During the time of Nazism, arts and music were severely curtailed by the Nazi machinery. Two of the Reich’s foremost orchestras, the Berlin and the Vienna Philharmonics, were both part of the cultural Gleichschaltung that occurred within the German Reich. Dealing differently with their new patrons, the orchestras developed a mixture of political cooperation, opportunism and opposition. While at times the orchestras attempted to bypass Nazi ideology and policies, such as in the case of the forced layoff of their Jewish members, the high party membership in Vienna in particular underlines how ambivalent reactions and attitudes towards the Hitler regime could be. While both orchestras underwent significant internal structural changes, the history of both philharmonic orchestras resembles one of privileged status and preferential treatment during the Third Reich.

This dissertation studies a small American religious group that survived unscathed during the Third Reich. Some fifteen thousand members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the Mormons, lived under National Socialism. Unlike persecuted Jews and Jehovah's Witnesses, and other small American-based sects that suffered severe restrictions, the Mormons worshiped freely under Hitler's regime. They survived by stressing congruence between church doctrine and Nazi dogma. Mormons emphasized their interest in genealogical research and sports, sent their husbands into the Wehrmacht and their sons into the Hitler Youth, and prayed for a Nazi victory in wartime. Mormon leaders purged all Jewish references from hymnals, lesson plans and liturgical practices, and shunned their few Jewish converts. They resurrected a doctrinal edict that required deference to civil authority, which the Mormons had not always obeyed. Some Mormons imagined fanciful connections with Nazism, to the point that a few believed Hitler admired their church, copied its welfare program, and organized the Nazi party along Mormon lines. This dissertation builds upon Christine Elizabeth King's theory of a common Weltanschauung between Mormons and Nazis, and Steven Carter's description of the Mormons' "accommodation" with National Socialism. Instead of a passive approach, however, the Mormons pursued aggressive and shameless "ingratiation" with the Nazi state. This work also examines memory. Mormons later tried to forget their pandering to the Nazis, especially when large numbers of Germans immigrated to Utah in the post-war period. When the story of a martyred Mormon resister, Helmuth Hubener, emerged in the 1970s, church officials interfered with the research of scholars at Brigham Young University. They feared that Hubener's example would incite Mormon youth to rebel against dictators abroad, hurt the church's relations with communist East Germany, and would offend recent German Mormon immigrants in Utah. A few Mormons shunned and harassed Hubener's surviving coconspirators. In recent years, Hubener?excommunicated for rebellion against the Nazis but later restored to full church membership?has been rehabilitated as a recognized hero of Mormonism. A new collective memory has been forged, one of wartime courage and suffering, while the inconvenient past is being conveniently discarded.

This thesis examines post-1990 representations of growing up in the Third Reich within German culture. It has two primary aims: to demonstrate how childhood is recalled, represented, and imagined by those with, and without first-hand experience of Nazism; and to situate these narratives as a central part of the post-Unification discourse about identity in the Berlin Republic. The material is organised into five chapters: it begins with an analysis of recent museum displays and exhibitions, followed by German cinema (Hitlerjunge Salomon, NaPolA: Elite für den Führer); autobiographical works, by former members of the Hitler Youth (Günter de Bruyn, Martin Walser, Günter Grass) and by Jewish children (Ruth Klüger, Georges-Arthur Goldschmidt, Günter Kunert); and finally, imagined accounts of growing up in the Third Reich (W.G. Sebald, Binjamin Wilkomirski, Gudrun Pausewang). Through close readings of primary sources, and analysis of their reception, including the public debates which they sparked, this study shows how these narratives interact with historical and contemporary notions of childhood. They are informed by the concern, embedded within post-Unification discourse, that the wealth of documentary and technical accounts of Nazism obscures the individual’s understanding of those events and what it was like to experience them. I argue that because of the close conceptual association between childhood and origins, these narratives contribute to a discourse about how the Third Reich is to be remembered, performing a 'search for a usable childhood'. This is situated within the context of Harald Welzer's notion of 'gefühlte Geschichte'; that is a mode of historical discourse focused on experience, rather than 'factual knowledge', and which appeals to emotions. In assessing narratives of growing up – which take a developmental view of childhood – this study seeks to open up previously rigid categorisations of childhood as found in literary studies which focus on the function of the child’s perspective as a literary device. Thus within a crowded research area the present study offers a differentiated treatment of these works.

