scholarly journals ILLUSION AND REALITY OF STATEHOOD: THE SEARCH FOR PARALLELS BETWEEN THE LITHUANIAN ACTIVIST FRONT AND THE ORGANISATION OF UKRAINIAN NATIONALISTST

Author(s):  
S. Jazavita

he present article analyses the relationship between the Lithuanian Activist Front and the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and their activity parallels in order to reach the Lithuanian and the Ukrainian independence in 1941. The research focuses on the attempts of the OUN and the LAF leaders to project the future Lithuanian and Ukrainian states in the 'New Europe' headed by Germany. Reaching for counterbalance against the USSR and the Communist ideology, the LAF and the OUN organizations aimed at taking into consideration the military and political power of Germany, while Škirpa, the leader of the LAF, coordinated his activities with the OUN leaders, Stetsko, Yaryi, and Bandera. Fanatical chiefs of the Third Reich manipulated with the Lithuanians and Ukrainians' feelings of revenge against the Bolsheviks and the will to feel Europeans; however, they involved a part of Lithuanians and Ukrainians to the massacre of Jews rather than allowed to contribute to Wehrmacht fight against the USSR. Important lesson here that Lithuania and Ukraine did not obtain any independence but just became a part of the Third Reich, which controlled the so called 'New Europe' at the time.

1999 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-51
Author(s):  
Kees Gispen

Inthis paper I would like to relate some of the results of my specialized research on Nazi inventor policy to themes and interpretations with which many students of the Third Reich already are familiar. One of those themes is the relationship between big business and the Nazi state. An influential hypothesis in this area centers on the notion of a “power cartel,” based on the insight that Nazi Germany was not a dictatorship in which all sectors of society were suppressed with equal force. According to the “power-cartel” interpretation, which incorporates elements of the Marxist perspective on the relationship between capitalism and National Socialism, the Third Reich was governed by an informal coalition of the Nazis, the military, and big business. This fundamental idea is then qualified by two additional observations. First, the Nazi movement is broken down into factions comprising the party, Labor Front, and SA on the one hand, and the Gestapo and SS on the other hand. The former are seen to lose power as time went by while that latter gained it, which helps explain the regime's increasing brutality and its accelerating descent into barbarism. Second, the idea of a changing balance of power is also applied to the power cartel as a whole. The point here is to account for the gradual loss of power by the military and big business. Their relatively advantageous positions in the regime’s early years steadily eroded, producing a very different weighting among the cartel’s members by the time World War II ended, without, however, ever completely destroying it.


Author(s):  
Konrad Graczyk

Abstract Special Courts in the Occupied Polish Territories in 1939. A Legal History Analysis. The study is devoted to the first period of activity of German special courts established in Poland in 1939. The basic scope presents the special courts of the Third Reich established on the basis of the regulation of 1933. They were a model for courts established in occupied Poland. Their creation is analyzed on the example of the Special Court in Katowitz (Sondergericht Kattowitz). Then, the activities of special courts in occupied Poland in 1939 are discussed with particular emphasis on case and penalty statistics. Attention is paid to some characteristic phenomena, such as problems with jurisdiction, differences resulting from the establishment of special courts as part of the military administration, and judgment of acts committed before the war and under Polish jurisdiction. The identified cases of violations of law in the activities of special courts in 1939 are also discussed.


Author(s):  
Eric Kurlander

This chapter illustrates how the National Socialist Workers' Party (NSDAP) appropriated supernatural ideas in order to appeal to ordinary Germans, enlisting the help of occultists and horror writers in shaping propaganda and political campaigning. By exploiting the supernatural imaginary, Hitler tied his political mission into something out of the Book of Revelation, as one ‘divinely chosen’ to create the Third Reich. The chapter then looks at three case studies. The first assesses Hitler's approach to politics through his reading of Ernst Schertel's 1923 occult treatise, Magic: History, Theory, Practice. The second considers the NSDAP's propaganda collaboration with the horror writer, Hanns Heinz Ewers. The third delves into the relationship between the NSDAP and Weimar's most popular ‘magician’, Erik Hanussen. In coopting Schertel's magic, enlisting Ewers, and forming an alliance with Hanussen, the Nazis diverted the masses from objective reality and toward the coming Third Reich.


