Many aspects of the Nazis’ methods of persuasion, especially the rhetoric and psychology of printed propaganda and the speeches of Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels have been the subjects of intensive study. Oddly, the subject of technology applied as an instrument or supplement to propaganda, or the rhetorical contributions of technological devices, has very little representation in Nazi studies, despite the significance it played in their rise to power. This thesis attempts to fill that gap. Specifically, I will be treating lights and lighting, sound and music, the Nuremberg Party Rallies, radio, and cinema from a rhetorical perspective. The rhetorical framework I have constructed to analyze these elements relies on a synthesis of Richard Weaver’s Tyrannizing Image and Kenneth Burke’s Terministic Screen concepts. Burke provides an important connection to visual rhetoric while Weaver provides links to culture, myth, and history.The ultimate goal of this thesis is to show how the rhetorical theories of Kenneth Burke and Richard Weaver can be used to explain the Nazis’ persuasion tactics. Aristotle demanded that rhetors “know all available means of persuasion,” and obviously, technological devices have rhetorical value. To prove this, I have relied as much as possible on primary sources, especially the autobiographies of former Nazis and Hitler’s Mein Kampf, but the Hitler biographers (Joachim Fest, Robert Waite, and John Toland) have also proved their usefulness. While this thesis is not an exhaustive treatment of the subject, it at least sows the field with seeds of thought. I do not address either the printed propaganda of Nazism or the speeches of Hitler or Goebbels. I examine instead the rhetorical devices and methods used by the Nazis to reinforce these types of persuasion.

In World War II, millions of men found themselves at one time or another in war captivity. Their daily lives in captivity have been documented in memoirs and historical studies, but despite the abundance of detail, the experience of war captivity as an experience of exclusion remains in-theorised. Western POWs held by Germany in particular were excluded not only from further involvement in direct combat, but also from the states of exception associated with the foreign slave labour and the racial persecutions particular to Germany at the time. While all around them people were killed for a number of reasons, their lives were protected – and in the case of Jewish soldiers extraordinarily so – for no other reason than to keep them alive. The first part of the thesis uses Carl Schmitt’s work on sovereignty and nomos to situate the POW camp within the framework of an international order where war is bracketed – gehegt. This order reveals itself as an order of war, in which law takes the role of the sovereign in guaranteeing the order. The second part then turns to the exception to this order, the POW camp, analysing its juridicopolitical situation on the example of Jewish POWs from Western forces held by Germany in the Second World War. The third part of the thesis looks at the wartime experiences of Emmanuel Levinas, who spent five years as a POW in Germany. The struggle Levinas’s work exhibits with the experience of captivity exemplifies this experience’s ultimate meaninglessness, and raises questions about the possibility of subjectivity without engagement.

This is a study of military psychiatry in the Second World War. Focusing on the British Army, it recounts how the military came to employ psychiatrists to revise recruitment procedures and to treat psychiatric casualties. The research has shown that psychiatry was a valued specialty and that psychiatrists were given considerable power and independence. For example, psychiatrists reformed personnel selection and placed intelligence testing at the centre of the military selection of personnel. Psychiatrists argued that by eliminating the 'dull and backward' the tests would help improve efficiency, hygiene, discipline and morale, reduce psychiatric casualties and establish that the Army was run in a meritocratic way. However, it is probable that intelligence testing made it less likely that working-class men would receive commissions. Still, the Army had no consistent military doctrine about what the psychiatrists should be aiming for -to return as many psychiatric casualties to combatant duties as was possible or to discharge men who had found it impossible to adapt to military life. In the initial stages of the war, the majority of casualties were treated in civilian hospitals in Britain, where most were discharged. This was partly because the majority were regarded as constitutional neurotics. When psychiatrists treated soldiers near the front line most were retained in some capacity. The decision on whether to evacuate patients was influenced by multiple factors including the patients' military experience and the doctors' commitment to treatment or selection. Back in Britain, service patients were increasingly more likely to be treated in military hospitals such as Northfield -famous for the 'Northfield experiments'. These provided an alternative model of military psychiatry in which psychiatric intervention refocused away from individuals and their histories and onto social relationships, and where the psychiatrists' values were realigned with the military rather than with civilian general medicine.

