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German Nationalism, National Socialism and Postwar Reconstruction 1918–1949
postwar German historical inquiry—those regarding the degree of national complicity in guilt, the nature of
NSDAP rule for various categories of inhabitants in Germany, and the existence of some innate national
character fault that predisposed it to such a terrible fate—can only be decided by recourse to documents from
the period and, in particular, by a thorough understanding of the nature of daily life prior to and during the
period of National Socialism. It is in the desire to make available such a portrait of the lives of ordinary
Germans at that time that I offer the present collection.
Perhaps it is not uncommon for someone who has dealt with materials of this kind to suffer from a feeling of
uncleanliness, a sort of figurative contamination from the proximity of a force that even only in written form
preserves much of its potential to revolt and terrorize. In that sense it has not been a pleasure to work with
these materials, and in fact I have long considered the need to deal with German National Socialism as the
most onerous and least appealing aspect of my otherwise delightful vocation. Nonetheless, I believe that it is
in the interest of scholarship that these materials be not only preserved for posterity, but also made widely
available to scholars through the creation of cataloguing records that adequately reflect their uniqueness and
their content. I hope our understanding of this period can be enriched through the dissemination of these
materials, and that the considerable effort to do so be deemed well spent if it serves to enrich the historical
debate over German National Socialism.
James Henry Spohrer
Ecully, France
March 2002
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