Conformity and resistance

Week 14

Folk community

“I have been expelled from the folk community”

The Nazi folk community

• More a notion than a reality• Idea of an equal community of racial comrades• Everyone’s participation• Participatory violence• Equality defined racially and socially• Strong gender components; state interfering with family and

private sphere• Based on exclusion of those who did not fit in racially and

biologically (“non-Aryans,” “asocials,” homosexuals, those sexually “deviant,” criminals, hereditary ill)

• Eugenics and later annihilation

Youth for the Führer

‘Co-ordination’ of education system‘Politically unreliable’ teachers sacked.Curriculum brought into line with Nazi ideology.

Youth Organizations:Deutsches Jungvolk (German Young People, DJ) – Boys aged 10-14.Hitler Jugend (Hitler Youth) – Boys aged 14-18.Jungmädelbund (League of Young Girls) – Girls aged 10-14.Bund Deutscher Mädel (League of German Girls, BDM) – Girls aged 14-18.

Highways and people’s car

Ernst Röhm, 1887-1934

With Himmler and Daluege, 1933

Heinrich HimmlerReichsführer SS and

Chief of Police

SS

Leibstandarte Waffen SS Totenkopfverbände

Ordnungspolizei (order police)

Municipal police

SipoSecurity Police

(Heydrich)

KripoCriminal Police

GestapoSecret state police

SDSecurity Service

(Heydrich)

Foreign intelligence

Domestic intelligence

Organization of the Nazi Police Apparatus(simplified)

Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler(1900-1945)

SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich (1904-1942)

Organization of the Reich Security Main Office

Headquarters of the RSHA and the Gestapo

Today the site of the Topography of Terror

Concentration camps in Nazi Germany

Conformity

August Landmesser, 1910-1944

Resistance

“I want you to know: there were no nameless heroes; it was people, who had names, faces, longing, and hopes, and therefore the pain of even the smallest among them was no lesser than of the first among those whose name we know. I want that they always stay close to you, as friends, as relatives, as yourselves.”

Julius Fučík from prison, 1943

Else and Otto Hampel, executed April 1943

Landmesser and his family

Liselotte Herrmann, 1909-1938

Foreign relations• At first calming other countries, pact with Poland• Failed coup in Austria in 1934, turning the country into autocracy• Saarland (1935), Rhineland (1936)• Rapprochement with Italy: conflict in Ethiopia and Spain• Berlin-Rome Axis, 1936: closing ranks with Mussolini• Hossbach memorandum, Nov 1937• Japan becomes ally in 1937• Austria annexed in March 1938• Appeasement: Czechoslovakia broken up Sep 38, occupied March 39• Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, August 39• Attack on Poland and beginning of WWII, Sep 1, 1939• Operation Barbarossa: attack on the Soviet Union, June 1941