The Big Picture
When I first began researching colonialism, I held a rather simple, functionalist view of it as a situation that occurs when groups of people who believe themselves to be superior gain effective...
View ArticleOn to Poland
The 1939 invasion brings us from the background to the foreground of the subject of this paper. After the Polish campaign was finished, the Nazi regime split their half of Poland into two pieces. One...
View ArticleLittle Kings
What were civil administrators doing in the Warthegau? They can roughly be divided in two halves. On the one side are the professionals – civil engineers, health inspectors, savings bank officials, and...
View ArticleSecond Career Nazis
Second careers did not mean sinecures. In 1933 and 1935 decrees were passed allowing thousands of Old Fighters, especially Ehrenzeichenträger, into the civil service. Often presented as an unemployment...
View ArticleBy the numbers
And so the stories continue, man by man. Of the 778 men (including twenty women) in my sample, 83 percent were NSDAP members. 35 percent had joined before 1933. Table 1 shows the occupations that the...
View ArticleBandwagoneers
Horst S. (b. 1907 in Hannover) joined the NSDAP in 1933, at the age of 26. It seems like 1933 was the breakthrough year of his life, and he had worked very hard to build up to it. From being a book...
View ArticleGeneral Analysis
In cultural history, as the saying goes, one example is an anecdote, two are a trend, and three are proof. There is a certain repetition in the stories that makes it unproductive to tell even more....
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Perpetrators?
The previous arguments can be rounded out and compared to Mann’s study by the addition of a few numbers. The first area is region, for me the most fascinating. Mann had found in his sample that...
View ArticleConclusion
Much of the failure and radicalization of the Nazi occupation of Poland can be traced to a series of systemic human factors whose roots like in the world of colonial occupation. I will outline these...
View ArticleNazi Election Data
First a look at the Weimar elections. The numbers are from Wikipedia. Social Democrat means SPD. Communist means USPD + KPD. Bourgeois 3 means DNVP + DVP + DDP. MC Splinters means various middle class...
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