Thesis advisor: Judith Bookbinder / The Nazis arranged an exhibition of "degenerate" art (Entartete Kunst), shown in Munich in 1937 to insult and degrade artists who are recognized today as some of the most talented artists of the twentieth century. The success of the exhibition affected each artist in a different manner. Many fled Germany and ventured to the United States while others unwilling to leave their homeland suppressed their creative impulses for a life of fear and psychological torture in Germany. The horrific and irreversible effects on the German artists and culture can only be adequately discussed in the context of the time period preceding the exhibition. The movement toward abstraction and expression in art clashed with the rise of Nazi aesthetics to culminate in the exhibition of "degenerate" art. The lives of three artists Ernst Barlach, Max Beckmann and Oskar Schlemmer are detailed in this paper. / Thesis (BA) — Boston College, 2005. / Submitted to: Boston College. College of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Fine Arts. / Discipline: College Honors Program.

This thesis investigates the background, activities, and motivations of German women who provided administrative support for Nazi institutions and agencies of the Third Reich. It compares women who specifically chose to serve the Nazi cause in voluntary roles with those who took on such work as a progression of established careers. Using a variety of sources, including post-war testimony in criminal cases, it shows how much they knew about the repressive and genocidal aspects of the regime and evaluates the role that ideology, as against other factors, played in their loyalty to their employers. Secretaries, SS-Helferinnen (SS female auxiliaries) and Nachrichtenhelferinnen des Heeres (female communication auxiliaries of the army) held similar jobs: taking dictation, answering telephones, and sending telegrams. Yet their backgrounds differed markedly. While secretaries were habitually recruited on the basis of their prior experience and competencies, the Helferinnen predominantly volunteered, sometimes motivated by ideology and the opportunity to serve their country, sometimes enticed by the prospect of foreign travel or the lure of the uniform. The thesis sheds light on these women's backgrounds: their social status, education, career patterns. It seeks to explain the situations and motives that propelled them into their positions and explores what they knew about the true nature of their work. These women often had access to information about the administration of genocide and are a relatively untapped resource. Their recollections shed light on the lives and work of their superiors, the mundane tasks that contributed to the displacement, deportation and death of millions of people across Europe, and the extent to which information about these atrocities was communicated and comprehended. Attention is paid to the specific role played by gender amongst perpetrators of the Holocaust. The question of how gender intersected with National Socialism, repression, atrocity and genocide forms the conceptual thread linking the separate chapters on these three groups of women who had varied backgrounds and degrees of initial commitment to Nazi ideology.

Revised Thesis (doctoral)--Universität, Salzburg, 2002. / Includes bibliographical references (p. [253]-269).

Revised Thesis (doctoral)--Universität, Salzburg, 2002. / Includes bibliographical references (p. [253]-269).

Thesis--Universität Wien, 2004. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 141-146) and index.

Münster (Westfalen), Univ., Diss., 2009. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 431-470).

In 1948 post-war Berlin, a mother, whose son was stolen from her during the war, implicates the woman that the Nazis gave him to in a Soviet spy ring, but soon realizes that her son's adoptive mother might be able to give her son a better life than she can and her actions put him in mortal danger.

This thesis analyses the radicalisation of the bürgertum in a single Bavarian town, Hof-an-der-Saale, in the five years after the First World War. It is bookended by two important and enormously different elections. In the first of these – the January 1919 elections to the National Assembly – the bürgerliche districts of Hof voted almost entirely for the German Democratic Party, a left-liberal, pro-Republican party that called for a parliamentary democracy, the separation of church and state, rights for women, a renunciation of German militarism and a close collaboration with the Social Democrats. But just five years later, in the Reichstag elections of May 1924, these very same districts cast their votes for the Völkisch Block, a cover organisation for the then-banned Nazi Party. Within half a decade, then, Hof's bürgerliche milieu had switched its allegiance from a party of left-liberal democrats to the most radical nationalists in German history. Why did this dramatic and disturbing electoral turnaround occur? In an effort to answer this question, this thesis offers a detailed study of the narratives and discourses that circulated within Hof's bürgerliche milieu during this five-year period. It uses newspaper editorials, the minutes of political meetings, electoral propaganda, the documents of civic associations and commercial organisations, the Protestant newsletter and a range of other sources in an effort to reconstruct what Hof's Burghers thought, said and wrote between these two elections. What happened between January 1919 and May 1924 to transform Hof's bürgerliche inhabitants from Democrat into Nazi voters, and how did this startling change manifest itself at the level of discourse and political culture?

Univ., Diss. u.d.T.: Reuleaux, Nele: Das Problem der Entdifferenzierung zwischen Tätern und Opfern des Nationalsozialismus im Konzept der intergenerativen Traumatransmission--Hannover, 2005.

This work seeks both to modify and challenge the prevailing view of an ideologically-driven Army intent on realizing Hitler's racist goals in the Soviet Union. One way of measuring the ideological commitment of the Army's soldiers is through an examination of the divisional level. Each of the three divisions under examination was recruited from a geographically and culturally distinct area, allowing the soldiers of the 121st, 123rd and 126th Infantry Divisions to recreate the sense of community unique to their home region: East Prussia, Berlin and Rhineland-Westphalia, respectively. The differences between social classes, traditional political allegiances and confessions found in these regions was thus transferred to these divisions and these distinctions allow for a more precise investigation of what types of men were more or less likely to subscribe to the German war of annihilation in the Soviet Union. Unlike much of the literature which examines the ideological nature of the war and the military conflict separately, this study looks at combat and occupation in tandem. Through the use of official military records, ranging from the Army down to the regimental level, as well as previously unused diaries and letters written by the men of these three divisions, a complex and varied picture of the German Army's activities and motivations arises. Firstly, while ideological concerns certainly played a role in determining the actions of these divisions, other more tangible problems, such as food and clothing shortages and numerical weakness, were more important issues in determining the Army's frequent savage interactions with civilians. Second, instead of the war serving to increasingly radicalize the behavior of the troops, the German Army began to significantly modify its conduct in hopes of winning the cooperation of Soviet civilians in late 1942 and 1943 before reverting to Scorched Earth policy in 1944. Internal mechanisms within the Army led to these changes in behavior: when a conciliatory policy was viewed as necessary to win the war, it was implemented; when the Army believed unadulterated violence was the means to victory, radical policies were carried out its forces. / text