Hitlers Bureaucrats

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Hitler's Bureaucrats

Author : Yaacov Lozowick
Publisher : A&C Black
ISBN 13 : 1441186263
Total Pages : 319 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (411 download)

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Book Synopsis Hitler's Bureaucrats by : Yaacov Lozowick

Download or read book Hitler's Bureaucrats written by Yaacov Lozowick and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2010-07-15 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For many, the name of Adolf Eichmann is synonymous with the Nazi murder of six million Jews. As a perpetuator of the Final Solution he stands alongside Adolf Hitler and Heinrich Himmler as one of history's most notorious murderers, yet ever since Hannah Arendt's seminal book, "Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil", there has been disagreement about the essence of Eichmann and by extension, about the definition of evil action. Was he a human monster or a petty bureaucrat? To what degree did the totalitarian organization to which he belonged absolve him and his staff from individual choice and responsibility for atrocities? This title looks at the words and actions of Eichmann and the bureaucrats he worked with in Berlin and throughout the more significant Gestapo offices in Western Europe. It claims that Hannah Arendt's thesis about the banality of evil was wrong. In chilling detail, it presents a group of people completely aware of what they were doing, people with high ideological motivation, people of initiative and dexterity who contributed far beyond what was necessary. While most of these bureaucrats sat behind desks rather than behind machine guns, there was nothing banal about the role they played in the destruction of European Jewry

A Terrible Efficiency

Author : Franklin G. Mixon, Jr.
Publisher : Springer Nature
ISBN 13 : 3030257673
Total Pages : 153 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (32 download)

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Book Synopsis A Terrible Efficiency by : Franklin G. Mixon, Jr.

Download or read book A Terrible Efficiency written by Franklin G. Mixon, Jr. and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2019-08-24 with total page 153 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides numerous examples that apply the modern theory of bureaucracy developed in Breton and Wintrobe (1982 and 1986) to the Nazi Holocaust. More specifically, the book argues, as do Breton and Wintrobe (1986), that the subordinates in the Nazi bureaucracy were not “following orders” as they claimed during the war crimes trials at Nuremberg and elsewhere, but were instead exhibiting an entrepreneurial spirit in competing with one another in order to find the most efficient way of exacting the Final Solution. This involved engaging in a process of exchange with their superiors, wherein the subordinates offered the kinds of informal services that are not codified in formal contracts. In doing so, they were competing for the rewards, or informal payments not codified in formal contracts, that were conferred by those at the top of the bureaucracy. These came in the form of rapid promotion, perquisites (pecuniary and in-kind), and other awards. The types of exchanges described above are based on “trust,” not formal institutions.

Bureaucracy, Work and Violence

Author : Alexander Nützenadel
Publisher : Berghahn Books
ISBN 13 : 1789204593
Total Pages : 529 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (892 download)

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Book Synopsis Bureaucracy, Work and Violence by : Alexander Nützenadel

Download or read book Bureaucracy, Work and Violence written by Alexander Nützenadel and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2020-05-01 with total page 529 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Work played a central role in Nazi ideology and propaganda, and even today there remain some who still emphasize the supposedly positive aspects of the regime’s labor policies, ignoring the horrific and inhumane conditions they produced. This definitive volume provides, for the first time, a systematic study of the Reich Ministry of Labor and its implementation of National Socialist work doctrine. In detailed and illuminating chapters, contributors scrutinize political maneuvering, ministerial operations, relations between party and administration, and individual officials’ actions to reveal the surprising extent to which administrative apparatuses were involved in the Nazi regime and its crimes.

Networks of Nazi Persecution

Author : Gerald D. Feldman
Publisher : Berghahn Books
ISBN 13 : 9781571811776
Total Pages : 396 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (117 download)

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Book Synopsis Networks of Nazi Persecution by : Gerald D. Feldman

Download or read book Networks of Nazi Persecution written by Gerald D. Feldman and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2005 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The persecution and mass-murder of the Jews during World War II would not have been possible without the modern organization of division of labor. Moreover, the perpetrators were dependent on human and organizational resources they could not always control by hierarchy and coercion. Instead, the persecution of the Jews was based, to a large extent, on a web of inter-organizational relations encompassing a broad variety of non-hierarchical cooperation as well as rivalry and competition. Based on newly accessible government and corporate archives, this volume combines fresh evidence with an interpretation of the governance of persecution, presented by prominent historians and social scientists. Gerald D. Feldman was Professor of History and Director of the Institute of European Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. His special fields of interest were 20th-century German history, and he had a special interest in business history, most recently authoring a biography of Hugo Stinnes, participating in the history of the Deutsche Bank, and writing a history of the Allianz Insurance Company in the Nazi period. Wolfgang Seibel is Professor of Political Science at the University of Konstanz, Germany. Previous appointments include guest professorships at the Institute for Advanced Study, Vienna (1992), and the University of California at Berkeley (1994). He was also a temporary member of the School of Social Science (1989/90) and of the School of Historical Studies (2003) of the Institute of Advanced Study, Princeton. Currently (2004/2005) he is a fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. His research is mainly devoted to issues of politics, public bureaucracy and non-governmental organizations.