2015 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Keisuke Yoshida

AbstractDuring the first half of the 20th century, especially between the two world wars, the German-speaking countries experienced the so-called Kierkegaard Renaissance. Although at that time a wide range of thinkers engaged with Kierkegaard’s writings, Georg Lukács and Theodor W. Adorno argue that Kierkegaard exercised a particularly strong influence on fascist thought. Furthermore, Wilfried Greve claims that Kierkegaard was widely interpreted in the decisionist-irrationalist fashion during the Third Reich, which resulted in the appropriation of Kierkegaard by the ideologues of National Socialism, particularly by Alfred Baeumler, a leading intellectual of National Socialism, and by Emanuel Hirsch, a leading theologian of the “German Christians” movement at the time. In the present article I examine historical examples of the decisionist-irrationalist Kierkegaard interpretation. Then I discuss Carl Schmitt’s appropriation of Kierkegaard and the critical responses to it from Karl Löwith and Norbert Bolz. This discussion leads to the conclusion that the decisionist-irrationalist Kierkegaard interpretation takes on an “occasionalistic” character and thereby willy nilly renders the arbitrary or accidental content of the decision absolute. It can be maintained that this “occasionalistic” character of the decisionistirrationalist interpretation paved the way for a Kierkegaard appropriation favored by fascist ideologues in the interwar period


Author(s):  
Anselm Doering-Manteuffel

Breaking the Law as a Norm: Contours of Ideological Radicalism within the Nazi Dictatorship. This article analyzes the relationship between Nazi legal experts’ efforts to create a canon of constitutional law for the Third Reich and the ideological radicalism characteristic of Hitler and the SS-state. The attempts of legal professionals to establish “völkisch” constitutional law emerged out of the staunch anti-liberalism that had spread throughout Germany since the end of World War I. However, this “völkisch” constitutional law bore no resemblance to rational European legal thought. It not only proved to be ineffective for this reason, but also because the ideological radicalism that reigned supreme in the Third Reich sought to break the law and let lawlessness rule.


2018 ◽  
Vol 51 (3) ◽  
pp. 367-389
Author(s):  
Edward B. Westermann

AbstractDuring the Third Reich, alcohol served as both a literal and metaphorical lubricant for acts of violence and atrocity by the men of theSturmabteilung(SA), theSchutzstaffel(SS), and the police. Scholars have extensively documented its use and abuse on the part of the perpetrators. For the SA, the SS, and the police, the consumption of alcohol was part of a ritual that not only bound the perpetrators together, but also became a facilitator of acts of “performative masculinity”—a type of masculinity expressly linked to physical or sexual violence. In many respects, the relationship among alcohol, masculinity, sex, and violence permeated all aspects of the Nazi killing process in the camps, the ghettos, and the killing fields. After the outbreak of war in September 1939, such practices were increasingly radicalized, with drinking and celebratory rituals becoming key elements for these closed male communities of perpetrators, who used them to prepare for acts of mass killing and, ultimately, genocide.


2021 ◽  
Vol 54 (2) ◽  
pp. 297-325
Author(s):  
Samuel Clowes Huneke

AbstractIn recent years scholars have shown increasing interest in lesbianism under National Socialism. But because female homosexuality was never criminalized in Nazi Germany, excluding Austria, historians have few archival sources through which to recount this past. That lack of evidence has led to strikingly different interpretations in the scholarly literature, with some historians claiming lesbians were a persecuted group and others insisting they were not. This article presents three archival case studies, each of which epitomizes a different mode in the relationship between lesbians and the Nazi state. In presenting these cases, the article contextualizes them with twenty-seven other cases from the literature, arguing that these different modes illustrate why different women met with such radically different fates. In so doing, it attempts to bridge the divide in the scholarship, putting persecution and tolerance into a single frame of reference for understanding the lives of lesbians in the Third Reich.


2016 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 49-67
Author(s):  
FRANCISCO MORENTE

German intervention in the Spanish Civil War was decisive for its development and result. Traditionally scholars have focused their attention on the support given by the Third Reich to the military rebels; however, they have widely neglected the study of the relationship between Germany and the Spanish Republic during the first four months of the war, when both countries maintained diplomatic relations. This paper aims at exploring a crucial aspect of that historical period, namely the circumstances of the Spanish diplomats in Berlin during those first four months, and the strategies that the German and the Spanish governments carried out in the harsh diplomatic battle that they ended up fighting. The author explains the difficult working conditions of the Spanish diplomats who were loyal to the Republic and stayed in Berlin in July 1936, when most of their colleagues deserted. Finally, he explores how the German Foreign Affairs Department, in collaboration with the Gestapo, managed to restrain the Spanish Republic diplomatic action in Germany.


1998 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 241-264 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laurent Olivier

For four years (1940–1944) after its defeat by the Third Reich, France was ruled by an anti-republican government whose active collaboration with the Nazis made a major contribution to the persecution and extermination of the Jews. Through the ‘National Revolution’, the Vichy regime developed an ideology opposed to democracy and republican roots and sought to re-invent its national origins as a justification for Pétainism. Thus, the Gallic past and archaeology in general played an important role in this new ideology by assimilating the defeat of the Gauls by Caesar to that of the French by the Nazis and by then comparing the successful incorporation of Gaul into the Roman Empire with that of France into a ‘new Europe’ dominated by Nazi Germany. At the same time, the Vichy regime provided French archaeology with its first legal and administrative structure, which allowed the development of the discipline. This legislative and administrative framework was preserved intact not only until the liberation but right up to the present day. It is the permanence of this structure which creates the problem of the relationship between current French archaeology and the Vichy regime.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document