Adolf Hitler
Story Stream
'Coffee With Hitler': Polite Society v. the Nazis September 13, 2022
When Hitler rose to power in the early 1930s, public reaction in Britain was not that of unalloyed horror. Instead, it lay somewhere between disinterest, snobbish, if inaccurate, contempt (“the man’s a house painter!”), and, in some circles, quiet sa...
City on the Brink May 24, 2022
Germany is now known as the site of the most horrific anti-Semitic slaughter in history, the Holocaust. But well before Hitler's rise, as Michael Brenner shows in his new book, In Hitler's Munich, there was a long history of Jewish communal life in G...
German Billionaires Are Still Benefiting from the Nazis May 02, 2022
It was a clear cold morning in January 1936 when Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler arrived at the luxurious Regina Palast Hotel in central Munich. He had come to pick up a group of businessmen for a day trip. Their destination: Dachau concentration ca...
How Thomas Mann Waged a Moral Battle Against Hitler February 18, 2022
No Mere Mistake December 15, 2021
On March 24, 1960, the small though influential biweekly Human Events published the following earthshaking claim: “Millions of American men and women would gladly have given their lives if it meant ending World War II a day sooner than it did. I beli...
Planning an Aryan Paradise April 30, 2021
So horrendous were the manifold atrocities perpetrated by Adolf Hitler and his followers that decades passed before scholars began to address the Nazis’ use of the visual arts in their comprehensive program for domination. This blind spot was attribu...
The Dangers of Consistency April 23, 2021
eople going into politics often proclaim that they “want to make a difference.” The story of Adolf Hitler suggests this may not always be a wonderful idea. Probably no individual has ever made a greater difference, for ill (though Stalin and Mao have...
Are We Living in an Age of Strongmen? April 09, 2021
The intellectual left reacted to Donald Trump’s election in 2016 in two very different ways. One group, like so many in the general public, immediately fell into full panic mode. The historian Timothy Snyder, for instance, rushed into print with a bo...
Hermann Göring's Program of Art Plunder January 22, 2021
Making one’s fortune in Occupied Paris was largely a matter of knowing the right people: in fact, the further to the right the better. In 1941, Bruno Lohse, a lowly SS officer and art history PhD, was languishing on the Baltic coast recovering from a...
Accounting for Evil September 11, 2020
And what did you do in the Nazi party, Opa?”Géraldine Schwarz’s grandfather died before she could ask him that question. But her need to know drives “Those Who Forget: My Family’s Story in Nazi Europe,” her riveting exploration of Germany’s post-Worl...
Toward an Antifascist Aesthetic August 20, 2020
Triumph of the Will, the 1935 Nazi propaganda film directed by Leni Riefenstahl in Nuremberg, comes up twice in the final volume of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s six-volume autobiographical novel, My Struggle. Both mentions of the film occur in the midst of ...
The Fascinating Objects of Fascism June 08, 2020
hen I was a little girl, I inherited a stamp collection from a distant relative. Neatly organised in Stanley Gibbons albums and stock-books on a country-by-country basis, my mother and I spread the lot out on our dining-room table and began leafing t...
Adolf? Not again. March 04, 2020
Adolf? Not again. My first reaction on learning that not one, but two, substantial new Hitler biographies were up for review was not one of unreserved joy. How much more is there to say? After all, Ian Kershaw’s two volumes from the turn of the centu...
Tell It to Hitler November 20, 2019
Hitler’s lightning-fast advances across Europe in the early months of World War II led to suspicions that he owed his victories to “fifth columns” of traitors: Nazi sympathizers who compromised their countries’ defenses from within through spying and...
Revisiting Hitler, in a New Authoritarian Age October 01, 2019
When not at work on a book about the roots of anti-Semitism in his country, the German historian and Holocaust expert Peter Longerich has been thinking about 1923.In that year, Longerich explained, Germany faced a severe crisis. The economy teetered,...
A Dandy Goes to War October 01, 2019
Nazi Germany produced two wartime diaries of equal literary and historical significance but written from the most different perspectives conceivable. Victor Klemperer wrote furtively, in daily dread of transport to an extermination camp, a fate he wa...
The German Artist Who Tried to Warn About Hitler September 20, 2019
When Adolf Hitler took charge of Germany 85 years ago this summer, he did not, contrary to popular belief, “seize power.” Rather, Germans elected him their Führer, or leader, in a referendum on Aug. 19, 1934 and subsequently chose to subscribe to the...
Thomas Mann's War Against Hitler September 02, 2019
IN FEBRUARY 1938, Thomas Mann and his family sailed from Cherbourg, France to New York, where they were greeted by a throng of reporters and a film crew from the Paramount News Corporation. Mann, who had won the Nobel Prize in 1929 and appeared on th...