This thesis focuses on economic relations between the Third Reich and Yugoslavia before the German attack in April 1941. It questions the conventional wisdom, according to which economic relations served mainly as a tool of German foreign policy towards Yugoslavia. Instead, it aims to place mutual economic relations within both the broader context of the German economic and financial plans and policies in the 1930s, and within the already existing economic and trading ties between the two countries, as they had been developing since the 1920s. Before 1936, economic relations between Yugoslavia and Germany are observed from the context of the polycratic character of the Third Reich’s executive, which enabled various economic policies, pursued by different levels of authority such as the Foreign Ministry, Economic Ministry, Food and Agriculture Ministry, the Reichsbank, etc. to exist alongside each other. After 1936, Yugoslav-German economic relations increasingly functioned within the framework of the German Four-Year-Plan. Yugoslavia’s mineral riches were of importance for German rearmament and, particularly after the Anschluss and the creation of the Bohemian Protectorate, Yugoslavia found itself increasingly dependent on trade with Germany. At the same time, the German market and exports were necessary for the process of Yugoslavia’s industrialisation, which had gathered momentum since the mid-1930s. This was however in many aspects inconsistent with the German long-term imperialist ambitions in South-Eastern Europe. This dissertation concludes that German economic policy towards Yugoslavia failed. Also, that contrary to the traditional view in historiography and despite its economic dependency on Germany, Yugoslavia maintained its political agency. It was international political developments beyond Yugoslavia’s control which eventually decreased Belgrade’s political maneuverability and forced the government in Belgrade to become more receptive towards German demands, particularly after the fall of France in June 1940.

Based on a narrative structure and historical context of literary works and other articles of the author, this thesis is supposed to answer a question how Ernst Wiechert's work reflects his personal and authorship development and above all his attitude to the Nazism regime. It shows in which points his early production is similar to ideologeme of German national socialism and how the author distances from them later. The thesis describes the character of his regime critics in political and moral polarity as well as the reason for the author's inside transformation from critics to Inner Emigration.

While most scholars focus on analyzing the content of photographs taken under Nazi rule, this dissertation examines photographic practices as social acts aimed at building the Nazi racial community (Volksgemeinschaft). Nazi officials envisioned photography as both an action and a shared experience which would transform Germans into National Socialists and unite them. Beginning in 1933, the dictatorship promoted photography for those who belonged to that community and set about excluding Jews from it. The dispossession of Jews in the photographic industry reinforced the connection between photography and national belonging even further. Because of the regime’s active intervention in the marketplace, many Germans had come to view photography by 1939 as a pastime that strengthened the bonds between members of this exclusive community, an association which acquired new significance during the Second World War. German soldiers and their families were actively encouraged by Nazi authorities to exchange photographs in order to fortify morale during military conflict. Based on a review of hundreds of albums, it is clear that soldiers and their loved ones understood sharing photographs and compiling photo albums as both a medium of intimate communication and a form of patriotic duty. On the war front, the act of photographing daily routines and the intervals between combat situations provided a way for Wehrmacht soldiers fighting on the Eastern Front and SS-men guarding concentration camps to reaffirm the values of comradeship and family that the Nazis viewed as fundamental to the racial community. Focused as they were on enacting these values, soldiers largely omitted atrocities in the photographs they sent home for their albums. Ultimately, it would fall to concentration camp prisoners to use photography to expose the violence and cruelty on which the Nazi project also depended, but which popular photography under National Socialism had treated as a secondary subject all along.

This study will explore how East German films released from the 1940s to the 1980s played a central role in both reinforcing and chipping away at the national foundational narrative of the German Democratic Republic. This narrative looked back at the memory of the Third Reich and classified communists as heroes, Nazis as villains, and the majority of Germans as dangerously apolitical while also emphasizing the contemporary Cold War division between the east and the west. This thesis argues that DEFA films utilized the memory of the Third Reich to support, question, and expand this dynamic foundational narrative which remained malleable and contested throughout the state’s existence.

