The society of Holocaust victims: what was life inside a Nazi camp like?
To mark the 80th anniversary of the first transport to Theresienstadt on 24 November 1941, scholar Anna Hájková explores the social relations that formed within Nazi camps.
The dividing line between German culture and Nazi culture
In November 1942, Anne Frank drafted a fictional advertising brochure for the rear part of the building in central Amsterdam that sheltered her and other Jews. Turning Nazi oppression on its head, she ruled that “all civilized languages” were permitted, “therefore no German.” Still, she was prepared to qualify the ban on the language of […]
How Germany’s financial collapse led to Nazism
The summer of 1931 saw Germany’s financial collapse, one of the biggest economic catastrophes of modern history. The German crisis contributed to the rise of the Nazi Party. The timeline below shows historic events that led up to Adolf Hitler’s taking control of Germany.
The Red Cross in Nazi Germany
Built on the Geneva Conventions of 1949, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) was founded to protect the lives and dignity of victims of armed conflict and violence and to provide them with assistance. But despite being one of the world’s most revered aid organizations, the ICRC has a complicated and unsettling history.
Christmas in Nazi Germany
Christmas is the most widely celebrated festival in the world but in few countries is it valued as deeply as in Germany. The country has given the world a number of important elements of the season, including the Christmas tree, the Advent calendar and wreath, gingerbread cookies, and Bach’s Christmas Oratorio, “Es ist ein Ros` entsprungen,” or “Vom Himmel Hoch.”
Suicide in Nazi Germany in 1945
When the US Army took the Saxon city of Leipzig in April 1945, a gruelling scene was revealed inside the town hall. The Nazi treasurer of the city, his wife, and his daughter had all committed suicide. But these suicides were not isolated cases. In the spring of 1945, Nazi Germany went to its end in an unprecedented wave of suicides.
Oxford University Press faces up to the Nazis
By Simon Eliot
Ever since the end of the First World War Oxford University Press had been keen to re-establish some sort of presence in the German book trade. Germany had been a significant market for its academic books in the nineteenth century, and a number of German scholars had edited Greek and Roman texts for the Press. Nevertheless the depressed state of the German economy and the uncertainty of its currency had made this impossible in the first few years after 1918.
Benazir Bhutto’s mixed legacy
By T.V. Paul
Benazir Bhutto, the daughter of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, had been prime minister of Pakistan twice: first in December 1988, and a second time in October 1993 after the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) managed to win two elections under her leadership. Both times the presidents (heads of state) dismissed Bhutto before she completed her full term.
Q&A with T.V. Paul on the 25th anniversary of Benazir Bhutto’s election
Twenty-five years ago today, Benazir Bhutto became the first female Prime Minister of Pakistan and the first female head of government in a Muslim country. T.V. Paul, author of The Warrior State: Pakistan in the Contemporary World, joins us to discuss her legacy, the role of women in Pakistani politics today, and the changing shape of political parties in Pakistan.
The History of the World: Nazis attack the USSR (‘Operation Barbarossa’)
In December 1940 planning began for a German invasion of the Soviet Union. By that winter, the USSR had made further gains in the west, apparently with an eye to securing a glacis against a future German attack. A war against Finland gave her important strategic areas. The Baltic republics of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia were swallowed in 1940.
How Nazi Germany lost the nuclear plot
By Gordon Fraser
When the Nazis came to power in Germany in 1933, neither the Atomic Bomb nor the Holocaust were on anybody’s agenda. Instead, the Nazi’s top aim was to rid German culture of perceived pollution. A priority was science, where paradoxically Germany already led the world. To safeguard this position, loud Nazi voices, such as Nobel laureate Philipp Lenard, complained about a ‘massive infiltration of the Jews into universities’.
Nazis on the run
Gerald Steinacher is the first person to uncover the full extent of the secret escape routes and hiding places ‘ratlines’ that smuggled Nazis out of Europe, through South Tyrol, across the Alps into Italy, and onward to Argentina and elsewhere. His ground-breaking research in the archives of the ICRC in Geneva brought to light the fact that the Red Cross supplied travel papers to war criminals – amongst them Adolf Eichmann and Josef Mengele.
Do American family names make sense?
Do names really mean anything, even when they seem to? Individuals in present day America called Smith, Jackson, Washington, or Redhead are not usually smiths, sons of Jack, residents in Washington, or red-haired.
American Exchanges: Third Reich’s Elite Schools
In the summer of 1935, an exchange programme between leading American academies and German schools, set up by the International Schoolboy Fellowship (ISF), was hijacked by the Nazi government. The organization had been set up in 1927 by Walter Huston Lillard, the principal of Tabor Academy in Marion, Massachusetts. Its aim was to foster better relations between all nations through the medium of schoolboy exchange.
The man behind the legend: Martin Niemöller, Hitler’s Personal Prisoner
Martin Niemöller, Lutheran pastor in the Dahlem parish at the outskirts of Berlin, stood at the centre of the struggle over hegemony in the German Protestant Church during the Third Reich.
Breakthrough and disgrace: Knut Hamsun’s Hunger and Pan in retrospect
The 2023 award of the Nobel Prize for literature to the Norwegian writer Jon Fosse brings Norwegian literature into focus for English-speaking readers and provides a fresh angle from which to view the writings of Knut Hamsun.