Suchergebnisse

Women in the American Communist Party believed the rise of fascism in Europe was a direct threat to women's rights. Hitler's rise to power and what Communists read as a push to 'nationalize' German women's maternity compelled Communist women to argue that fascism was a threat to women's rights and perpetuated false ideals of 'natural' gender roles. Communist women dutifully followed the party's anti-fascist line; however, they expanded it by arguing that gender inequality was on the rise in fascist nations and women's rights had to move to the forefront of Popular Front struggles. Communists emphasized the rights of mothers and workers in an effort to better secure the rights of women. This article argues that party women rejected Nazi pronatalism, advanced women's rights within the party's 'United Front' and pushed their agenda within the American Communist Party.

Anti-fascism became one of the main causes of the American left-liberal milieu during the mid-1930s. The chapter offers a new analysis of two communist-led, international organisations called the World Committee against War and Fascism and the World Relief Committee for the Victims of German Fascism. The chapter aims to show how anti-Nazi activities were initially mobilised in the USA from 1933 to 1935. It reveals the transnational connections present in American anti-fascist movements and shows the importance of the connections established between American anti-fascists and German, British and French anti-fascists before the beginning of the popular front period. It provides new insights to the ways anti-fascist ideas and practices were effectively circulated across the Atlantic and within North America. The time period was filled with contradictions and ambiguities especially due to the Communist International's sectarianism that initially hampered co-operation within the broader American left. Still, transatlantic anti-fascist solidarity networks had already managed by mid-1933 to inspire local anti-Nazi activism across the USA.

ALTHOUGH ANTI-SEMITISM WAS FUNDAMENTAL TO NAZISM, IT SEEMS NOT TO HAVE BEEN ESSENTIAL TO THE MAJORITY OF GERMANS. NOR DOES IT APPEAR TO HAVE BEEN A DECISIVE FACTOR IN EITHER THE NAZI RISE TO POWER OF HITLER'S VAST POPULARITY THROUGHOUT THE 1930S AND IN THE EARLY YEARS OF THE LAW. YET NAZI GERMANY WAS A SOCIETY ON ITS WAY TO THE HOLOCAUST (HILBERG, 1961). HITLER ASSUMED POWER TO SAVE GERMANY FROM THE JEWS. HATRED OF THE JEWS HAD BEEN THE CORE OF HIS WELTANSCHAUUNG FROM THE VERY BEGINNINGS OF HIS POLITICAL CAREER (JACKEL, 1969; WAITE, 1977). THIS PAPER ASKS WHETHER WE MAY TEND TO UNDERRATE THE SIGNIFICANCE OF ANTI-SEMITISM FOR THE POPULAR APPEAL OF NAZISM IN GERMANY.

Erich Fromm's The Working Class in Weimar Germany relates political party affiliation to attitudes; some findings imply that many German workers circa 1929-1930 were not anti-Semitic. Contrariwise, Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners Posits uniformly high levels of eliminationist, racially based anti-Semitism among the Germans who perpetrated the mass killings of Jews circa 1941 and thereafter. Because these killers were ordinary Germans, Goldhagen believes that almost any German would have willingly conducted the genocide. By explicating the process of Nazification of Germans, this article aims to reconcile these seemingly contradictory observations. The Germans' anti-Semitism increased over time because of the Nazis' threat of coercion, the public's perceptions of the regime's economic and international achievements, and anti-Semitic propaganda. By 1941, many Germans had internalized the Nazi worldview, which included eliminationist anti-Semitism as an intrinsic component. Had such Nazified Germans been called upon to serve in the killing units, many would have—some with enthusiasm and some with reluctance. Their anti-Semitism and the cohesion of their killing units would have directed them to kill Jews.

InJune 1937, a thirteen-year-old boy by the name of Fritz Brüggemann wrote Heinrich Himmler, the Reichsführer-SS and head of the German police, asking for some theological advice. Himmler, a leading "neopagan" in the Nazi movement, had formally left the Catholic Church in 1936, but had been lost to Christianity years before. Fritz Brüggemann had also left his church, which meant that he, like Himmler, formally went by the designationgottgläubig(literally "believing in God"). Those designated as "believing in God" did not just avoid church taxes; they were also making a statement about their rejection of Germany's two confessions and their interest in a newvölkischalternative. Still, for this young Hitler Youth squad leader from Schönebeck, a speech on religion delivered to his troop was causing him concern. He was not sure if he had heard correctly, but he thought he understood the speaker to say that Jesus had been a Jew. He wrote to see if the Reichsführer-SS could perhaps enlighten him on this question. He received a reply from Rudolf Brandt, Himmler's personal assistant and a leading figure in his entourage. "The Reichsführer is of the opinion," wrote Brandt, "that Christ was not a Jew. You must certainly have misunderstood the speaker."

"Based on extensive scrutiny of primary sources from Nazi and Jihadist ideologues, David Patterson argues that Jihadist antisemitism stems from Nazi ideology. This book challenges the idea that Jihadist antisemitism has medieval roots, identifying its distinctively modern characteristics and tracing interconnections that link the Nazis to the Muslim Brotherhood to the PLO, Fatah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, Al-Qaeda, the Sudan, the Iranian Islamic Republic, and other groups with an antisemitic worldview. Based on his close reading of numerous Jihadist texts, Patterson critiques their antisemitic teachings and affirms the importance of Jewish teaching, concluding that humanity needs the very Jewish teaching and testimony that the Jihadists advocate destroying"--