The 'racial state' has become a familiar shorthand for the Third Reich, encapsulating its raison d'etre, ambitions, and the underlying logic of its genocidal violence. The Nazi racial state's agenda is generally understood as a fundamental reshaping of society based on a new hierarchy of racial value. However, this volume argues that it is time to reappraise what race really meant under Nazism, and to question and complicate its relationship to the Nazis' agenda, actions, and appeal. Based on a wealth of new research, the contributors show that racial knowledge and racial discourse in Nazi Germany were far more contradictory and disparate than we have come to assume. They shed new light on the ways that racial policy worked and was understood, and consider race's function, content, and power in relation to society and nation, and above all, in relation to the extraordinary violence unleashed by the Nazis.

Bringing together some of the most prominent contemporary historians of modern Germany alongside innovative newcomers to the field, this volume offers new perspectives on key debates surrounding Germany's descent into, and emergence from, the Nazi catastrophe. It explores the intersections between society, economy, and international policy, with a particular interest in the relations between elites and the wider society, and provides new insights into the complex continuities and discontinuities of modern German history. This volume offers a rich selection of essays that contribute to our understanding of the road to war, Nazism, and the Holocaust, as well as Germany's transformation after 1945.

This is an English-language collection of essays on modern German history with a generational theme, first published in 1995. It addresses, first, the extraordinary power and persistence of a German tradition of youthful rebellion extending from the Sturm und Drang in the eighteenth century to the student revolts of 1968 and, second, the impact of the dramatic ruptures and discontinuities in modern German history on the formation and interaction of successive historical cohorts. Using a variety of different approaches, including literacy and oral history, the collection pays particular attention to the way generational identities interacted with those of class and gender. The book adds to our understanding of generations, of the balance between continuity and discontinuity in modern German history, of the generational roots of National Socialism and the Hitler Youth generation's impact on East and West German society.

Jewish Responses to Persecution, 1933 1946 offers a new perspective on Holocaust history by presenting documentation that describes the manifestations and meanings of Nazi Germany's "final solution" from the Jewish perspective. This first volume, taking us from Hitler's rise to power through the aftermath of Kristallnacht, vividly reveals the increasing devastation and confusion wrought in Jewish communities in and beyond Germany at the time. Numerous period photos, documents, and annotations make this unique series an invaluable research and teaching tool. Co-published with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

This is an English-language collection of essays on modern German history with a generational theme, first published in 1995. It addresses, first, the extraordinary power and persistence of a German tradition of youthful rebellion extending from the Sturm und Drang in the eighteenth century to the student revolts of 1968 and, second, the impact of the dramatic ruptures and discontinuities in modern German history on the formation and interaction of successive historical cohorts. Using a variety of different approaches, including literacy and oral history, the collection pays particular attention to the way generational identities interacted with those of class and gender. The book adds to our understanding of generations, of the balance between continuity and discontinuity in modern German history, of the generational roots of National Socialism and the Hitler Youth generation's impact on East and West German society.

Lives Reclaimed tells an extraordinary story of resistance against the Nazi regime and help for Jews in the Third Reich. Still largely unknown today, 'The Bund' were a small left-wing group based in Germany's industrial heartland. Initially preoccupied with surviving the Nazi onslaught and adapting to clandestine life under a dictatorship, in 1938 the men and women of the Bund were shocked by the anti-Jewish violence of Kristallnacht into reaching out to their Jewish neighbours. Using an unparalleled trove of previously undiscovered private papers, Mark Roseman places support for Jews under the shadow of Nazism in a completely new light, exploring the striking palette of gestures and actions that proved possible even in Nazi Germany - from simple symbolic acts of solidarity, through sending parcels to the Polish ghettos and Theresienstadt, to providing false identities and hiding people on the run. In doing so, he uncovers the challenges of living and acting under a dictatorship when neighbours and acquaintances might be as great a threat as the Gestapo, and examines the experiences of those assisted by the group, as they hid in plain sight, moving from address to address. Throughout, we are prompted to ask what drove and equipped the Bund to step into the broken glass of Kristallnacht, to visit Jewish organizations and Jewish barracks to ascertain local needs, to line up in the post-office with packages for Theresienstadt, or to brave a visit to the cells in a local police station with a message for imprisoned Jews? Although not the first book to tell the story of Jews saved from Nazi persecution, the story of the Bund is unique in the way it is able to pursue the choices, dilemmas, fears, and hopes of the helpers themselves, observing them through the changing conditions of both war and Holocaust.

The 'racial state' has become a familiar shorthand for the Third Reich, encapsulating its raison d'etre, ambitions, and the underlying logic of its genocidal violence. The Nazi racial state's agenda is generally understood as a fundamental reshaping of society based on a new hierarchy of racial value. However, this volume argues that it is time to reappraise what race really meant under Nazism, and to question and complicate its relationship to the Nazis' agenda, actions, and appeal. Based on a wealth of new research, the contributors show that racial knowledge and racial discourse in Nazi Germany were far more contradictory and disparate than we have come to assume. They shed new light on the ways that racial policy worked and was understood, and consider race's function, content, and power in relation to society and nation, and above all, in relation to the extraordinary violence unleashed by the Nazis.

On 20 January 1942, the most murderous meeting in history took place.

Chaired by Reinhard Heydrich, one of the most feared men in Germany, it summoned top Nazi officials to a grand villa on the shore of Berlin’s Lake Wannsee in order to clarify ‘the Final Solution of the Jewish question’. They ate good food, drank cognac and smoked cigars – and in less than two hours had effectively sentenced six million people to death.

Only one set of minutes from this secret meeting survived, and argument has raged over its contents. Now Mark Roseman brilliantly unravels the macabre mystery of what has been called ‘the most shameful document of modern history’.   

German History from the Margins offers new ways of thinking about ethnic and religious minorities and other outsiders in modern German history. Many established paradigms of German history are challenged by the contributors new and often provocative findings, including evidence of the striking cosmopolitanism of Germany s 19th-century eastern border communities; German Jewry s sophisticated appropriation of the discourse of tribe and race; the unexpected absence of antisemitism in Weimar s campaign against smut; the Nazi embrace of purportedly "Jewish" sexual behavior; and post-war West Germany s struggles with ethnic and racial minorities despite its avowed liberalism. Germany s minorities have always been active partners in defining what it is to be German, and even after 1945, despite the legacy of the Nazis murderous destructiveness, German society continues to be characterized by ethnic and cultural diversity."