Richard Bessel | |
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Born | Richard Bessel 29 April 1948 |
Nationality | American |
Academic background | |
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Academic work | |
Discipline | History |
Institutions |
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Richard Bessel FRHistS is professor of twentieth century history at the University of York and a member of the editorial boards of German History and History Today . He is a specialist in the social and political history of modern Germany,the aftermath of the two world wars and the history of policing. [1]
Bessel earned his BA at Antioch College and his DPhil at the University of Oxford. He is a fellow of the Royal Historical Society. [1] He is also a fellow of the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies. [2]
Bessel's Germany 1945:From War to Peace (2009),dealing with the transition from German defeat at the end of the Second World War to peace,was positively reviewed by Jeffry Diefendorf in H-Net with the reviewer noting its relevance to modern debates about failed states and nation building. [3] Brian Ladd,in The New York Times ,noted Bessel's "sober" treatment of the topic and his preference for understatement over pathos. [4]
In Violence - A Modern Obsession (2015),Bessel gave a history of violence in the twentieth century that The Guardian's reviewer saw as a warning. [5] Ian Bell,in The Herald,noted the denseness of the material and the hellishness of the twentieth century outlined by Bessel,but also that the work was thoughtful rather than being a polemic against violence. [6]
The Volkssturm was a levée en masse national militia established by Nazi Germany during the last months of World War II. It was set up by the Nazi Party on the orders of Adolf Hitler and established on 25 September 1944. It was staffed by conscripting males between the ages of 16 and 60 years, who were not already serving in some military unit.
Pacifism is the opposition or resistance to war, militarism or violence. The word pacifism was coined by the French peace campaigner Émile Arnaud and adopted by other peace activists at the tenth Universal Peace Congress in Glasgow in 1901. A related term is ahimsa, which is a core philosophy in Indian religions such as Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism. While modern connotations are recent, having been explicated since the 19th century, ancient references abound.
Alfred Ernst Rosenberg was a Baltic German Nazi theorist and ideologue. Rosenberg was first introduced to Adolf Hitler by Dietrich Eckart and he held several important posts in the Nazi government. He was the head of the NSDAP Office of Foreign Affairs during the entire rule of Nazi Germany (1933–1945), and led Amt Rosenberg, an official Nazi body for cultural policy and surveillance, between 1934 and 1945. During World War II, Rosenberg was the head of the Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories (1941–1945). After the war, he was convicted of crimes against peace; planning, initiating and waging wars of aggression; war crimes; and crimes against humanity at the Nuremberg trials in 1946. He was sentenced to death by hanging and executed on 16 October 1946.
The German Labour Front was the national labour organization of the Nazi Party, which replaced the various independent trade unions in Germany during the process of Gleichschaltung or Nazification.
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany is a book by American journalist William L. Shirer in which the author chronicles the rise and fall of Nazi Germany from the birth of Adolf Hitler in 1889 to the end of World War II in Europe in 1945. It was first published in 1960 by Simon & Schuster in the United States. It was a bestseller in both the United States and Europe, and a critical success outside Germany; in Germany, criticism of the book stimulated sales. The book was feted by journalists, as reflected by its receipt of the National Book Award for non-fiction, but the reception from academic historians was mixed.
Louis Leo Snyder was an American scholar, who witnessed first hand the Nazi mass rallies held from 1923 on in Germany; and wrote about them from New York in his Hitlerism: The Iron Fist in Germany published in 1932 under the pseudonym Nordicus. Snyder predicted Adolf Hitler's rise to power, Nazi alliance with Benito Mussolini, and possibly the war upon the French and the Jews. His book was the first publication of the complete NSDAP National Socialist Program in the English language.
The Madagascar Plan was a plan proposed by the Nazi German government to forcibly relocate the Jewish population of Europe to the island of Madagascar. Franz Rademacher, head of the Jewish Department of the German Foreign Office, proposed the idea in June 1940, shortly before the Fall of France. The proposal called for the handing over of control of Madagascar, then a French colony, to Germany as part of the eventual peace terms.
