During the century from the 1890 publication of Ehrenfels's proposition on
Gestaltqualitäten
to the 1989 dissolution of the European states governed by Marxist orthodoxy, Gestalt theory was drawn ...into the political fray in several ways. It was grotesquely misappropriated during the Nazi regime in support of race, territorial expansion, and war aims. On the other side, because it was seen as having a subjectivist taint, the Gestalt approach was anathema where dialectical materialist dogma reigned. In contrast, close reading of the seminal 1912 Wertheimer paper and the 1920 Köhler book reveals that the Gestalt founders’ views accord well with current Gestalt research.
The significance of being an intellectual when taken prisoner and sent to a concentration camp by the Nazis is rarely discussed – instead, the importance of being either a Jew or a political prisoner ...(say, a German communist) is highlighted. By contrast, Jean Amery’s recollections of being tortured and sent to Auschwitz concentrate on his self-understanding as an intellectual. What difference does the identity and outlook as an intellectual make in the extreme circumstances found in Auschwitz? The paper discusses Amery’s views on this question, invoking that of others who have also addressed it, like Primo Levi and Theodor Adorno.
The Virtuous Wehrmacht
explores the myth of the German armed forces' innocence
during World War II by reconstructing the moral world of German
soldiers on the Eastern Front. How did they avoid ...feelings
of guilt about the many atrocities their side committed? David A.
Harrisville compellingly demonstrates that this myth of innocence
was created during the course of the war itself-and did not arise
as a postwar whitewashing of events. In 1941 three million
Wehrmacht troops overran the border between German- and
Soviet-occupied Poland, racing toward the USSR in the largest
military operation in modern history. Over the next four years,
they embarked on a campaign of wanton brutality, murdering
countless civilians, systemically starving millions of Soviet
prisoners of war, and actively participating in the genocide of
Eastern European Jews. After the war, however, German servicemen
insisted that they had fought honorably and that their institution
had never involved itself in Nazi crimes.
Drawing on more than two thousand letters from German soldiers,
contextualized by operational and home front documents, Harrisville
shows that this myth was the culmination of long-running efforts by
the army to preserve an illusion of respectability in the midst of
a criminal operation. The primary authors of this fabrication were
ordinary soldiers cultivating a decent self-image and developing
moral arguments to explain their behavior by drawing on a
constellation of values that long preceded Nazism.
The Virtuous Wehrmacht explains how the army encouraged
troops to view themselves as honorable representatives of a
civilized nation, not only racially but morally superior to
others.
The Nazi regime used state-run marriage mediation of disabled veterans and war widows to align women's marital choices with the Nazi goal of raising the German birth rate. Marriage centers were ...intended as a gateway to wider acceptance of population policy and to eventually abolish the marriage “free marketplace” in favor of demographic management to create collective outcomes of hereditary fitness. This involved creating new marital and reproductive duties among Germans and channeling this social responsibility to convince Germans to willingly participate in marriage mediation for the greater good. Yet, individual desire and self-reliance in the broader marketplace almost always trumped Nazi policy.
The spread of hate speech challenges the health of democracy and media systems in contemporary societies. This study aims to contribute to a better understanding of user-generated online hate speech ...reported by Internet users to national monitoring organizations, in particular its ‘ecosystem‘, discursive elements, and links to political discourses. First, we analyzed the main characteristics of the reported statements (source, removal rate, and targets) to reveal the media and political context of reported user-generated online hate speech. Next, we focused on hate speech statements against migrants and analyzed their discursive elements with the method of critical frame analysis (frames, actors, metaphors, and references) to understand the corresponding discourse. The main discursive feature of these statements is the prognosis, which calls for death and violence, so we could label this communication as ‘executive speech.’ Other key features are references to weapons and Nazi crimes from WWII, indicating the authors’ extreme-right ideological convictions, and the metaphors, employed to provoke disgust from migrants, present them as culturally inferior and raise fears about their supposed violent behavior. The corresponding diagnoses frame migrants as a threat in a similar way to populist political discourses of othering and complement these in providing ‘final’ solutions in prognoses.
