Nazism  

From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia

(Difference between revisions)
Jump to: navigation, search
Revision as of 11:35, 27 March 2013
Jahsonic (Talk | contribs)

← Previous diff
Revision as of 11:44, 27 March 2013
Jahsonic (Talk | contribs)

Next diff →
Line 6: Line 6:
Many see strong connections to the values of Nazism and the [[irrationalism|irrationalist]] tradition of the [[romantic movement]] of the early 19th century. Strength, [[passion]], [[frank]] declarations of [[feeling]]s, and deep devotion to family and community were valued by the Nazis though first expressed by many Romantic artists, musicians, and writers. Many see strong connections to the values of Nazism and the [[irrationalism|irrationalist]] tradition of the [[romantic movement]] of the early 19th century. Strength, [[passion]], [[frank]] declarations of [[feeling]]s, and deep devotion to family and community were valued by the Nazis though first expressed by many Romantic artists, musicians, and writers.
 +==Ideology==
 +From 1920 to 1923, Hitler formulated his ideology, then published it in 1925–26, as ''[[Mein Kampf]]'', a two-volume, biography and political manifesto.
 +
 +Though Hitler for "tactical" reasons had rhetorically declared a 1920 party platform with [[Socialism|socialist]] platitudes "unshakable," actually "many paragraphs of the party program were obviously merely a demagogic appeal to the mood of the lower classes at a time when they were in bad straits and were sympathetic to radical and even socialist slogans...Point 11, for example...Point 12...nationalization...Point 16...communalization.... put in at the insistence of Drexler and Feder, who apparently really believed in the 'socialism' of National Socialism." In actual practice, such points were mere slogans, "most of them forgotten by the time the party came to power.... the Nazi leader himself was later to be embarrassed when reminded of some of them." Historian Conan Fischer argues that the Nazis were sincere in their use of the adjective ''socialist'', which they saw as inseparable from the adjective ''national'', and meant it as a socialism of the [[master race]], rather than the socialism of the "underprivileged and oppressed seeking justice and equal rights."
 +
 +===Social class===
 +In 1922, Adolf Hitler discredited other nationalist and racialist political parties as disconnected from the mass populace, especially lower and [[working class|working-class]] young people:
 +
 +:The racialists were not capable of drawing the practical conclusions from correct theoretical judgements, especially in the Jewish Question. In this way, the German racialist movement developed a similar pattern to that of the 1880s and 1890s. As in those days, its leadership gradually fell into the hands of highly honourable, but fantastically naïve men of learning, professors, district counsellors, schoolmasters, and lawyers — in short a bourgeois, idealistic, and refined class. It lacked the warm breath of the nation's youthful vigour.
 +
 +Despite many working-class supporters and members, the appeal of the [[Nazi Party]] was arguably more effective with the [[middle class]]. Moreover, the financial collapse of the [[White-collar worker|white collar]] middle-class of the 1920s figures much in their strong support of Nazism, thus the great percentage of declared middle-class support for the Nazis. In the poor country that was the [[Weimar Republic]] of the early 1930s, the Nazi Party realised their socialist policies with food and shelter for the unemployed and the homeless — later recruited to the Brownshirt ''[[Sturmabteilung]]'' (SA — Storm Detachment).
 +
 +===Sex and gender===
 +{{Further2|[[Women in the Third Reich]]}}
 +[[File:Berlin Pink Triangle.JPG|thumb|125px|''Homophobia:'' Berlin Memorial to Homosexual Victims of the Holocaust; ''Totgeschlagen—Totgeschwiegen'' (Struck Dead—Hushed Up)]]
 +Nazi ideology advocated excluding women from political involvement and confining them to the spheres of "[[Kinder, Küche, Kirche]]" (Children, Kitchen, Church).{{citation needed|date=May 2012}}
 +
 +====Opposition to homosexuality====
 +;''[[Persecution of homosexuals in Nazi Germany and the Holocaust]]''
 +
 +After the Night of the Long Knives, Hitler promoted Himmler and the [[SS]], who then zealously suppressed homosexuality, saying: "We must exterminate these people root and branch ... the homosexual must be eliminated." In 1936, Himmler established the "Reichszentrale zur Bekämpfung der Homosexualität und Abtreibung" ("Reich Central Office for the Combating of Homosexuality and Abortion"). The Nazi régime incarcerated some 100,000 homosexuals during the 1930s. As concentration camp prisoners, homosexual men were forced to wear [[pink triangle]] badges.
 +
 +===Racial policy===
 +:'[[Nazism and race]], [[Racial policy of Nazi Germany]]''
 +[[File:NordischNordic.JPG|thumb|150px|left|The Master Race: the ''Meyers Blitz-Lexikon'' ([[Weimar Republic|Leipzig, 1932]]) depicts German war hero [[Karl von Müller]] as an exemplar Nordic type of the [[Herrenvolk]].]]
 +[[File:Generalplan Ost map.tiff|thumb|Europe, with pre-WW2 borders, showing the extension of ''[[Generalplan Ost]]'', i.e., the massive depopulation and ethnic cleansing within German ''Lebensraum''.]]
 +Several of the founders and leaders of the Nazi Party were members of the ''[[Thule-Gesellschaft]]'' (Thule Society), who romanticized Aryan race superstitions with ritual and theology. Originally, derived from the ''[[Germanenorden]]'', the Thule Society shared the racist superstitions of [[Ariosophy]] and the society's activities consisted of [[anti-Semitism]] lectures and excursions of Germanic antiquity. The Thule Society member, [[Dietrich Eckart]], coached Adolf Hitler in public speaking, and Hitler later dedicated ''Mein Kampf'' to Eckart. The DAP had initial support from the Thule Society — but after Hitler had taken over the Party, by denigrating their superstitious approach to politics, the society's members were quickly marginalised to allow the party to become a mass movement.
