Eric Kurlander (born January 1973) is an American historian who currently serves as the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of History at Stetson University. [1] He received his B.A. in history from Bowdoin College, and his M.A. and Ph.D. in modern European history from Harvard University. Kurlander is a specialist in modern German history and particularly of Nazi Germany, about which he has written three books. The most recent, Hitler's Monsters: A Supernatural History of the Third Reich, was nominated for the Bookseller/Diagram Prize for Oddest Title of the Year in 2019. [2]
Gleichschaltung, or in English, co-ordination, was in Nazi terminology the process of Nazification by which Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party successively established a system of totalitarian control and coordination over all aspects of German society and societies occupied by Nazi Germany "from the economy and trade associations to the media, culture and education".
The German People's Party was a national liberal party in Weimar Germany and a successor to the National Liberal Party of the German Empire. A right-wing liberal or conservative-liberal party, its most famous member was Chancellor and Foreign Minister Gustav Stresemann, a 1926 Nobel Peace Prize laureate.
The German Democratic Party was a liberal political party in Germany. It was founded in November 1918 by leaders of the former Progressive People's Party, left-wing members of the National Liberal Party and a new group calling themselves the Democrats.
Alfred Ernst Christian Alexander Hugenberg was an influential German businessman and politician. An important figure in nationalist politics in Germany for the first few decades of the twentieth century, Hugenberg became the country's leading media proprietor during the interwar period. As leader of the German National People's Party he was instrumental in helping Adolf Hitler become Chancellor of Germany and served in his first cabinet in 1933, hoping to control Hitler and use him as his "tool." Those plans backfired, and by the end of 1933 Hugenberg had been pushed to the sidelines. Although Hugenberg continued to serve as a "guest" member of the Reichstag until 1945, he wielded no political influence.
The Heim ins Reich was a foreign policy pursued by Adolf Hitler during World War II, beginning in 1938. The aim of Hitler's initiative was to convince all Volksdeutsche who were living outside Nazi Germany that they should strive to bring these regions "home" into Greater Germany, but also relocate from territories that were not under German control, following the conquest of Poland, in accordance with the Nazi–Soviet pact. The Heim ins Reich manifesto targeted areas ceded in Versailles to the newly reborn nation of Poland, various lands of immigration, as well as other areas that were inhabited by significant ethnic German populations, such as the Sudetenland, Danzig, and the southeastern and northeastern regions of Europe after 6 October 1939.
The Völkisch movement was a German ethno-nationalist movement active from the late 19th century through to the Nazi era, with remnants in the Federal Republic of Germany afterwards. Erected on the idea of "blood and soil", inspired by the one-body-metaphor, and by the idea of naturally grown communities in unity, it was characterized by organicism, racialism, populism, agrarianism, romantic nationalism and – as a consequence of a growing exclusive and ethnic connotation – by antisemitism from the 1900s onward. Völkisch nationalists generally considered the Jews to be an "alien people" who belonged to a different Volk than the Germans.
The Reich Security Main Office was an organization subordinate to Heinrich Himmler in his dual capacity as Chef der Deutschen Polizei and Reichsführer-SS, the head of the Nazi Party's Schutzstaffel (SS). The organization's stated duty was to fight all "enemies of the Reich" inside and outside the borders of Nazi Germany.
Social liberalism, also known as left liberalism in Germany, new liberalism in the United Kingdom, modern liberalism in the United States, and progressive liberalism in Spanish speaking countries is a political philosophy and variety of liberalism that endorses a social market economy within an individualist economy and the expansion of civil and political rights. Under social liberalism, the common good is viewed as harmonious with the freedom of the individual.
This article aims to give a historical outline of liberalism in Germany. The liberal parties dealt with in the timeline below are, largely, those which received sufficient support at one time or another to have been represented in parliament. Not all parties so included, however, necessarily labeled themselves "liberal". The sign ⇒ denotes another party in that scheme.
The association of Nazism with occultism occurs in a wide range of theories, speculation and research into the origins of Nazism and into Nazism's possible relationship with various occult traditions. Such ideas have flourished as a part of popular culture since at least the early 1940s, and gained renewed popularity starting in the 1960s. Books on the topic include The Morning of the Magicians (1960) and The Spear of Destiny (1972). Nazism and occultism have also been featured in numerous documentaries, films, novels, comic books, and other fictional media. Notable examples include the film Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), the Wolfenstein video game series, and the comic-book series Hellboy (1993-present).
Sir Richard John Evans is a British historian of 19th- and 20th-century Europe with a focus on Germany. He is the author of eighteen books, including his three-volume The Third Reich Trilogy (2003–2008). Evans was Regius Professor of History at the University of Cambridge from 2008 until his retirement in 2014, and President of Cambridge's Wolfson College from 2010 to 2017. He has been Provost of Gresham College in London since 2014. Evans was appointed Knight Bachelor for services to scholarship in the 2012 Birthday Honours.
Henry Ashby Turner, Jr. was an American historian of Germany who was a professor at Yale University for over forty years. He is best known for his book German Big Business and the Rise of Hitler (1985) in which he challenged the common theory that industrialists in Germany were the Nazi Party’s most influential supporters.
The Free-minded People's Party or Radical People's Party was a social liberal party in the German Empire, founded as a result of the split of the German Free-minded Party in 1893. One of its most notable members was Eugen Richter, who was party leader from 1893 to 1906. The party advocated liberalism, social progressivism and parliamentarism.
Die Glocke was a purported top-secret Nazi scientific technological device, secret weapon, or Wunderwaffe. First described by Polish journalist and author Igor Witkowski in Prawda o Wunderwaffe (2000), it was later popularized by military journalist and author Nick Cook who associated it with Nazi occultism, antigravity and free energy research. Mainstream reviewers have criticized claims about Die Glocke as being pseudoscientific, recycled rumors, and a hoax. Die Glocke and other alleged Nazi "miracle weapons" have been dramatized in video games, television shows, and novels.
National liberalism is a variant of liberalism, combining liberal policies and issues with elements of nationalism.
Schleswig-Holstein Farmers and Farmworkers Democracy was a regional agrarian political party based in Schleswig-Holstein during the Weimar Republic. The party won a single seat in the 1919 federal election and one in the Free State of Prussia the same year.
Nazism, officially National Socialism, is the ideology and practices associated with Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party in Nazi Germany. During Hitler's rise to power in 1930s Europe, it was frequently referred to as Hitlerism. The later related term "Neo-Nazism" is applied to other far-right groups with similar ideas which formed after the collapse of the Nazi regime.
German nationalism is a political ideology and historical current in Austrian politics. It arose in the 19th century as a nationalist movement amongst the German-speaking population of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It favours close ties with Germany, which it views as the nation-state for all ethnic Germans, and the possibility of the incorporation of Austria into a Greater Germany.
Hitler: Memoirs of a Confidant are the published memoirs written by Otto Wagener about Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party's early history. A German major general by the end for World War II and, for a period, Wagener was Adolf Hitler's party economist, chief of staff of the SA, and confidant, whose career was derailed by rival Hermann Göring. Wagener wrote his memoirs in 1946 while being held by the British, filling “thirty-six British military exercise notebooks.” His work was not published until seven years after his death, in 1978 in German. The English edition was published in 1985 by Yale University Press. His memoirs are used, to some degree, by Third Reich historians.