USM Open Source History Text: The World at War: World History 1914-1945Main MenuIntroduction: A Mural as WindowOn Diego Rivera's Detroit IndustryThe World Around 1914, Part I: the Journey of Young GandhiThe World Around 1914, Part II: The Era of Nationalism and Imperialism (1848-1914)The First World WarThe Long Russian Revolution (1917 – 1929)The Decline of the West? Europe from 1919 – 1929A New Middle East: The Rise of the Middle East State SystemChina Between Qing Collapse and WWIILatin America Between Boom and Bust (1911-1929)Africa Under Colonial Rule: Politics and Race from 1914‐1939The United States from The First World War to the Great DepressionThe Great DepressionThree Varieties of Radicalism in the 1930s: Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, and Imperial JapanThree Responses to Modernity: Ho Chi Minh, Ibn Saud, and Getulio VargasThe Second World WarSeth Rogoff5f001fc099cd635507b143be056702764af6929c
Nazi Terror
12017-07-14T23:06:26-07:00Seth Rogoff5f001fc099cd635507b143be056702764af6929c192372plain2017-09-19T07:45:52-07:00Seth Rogoff5f001fc099cd635507b143be056702764af6929cThe central myth of the Nazi Party and its ideology was that Germany and a homogenous nation that reflected the will of the German People (racially defined) as embodied in the Führer (Hitler). This notion was no exceedingly important to the Nazi vision that deviation from this notion of homogeneity was seen as a direct threat to the state. Deviations came in many forms. Jews were a deviation because the Nazis defined them as racial enemies. Communists were deviations because they sought to divide and weaken Germany unity in pursuance of an economic and internationist agenda. The insane or the handicapped were deviations because the Nazis viewed them as threats to the racial health of the German people. Artists and writers were deviations because they were infected to ideologies or concepts that the Nazis found anathema: individualism, feminism, homosexuality, pacifism, etc. To deal with these threats to the ideological notion of social homogeneity or uniformity, the Nazis built a massive apparatus of terror. And this foundation, this terror apparatus, would be exported to devastating effects during WWII. The most prominent instrument of terror in the Nazi system was the network of SS controlled and administered concentration camps in Germany. Concentration camps were located near almost all major urban areas and could be used to imprison tens of thousands of people at once. In addition, each concentration camp was itself a planet around which orbited dozens or even hundreds of satellite locations used to terrorize the population.
