scholarly journals Organising National Socialism: Nazi Organisation in Sweden and the Netherlands, 1931–1939

2021 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 351-365
Author(s):  
Nathaniël Kunkeler

This article compares the party apparatuses of the National Socialist Movement of the Netherlands and the National Socialist Workers’ Party of Sweden. These two parties, founded in the 1930s, both to some extent mimicked the organisational model of Hitler's party in Germany. While this has been frequently noted, the deployment of this model in practice has not been analysed in any detail. The article explores the specific characters of the Swedish and Dutch fascist party organisations diachronically vis-à-vis propaganda, member activism and internal cohesion, highlighting their changes, successes and failures. The comparison reveals that the party apparatus was highly dependent on the specifics of national infrastructure, demographic distribution and urbanisation and the physical landscape, with notable consequences for internal party cohesion and morale. In the final analysis the relative appeal and popularity of the parties is shown party be the result of how the Nazi organisational model was deployed in practice within each national context.

Quaerendo ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 40 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 284-304
Author(s):  
Gerard Groeneveld

AbstractDe Amsterdamsche Keurkamer, founded in 1932, was the first National Socialist publishing house in the Netherlands. Under the management of author and poet George Kettmann the firm grew to become one of the major cultural mainstays of National Socialism in Holland. Kettmann earned himself some sort of reputation in the late thirties when he brought out a Dutch translation of Hitler’s Mein Kampf. In the years of the occupation his company succeeded in defining the position and character of the ‘official’ literature ‐ ‘official’ meaning in line with National Socialist ideology.


Author(s):  
Kristen Renwick Monroe

This chapter showcases a Dutch collaborator named Fritz. Fritz shared many of Tony's prewar conservative opinions in favor of the monarchy and traditional Dutch values, although he was of working-class origins, unlike Tony and Beatrix, who were Dutch bourgeoisie. But unlike Beatrix or Tony, Fritz joined the Nazi Party, wrote propaganda for the Nazi cause, and married the daughter of a German Nazi. When he was interviewed in 1992, Fritz indicated he was appalled at what he later learned about Nazi treatment of Jews but that he still believed in many of the goals of the National Socialist movement and felt that Hitler had betrayed the movement. Fritz is thus classified as a disillusioned Nazi supporter who retains his faith in much of National Socialism, and this chapter is presented as illustrative of the psychology of those who once supported the Nazi regime but who were disillusioned after the war.


2012 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 661-679 ◽  
Author(s):  
DANIEL MORAT

Martin Heidegger and Ernst Jünger rightly count among the signal examples of intellectual complicity with National Socialism. But after supporting the National Socialist movement in its early years, they both withdrew from political activism during the 1930s and considered themselves to be in “inner emigration” thereafter. How did they react to the end of National Socialism, to the Allied occupation and finally to the foundation of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1949? Did they abandon their stance of seclusion and engage once more with political issues? Or did they persist in their withdrawal from the political sphere? In analyzing the intellectual relationship of Heidegger and Jünger after 1945, the article reevaluates the assumption of a “deradicalization” (Jerry Muller) of German conservatism after the Second World War by showing that Heidegger's and Jünger's postwar positions were no less radical than their earlier thought, although their attitude towards the political sphere changed fundamentally.


Author(s):  
Bert Jan Hartman

Abstract The focus of this article is on the actions of Reverend Frits Slomp, vicar of the Reformed Church in Heemse, during the economic depression of the 1930s, and his response to the rise of national socialism as a new political movement. During the depression many labourers in Heemse and Hardenberg lost their jobs. Reverend Slomp put a great deal of personal effort into helping these men and into trying to solve their social-economic problems. When in 1933 the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP) came into power in Germany and the National Socialist Party (NSB) was gaining ground in the Netherlands, Reverend Slomp warned about the dangers of National Socialism.


2017 ◽  
Vol 61 (1) ◽  
pp. 205-225 ◽  
Author(s):  
NATHANIËL KUNKELER

AbstractGeneric fascism scholarship, which has turned strongly towards cultural political history in recent years, has focused heavily on themes of rebirth in fascist culture, but rebirth's counterpart of decline remains under-researched. After emphasizing the existence of several distinct and even mutually exclusive ideological strands in the NSB, this article shows how ideological difference was marked by narratives of decline. But they were equally used to generate a coherent political message about the contemporary state of the Netherlands. Central to their functionality as a unifying tool was party newspaper Volk en Vaderland, which served to promote a patriotic, news-focused, and peculiarly Dutch narrative of decline that overarched ideological difference. Yet more than just tying ends together, one narrative in particular served as a crucial ideological constant in the Movement, namely the Leider Anton Mussert's narrative of decline since the early modern Golden Age of the Dutch Republic, which tied traditional liberal patriotic themes into fascist discourse. Where other historians have emphasized Mussert's lack of moral and ideological leadership, the article impresses how narratives of decline functioned as moral support, and rallied NSB loyalists throughout the German occupation of the Netherlands, until Mussert's own death.