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 he retired 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.
This bibliography of Adolf Hitler is a list of some non-fiction texts in English written about and by him.
Nazi Germany was an overwhelmingly Christian nation. A census in May 1939, six years into the Nazi era and a year following the annexations of Austria and Czechoslovakia into Germany, indicates that 54% of the population considered itself Protestant, 41% considered itself Catholic, 3.5% self-identified as Gottgläubig, and 1.5% as "atheist". Protestants were over-represented in the Nazi Party's membership and electorate, and Catholics were under-represented.
The religious beliefs of Adolf Hitler, dictator of Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945, have been a matter of debate. His opinions regarding religious matters changed considerably over time. During the beginning of his political career, Hitler publicly expressed favorable opinions towards traditional Christian ideals, but later abandoned them. Most historians describe his later posture as adversarial to organized Christianity and established Christian denominations. He also staunchly criticized atheism.
Dagmar Herzog is Distinguished Professor of History and the Daniel Rose Faculty Scholar at the Graduate Center, City University of New York.
During the final weeks of Nazi Germany and World War II in Europe, many civilians, government officials, and military personnel throughout Germany and German-occupied Europe committed suicide. In addition to high-ranking Nazi officials like Adolf Hitler, Joseph Goebbels, Heinrich Himmler, and Philipp Bouhler, many others chose suicide rather than accept the defeat of Germany. Motivating factors included fear of reprisals and atrocities by the Allies and especially the Red Army, Nazi propaganda glorifying suicide as preferable to defeat, and despondency after the suicide of Adolf Hitler. For example, in May 1945, up to 1,000 people killed themselves before and after the entry of the Red Army into the German town of Demmin. In Berlin alone more than 7,000 suicides were reported in 1945.
Robert Gerwarth is a German historian and author who specialises in European history, with an emphasis on German history. Since finishing a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Oxford, he has held fellowships at Princeton, Harvard, the NIOD (Amsterdam) and the Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of Western Australia. He teaches at University College Dublin (UCD), Ireland.
The ideology of the Schutzstaffel, a paramilitary force and an instrument of terror of the Nazi Party in Nazi Germany, emphasized a racist vision of "racial purity", primarily based on antisemitism and loyalty to Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany.
This is a list of books about Nazi Germany, the state that existed in Germany during the period from 1933 to 1945, when its government was controlled by Adolf Hitler and his National Socialist German Workers' Party. It also includes some important works on the development of Nazi imperial ideology, totalitarianism, German society during the era, the formation of anti-Semitic racial policies, the post-war ramifications of Nazism, along with various conceptual interpretations of the Third Reich.
This is a bibliographyof works on World War II. The bibliography aims to include primary, secondary and tertiary sources regarding the European theatre of World War II (1939–1945) and the Pacific War (1941–1945). By extension, it includes works regarding the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945). Additionally, the scope of the bibliography expands to the causes of World War II and the immediate aftermath of World War II, such as evacuation and expulsion and war crimes trials. Works on the causes or the aftermath of World War II should only be included if they describe the respective events in the specific context of and relation to the conflict itself.
Wolfram Wette is a German military historian and peace researcher. He is an author or editor of over 40 books on the history of Nazi Germany, including the seminal Germany and the Second World War series from the German Military History Research Office (MGFA).
Aristotle Kallis is a British historian who specialises in modern European history, with an emphasis on the study of inter-war German and Italian fascism, as well as propaganda in Nazi Germany. He is an author and editor of several books on the subject of fascism and totalitarianism, including Genocide and Fascism: The Eliminationist Drive in Fascist Europe (2009). His 2005 book, Nazi Propaganda and the Second World War, deals with the subjects of Nazi propaganda and the Wehrmacht Propaganda Troops.
William I. Hitchcock is the William W. Corcoran Professor of History at the University of Virginia. His work focuses on the history of the 20th century.