of Versailles but had mixed feelings about going to war.

Chapter 1 describes the main ideological tenets of National Socialism, usually called Nazism, and explains their deep roots in European thought, culture, and religious tradition. The chapter identifies the core elements of Nazi ideology as biological racism, Social Darwinism, eugenics, romantic nationalism, antisemitism, anti-Marxism, and anti-liberalism. While some of these elements were of recent vintage, antisemitism was a centuries-old phenomenon in Europe. The racial antisemitism propagated by Nazism modernized a sentiment that had historically been based in religious and economic animosities. Hitler and other leading Nazis were not original thinkers, but rather they channeled these disparate ideological strands into a loose synthesis. The diffuse and disparate nature of Nazi ideology proved to be a practical political advantage inasmuch as it offered a menu of ideas and grievances from which potential followers could choose. The “Socialism” contained in the phrase National Socialism had nothing to do with the Marxist tradition, but rather hearkened back to the antisemitic Christian Socialism of the nineteenth century and was intended to signal solidarity with Germans who were resentful of the exploitative aspects of capitalism, which were often associated with Jews.

Chapter 10 offers a wide-ranging examination of developments inside Germany from early 1943 to the end of the war in Europe in May 1945. After the major German defeat at Stalingrad, the Nazi regime announced a transition to a “Total War” footing, which involved a more thorough mobilization of women, university students, and youth for the war effort. The Allied air war against Germany intensified, inflicting widescale damage on German cities, and forcing German authorities to scramble to clear rubble and keep society functioning. Domestic resistance efforts intensified along a broad ideological spectrum but had little effect. The most notable instance of resistance was the failed attempt on July 20, 1944 to assassinate Hitler and have the army seize power. The end phase of the Nazi regime was characterized by the intensification of internally directed violence, the victims of which included foreign workers, Germans who wished to cooperate with the invading Allied armies in the West, and Jews who had managed to survive the Final Solution. The Volkssturm, a national militia created to help repel the invading forces, proved ineffectual. As Berlin was falling to the Red Army, Hitler committed suicide on April 30, 1945. The German surrender followed in early May.

In a succinct and highly readable text, Alan E. Steinweis presents a synthesis of classic and recent research on the origins, development, and downfall of Nazi Germany. Rooted in nationalism and racism, and commanded by a charismatic leader, the Nazi movement created a populist and authoritarian alternative to a democratic republic plagued by unemployment and political fragmentation. A one-party dictatorship was achieved quickly after Hitler became chancellor in January 1933. In the years before World War II, the Nazi regime achieved popularity by restoring Germany to great-power status and by presiding over an economic recovery fueled by rearmament. Simultaneously the regime set in place an apparatus of coercion to marginalize Jews and other groups deemed objectionable by Nazi ideology, as well as to quell domestic opposition to the declared goals of the German “People’s Community.” Nazi ideology formed the basis for Germany’s goals and actions in World War II, which aimed at German hegemony and a racial transformation of Europe. Despite considerable internal dissent and some active resistance, the Nazi regime mobilized German society behind the war effort. In the end, Nazism was defeated from the outside by a superior military alliance.

Chapter 3 focuses on the transformation of Germany into a one-party dictatorship. It focuses on the period from Hitler’s appointment to the German chancellorship on January 30, 1933 to his accession to the presidency and position of “Leader” (Führer) in August 1934. Two key steps toward dictatorship were the Reichstag Fire Decree of February 28, 1933, which suspended individual rights, and the Enabling Act, which transferred lawmaking authority from the parliament to the cabinet. The chapter also examines the prohibition of political parties other than the NSDAP. On the level of German society, the chapter analyzes the process known as “coordination” (Gleichschaltung), by which organizations were taken over by Nazis. An important feature of this development was “self-coordination,” in which organizations placed themselves under Nazi leadership voluntarily. Terror and intimidation formed the background for much of this process. The chapter examines the causes and consequences of the “Night of the Long Knives” of June 30, 1934, when the leadership of the Nazi SA, as well as many others, were killed on Hitler’s order. That violent event served to stabilize the Nazi regime by eliminating challenges to Hitler’s authority from both the SA and conservative circles.

Islamic Jihadism has deep ties to National Socialism, both in its history and in its vision of a world that is “purified of the Jews.” Chapter 8 demonstrates the influences of Nazi exterminationist Jew hatred on modern Islamic Jihadism. It should be noted that I use the term Islamic Jihadism to distinguish Jihadists from other Muslims who are not part of this movement. Tracing the path from Hitler to Hamas, the chapter brings out the connections between the antisemitism of the Muslim Brotherhood and National Socialist Jew hatred, with particular attention to the Nazi war criminal Haj Amin al-Husseini. I incorporate primary texts of Jihadist ideologues such as Hasan al-Banna, Sayyid Qutb, Abdullah Azzam, Ruhullah Khomeini, and others. Like the Nazis, but with theological differences, the Jihadists maintain not that all Jews are evil but that all evil is Jewish, to which and that to resolve it there can be only a Final Solution.

In the interwar period, the issue of how much space capitalism left for human agency preoccupied many Germans. Would they be able to revolutionize or reform this economic order, or were they compelled to work and live within it? This chapter argues that capitalism proved remarkably capable of confining individual, collective, and governmental agency. Therefore, expectations of transformation were often disappointed or scaled back, as the first section shows. The second section examines more tacit ways of adapting to a capitalist logic, while the third turns to the attempts of Chancellor Hermann Brüning’s two cabinets to steer Germany through the economic depression. Brüning was caught between calls for decisive leadership, doubts about the effectiveness of government intervention, and a rapidly shifting situation. Adolf Hitler, by contrast, promised to restore human control over the economy. After 1933, his regime loudly claimed to have transcended capitalism while inconspicuously exploiting its logic.