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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.

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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.

This study makes use not only of German documents captured during the Second World War but of personal accounts of major figures of the Third Reich and their testimony at the Nuremberg Trials. Organized into five chapters, this study surveys Nazi- Soviet relations from 1939 to 1941, from the German viewpoint, with emphasis on Adolf Hitler's assessment of Russian policies and Germany's wartime situation, both of which factors shaped his decision to invade the USSR. The conclusion is that Hitler saw his attack on the Soviet Union as a preventive war, carried out to destroy a growing threat to the Reich. He interpreted Russian activities during the period 1939-1941 as designed to strengthen the USSR strategically against Germany in preparation for intervention in the ongoing conflict with Britain.

A tese objetiva analisar a forma como o Sínodo Evangélico Luterano do Brasil (hoje Igreja Evangélica Luterana do Brasil), proveniente do Sínodo de Missouri dos Estados Unidos, se posicionou em relação a assuntos em evidência da década de 1940 no Brasil, como questões envolvendo o Germanismo e o Nacional Socialismo Alemão presentes entre teuto-brasileiros. Além disso, o Sínodo necessitou adaptar-se às novas imposições da Campanha de Nacionalização do Governo de Getúlio Vargas, que visava o abrasileiramento de todos os imigrantes e seus descendentes residentes em solo brasileiro. A análise dos pressupostos do Sínodo a respeito destas questões compreende a premissa da Confessionalidade Luterana que, no entender do Sínodo, expressa uma necessária separação entre Igreja e Estado. Através de um processo judicial que envolveu dois pastores do Sínodo, presos e condenados no que ficou registrado na história como a Trama Nazi-integralista de Cruz Alta, resgatamos a visão que as autoridades brasileiras da época possuíam do Sínodo Evangélico Luterano do Brasil, especialmente no que tange ao Germanismo e ao Nacional Socialismo. / This dissertation aims at analyzing the way in which the former Evangelical Lutheran Synod of Brazil (now Evangelical Lutheran Church of Brazil), originating from the Missouri Synod of the United States, took a stand in the 1940s as regards the then-current issues in Brazil, such as matters involving Germanism and the German National Socialism among Teuto-Brazilians. Besides that, the Synod needed to adapt itself to the new impositions of the Nationalization Campaign ordained by the government of Getúlio Vargas, which was meant to brazilianize all immigrants and their descendants living on Brazilian soil. The analysis of the assumptions held by the Synod on those issues encompasses the premise of Lutheran Confessionalism which as the Synod sees it spells a necessary separation of Church and State. Also, by looking into a lawsuit involving two Synod pastors who were arrested and convicted in what came to be historically termed as the Nazi-Integralist Plot of Cruz Alta/RS, we have retrieved the viewpoint Brazilian authorities of that time had on the Evangelical Lutheran Synod of Brazil, especially concerning Germanism and the National Socialism.

In 1990 a small self-published journal/magazine called The Watcher was distributed among New Zealand's occult underground. The Watcher described itself as 'the New Zealand Voice of the Left Hand Path', and was published as the journal of the Order of the Left Hand Path. The Watcher and the Order directed its attentions towards those occultists who identified themselves as Satanists and, as such, the journal articulated a distinctly Satanic philosophy and perspective. However, as the journal evolved and developed, renaming itself as The Heretic and The Nexus in later years, there arose alongside Satanic philosophy an increasing emphases on what could be called esoteric Nazism or esoteric Nationalism. Given that the editor of The Watcher was Kerry Bolton, a man who has been immersed in New Zealand's Nationalist/neo-Nazi movement since the early 1970s, such an increasingly political orientation was perhaps unsurprising. This thesis examines the way in which the Order bought Satanic and neo-Nazi ideologies together and the resulting synthesis. It also looks at the transition from being a Satanic order led by a neo-Nazi to an openly neo-Nazi Order that uses Satanic philosophy to justify and popularise its conception of National Socialism.

A tese objetiva analisar a forma como o Sínodo Evangélico Luterano do Brasil (hoje Igreja Evangélica Luterana do Brasil), proveniente do Sínodo de Missouri dos Estados Unidos, se posicionou em relação a assuntos em evidência da década de 1940 no Brasil, como questões envolvendo o Germanismo e o Nacional Socialismo Alemão presentes entre teuto-brasileiros. Além disso, o Sínodo necessitou adaptar-se às novas imposições da Campanha de Nacionalização do Governo de Getúlio Vargas, que visava o abrasileiramento de todos os imigrantes e seus descendentes residentes em solo brasileiro. A análise dos pressupostos do Sínodo a respeito destas questões compreende a premissa da Confessionalidade Luterana que, no entender do Sínodo, expressa uma necessária separação entre Igreja e Estado. Através de um processo judicial que envolveu dois pastores do Sínodo, presos e condenados no que ficou registrado na história como a Trama Nazi-integralista de Cruz Alta, resgatamos a visão que as autoridades brasileiras da época possuíam do Sínodo Evangélico Luterano do Brasil, especialmente no que tange ao Germanismo e ao Nacional Socialismo. / This dissertation aims at analyzing the way in which the former Evangelical Lutheran Synod of Brazil (now Evangelical Lutheran Church of Brazil), originating from the Missouri Synod of the United States, took a stand in the 1940s as regards the then-current issues in Brazil, such as matters involving Germanism and the German National Socialism among Teuto-Brazilians. Besides that, the Synod needed to adapt itself to the new impositions of the Nationalization Campaign ordained by the government of Getúlio Vargas, which was meant to brazilianize all immigrants and their descendants living on Brazilian soil. The analysis of the assumptions held by the Synod on those issues encompasses the premise of Lutheran Confessionalism which as the Synod sees it spells a necessary separation of Church and State. Also, by looking into a lawsuit involving two Synod pastors who were arrested and convicted in what came to be historically termed as the Nazi-Integralist Plot of Cruz Alta/RS, we have retrieved the viewpoint Brazilian authorities of that time had on the Evangelical Lutheran Synod of Brazil, especially concerning Germanism and the National Socialism.

This dissertation makes the argument that the Franklin Roosevelt administration (1933-1945) embarked upon a global hegemonic project to transform the United States into a world empire and bring about the "New World Order." In addition, the expansion of U.S. commercial and military air routes was seen as instrumental to the realization of this project.