reading this week:

Paxton and Hessler, TCE, get through Ch. 13 by the end of the week
Moeller, The Nazi State and German Society, finish
United Nations Resolution 260 (III), Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1948), at the United Nations Audiovisual Library of International Law

Nazi Germany and Stalin's Soviet Union
I. Nazi Germany
i. What was National Socialism?
ii. Explaining the Nazis' success: how did the they come to power?
iii. The Nazi regime
II. Stalin’s Soviet Union
i. The USSR in the 1920s: a new direction?
ii. "Stalinism":  The Soviet Union in the 1930s

I. Nazi Germany

Why did the Nazis succeed?
1. weaknesses and burdens of the Weimar Republic
2. the Nazis' own movement and appeal

National Socialist German Workers Party

Nazi ideology
1. Extreme racist nationalism: anti-Semitic, anti-Slavic (and also directed at other groups)
Volk = the “folk,” defined as a biological ace (“blood and soil”) - "Aryan race"
Lebensraum = “living space,” room for the race to expand
Social Darwinism
2. The promise of a conflict-free society
Volksgemeinschaft = Volk community (racial community)
anti-liberal, anti-socialist, anti-communist
3. The Führer (leader) principle
united will
total subordination
4. Negative integration
unity created by demonizing enemies
again: anti-Semitic, anti-Slavic; also anti-Communist
5. Total mobilization
state of permanent emergency (WWI front experience)
“Sieg oder Untergang,” victory or destruction - no alternative

two big-picture perspectives on modern German history:
Sonderweg, or Germany's abnormal "special path": an authoritarian political culture and a weak civil society (unlike Western democracies)
or
rapid, intensive modernization plus a series of catastrophes (WWI, demobilization, hyperinflation of 1923, Great Depression)

Problems of the Weimar Republic:
1. Constitution:
a. proportional representation: represents minority opinions, but produces weak coalition governments
b. presidential emergency powers to rule by decree (Article 48)
2. Treaty of Versailles (not the absolute amount of reparations; instead: gave radical nationalists an issue)
3. Opposition of elites (army, heavy industry, judges, professors, university students)
4. Catastrophic social experiences (1923 hyperinflation, Great Depression after 1929)
5. Political polarization (Nazis; Communists; middle-class voters (except Catholics) desert centrist parties)

The Nazis’ path to power
1. genuine social and electoral support
2. learned how to be effective at organizing a mass political party
3. dual strategy: street violence and electoral politics
4. collusion of elites

31 January 1933: Hitler legally appointed Chancellor (prime minister) by President von Hindenburg
23 February 1933: Reichstag fire
Enabling Law (delcares a state of emergency and suspends civil liberties, enabling Nazis to initimidate and suppress opposition)

The Nazis in power: four goals
1. consolidate political power (Gleichschaltung)
2. generate economic recovery (Four Year Plan, labor brigades, militarization, autarchy)
3. carry out racial policies (Nuremberg laws (1935) | "Kristallnacht" (November 1938))
4. mobilize for expansion and war

II. Stalin’s Soviet Union

“socialism in one country”
Trotsky
NEP = New Economic Policy (1920s)

constructivism
Tatlin, "Monument to the Third International"
photomontage
socialist realism

"We are fifty or a hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must catch up this distance in ten years. Either we do it, or we go under."
--Stalin, ca. 1931

Stalin (Josef Djugashvili)
"comrade card file"
cult of Lenin

Five Year Plans
forced collectivization of agriculture
kulaks / “liquidating the kulaks as a class”
mass famine | Ukraine and northern Caucasus 1932-1933
death toll: ca. 3 million
Stakhanov, "overfulfill your quota"

gulag = network of prison/forced labor camps in east ("Siberia")
political purges
show trials of old Bolshevik leaders, 1936-1938