Christian Goeschel— The meetings between Mussolini and Hitler were robust projections of an aggressive challenge to the Wilsonian post-war order. The Fascist and Nazi regimes defied lurking tensions to promote a powerful image of unity, a unity symbolised by the dictatorial friends meeting amidst their peoples – in marked contrast
Stephen G. Fritz— Life is normally characterized by irony, paradox, ambiguity, and ambivalence, but Adolf Hitler saw it with a startling (and frightening) clarity. Beginning early in his career as an orator and political rabble-rouser, he habitually used history as an explanation and justification for his actions. He had, indeed,
Stephen G. Fritz— It is mid-September 1941. The unpredictable late summer weather in Russia has turned in Germany’s favor, as has the military situation. In late August, with the nightmarish and costly fighting near Smolensk finally concluded, Adolf Hitler has ordered German armored forces turned to the south where, in
Bill Niven— In April 1954, together with his lawyer, the film director Veit Harlan made his way to a gravel pit near Zurich. There, he demonstratively set fire to the only available negative of the anti-Semitic Nazi film he had directed for Joseph Goebbels: Jud Süβ, first shown in 1940.
Martin Kitchen— The Oxford historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, whom British Intelligence had appointed to counter Soviet claims that Hitler was not dead but had sought refuge with the Western Allies, interviewed Albert Speer while he was in custody at Kransberg Castle, where he awaited trial at Nuremberg. He had found him
Ben H. Shepherd— For decades after the Second World War, the German army of the Third Reich retained an image as an oasis of decency amid the depravities of the Nazi regime. Yet the reality, which studies of recent decades have conclusively demonstrated, was that the army was deeply implicated,
Adolf Hitler’s makeover from rabble‑rouser to statesman coincided with a series of dramatic home renovations he undertook during the mid‑1930s. In the brand-new book Hitler at Home, author Despina Stratigakos exposes the dictator’s preoccupation with his private persona, which was shaped by the aesthetic and ideological management of his domestic architecture.
Follow @yaleRELIbooks On the night of November 9, 1938, now known as Kristallnacht, the Nazis burned the Hebrew Bible everywhere in Germany. In the video below, Alon Confino explains why this act, among the other horrors committed that night, was particularly unusual. There is not a direct connection between the Nazi’s racist ideology
Seventy years after the end of WWII, we tend to associate Hitler and the German Reich with destruction. Yet, as Hitler rose to power in the 1920s and 1930s, construction was a key part of his political agenda, a fact that Thomas Friedrich makes clear in Hitler’s Berlin: Abused City,
With so much political activity and talk of revolution in Egypt, Tunisia, and the greater Middle East, perhaps it is time for us to revisit the darker side of resolutions and how regimes can affect the greater course of human history with decisive action. Indeed, when the object of “solving”