An attempt to understand Nazi Society

Coming into this course I knew some history about the Third Reich and the Nazis but like most people not really paying attention to this time period, most of what I knew was about post-1939 Germany and their role (and crimes) in World War 2. So this definitely taught me a lot about how and why the Nazis rose to power in the period following World War 1. Learning about this really helped me differentiate this time period from all the other mass genocides that have happened over the years. One of the first things we talked about when coming into this course was how different Nazi Germany was in terms of mass murdering governments because they came out of a “culturally and economically advanced” country. Seeing how this kind of country could degrade into the Nazi regime is very important in order to understand how we can avoid situations like this again. The fact that Nazi Germany overthrew an incredibly democratic system like the Weimar Republic shows that no system can be immune from becoming a terrifying autocratic regime. More importantly than this, the course really taught me about the interplay between a government and its citizens.

Throughout this course one of the things that I was most shocked to find out about was how “bottom-up” the regime was run. I had always imagined the Third Reich as a highly dictatorial, authoritarian regime that controlled the population. I believed that Germany under the Nazis would have been either terrorizing or like living in a long brainwashed nightmare. So I was especially fascinated but also very disturbed to see how much this was, as Professor Ertman put it, a participatory dictatorship. Through our Kershaw readings we saw how the people’s support really helped developed Hitler to become the autocratic leader that lead a regime which terrorized much of Europe. We also saw in the Allen readings how much local communities became “Nazified” with little influence from the top echelon of the Nazi party. In addition it really shocked me to see how most Germans living under the Nazi regime were not virulent anti-semites. The last reading especially gave me a perspective that I had never thought of. The Holocaust always seemed to me the cause of the Nazi party’s elite members. However, through our readings I gained a much greater realization of the actual soldiers and policemen that performed these murderous tasks. The fact that these men that had no severe hatred or pathological disorder were capable of committing one of the most horrific crimes in human history still baffles me. This course has taught me a lot more about a society I knew about only superficially and has helped me understand many aspects of this society but has also raised some questions that still are not fully answered.