 +
 +Hitler viewed individual races as being part of a hierarchy, and he espoused the "aristocratic idea of nature". This view led to his assertion of superior and higher qualities of the Aryan race. Hitler claimed to have first developed his worldview while in Vienna from 1907 to 1913, concluding that the [[Austria-Hungary|Austro–Hungarian Empire]] comprised racial, religious, and cultural hierarchies; he viewed "Aryans" as the ultimate master race inhabiting the top, whilst Jews and [[Romani people|Gypsies]] were at bottom. Other research suggests that Hitler's virulent antisemitism was a post-war development, influenced from the [[Russian civil war]]. The idea of the Russian roots of Nazism has been explored by [[Walter Laqueur]] and Michael Kellogg.
 +
 +The racist subject of Nazism was ''[[Volk|Das Volk]]'', the German people living under continual cultural attack by [[Judeo-Bolshevism]]. Nazi Party leadership sought to unify the ''Volk'', and strongly encouraged [[stoicism]], self-discipline and self-sacrifice to achieve final victory. Nazi propagandist [[Joseph Goebbels]] frequently employed antisemitic rhetoric to underline this view: "The Jew is the enemy and destroyer of the purity of blood, the conscious destroyer of our race ... As socialists, we are opponents of the Jews, because we see, in the Hebrews, the incarnation of [[capitalism]], of the misuse of the nation's goods."
 +
 +In the [[Pseudoscience|pseudoscientific]] treatise, ''[[The Myth of the Twentieth Century]]'' — according to Terrence Ball and Richard Bellamy, the second-most important book to Nazism, after ''Mein Kampf'' — [[Reichstag (Nazi Germany)|Reichstag]] Secretary, [[Alfred Rosenberg]] proposed that, "[F]rom a northern centre of creation which, without postulating an actual submerged Atlantic continent, we may call [[Atlantis]], swarms of warriors once fanned out, in obedience to the ever-renewed and incarnate [[Nordic race|Nordic]] longing for distance to conquer and space to shape".
 +
 +According to Nazism, through struggle and proper "breeding", the "strong" would subdue the "weak" and rise to dominance. For example, Nazi policy since 1920 emphasized that only people of "German blood" could be considered German citizens thus excluding people of Jewish descent, a view that ultimately resulted in the killing of millions of people in the [[Holocaust]].
 +
 +[[File:Buchenwald Corpses 60623.jpg|thumb|220px|A wagon piled high with corpses outside the crematorium in [[Buchenwald concentration camp]]]]
 +
 +To maintain the "purity and strength" of the Aryan race, the Nazis sought to [[Genocide|exterminate]] Jews, [[Romani people|Romani]], and the [[Physical disability|physically]] and [[Developmental disability|mentally disabled]]. Other groups deemed "[[Degeneration|degenerate]]" and "[[Asociality|asocial]]" who were not targeted for extermination, but received [[Social exclusion|exclusionary treatment]] by the Nazi state, included [[Homosexuality|homosexuals]], [[Black people in Nazi Germany|blacks]], [[Jehovah's Witnesses]] and political opponents. One of Hitler's ambitions at the start of the war was to [[Generalplan Ost|exterminate]], expel, or enslave most or all [[Slav]]s from central and eastern Europe (i.e., [[Nazi crimes against ethnic Poles|Poles]], Russians, Ukrainians, etc.) so as to make [[Lebensraum|living space]] for German settlers.
 +
 +Hitler declared that racial conflict against Jews was necessary to save Germany from suffering under them and dismissed concerns about such conflict being inhumane or an injustice:
 +
 +<blockquote>We may be inhumane, but if we rescue Germany we have achieved the greatest deed in the world. We may work injustice, but if we rescue Germany then we have removed the greatest injustice in the world. We may be immoral, but if our people is rescued we have opened the way for morality.
 +</blockquote>
 +
 +In Germany, the idea of creating a master-race resulted in efforts to "purify' the ''Deutsche Volk'' through [[Nazi eugenics|eugenics]]; its culmination was [[compulsory sterilization]] or [[involuntary euthanasia]] of physically or mentally disabled people. The ideological justification was [[Adolf Hitler]]'s view of [[Sparta]] (11th c.–195 BC) as the original ''Völkisch'' state; he praised their dispassionate destruction of congenitally deformed infants in maintaining racial purity:
 +
 +The number of Germans of African descent was low; however, some of them were enlisted into Nazi organisations like the [[Hitler Youth]] and the ''Wehrmacht''.
 +
 +===Religion===
 +
 +The [[National Socialist Program|Nazi Party Programme]] of 1920 guaranteed freedom for all religious denominations not hostile to the State and endorsed [[Positive Christianity]] to combat “the Jewish-materialist spirit”.<ref name="documents"/> It was a modified version of Christianity which emphasized racial purity and nationalism.{{sfn|McNab|2009|p=182}} The Nazis were aided by theologians, such as, Dr. [[Ernst Bergmann (philosopher)]]. Bergmann, in his work, ''Die 25 Thesen der Deutschreligion'' (Twenty-five Points of the German Religion), held that the Old Testament and portions of the New Testament of the Bible were inaccurate. He claimed that Jesus was not a Jew and of Aryan origin, and that Adolf Hitler was the new messiah.{{sfn|McNab|2009|p=182}} At the same time the Nazis utilized Protestant [[Martin Luther]] in their propaganda. Nazis publicly displayed an original of Luther's ''On the Jews and their Lies'' during the annual Nuremberg rallies.<ref name="understandably"/><ref name="baylor"/> The Nazis endorsed the pro-Nazi Protestant [[German Christians]] organization.
 +
