Suchergebnisse

"Our Germans is a highly engaging history of one of the United States' most controversial intelligence operations during the early Cold War. Project Paperclip brought fifteen hundred German scientists and their dependents to the United States in the first decade after World War II. More than the freighters full of equipment and documents recovered from caves and hastily abandoned warehouses, the "German brains" who designed and built the V-2 rocket and other "wonder weapons" for the Third Reich proved invaluable to America's emerging military-industrial complex. Whether they remained under military employment, transitioned to civilian agencies like NASA, or sought more lucrative careers with corporations flush with government contracts, German specialists recruited into the Paperclip program assumed enormously influential positions within the labyrinthine national security state."--Provided by publisher

That theWehrmachtparticipated fully in a racial war of extermination on behalf of the National Socialist regime is indisputable. Officers and enlisted men alike accepted the logic that the elimination of the Soviet Union was necessary for Germany's survival. The Wehrmacht's atrocities on the Eastern Front are a testament to the success of National Socialist propaganda and ideological training, but the construct of "Judeo-bolshevism" originated during World War I and its immediate aftermath. Between 1918 and 1923, central Europe witnessed a surge in right-wing paramilitary violence and anti-Semitic activity resulting from fears of bolshevism and a widely held belief that Jews were largely responsible for spreading revolution. Jews suffered the consequences of revolution and resurgent nationalism in the borderlands between Germany and Russia after World War I, but it was inside Germany that the construct of Judeo-bolshevism evolved into a powerful rhetorical tool for the growingvölkischmovement and eventually a justification for genocide.

The 1997 release of Paul Verhoeven's Starship Troopers generated controversy for its obvious Nazi imagery and ironic endorsement of a fascist future. Based on Robert Heinlein's equally controversial novel in which a militarized Earth is engaged in a war of annihilation against a race of insects, Verhoeven's film portrays a society that embraces the logic of extermination and uses Nazi language and signifiers to express eliminationist rhetoric at every turn. Schools, the media, and the future military consisently invoke Nazi terminology and allusions to frame the conflict against the "Arachnids." From the blatant mimicry of Triumph of the Will to the twisted use of Frank Capra's Why We Fight series, Verhoeven cleverly mixes Nazi imagery with the patriotic fervor promoted in American propaganda films from the Second World War. Verhoeven attempts to seduce the audience into accepting and even cheering for genocide on a galactic scale. The irony of this approach was lost on most of the audience and reviewers.

Utilizing thousands of photographs; uncensored, personal letters; diaries; and official documents, the controversial exhibit sought to expose Germans and Austrians to the irrefutable truth that most serious historians accepted as fact decades earlier-rank-and-file German soldiers committed atrocities on the Eastern Front as part of a broader campaign of extermination. The most interesting part of the book from the perspective of the historian of modern Germany is the final section detailing how and why the myth of the clean Wehrmacht prospered and eventually deteriorated in the postwar period.