Adolf Hitler is the epitome of evil, the arch aggressor who ignited World War II and the malevolent force who conceived and implemented the Holocaust. For much of the period after 1945, Hitler’s Nazi regime was viewed through this prism, as the Federal Republic of Germany accepted full responsibility for Hitler’s unprecedented crimes against Jews […]
How did Canada respond, publicly and institutionally, to the rise of Nazism in Germany? Part of the answer is found in Nazi Germany, Canadian Responses: Confronting Antisemitism in the Shadow of War (McGill-Queen’s University Press). A book of essays by Canadian academics, it explores a number of overlapping issues — Canada’s reaction to Nazism, Canada’s […]
Olivier Lubrich, a professor of German and comparative literature at the University of Berne in Switzerland, has compiled a historically useful anthology of essays and letters, both published and unpublished, describing life in Nazi Germany. Travels in the Reich, 1933-1945 (The University of Chicago Press) presents a chilling portrait of a nation under the thrall […]
Joachim Fest’s thoughtful memoirs of his boyhood and youth, Not I (Other Press), transport a reader to a terrible time and a horrible place. Born in Berlin into a conservative Catholic family, Fest was seven years old when Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor of Germany. Fest’s father, Johannes, a German patriot and a supporter of the […]
The Roman Catholic church in Nazi Germany supported the regime’s antisemitic policies, says an American scholar specializing in modern German history. Speaking in Toronto during Holocaust Education Week, Beth Griech-Polelle, a Bowling Green State University historian, said the German church accommodated itself to Adolf Hitler’s new order to protect its interests and parishioners. Fearing it […]