Course Outline:

Week 1: Course Introduction
Texbook Reading: Kitchen, chapter 1


Week 2: The Death of a Democracy
Textbook Reading: Kitchen, chapter 2
Read for discussion: William Sheridan Allen, The Nazi Seizure of Power, Part I

Week 3: Terror, Complicity, and Propaganda
Textbook Reading: Kitchen, chapters 3, 6-7
Read for discussion: William Sheridan Allen, The Nazi Seizure of Power, Part II

Week 4: The Promises and Realities of National Socialism
Textbook Reading: Kitchen, chapters 4-5
Read for discussion: Melita Maschmann, Account Rendered [Excerpts] (Canvas); and Helen Epstein, "I Was a Nazi, and Here's Why"

Week 5: Women in the Fatherland
Textbook Reading: Kitchen, chapters 4-5
Read for discussion: Gisela Bock, “Antinatalism, Maternity and Paternity in National Socialist Racism” (Canvas); Eric A. Johnson, “Gender, Race, and the Gestapo” (Canvas); Vandana Joshi, “The Private Became Public: Wives as Denouncers in the Third Reich” (Canvas)

Week 6: Race, Eugenics, and the Persecution of Jews  
Read for discussion: Marion Kaplan, Between Dignity and Despair: Jewish Life in Nazi Germany, chapters 1-5

Take-Home Midterm

Week 7: The Home Front: Consensus in Wartime
Textbook Reading: Kitchen, chapters 8, 10
Read for discussion: Documents on the Persecution of Gay Men (Canvas)

Week 8: War and Barbarization
Textbook Reading: Kitchen, chapter 10

Read for discussion: Omer Bartov, Hitler's Army: Soldiers, Nazis, and War in the Third Reich (all).
Documents on Operation Barbarossa
Film: “Mein Krieg / My Private War”(1991), by Harriet Eder and Thomas Kufus


Week 9: Ordinary Men or Willing Executioners?
Textbook Reading: Kitchen, chapter 9
Read for discussion: Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (all).
Film: “Obedience to Authority”(1969), by Stanley Milgram


Week 10: The Final Solution
Read for discussion: Kaplan, Between Dignity and Despair, chapters 6-8.