Hitler's Shadow Empire

Author : Pierpaolo Barbieri
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 0674728858
Total Pages : 368 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (747 download)

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Book Synopsis Hitler's Shadow Empire by : Pierpaolo Barbieri

Download or read book Hitler's Shadow Empire written by Pierpaolo Barbieri and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2015 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pitting fascists and communists in a showdown for supremacy, the Spanish Civil War has long been seen as a grim dress rehearsal for World War II. Francisco Franco’s Nationalists prevailed with German and Italian military assistance—a clear instance, it seemed, of like-minded regimes joining forces in the fight against global Bolshevism. In Hitler’s Shadow Empire Pierpaolo Barbieri revises this standard account of Axis intervention in the Spanish Civil War, arguing that economic ambitions—not ideology—drove Hitler’s Iberian intervention. The Nazis hoped to establish an economic empire in Europe, and in Spain they tested the tactics intended for future subject territories. “The Spanish Civil War is among the 20th-century military conflicts about which the most continues to be published...Hitler’s Shadow Empire is one of few recent studies offering fresh information, specifically describing German trade in the Franco-controlled zone. While it is typically assumed that Nazi Germany, like Stalinist Russia, became involved in the Spanish Civil War for ideological reasons, Pierpaolo Barbieri, an economic analyst, shows that the motives of the two main powers were quite different. —Stephen Schwartz, Weekly Standard

Hitler's Dancers

Author : Lilian Karina
Publisher : Berghahn Books
ISBN 13 : 9781571816887
Total Pages : 400 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (168 download)

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Book Synopsis Hitler's Dancers by : Lilian Karina

Download or read book Hitler's Dancers written by Lilian Karina and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2004 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Nazis burned books and banned much modern art. However, few people know the fascinating story of German modern dance, which was the great exception. Modern expressive dance found favor with the regime and especially with the infamous Dr. Joseph Goebbels, the Minister of Propaganda. How modern artists collaborated with Nazism reveals an important aspect of modernism, uncovers the bizarre bureaucracy which controlled culture and tells the histories of great figures who became enthusiastic Nazis and lied about it later. The book offers three perspectives: the dancer Lilian Karina writes her very vivid personal story of dancing in interwar Germany; the dance historian Marion Kant gives a systematic account of the interaction of modern dance and the totalitarian state, and a documentary appendix provides a glimpse into the twisted reality created by Nazi racism, pedantic bureaucrats and artistic ambition.

Limits of Hitler's Power

Author : Edward Norman Peterson
Publisher : Princeton University Press
ISBN 13 : 1400878098
Total Pages : 497 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (8 download)

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Book Synopsis Limits of Hitler's Power by : Edward Norman Peterson

Download or read book Limits of Hitler's Power written by Edward Norman Peterson and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2015-12-08 with total page 497 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Professor Peterson examines these questions in relation to Hitler's government with its reputedly unlimited internal power; he traces the flow of power throughout the Nazi state from 1933 to 1945, from Hitler to his ministers to provincial governments. Through a detailed analysis of the province of Bavaria the author shows that Hitler did not have the absolute power often assumed; that power in a totalitarian state is far more complex than many historians have conjectured; that Hitler dealt with a vast bureaucratic structure complicated by constant internecine fighting, and that only rarely did he command complete obedience. Originally published in 1969. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

The Nazis Next Door

Author : Eric Lichtblau
Publisher : HMH
ISBN 13 : 0547669224
Total Pages : 299 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (476 download)

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Book Synopsis The Nazis Next Door by : Eric Lichtblau

Download or read book The Nazis Next Door written by Eric Lichtblau and published by HMH. This book was released on 2014-10-28 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Newsweek Best Book of the Year: “Captivating . . . rooted in first-rate research” (The New York Times Book Review). In this New York Times bestseller, once-secret government records and interviews tell the full story of the thousands of Nazis—from concentration camp guards to high-level officers in the Third Reich—who came to the United States after World War II and quietly settled into new lives. Many gained entry on their own as self-styled war “refugees.” But some had help from the US government. The CIA, the FBI, and the military all put Hitler’s minions to work as spies, intelligence assets, and leading scientists and engineers, whitewashing their histories. Only years after their arrival did private sleuths and government prosecutors begin trying to identify the hidden Nazis. Now, relying on a trove of newly disclosed documents and scores of interviews, Pulitzer Prize–winning investigative reporter Eric Lichtblau reveals this little-known and “disturbing” chapter of postwar history (Salon).