1991 ◽  
Vol 24 (4) ◽  
pp. 402-423 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan E. Steinweis

Between 1928 and 1932, the National Socialist movement transformed itself from an insurgent fringe party into Germany's most potent political force. The most important factor in this dramatic turnabout in political fortunes was the rapid deterioration of the German economy beginning in 1929. It does not, however, logically follow that the German people simply fell into the lap of the party and its charismatic leader. To the contrary, the party aggressively employed sophisticated propagandistic and organizational strategies for attracting and mobilizing diverse segments of German society. With the onset of the economic crisis, and the consequent social and political turmoil, the party stood ready to receive, organize, and mobilize Germans from all social strata.


Fascism ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 169-193
Author(s):  
Matthew Kott

Aside from equating it with Hitlerism, there have been few scholarly attempts to define national socialism and specify its relation to the broader category of fascism. This article posits that national socialisms are a sub-genus of fascism, where the distinguishing feature is an ultaranationalism based on a palingenetic völkisch racism, of which anti-Semitism is an essential element. Thus, national socialism is not just mimetic Hitlerism, as Hitler is not even necessary. National socialist movements may even conceivably be opposed to the goals and actions of Hitlerism. To test this definition, the case of Latvia’s Pērkonkrusts [Thunder Cross] movement is analysed. Based on an analysis of its ideology, Pērkonkrusts is a national socialist movement with a völkisch racialist worldview, while also being essentially anti-German. The case study even addresses the apparent paradox that Pērkonkrusts both collaborated in the Holocaust, and engaged in resistance against the German occupation regime.


2019 ◽  
Vol 40 (4) ◽  
pp. 31-57
Author(s):  
Paweł Kołek

THE NATIONAL SOCIALIST MOVEMENT NSB IN THE NETHERLANDS AND ITS CONCEPT OF FOREIGN POLICY, 1931–1945The National Socialist Movement in the Netherlands NSB, established in 1931, was the most important collaborating political party in that country during World War II. The movement developed its own concept of foreign policy, which differed from the policy of Nazi Germany. The party aimed at upholding Europe’s dominant position in the world. To achieve that, the European system should be reconstructed and Germany’s leading role within it needed to be acknowledged. Close cooperation of nation-states should form the basis of the continental order. The prospective Dutch national state — “Dietsland” — was to be composed not only of the Dutch people, but also of the Flemish and the Afrikaners. This united country was also supposed to secure its colonial possessions overseas. This concept of foreign policy was maintained during the whole period of the movement’s existence, even though some minor modifications did occur in the meantime.


Author(s):  
Nitzan Shoshan

Abstract This article examines whether and how the figure of Adolf Hitler in particular, and National Socialism more generally, operate as moral exemplars in today’s Germany. In conversation with similar studies about Mosely in England, Franco in Spain, and Mussolini in Italy, it seeks to advance our comparative understanding of neofascism in Europe and beyond. In Germany, legal and discursive constraints limit what can be said about the Third Reich period, while even far-right nationalists often condemn Hitler, for either the Holocaust or his military failure. Here I revise the concept of moral exemplarity as elaborated by Caroline Humphry to argue that Hitler and National Socialism do nevertheless work as contemporary exemplars, in at least three fashions: negativity, substitution, and extension. First, they stand as the most extreme markers of negative exemplarity for broad publics that understand them as illustrations of absolute moral depravity. Second, while Hitler himself is widely unpopular, Führer-substitutes such as Rudolf Hess provide alternative figures that German nationalists admire and seek to emulate. Finally, by extension to the realm of the ordinary, National Socialism introduces a cast of exemplars in the figures of loving grandfathers or anonymous fallen soldiers. The moral values for which they stand, I show, appear to be particularly significant for young nationalists. An extended, more open-ended notion of exemplarity, I conclude, can offer important insights about the lingering afterlife of fascist figures in the moral life of European nationalists today.


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