Nazism and Polarization: The Left and the Third Reich

Abstract

. This review provides an overview and critique of recent scholarship on German National Socialism. It focuses on four problems through which historians have recently challenged the Marxist scholarship that played a significant role in shaping debates on Nazism in the sixties and seventies : the composition of the Nazi electorate, the Nazi ' racial state ', Nazi social policy, and the Holocaust. Although acknowledging the importance of such themes in recent work as the Nazi regime's racism, anti-Semitism, and modernity, the review maintains that the key issue in Marxist scholarship, the polarization between left and right during the interwar period in Europe, provides the essential context for understanding the Nazi regime's ideological extremes and racial practices. To make its case, it explores four examples of the left's influence, the German left's relative cohesion as political and social movements, its place in the discourse of ' racial hygiene', its role in debates on the ' standard of living ', and finally, its relevance to Nazi expansionism and the ' Final Solution '.In the mid-seventies, the Marxist historian, Tim Mason, argued that the Nazi regime waged war prematurely to extricate itself from a ' domestic crisis ' of its own creation. Confronted by a restive German working class, the Third Reich could not give priority to the war preparations that were essential to expansion because doing so would require unpopular reductions in domestic consumption. Thus, the regime resorted to a short war strategy, the Blitzkrieg, in search of the food, labour, and raw materials that it needed without unduly burdening the German population. Mason's work stimulated a raft of research, especially on the attitudes of German workers toward the Nazi regime, yet his thesis found few adherents. Historians not only questioned his major arguments ; new paradigms in the field challenged Mason's life work, which was to demonstrate how class relations shaped the character of the Third Reich. Indeed, Mason's defence of class analysis near the end of his life sounded distinctly dated. ' At a very simple but fundamental level Nazism was part of an epoch of general and acute class conflict throughout Western Europe, when relations between capital and labour, left and right, were the axis of public affairs … It was one of the main aims of Nazism to abolish this class society precisely because it was conflictual. '" Recent scholarship has in fact exposed the limitations of Mason's interpretation of the Third Reich, as well as the generic concept of fascism, or more aptly its Marxist variant, " Tim Mason, Social policy in the Third Reich : the working class and the ' national community ', trans. John Broadwin and ed. Jane Caplan (Providence and Oxford, ), pp. -. Originally publ. as Socialpolitik im Dritten Reich (Opladen, ).

El Estado del bienestar racial y sus enemigos políticos y de fe. Notas de investigación de los archivos de la Gestapo en el inicio de la dictadura nacionalsocialista (1933 - 1937)

“…También se debe considerar que esto se manifestó en una vigilancia, control y persecución sobre católicos, evangélicos, judíos, etc. Así, en un perspectiva amplia y sintética, el nacionalsocialismo veía un conjunto de enemigos, "todos los problemas eran problemas raciales para el nazismo, y la ideología völkisch del nazismo proveía de diagnóstico y solución de todos los problemas contemporáneos, incluyendo la división de clases" (Baranowsky, 2000(Baranowsky, : 1159.…”

“…Desde la década de 1990 se puede observar que dentro del estudio del nacionalsocialismo alemán y su dictadura se ha vitalizado la consideración de los elementos o factores políticos, sociales, Noakes, 1966, Baranowsky, 2000 y económicos(Aly, 2006;Temmin, 1991, Tooze, 2007, para entender de mejor manera tanto el proceso de ascenso al poder, como la dictadura, la guerra y el Holocausto o Shoa. Este despliegue de interés en los aspectos políticos, sociales y económicos no implica un desconocimiento o abandono de los problemas que plantean el holocausto a la historia y otras disciplinas humanas y sociales, sino que persiguen aproximarnos a una mejor comprensión de la dictadura nazi y sus crímenes.…”