The Death of Democracy

Author : Benjamin Carter Hett
Publisher : Henry Holt and Company
ISBN 13 : 1250162513
Total Pages : 304 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (51 download)

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Book Synopsis The Death of Democracy by : Benjamin Carter Hett

Download or read book The Death of Democracy written by Benjamin Carter Hett and published by Henry Holt and Company. This book was released on 2018-04-03 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A riveting account of how the Nazi Party came to power and how the failures of the Weimar Republic and the shortsightedness of German politicians allowed it to happen. Why did democracy fall apart so quickly and completely in Germany in the 1930s? How did a democratic government allow Adolf Hitler to seize power? In The Death of Democracy, Benjamin Carter Hett answers these questions, and the story he tells has disturbing resonances for our own time. To say that Hitler was elected is too simple. He would never have come to power if Germany’s leading politicians had not responded to a spate of populist insurgencies by trying to co-opt him, a strategy that backed them into a corner from which the only way out was to bring the Nazis in. Hett lays bare the misguided confidence of conservative politicians who believed that Hitler and his followers would willingly support them, not recognizing that their efforts to use the Nazis actually played into Hitler’s hands. They had willingly given him the tools to turn Germany into a vicious dictatorship. Benjamin Carter Hett is a leading scholar of twentieth-century Germany and a gifted storyteller whose portraits of these feckless politicians show how fragile democracy can be when those in power do not respect it. He offers a powerful lesson for today, when democracy once again finds itself embattled and the siren song of strongmen sounds ever louder.

Working Towards the Führer

Author : Anthony McElligott
Publisher : Manchester University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780719067334
Total Pages : 292 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (673 download)

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Book Synopsis Working Towards the Führer by : Anthony McElligott

Download or read book Working Towards the Führer written by Anthony McElligott and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Covering issues such as the legacy of the World Wars, the female voter, propaganda, occupied lands, the judiciary, public opinion and resistance, this volume furthers the debate on how Nazi Germany operated. Gone are the post-war stereotypes--instead there is a more complex picture of the regime and its actions, one that shows the instability of the dictatorship, its dependence on a measure of consent as well as coercion.

The Nazis' March to Chaos

Author : Roger Beaumont
Publisher : Praeger
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 232 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (91 download)

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Book Synopsis The Nazis' March to Chaos by : Roger Beaumont

Download or read book The Nazis' March to Chaos written by Roger Beaumont and published by Praeger. This book was released on 2000-01-30 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rather than a technical treatise based on equations, this study of the Hitler era in Germany from the standpoint of chaos-complexity theory is a narrative history based on a non-linear perspective. After defining basic chaos-complexity concepts and terms, like sensitivity to initial conditions and fractals, the book explores the Third Reich as a chaotic system; the clash between the image of Nazi technical prowess and the anti-modernism in National Socialist ideology; and German and Nazi military tactics and doctrine as ways of coping with the chaos of war and imposing it upon the enemy. Beaumont also looks at attempts to instill the arrogance and rage of the Nazi Party's brown-shirted storm troops into the Wehrmacht through the National Socialist Leadership Officer program, the Nazi Commissars. What were the intricate causal roots of the Endloesung or Final Solution? Why did the Allies refuse to mount a direct attack on the Nazi infrastructure responsible for the Holocaust? The study concludes with a discussion of paradoxes and implications, considering such questions as whether Nazism was a form of chaos, in the theoretical sense of its being a degree of order within apparently random turbulence, or a kind of recurring pathology, as well as whether social and historical processes are tractable to chaos-complexity-based analyses.