 +The Nazis were initially highly hostile to Catholics because most Catholics supported the [[German Centre Party]]. Catholics opposed the Nazis' promotion of sterilization of those deemed inferior, and the Catholic Church forbade its members to vote for the Nazis. In 1933, extensive Nazi violence occurred against Catholics due to the their association with the Centre Party and their opposition to the Nazi regime's sterilization laws.<ref name="international27"/> The Nazis demanded that Catholics declare their loyalty to the German state.<ref name="Robert Anthony Krieg 2004. p. 4"/> In propaganda, the Nazis used elements of Germany's Catholic history, in particular the German Catholic [[Teutonic Knights]] and their campaigns in Eastern Europe. The Nazis identified them as "sentinels" in the East against "Slavic chaos", though beyond that symbolism the influence of the Teutonic Knights on Nazism was limited.<ref name="interaction"/> Hitler also admitted that the Nazis' night rallies were inspired by the Catholic rituals he witnessed during his Catholic upbringing.<ref name="Roger Griffin 2005. p. 85"/> The Nazis did seek official reconciliation with the Catholic Church and endorsed the creation of the pro-Nazi Catholic ''[[Kreuz und Adler]]'' organization that supported a [[national Catholicism]].<ref name="Robert Anthony Krieg 2004. p. 4"/> On 20 July 1933, a successful concordat (''[[Reichskonkordat]]'') was signed between Nazi Germany and the Catholic Church which demanded loyalty of German Catholics to the German state in exchange for acceptance of the Catholic Church in Germany. The Catholic Church then ended its ban on members supporting the Nazi Party.<ref name="Robert Anthony Krieg 2004. p. 4"/>
 +
 +Historian [[Michael Burleigh]] claims that Nazism used Christianity for political purposes, but such use required that "fundamental tenets were stripped out, but the remaining diffuse religious emotionality had its uses".<ref name="Roger Griffin 2005. p. 85"/> Burleigh claims that Nazism's conception of spirituality was "self-conciously pagan and primitive".<ref name="Roger Griffin 2005. p. 85"/> However, historian [[Roger Griffin]] rejects the claim that Nazism was primarily pagan, noting that although there were some influential neo-paganists in the Nazi Party, such as [[Heinrich Himmler]] and [[Alfred Rosenberg]], they represented a minority and their views did not influence Nazi ideology beyond its use for symbolism; its noted that Hitler denounced Germanic paganism in ''Mein Kampf'' and condemned Rosenberg's and Himmler's paganism as "nonsense".{{sfn|Speer|1971|p=141, 212}}<ref name="totalitarianism"/>
 +
 +===Economics===
 +{{Further|Economy of Nazi Germany|Economics of fascism}}
 +[[File:Bundesarchiv Bild 102-15750, Ausstellung "Deutsches Volk-Deutsche Arbeit".jpg|thumb|''Deutsches Volk–Deutsche Arbeit:'' German People, German Work, the alliance of worker and work. (1934)]]
 +
 +Hitler had little interest towards money and economics in general. After he became ''Reichskanzler'' on 30 January 1933 he never touched his salary from the state.<ref>William S. Shirer, "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich"</ref> At the national level, Hitler left the subject to others. In the early days of the Nazi government [[Alfred Hugenberg]], the party leader of the conservative German-National party, [[DNVP]], was the Minister of Finance - the ''Reichswirtschaftsminister''. He continued to serve in this position for a short time even after all parties except the [[NSDAP]] were prohibited in March 1933. In June Hugenberg was replaced by [[Kurt Schmitt]], a man that had joined the Nazi Party in late spring of 1933. Schmitt's time in office was also short and in 1934 the president of the national German bank [[Hjalmar Schacht]] become the third man responsible for the economy of Nazi Germany. He lasted until 1938 when the first real Nazi, [[Walther Funk]] was appointed to the position. Afterwards, Schacht remained minister without portfolio until he was put in a [[Nazi concentration camps|concentration camp]] in 1944. Schacht survived and was later put on trial in [[Nuremberg trial|Nürmberg]] where he was found "not guilty" on all counts. During Walther Funk's era as Minister of Finance, he had to follow a ''four year plan'' created by [[Herman Göring]]. Although this was not possible due to the war and the incompetence of Göring, the fall of the Third Reich had little to do with economics.<ref>about Alfred Hugenberg, Kurt Schmitt, Hjalmar Schacht and Walther Funk - see the individual articles in the German Wikipedia</ref>
 +
 +Hitler believed that private ownership was useful in that it encouraged creative competition and technical innovation, but insisted that it had to conform to national interests and be "productive" rather than "parasitical".<ref name="R.J. Overy 2004. p. 403"/> Private property rights were conditional upon the economic mode of use; if it did not advance Nazi economic goals then the state could nationalize it.<ref name="economic573"/> Although the Nazis [[Privatisation|privatised]] public properties and public services, they also increased economic state control.<ref name="guillebaud"/> Under Nazi economics, free competition and self-regulating markets diminished; nevertheless, Hitler's [[Social Darwinism|social Darwinist]] beliefs made him reluctant to entirely disregard business competition and private property as economic engines.<ref name="economics"/><ref name="university28"/>
 +
 +To tie farmers to their land, selling agricultural land was prohibited.<ref>Germany, 1871-1945: A Concise History By Raffael Scheck page 167 ISBN 978-1845208172 First Edition</ref> Farm ownership was nominally private, but discretion over operations and residual income were proscribed.{{citation needed|date=November 2012}} That was achieved by granting business monopoly rights to marketing boards to control production and prices with a quota system.<ref>{{cite book |title=The Primacy of Politics: Social Democracy and the Making of Europe's Twentieth Century|url=http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=BNV5uVCQnq8C&pg=PA146&lpg=PP1&vq=146 |first=Sheri |last=Berman |page=146 |isbn=978-0521521109}}</ref>
 +
 +====Anti-communism====