The Virtuous Wehrmacht explores the myth of the German armed forces' innocence during World War II by reconstructing the moral world of German soldiers on the Eastern Front. How did they avoid ...feelings of guilt about the many atrocities their side committed? David A. Harrisville compellingly demonstrates that this myth of innocence was created during the course of the war itself—and did not arise as a postwar whitewashing of events. In 1941 three million Wehrmacht troops overran the border between German- and Soviet- occupied Poland, racing toward the USSR in the largest military operation in modern history. Over the next four years, they embarked on a campaign of wanton brutality, murdering countless civilians, systemically starving millions of Soviet prisoners of war, and actively participating in the genocide of Eastern European Jews. After the war, however, German servicemen insisted that they had fought honorably and that their institution had never involved itself in Nazi crimes. Drawing on more than two thousand letters from German soldiers, contextualized by operational and home front documents, Harrisville shows that this myth was the culmination of long-running efforts by the army to preserve an illusion of respectability in the midst of a criminal operation. The primary authors of this fabrication were ordinary soldiers cultivating a decent self-image and developing moral arguments to explain their behavior by drawing on a constellation of values that long preceded Nazism. The Virtuous Wehrmacht explains how the army encouraged troops to view themselves as honorable representatives of a civilized nation, not only racially but morally superior to others.
Den 8. desember 1943 forlot dampskipet «Donau» Oslo havn med 254 norske politimenn ombord. Dette var embets- og tjenestemenn, hvorav hovedparten var personer som okkupasjonsmakten betraktet som ...«upålitelige» og som var blitt holdt fanget siden Reichskommissar Terbovens aksjon mot det norske politiet samme år. Politifolkene endte til slutt opp i den såkalte «germanerleiren» i Stutthof ved Danzig (Gdansk). Her skulle de motta ideologisk og politifaglig opplæring i den hensikt å gjøre dem til lojale medlemmer av det fremtidige SS-kontrollerte norske «statsbeskyttelseskorps». Under det meste av politifolkenes opphold i Stutthof forsøkte SS, både med gulrot og pisk, å forme dem til troende nasjonalsosialister. Prosjektet ble en total fiasko. Fangegruppen stod imot det massive presset. De problemer dette prosjektet forårsaket, synliggjør blant annet spenningen som SS’ dobbeltoppdrag i Norge skapte. Organisasjonen skulle tjene som Reichskommissariats brutale sikkerhets- og represjonsapparat, samtidig som den gjennom institusjonsbygging og propaganda skulle vinne de raserene nordmennene for den storgermanske idé.
Le présent article retrace l’histoire de la politique de « formation » ou « éducation idéologique » ( weltanchauliche Schulung ou weltanschauliche Erziehung ) mise en œuvre entre 1933 et 1945 par la ...SS ( Schutzstaffel ), organisation qui se voulait l’élite du nazisme. Il s’agit ce faisant d’apporter, à travers l’étude empirique d’un cas paradigmatique des efforts déployés par le régime nazi pour transmettre son système de valeurs à ses hommes, un éclairage complémentaire aux travaux qui analysent l’univers normatif du national-socialisme sous l’angle de l’histoire des idées, et à ceux qui tentent de comprendre les motivations des acteurs du régime hitlérien. La présente contribution croise l’histoire du réseau des institutions chargées de l’élaboration et de l’application de cette politique, une enquête prosopographique sur le personnel de cadres qui anima ces institutions et l’étude des pratiques éducatives et des discours idéologiques élaborés au sein de celles-ci et l’analyse de l’impact de ces politiques. Après avoir abordé successivement les deux principales phases du développement de la politique de formation idéologique, qui a d’abord visé à la création d’une élite civile militante du régime nazi (1933-1939), avant de se recentrer sur les unités militaires et policières de la SS (1939-1945), l’on propose une évaluation de l’empreinte que le système normatif ainsi transmis a pu laisser sur la masse des militants et soldats et policiers de la SS, qui montre que celle-ci, quoique réelle, a été extrêmement inégale, et est demeurée nettement inférieure aux ambitions initiales des idéologues de la SS.
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