This investigation examines the origins and function of the Napolas, boarding schools for the Third Reich’s future elite, before 1945 and demonstrates how those connected to the schools rehabilitated their experiences as students and teachers in the early postwar period and in the years since reunification. Between 1933 and 1945, the Napolas recruited racially valuable children and prepared them for leadership roles in Nazi Germany’s Thousand-Year Reich. The schools’ emphasis upon racial purity and premilitary training caught the attention of Heinrich Himmler and the SS. The appointment of August Heißmeyer, a high-ranking SS official, to the position of Napola inspector in 1936 opened the door for closer relations between the two organizations. Although the Napolas remained formally under the auspices of the Reich Education Ministry for the entirety of the Nazi dictatorship, the schools were gradually absorbed into the SS’ sphere of influence after 1936. The Napolas ceased to exist with the defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945. Due to the Napolas’ past ties to the SS, one of seven organizations deemed criminal by the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, former administrators, teachers, and pupils of the schools were caught in the crosshairs of the Allied denazification program. Legal changes in the U.S. Occupation Zone in March 1946 gave Napola apologists an opportunity to challenge Allied accusations regarding the Napolas’ past as Nazi sites of indoctrination. As a result, a collective defense of the Napolas began to emerge, growing in repute and complexity as the denazification process continued. By 1949, the Napolas’ “postwar legend,” an exonerative tale of the schools’ history during the Third Reich, had not only stalled prosecution indefinitely, but also successfully reintegrated alumni into West German society. The postwar myth that exonerated the schools survived challenges during the Bonn Republic more or less unscathed. The willingness of former Napola pupils to recast their experiences as Nazi elite students in a positive light indicates that the Napolas’ postwar legend has lost none of its persuasiveness in unified Germany. / Dissertation / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / This investigation examines the legacy of the Third Reich through the prism of education. After the collapse of the Nazi regime in 1945, the United States, Great Britain, the Soviet Union and France divided Germany into four zones of occupation and introduced a wide-ranging program of denazification. Former administrators, teachers and pupils of the Napolas, boarding schools for the Third Reich’s future elite, were among those affected by the purge. The Napolas had enjoyed an intimate relationship to Heinrich Himmler’s SS between 1936 and 1945, due in large part to the schools’ emphasis on racial purity and premilitary training. Yet Napola apologists responded to postwar prosecution by denying the schools’ role in Nazi plans for European domination. Their constructed memories rehabilitated the Napolas’ postwar image and successfully reintegrated alumni into West German society. The Napolas’ “postwar legend” has since become the defining characteristic of Napola alumni associations’ collective identities.

This thesis deals with the poster of the Nazi Third Reich and the ideology shaped by the images and text communication, which it presents. The work looks at the poster as an important medium of communication that served Nazi propaganda to spread National Socialist ideology. This thesis aims to analyse these myths and debunk them in the way how Roland Barthes defines them in his book Mythologies. The author of the diploma thesis applies the traditional method of qualitative research of the media content - mythological and semiotic analysis - to demystify the myths and semiotic characters used in the selected Nazi posters. The first part of the thesis contains terminology, the second part presents the analysis of the individual posters, which are divided into several groups. In the conclusion of the thesis, the author presents a list of common symbols and myths, which are the result of the analysis.

Cette étude des politiques musicales en Allemagne de 1933 à 1949 offre une analyse historique et musicologique des liens inévitables qu’entretinrent musique et politique au gré des événements historiques et sous des systèmes divers et antagonistes : nazisme, communisme,démocraties. Le point de départ de notre réflexion est l’étude du nazisme. Revendiquant une« révolution » par le renversement de la République de Weimar emblématique de ce qu’ Adolf Hitler nomme déjà une « dégénérescence » croissante dans le domaine artistique, il s’est nourri du terreau nationaliste et pangermaniste présent en Allemagne depuis le XIXe siècle pour professer l’idéologie obsessionnelle et excluante de la « pureté de sang » comme élément de définition de la germanité. De ces fondements découle l’organisation de notre travail, qui s’intéresse aux politiques musicales mises en oeuvre depuis la naissance du IIIe Reich jusqu’à la constitution de deux Allemagnes, au regard de trois axes conducteurs. Celui de la pureté tout d’abord, déclinée en réaction contre des définitions très diverses de l’impur ou de l’indésirable selon les régimes politiques et les périodes étudiées ; l’accompagnent les questionnements concernant la recherche de pureté en musique, mais aussi de la « purification » oud’« épuration » musicale. Celui du « peuple » ensuite ; les réalités politiques, géographiques et idéologiques parfois antagonistes inhérentes à ce terme presque métonymique sous-tendent déjà la complexité des liens qu’il entretiendra avec la musique. Celui de la rupture enfin : en étudiant des régimes qui se construisent par l’opposition mutuelle, nous analysons les mises en application des velléités ou des utopies de rupture en lien avec les politiques musicales et nous nous interrogeons sur la possibilité de la rupture dans le domaine artistique lorsque celui-ci est lié au politique. / This historical and musicological study focuses on the politics of Music in Germany, from 1933to 1949. It explores the inherent relationship between music and politics, under diversified andantagonistic regimes. It starts with the Hitler years and the study of Nazism. Professing anational-socialist “revolution”, mainly by the rejection and stigmatization of the WeimarRepublic artistic accomplishments, Hitler defines the music and the new “Aryan” Man he wantsto create primarily by professing an ideology of blood “purity”. This is the concept we startfrom: the ideology of “purity” has many musical consequences throughout the century, leadingto the idea of “purification” or even musical “purge” during and after the Hitler years. We alsotake interest in the links between music and “the people”: the political and geographical contextsleading to a definition as a “racial community” or as an “occupied population” underline thecomplexity of the relationships with the political power and with music itself. Last but not least,we question the concept of “rupture” that defines each regime and its mostly utopian ambition torenew the musical creation, to fit its new political agenda.