 +Historians [[Ian Kershaw]] and [[Joachim Fest]] argue that in post-[[World War I]] Germany, the Nazis were one of many nationalist and fascist political parties contending for the leadership of Germany's [[anti-communism|anti-communist]] movement. The Nazis claimed that communism was dangerous to the well-being of nations because of its intention to dissolve [[private property]], its support of [[class conflict]], its aggression against the [[Middle-class|middle class]], its hostility towards small businessmen, and its [[atheism]].<ref name=autogenerated20 /> Nazism rejected [[class conflict]]-based [[socialism]] and economic [[egalitarianism]], favouring instead a [[Social stratification|stratified]] economy with [[social class]]es based on merit and talent, retaining [[private property]], and the creation of national solidarity that transcends class distinction.<ref name=autogenerated11 />
 +
 +During the 1920s, Hitler urged disparate Nazi factions to unite in opposition to "[[Jewish Bolshevism|Jewish Marxism]]."<ref name="Adolf Hitler"/> Hitler asserted that the "three vices" of "Jewish [[Marxism]]" were [[democracy]], [[pacifism]] and [[internationalism (politics)|internationalism]].<ref name="Hitler, the Germans, and the Final Solution"/>
 +
 +In 1930, Hitler said: "Our adopted term ‘Socialist' has nothing to do with Marxist Socialism. Marxism is anti-property; true Socialism is not."<ref name="university29"/> In 1942, Hitler privately said: "I absolutely insist on protecting private property ... we must encourage private initiative".<ref name="Hitler's Table Talk, 1941–1944: His Private Conversations"/>
 +
 +During the late 1930s and the 1940s, anti-communist regimes and groups that supported Nazism included the [[Falange]] in [[Spain]]; the [[Vichy France|Vichy regime]] and the [[33rd Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS Charlemagne (1st French)]] in France; and the [[Cliveden Set]], [[Lord Halifax]], and associates of [[Neville Chamberlain]] in Britain.<ref name="carroll"/>
 +
 +====Anti-capitalism====
 +[[File:Der Stürmer Christmas 1929.jpg|thumb|[[antisemitism|Anti-Semitic]] and [[anti-capitalism|anti-capitalist]] Nazi cartoon telling Germans not to buy from [[Jew]]ish shops.]]
 +The Nazis argued that [[capitalism]] damages nations due to [[international finance]], the economic dominance of [[big business]], and Jewish influences.<ref name="autogenerated20"/> Nazi propaganda posters in [[working class]] districts emphasized anti-capitalism, such as one that said: "The maintenance of a rotten industrial system has nothing to do with nationalism. I can love Germany and hate capitalism."<ref name="publishers30"/>
 +
 +[[Adolf Hitler]], both in public and in private, expressed disdain for capitalism, arguing that it holds nations ransom in the interests of a parasitic [[Cosmopolitanism|cosmopolitan]] [[rentier capitalism|rentier]] class.<ref name="R.J. Overy 2004. p. 399"/> He opposed [[free market]] capitalism's profit-seeking impulses and desired an economy in which community interests would be upheld.<ref name="R.J. Overy 2004. p. 403"/>
 +
 +Hitler distrusted capitalism for being unreliable due to its [[egotism]], and he preferred a state-directed economy that is subordinated to the interests of the [[Volk]].<ref name="R.J. Overy 2004. p. 399"/> Hitler said in 1927, "We are socialists, we are enemies of today's capitalistic economic system for the exploitation of the economically weak, with its unfair salaries, with its unseemly evaluation of a human being according to wealth and property instead of responsibility and performance, and we are determined to destroy this system under all conditions."<ref>{{Cite book | author=Toland, John | title=Adolf Hitler | pages=224–225 | publisher=Doubleday | year=1976 | isbn=978-0385037242 }}</ref>
 +
 +Hitler told a party leader in 1934, "The economic system of our day is the creation of the Jews."<ref name="R.J. Overy 2004. p. 399" /> Hitler said to [[Benito Mussolini]] that "Capitalism had run its course".<ref name="R.J. Overy 2004. p. 399"/> Hitler also said that the business [[bourgeoisie]] "know nothing except their profit. 'Fatherland' is only a word for them."<ref name="dictators"/> Hitler admired [[Napoleon]] as a role model for his anti-[[conservatism|conservative]], anti-capitalist and anti-bourgeois attitudes.<ref name="hanfstaengl"/>
 +
 +In ''[[Mein Kampf]]'', Hitler effectively supported [[mercantilism]], in the belief that economic resources from their respective territories should be seized by force; he believed that the policy of ''[[Lebensraum]]'' would provide Germany with such economically valuable territories.<ref name="R.J. Overy 2004. p. 402"/> He argued that the only means to maintain economic security was to have direct control over resources rather than being forced to rely on world trade.<ref name="R.J. Overy 2004. p. 402"/> He claimed that war to gain such resources was the only means to surpass the failing capitalist economic system.<ref name="R.J. Overy 2004. p. 402"/>
 +
 +A number of other Nazis held strong revolutionary socialist and anti-capitalist beliefs, most prominently [[Ernst Röhm]], the leader of the [[Sturmabteilung]] (SA).<ref name="factionalism"/> Röhm claimed that the Nazis' rise to power constituted a national revolution, but insisted that a socialist "second revolution" was required for Nazi ideology to be fulfilled.<ref name="Nyomarkay, Joseph 1967 p. 130"/> Röhm's SA began attacks against individuals deemed to be associated with conservative reaction.<ref name="Nyomarkay, Joseph 1967 p. 130"/> Hitler saw Röhm's independent actions as violating and possibly threatening his leadership, as well as jeopardizing the regime by alienating the conservative President [[Paul von Hindenburg]] and the conservative-oriented German Army.<ref name="Joseph Nyomarkay 1967. p. 133"/> This resulted in Hitler purging Röhm and other radical members of the SA.<ref name="Joseph Nyomarkay 1967. p. 133"/>
 +
 +Another radical Nazi, Propaganda Minister [[Joseph Goebbels]] adamantly stressed the socialist character of Nazism, and claimed in his diary that if he were to pick between [[Bolshevism]] and capitalism, he said "in final analysis", "it would be better for us to go down with Bolshevism than live in eternal slavery under capitalism."<ref name="disciples"/>
==See also== ==See also==