On the Road to the Wolf's Lair

Author : Theodore S. Hamerow
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780674636804
Total Pages : 474 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (368 download)

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Book Synopsis On the Road to the Wolf's Lair by : Theodore S. Hamerow

Download or read book On the Road to the Wolf's Lair written by Theodore S. Hamerow and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 474 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the beginning, they rallied behind Hitler in the national interest of Germany; in the end, they sacrificed their lives to assassinate him. A history of German resistance to Hitler in high places, this book offers a glimpse into one of the most intractable mysteries. Why did high-ranking army officers, civil servants, and religious leaders support Hitler? Why did they ultimately turn against him? What transformed these unlikely men, most of them elitist, militaristic, and fiercely nationalistic, into martyrs to a universal ideal? The resisters in On the Road to the Wolf's Lair are not the singular souls doomed to failure by the massive Nazi machinery, but those who emerged from the Third Reich itself--those people whose cultural, administrative, and military positions allowed them, ultimately, to form a systematic, organized opposition to the Nazi regime. These were people with a vested interest in the Third Reich, and their slow and painful awakening to its evils makes a dramatic story, marked as much by temporizing and compromise, vacillation and reluctance--a resistance to conscience--as by the intrigue and heroics of political resistance that finally emerged. Hamerow follows these men as, one by one, they find themselves overwhelmed by guilt and contrition over their support of a murderous regime. He shows how their awakened moral reckonings and higher interests overrode lifetime habits and disciplines on the road to "the wolf's lair." The result is an unsparing history of the German resistance to Hitler--one where the players emerge for the first time as real people with complex motives and evolving characters. Almost a history of the possibility of an emerging collective moral conscience within a destructive environment, the book adds to our understanding of the fall of the Third Reich and of the task of history itself.

Hitler's American Model

Author : James Q. Whitman
Publisher : Princeton University Press
ISBN 13 : 1400884632
Total Pages : 223 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (8 download)

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Book Synopsis Hitler's American Model by : James Q. Whitman

Download or read book Hitler's American Model written by James Q. Whitman and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2017-02-14 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How American race law provided a blueprint for Nazi Germany Nazism triumphed in Germany during the high era of Jim Crow laws in the United States. Did the American regime of racial oppression in any way inspire the Nazis? The unsettling answer is yes. In Hitler's American Model, James Whitman presents a detailed investigation of the American impact on the notorious Nuremberg Laws, the centerpiece anti-Jewish legislation of the Nazi regime. Contrary to those who have insisted that there was no meaningful connection between American and German racial repression, Whitman demonstrates that the Nazis took a real, sustained, significant, and revealing interest in American race policies. As Whitman shows, the Nuremberg Laws were crafted in an atmosphere of considerable attention to the precedents American race laws had to offer. German praise for American practices, already found in Hitler's Mein Kampf, was continuous throughout the early 1930s, and the most radical Nazi lawyers were eager advocates of the use of American models. But while Jim Crow segregation was one aspect of American law that appealed to Nazi radicals, it was not the most consequential one. Rather, both American citizenship and antimiscegenation laws proved directly relevant to the two principal Nuremberg Laws—the Citizenship Law and the Blood Law. Whitman looks at the ultimate, ugly irony that when Nazis rejected American practices, it was sometimes not because they found them too enlightened, but too harsh. Indelibly linking American race laws to the shaping of Nazi policies in Germany, Hitler's American Model upends understandings of America's influence on racist practices in the wider world.

Martin Bormann

Author : Volker Koop
Publisher : Frontline Books
ISBN 13 : 1473886953
Total Pages : 248 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (738 download)

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Book Synopsis Martin Bormann by : Volker Koop

Download or read book Martin Bormann written by Volker Koop and published by Frontline Books. This book was released on 2020-08-27 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Born on 17 June 1900, Martin Ludwig Bormann became one of the most powerful and most feared men in the Third Reich. An obsessive bureaucrat, it was Bormann who helped steer Hitler’s apparatus of terror so effectively that he became the clandestine ruler of Nazi Germany. After joining the Nazi Party in 1927 Bormann rose through its ranks. Indeed, by July 1933 Bormann had maneuvered himself into the position where he became the Chief of Cabinet in the Office of the Deputy Führer, Rudolf Hess. In this role Bormann gradually consolidated his power base, so that when Hess carried out his infamous flight to the United Kingdom in 1941, Bormann stepped into his shoes. As the head of the Party Chancellery, Bormann duly took control of the Nazi Party. By the end of 1942, he was in effect Hitler’s deputy and his closest collaborator. With the Führer increasingly preoccupied with military matters, Hitler came to rely more and more on Bormann to handle Germany’s domestic affairs. On 12 April 1943, Bormann was appointed Personal Secretary to the Führer. Feared by ministers, Gauleiters, civil servants, judges and generals alike, Bormann identified strongly with Hitler’s ideas on racial politics, destruction of the Jews and forced labor and made himself indispensable as the Führer’s executioner. Cold as ice, he decided the fate of millions of people. In January 1945, with the Third Reich collapsing, Bormann returned to the Führerbunker with Hitler. Following Hitler’s suicide on 30 April, Bormann was named as Party Minister, thus officially confirming his rise to the top of the Party. Late the following day he fled from the bunker in an attempt to escape the encircling Red Army; his fate remaining a mystery for many years. In October 1946 he was found guilty in absentia by the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg and sentenced to death. Drawing heavily on recently declassified documents and files, the historian and journalist Volker Koop reveals the full story of the most faithful member of Hitler’s inner circle, an individual who, whilst little known to the German people, became the second most powerful man in the Third Reich.