This thesis examines the relationship between the private naval armaments industry, businessmen and the British Government’s supply planning framework between 1918 and 1941. More specifically, it reassesses the concept of the Military-Industrial Complex by examining the impact of disarmament upon private industry, the role of leading industrialists within supply and procurement policy, and the successes and failings of the Government’s supply organisation. This work blends together political, naval and business history in new ways, and, by situating the business activities of industrialists alongside their work as government advisors, it sheds new light on the operation of the British state. This thesis argues that there was a small coterie of influential businessmen, led by Lord Weir, who, in a time of great need for Britain, first gained access to secret information on industrial mobilisation as advisers to the Supply Board and Principal Supply Officers Committee (PSOC), and later were able to directly influence policy. This made Lord Weir and Sir James Lithgow among the most influential industrial figures in Britain. This was a relationship which cut both ways: Weir and others provided the state with honest, thoughtful advice and policies, but, as ‘insiders’ utilised their access to information to build a business empire at a fraction of the normal costs. Outsiders, by way of contrast, lacked influence and were forced together into a defensive ‘ring’ – or cartel – and effectively fixed prices for British warships in the lean 1920s. However, by the 1930s, the cartel grew into one of the most sophisticated profiteering groups of its day, before being shut down by the Admiralty in 1941. More generally, this work argues that the Japanese invasion of Manchuria was a turning point for supply organisation, and that between 1931 and 1935, the PSOC and its component bodies were governed by necessity. Powerful constraints on finance and political manoeuvre explain the nature of industrial involvement. Thus, it is argued that the PSOC did a broadly effective job at organising industry with the tools it was given, and the failings were down to the top levels of policymaking – the Cabinet – not acting upon advice to ease procurement bottlenecks early enough, to the extent that British warship construction was more expensive and slower than it could have been. In sum, this group of industrialists, the Admiralty and a few key figures in the PSOC such as Sir Harold Brown, effectively saved MacDonald, Baldwin and Chamberlain’s National Government from itself.

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This thesis is about the children of former Far East prisoners of war (FEPOWs): their memories of childhood, how they fashioned those memories in adulthood, and the relationship between the two. The FEPOW experience reverberated through postwar family life, and continued to shape the lives of participants across the intervening decades. Although a great deal is now known about the hardships suffered by the men, captivity had a deep and enduring impact on their children, but their history is rarely heard, and poorly understood. In Roots of Remembrance I investigate the lives of these children through in-depth interviews, using a psychosocial approach to both interviews and analysis. By tracing intergenerational transmission through the life course, I show that the memory practices of the children of Far East POWs had psychosocial roots in the captivity experiences of their fathers. For some, childhood was coloured by overt physical or psychological trauma; for others, what passed as a ‘normal’ upbringing led later to a pressing desire to discover more about their fathers’ wartime histories. My research demonstrates the need for a more nuanced and holistic approach to understanding intergenerational trauma transmission within this particular group. I argue that participants made creative use of memory practices across the course of their lives to revisit, review and reconstruct their relationships with their fathers, in order to reach an accommodation with their childhood memories. Findings include the value of attachment theory in understanding the associations between childhood experience and later memory practices, the role of the body and other implicit means of transmitting trauma, and the need for a greater awareness of the impact of cumulative and complex trauma within these families. Finally, I conclude that the psychosocial methodology enabled me to access areas of subjectivity and intersubjectivity that might otherwise have remained in the shadows.

This thesis is about the depiction of the damaged male in contemporary American war films in the period 1990 to 2010. All the films in this thesis deploy complex strategies but induce simple and readily accessible pleasures in order to mask, disavow or displace the operations of US imperialism. It is my argument that the premier emotive trope for emblematising and offering up the damaged male as spectacle and political tool is the American war film. I also argue that masochistic subjectivity (and spectatorship) is exploited in these films, sometimes through using it as a radical transformative tool in order to uncover the contradictions and abuses in US imperial power, but mostly through utilizing its distinct narrative and aesthetic qualities in order to make available to spectators the pleasures of consuming these images, and also to portray the damaged male as a seductive and desirable subjectivity to adopt. The contemporary war film offers up fantasies of imperilled male psychologies and then projects these traumatic (or “weak”/“victimised”) states into the white domestic and suburban space of the US. Accordingly this enables identification with the damaged male, and all his attendant narratives of dispossession, innocence, and victimhood, and then doubles and reinforces this identification by threatening the sanctity and security of the US homeland. My argument builds towards addressing ethical questions of spectatorial passivity and culpability that surround our engagement with global media, and mass visual culture in the context of war. I ultimately identify ethical spectatorship of contemporary war films as bolstering a neo-liberal project advancing the “turn to the self”, and hence audiences could unwittingly be engaged in shoring up white male ethno-centricity and the attendant forces of US cultural and geopolitical imperialism.