Revision as of 11:44, 27 March 2013

This page Nazism is part of the Nazism portal.  Illustration: Cover of the catalogue of the Nazi "Degenerate Art Exhibition" (1937). The exhibition was held to defame modern and Jewish artists. On the cover is Der Neue Mensch sculpture by Otto Freundlich.
Enlarge
This page Nazism is part of the Nazism portal.
Illustration: Cover of the catalogue of the Nazi "Degenerate Art Exhibition" (1937). The exhibition was held to defame modern and Jewish artists. On the cover is Der Neue Mensch sculpture by Otto Freundlich.

Related e

Wikipedia
Wiktionary
Shop


Featured:

Nazism or Naziism, officially called National Socialism (German: Nationalsozialismus), refers primarily to the totalitarian ideology and practices of the Nazi Party (National Socialist German Workers' Party, German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei or NSDAP) under Adolf Hitler. It also refers to the policies adopted by the government of Germany 1933 to 1945, a period in German history known as Nazi Germany or the "Third Reich".

Many see strong connections to the values of Nazism and the irrationalist tradition of the romantic movement of the early 19th century. Strength, passion, frank declarations of feelings, and deep devotion to family and community were valued by the Nazis though first expressed by many Romantic artists, musicians, and writers.

Contents

Ideology

From 1920 to 1923, Hitler formulated his ideology, then published it in 1925–26, as Mein Kampf, a two-volume, biography and political manifesto.

Though Hitler for "tactical" reasons had rhetorically declared a 1920 party platform with socialist platitudes "unshakable," actually "many paragraphs of the party program were obviously merely a demagogic appeal to the mood of the lower classes at a time when they were in bad straits and were sympathetic to radical and even socialist slogans...Point 11, for example...Point 12...nationalization...Point 16...communalization.... put in at the insistence of Drexler and Feder, who apparently really believed in the 'socialism' of National Socialism." In actual practice, such points were mere slogans, "most of them forgotten by the time the party came to power.... the Nazi leader himself was later to be embarrassed when reminded of some of them." Historian Conan Fischer argues that the Nazis were sincere in their use of the adjective socialist, which they saw as inseparable from the adjective national, and meant it as a socialism of the master race, rather than the socialism of the "underprivileged and oppressed seeking justice and equal rights."

Social class

In 1922, Adolf Hitler discredited other nationalist and racialist political parties as disconnected from the mass populace, especially lower and working-class young people:

The racialists were not capable of drawing the practical conclusions from correct theoretical judgements, especially in the Jewish Question. In this way, the German racialist movement developed a similar pattern to that of the 1880s and 1890s. As in those days, its leadership gradually fell into the hands of highly honourable, but fantastically naïve men of learning, professors, district counsellors, schoolmasters, and lawyers — in short a bourgeois, idealistic, and refined class. It lacked the warm breath of the nation's youthful vigour.

Despite many working-class supporters and members, the appeal of the Nazi Party was arguably more effective with the middle class. Moreover, the financial collapse of the white collar middle-class of the 1920s figures much in their strong support of Nazism, thus the great percentage of declared middle-class support for the Nazis. In the poor country that was the Weimar Republic of the early 1930s, the Nazi Party realised their socialist policies with food and shelter for the unemployed and the homeless — later recruited to the Brownshirt Sturmabteilung (SA — Storm Detachment).