Hitler’s Ethic

Author : R. Weikart
Publisher : Springer
ISBN 13 : 0230623980
Total Pages : 261 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (36 download)

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Book Synopsis Hitler’s Ethic by : R. Weikart

Download or read book Hitler’s Ethic written by R. Weikart and published by Springer. This book was released on 2009-07-20 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, Weikart helps unlock the mystery of Hitler's evil by vividly demonstrating the surprising conclusion that Hitler's immorality flowed from a coherent ethic. Hitler was inspired by evolutionary ethics to pursue the utopian project of biologically improving the human race.

Big Business and Hitler

Author : Jacques R. Pauwels
Publisher : James Lorimer & Company
ISBN 13 : 1459409760
Total Pages : 306 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (594 download)

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Book Synopsis Big Business and Hitler by : Jacques R. Pauwels

Download or read book Big Business and Hitler written by Jacques R. Pauwels and published by James Lorimer & Company. This book was released on 2017-11-15 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For big business in Germany and around the world, Hitler and his National Socialist party were good news. Business was bad in the 1930s, and for multinational corporations Germany was a bright spot in a world suffering from the Great Depression. As Jacques R. Pauwels explains in this book, corporations were delighted with the profits that came from re-arming Germany, and then supplying both sides of the Second World War. Recent historical research in Germany has laid bare the links between Hitler's regime and big German firms. Scholars have now also documented the role of American firms — General Motors, IBM, Standard Oil, Ford, and many others — whose German subsidiaries eagerly sold equipment, weapons, and fuel needed for the German war machine. A key roadblock to America's late entry into the Second World War was behind-the-scenes pressure from US corporations seeking to protect their profitable business selling to both sides. Basing his work on the recent findings of scholars in many European countries and the US, Pauwels explains how Hitler gained and held the support of powerful business interests who found the well-liked oneparty fascist government, ready and willing to protect the property and profits of big business. He documents the role of the many multinationals in business today who supported Hitler and gained from the Nazi government's horrendous measures.

Hitler's Police Battalions

Author : Edward B. Westermann
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 366 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (91 download)

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Book Synopsis Hitler's Police Battalions by : Edward B. Westermann

Download or read book Hitler's Police Battalions written by Edward B. Westermann and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page 366 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When the German Wehrmacht swarmed across Eastern Europe, an elite corps followed close at its heels. Along with the SS and Gestapo, the Ordnungspolizei, or Uniformed Police, played a central role in Nazi genocide that until now has been generally neglected by historians of the war. Beginning with the invasion of Poland, the Uniformed Police were charged with following the army to curb resistance, pacify the countryside, patrol Jewish ghettos, and generally maintain order in the conquered territories. Edward Westermann examines how this force emerged as a primary instrument of annihilation, responsible for the murder of hundreds of thousands of the Third Reich's political and racial enemies. In Hitler's Police Battalions he reveals how the institutional mindset of these "ordinary policemen" allowed them to commit atrocities without a second thought. To uncover the story of how the German national police were fashioned into a corps of political soldiers, Westermann reveals initiatives pursued before the war by Heinrich Himmler and Kurt Daluege to create a culture within the existing police forces that fostered anti-Semitism and anti-Communism as institutional norms. Challenging prevailing interpretations of German culture, Westermann draws on extensive archival research—including the testimony of former policemen—to illuminate this transformation and the callous organizational culture that emerged. Purged of dissidents, indoctrinated to idolize Hitler, and trained in military combat, these police battalions-often numbering several hundred men-repeatedly conducted actions against Jews, Slavs, gypsies, asocials, and other groups on their own initiative, even when they had the choice not to. In addition to documenting these atrocities, Westermann examines cooperation between the Ordnungspolizei and the SS and Gestapo, and the close relationship between police and Wehrmacht in the conduct of the anti-partisan campaign of annihilation. Throughout, Westermann stresses the importance of ideological indoctrination and organizational initiatives within specific groups. It was the organizational culture of the Uniformed Police, he maintains, and not German culture in general that led these men to commit genocide. Hitler's Police Battalions provides the most complete and comprehensive study to date of this neglected branch of Himmler's SS and Police empire and adds a new dimension to our understanding of the Holocaust and the war on the Eastern front.