Sex and gender

Template:Further2 thumb|125px|Homophobia: Berlin Memorial to Homosexual Victims of the Holocaust; Totgeschlagen—Totgeschwiegen (Struck Dead—Hushed Up) Nazi ideology advocated excluding women from political involvement and confining them to the spheres of "Kinder, Küche, Kirche" (Children, Kitchen, Church).Template:Citation needed

Opposition to homosexuality

Persecution of homosexuals in Nazi Germany and the Holocaust

After the Night of the Long Knives, Hitler promoted Himmler and the SS, who then zealously suppressed homosexuality, saying: "We must exterminate these people root and branch ... the homosexual must be eliminated." In 1936, Himmler established the "Reichszentrale zur Bekämpfung der Homosexualität und Abtreibung" ("Reich Central Office for the Combating of Homosexuality and Abortion"). The Nazi régime incarcerated some 100,000 homosexuals during the 1930s. As concentration camp prisoners, homosexual men were forced to wear pink triangle badges.

Racial policy

'Nazism and race, Racial policy of Nazi Germany

[[File:NordischNordic.JPG|thumb|150px|left|The Master Race: the Meyers Blitz-Lexikon (Leipzig, 1932) depicts German war hero Karl von Müller as an exemplar Nordic type of the Herrenvolk.]] [[File:Generalplan Ost map.tiff|thumb|Europe, with pre-WW2 borders, showing the extension of Generalplan Ost, i.e., the massive depopulation and ethnic cleansing within German Lebensraum.]] Several of the founders and leaders of the Nazi Party were members of the Thule-Gesellschaft (Thule Society), who romanticized Aryan race superstitions with ritual and theology. Originally, derived from the Germanenorden, the Thule Society shared the racist superstitions of Ariosophy and the society's activities consisted of anti-Semitism lectures and excursions of Germanic antiquity. The Thule Society member, Dietrich Eckart, coached Adolf Hitler in public speaking, and Hitler later dedicated Mein Kampf to Eckart. The DAP had initial support from the Thule Society — but after Hitler had taken over the Party, by denigrating their superstitious approach to politics, the society's members were quickly marginalised to allow the party to become a mass movement.

Hitler viewed individual races as being part of a hierarchy, and he espoused the "aristocratic idea of nature". This view led to his assertion of superior and higher qualities of the Aryan race. Hitler claimed to have first developed his worldview while in Vienna from 1907 to 1913, concluding that the Austro–Hungarian Empire comprised racial, religious, and cultural hierarchies; he viewed "Aryans" as the ultimate master race inhabiting the top, whilst Jews and Gypsies were at bottom. Other research suggests that Hitler's virulent antisemitism was a post-war development, influenced from the Russian civil war. The idea of the Russian roots of Nazism has been explored by Walter Laqueur and Michael Kellogg.

The racist subject of Nazism was Das Volk, the German people living under continual cultural attack by Judeo-Bolshevism. Nazi Party leadership sought to unify the Volk, and strongly encouraged stoicism, self-discipline and self-sacrifice to achieve final victory. Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels frequently employed antisemitic rhetoric to underline this view: "The Jew is the enemy and destroyer of the purity of blood, the conscious destroyer of our race ... As socialists, we are opponents of the Jews, because we see, in the Hebrews, the incarnation of capitalism, of the misuse of the nation's goods."

In the pseudoscientific treatise, The Myth of the Twentieth Century — according to Terrence Ball and Richard Bellamy, the second-most important book to Nazism, after Mein KampfReichstag Secretary, Alfred Rosenberg proposed that, "[F]rom a northern centre of creation which, without postulating an actual submerged Atlantic continent, we may call Atlantis, swarms of warriors once fanned out, in obedience to the ever-renewed and incarnate Nordic longing for distance to conquer and space to shape".

According to Nazism, through struggle and proper "breeding", the "strong" would subdue the "weak" and rise to dominance. For example, Nazi policy since 1920 emphasized that only people of "German blood" could be considered German citizens thus excluding people of Jewish descent, a view that ultimately resulted in the killing of millions of people in the Holocaust.

[[File:Buchenwald Corpses 60623.jpg|thumb|220px|A wagon piled high with corpses outside the crematorium in Buchenwald concentration camp]]

To maintain the "purity and strength" of the Aryan race, the Nazis sought to exterminate Jews, Romani, and the physically and mentally disabled. Other groups deemed "degenerate" and "asocial" who were not targeted for extermination, but received exclusionary treatment by the Nazi state, included homosexuals, blacks, Jehovah's Witnesses and political opponents. One of Hitler's ambitions at the start of the war was to exterminate, expel, or enslave most or all Slavs from central and eastern Europe (i.e., Poles, Russians, Ukrainians, etc.) so as to make living space for German settlers.

Hitler declared that racial conflict against Jews was necessary to save Germany from suffering under them and dismissed concerns about such conflict being inhumane or an injustice:

We may be inhumane, but if we rescue Germany we have achieved the greatest deed in the world. We may work injustice, but if we rescue Germany then we have removed the greatest injustice in the world. We may be immoral, but if our people is rescued we have opened the way for morality.

In Germany, the idea of creating a master-race resulted in efforts to "purify' the Deutsche Volk through eugenics; its culmination was compulsory sterilization or involuntary euthanasia of physically or mentally disabled people. The ideological justification was Adolf Hitler's view of Sparta (11th c.–195 BC) as the original Völkisch state; he praised their dispassionate destruction of congenitally deformed infants in maintaining racial purity:

The number of Germans of African descent was low; however, some of them were enlisted into Nazi organisations like the Hitler Youth and the Wehrmacht.

Religion

The Nazi Party Programme of 1920 guaranteed freedom for all religious denominations not hostile to the State and endorsed Positive Christianity to combat “the Jewish-materialist spirit”.<ref name="documents"/> It was a modified version of Christianity which emphasized racial purity and nationalism.Template:Sfn The Nazis were aided by theologians, such as, Dr. Ernst Bergmann (philosopher). Bergmann, in his work, Die 25 Thesen der Deutschreligion (Twenty-five Points of the German Religion), held that the Old Testament and portions of the New Testament of the Bible were inaccurate. He claimed that Jesus was not a Jew and of Aryan origin, and that Adolf Hitler was the new messiah.Template:Sfn At the same time the Nazis utilized Protestant Martin Luther in their propaganda. Nazis publicly displayed an original of Luther's On the Jews and their Lies during the annual Nuremberg rallies.<ref name="understandably"/><ref name="baylor"/> The Nazis endorsed the pro-Nazi Protestant German Christians organization.

The Nazis were initially highly hostile to Catholics because most Catholics supported the German Centre Party. Catholics opposed the Nazis' promotion of sterilization of those deemed inferior, and the Catholic Church forbade its members to vote for the Nazis. In 1933, extensive Nazi violence occurred against Catholics due to the their association with the Centre Party and their opposition to the Nazi regime's sterilization laws.<ref name="international27"/> The Nazis demanded that Catholics declare their loyalty to the German state.<ref name="Robert Anthony Krieg 2004. p. 4"/> In propaganda, the Nazis used elements of Germany's Catholic history, in particular the German Catholic Teutonic Knights and their campaigns in Eastern Europe. The Nazis identified them as "sentinels" in the East against "Slavic chaos", though beyond that symbolism the influence of the Teutonic Knights on Nazism was limited.<ref name="interaction"/> Hitler also admitted that the Nazis' night rallies were inspired by the Catholic rituals he witnessed during his Catholic upbringing.<ref name="Roger Griffin 2005. p. 85"/> The Nazis did seek official reconciliation with the Catholic Church and endorsed the creation of the pro-Nazi Catholic Kreuz und Adler organization that supported a national Catholicism.<ref name="Robert Anthony Krieg 2004. p. 4"/> On 20 July 1933, a successful concordat (Reichskonkordat) was signed between Nazi Germany and the Catholic Church which demanded loyalty of German Catholics to the German state in exchange for acceptance of the Catholic Church in Germany. The Catholic Church then ended its ban on members supporting the Nazi Party.<ref name="Robert Anthony Krieg 2004. p. 4"/>

Historian Michael Burleigh claims that Nazism used Christianity for political purposes, but such use required that "fundamental tenets were stripped out, but the remaining diffuse religious emotionality had its uses".<ref name="Roger Griffin 2005. p. 85"/> Burleigh claims that Nazism's conception of spirituality was "self-conciously pagan and primitive".<ref name="Roger Griffin 2005. p. 85"/> However, historian Roger Griffin rejects the claim that Nazism was primarily pagan, noting that although there were some influential neo-paganists in the Nazi Party, such as Heinrich Himmler and Alfred Rosenberg, they represented a minority and their views did not influence Nazi ideology beyond its use for symbolism; its noted that Hitler denounced Germanic paganism in Mein Kampf and condemned Rosenberg's and Himmler's paganism as "nonsense".Template:Sfn<ref name="totalitarianism"/>

Economics

Template:Further thumb|Deutsches Volk–Deutsche Arbeit: German People, German Work, the alliance of worker and work. (1934)

Hitler had little interest towards money and economics in general. After he became Reichskanzler on 30 January 1933 he never touched his salary from the state.<ref>William S. Shirer, "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich"</ref> At the national level, Hitler left the subject to others. In the early days of the Nazi government Alfred Hugenberg, the party leader of the conservative German-National party, DNVP, was the Minister of Finance - the Reichswirtschaftsminister. He continued to serve in this position for a short time even after all parties except the NSDAP were prohibited in March 1933. In June Hugenberg was replaced by Kurt Schmitt, a man that had joined the Nazi Party in late spring of 1933. Schmitt's time in office was also short and in 1934 the president of the national German bank Hjalmar Schacht become the third man responsible for the economy of Nazi Germany. He lasted until 1938 when the first real Nazi, Walther Funk was appointed to the position. Afterwards, Schacht remained minister without portfolio until he was put in a concentration camp in 1944. Schacht survived and was later put on trial in Nürmberg where he was found "not guilty" on all counts. During Walther Funk's era as Minister of Finance, he had to follow a four year plan created by Herman Göring. Although this was not possible due to the war and the incompetence of Göring, the fall of the Third Reich had little to do with economics.<ref>about Alfred Hugenberg, Kurt Schmitt, Hjalmar Schacht and Walther Funk - see the individual articles in the German Wikipedia</ref>

Hitler believed that private ownership was useful in that it encouraged creative competition and technical innovation, but insisted that it had to conform to national interests and be "productive" rather than "parasitical".<ref name="R.J. Overy 2004. p. 403"/> Private property rights were conditional upon the economic mode of use; if it did not advance Nazi economic goals then the state could nationalize it.<ref name="economic573"/> Although the Nazis privatised public properties and public services, they also increased economic state control.<ref name="guillebaud"/> Under Nazi economics, free competition and self-regulating markets diminished; nevertheless, Hitler's social Darwinist beliefs made him reluctant to entirely disregard business competition and private property as economic engines.<ref name="economics"/><ref name="university28"/>

To tie farmers to their land, selling agricultural land was prohibited.<ref>Germany, 1871-1945: A Concise History By Raffael Scheck page 167 ISBN 978-1845208172 First Edition</ref> Farm ownership was nominally private, but discretion over operations and residual income were proscribed.Template:Citation needed That was achieved by granting business monopoly rights to marketing boards to control production and prices with a quota system.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>

Anti-communism

Historians Ian Kershaw and Joachim Fest argue that in post-World War I Germany, the Nazis were one of many nationalist and fascist political parties contending for the leadership of Germany's anti-communist movement. The Nazis claimed that communism was dangerous to the well-being of nations because of its intention to dissolve private property, its support of class conflict, its aggression against the middle class, its hostility towards small businessmen, and its atheism.<ref name=autogenerated20 /> Nazism rejected class conflict-based socialism and economic egalitarianism, favouring instead a stratified economy with social classes based on merit and talent, retaining private property, and the creation of national solidarity that transcends class distinction.<ref name=autogenerated11 />

During the 1920s, Hitler urged disparate Nazi factions to unite in opposition to "Jewish Marxism."<ref name="Adolf Hitler"/> Hitler asserted that the "three vices" of "Jewish Marxism" were democracy, pacifism and internationalism.<ref name="Hitler, the Germans, and the Final Solution"/>

In 1930, Hitler said: "Our adopted term ‘Socialist' has nothing to do with Marxist Socialism. Marxism is anti-property; true Socialism is not."<ref name="university29"/> In 1942, Hitler privately said: "I absolutely insist on protecting private property ... we must encourage private initiative".<ref name="Hitler's Table Talk, 1941–1944: His Private Conversations"/>

During the late 1930s and the 1940s, anti-communist regimes and groups that supported Nazism included the Falange in Spain; the Vichy regime and the 33rd Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS Charlemagne (1st French) in France; and the Cliveden Set, Lord Halifax, and associates of Neville Chamberlain in Britain.<ref name="carroll"/>

Anti-capitalism

[[File:Der Stürmer Christmas 1929.jpg|thumb|Anti-Semitic and anti-capitalist Nazi cartoon telling Germans not to buy from Jewish shops.]] The Nazis argued that capitalism damages nations due to international finance, the economic dominance of big business, and Jewish influences.<ref name="autogenerated20"/> Nazi propaganda posters in working class districts emphasized anti-capitalism, such as one that said: "The maintenance of a rotten industrial system has nothing to do with nationalism. I can love Germany and hate capitalism."<ref name="publishers30"/>

Adolf Hitler, both in public and in private, expressed disdain for capitalism, arguing that it holds nations ransom in the interests of a parasitic cosmopolitan rentier class.<ref name="R.J. Overy 2004. p. 399"/> He opposed free market capitalism's profit-seeking impulses and desired an economy in which community interests would be upheld.<ref name="R.J. Overy 2004. p. 403"/>

Hitler distrusted capitalism for being unreliable due to its egotism, and he preferred a state-directed economy that is subordinated to the interests of the Volk.<ref name="R.J. Overy 2004. p. 399"/> Hitler said in 1927, "We are socialists, we are enemies of today's capitalistic economic system for the exploitation of the economically weak, with its unfair salaries, with its unseemly evaluation of a human being according to wealth and property instead of responsibility and performance, and we are determined to destroy this system under all conditions."<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>

Hitler told a party leader in 1934, "The economic system of our day is the creation of the Jews."<ref name="R.J. Overy 2004. p. 399" /> Hitler said to Benito Mussolini that "Capitalism had run its course".<ref name="R.J. Overy 2004. p. 399"/> Hitler also said that the business bourgeoisie "know nothing except their profit. 'Fatherland' is only a word for them."<ref name="dictators"/> Hitler admired Napoleon as a role model for his anti-conservative, anti-capitalist and anti-bourgeois attitudes.<ref name="hanfstaengl"/>

In Mein Kampf, Hitler effectively supported mercantilism, in the belief that economic resources from their respective territories should be seized by force; he believed that the policy of Lebensraum would provide Germany with such economically valuable territories.<ref name="R.J. Overy 2004. p. 402"/> He argued that the only means to maintain economic security was to have direct control over resources rather than being forced to rely on world trade.<ref name="R.J. Overy 2004. p. 402"/> He claimed that war to gain such resources was the only means to surpass the failing capitalist economic system.<ref name="R.J. Overy 2004. p. 402"/>

A number of other Nazis held strong revolutionary socialist and anti-capitalist beliefs, most prominently Ernst Röhm, the leader of the Sturmabteilung (SA).<ref name="factionalism"/> Röhm claimed that the Nazis' rise to power constituted a national revolution, but insisted that a socialist "second revolution" was required for Nazi ideology to be fulfilled.<ref name="Nyomarkay, Joseph 1967 p. 130"/> Röhm's SA began attacks against individuals deemed to be associated with conservative reaction.<ref name="Nyomarkay, Joseph 1967 p. 130"/> Hitler saw Röhm's independent actions as violating and possibly threatening his leadership, as well as jeopardizing the regime by alienating the conservative President Paul von Hindenburg and the conservative-oriented German Army.<ref name="Joseph Nyomarkay 1967. p. 133"/> This resulted in Hitler purging Röhm and other radical members of the SA.<ref name="Joseph Nyomarkay 1967. p. 133"/>

Another radical Nazi, Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels adamantly stressed the socialist character of Nazism, and claimed in his diary that if he were to pick between Bolshevism and capitalism, he said "in final analysis", "it would be better for us to go down with Bolshevism than live in eternal slavery under capitalism."<ref name="disciples"/>

See also




Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "Nazism" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.

Personal tools