PDF file: History - Advanced Higher - Germany - Education Scotland

Critics of Noltke argued that his views were trying to ‘rehabilitate’ and ‘normalise’
and ‘relativise’ the Nazi past. (And yet it should be remembered that Noltke always
strenuously denied that he was trying to ‘rehabilitate’ the Nazis.) Another German
historian, Hans-Ulrich Wehler, has argued that the evils of the Third Reich should be
faced and confronted so that Germany could move forwards as a liberal and
democratic State. The German past, particularly the Nazi past, was crucial in
impinging upon the politics of the present.
For decades after the Second World War many historians portrayed the Third Reich
as a ruthlessly efficient and monolithic ‘totalitarian’ state. Such historians had looked
at Germany ‘from the top’ down by investigating the nature of Hitler’s rule and how
various institutions and organisations had been affected by National Socialist rule.
Once again Hitler and his henchmen ‘influenced’ and ‘determined’ much historical
writing. This image has been hard to dispel and still lingers on, at least in the mind of
the general reader. However, in the 1970s social historians began to look at history
‘from below’ and how the ordinary German people themselves had been affected in
their ‘everyday life’ or ‘Alltagsgeschichte’ by the Nazi regime. (Yet as long ago as
the early 1930s a leading Communist, Ernst Ottwald, wrote about the ‘unknown
National Socialist’. On this see Hiden and Farquharson, Explaining Hitler’s
Germany, 1989, pp.167-68.) Major impetus to this new social history ‘from below’
was given by two massive studies taking place in Germany. In the south Martin
Broszat and other German historians were editing the ‘Bavarian Project’, whilst in the
west Lutz Niethammmer was editing the ‘Ruhr Oral History Project’. (It should,
however, be noted that the ‘Ruhr historians’ still used fairly generalised ‘top down’
conceptual models.) Both research projects looked at the mundane and not so
mundane ways in which the Nazi State impinged upon and affected the lives of
individual Germans as they went about their daily business. Incidentally social
history had thereby gained a respectability and credence amongst a number of
German academics that would have been unknown and unheard of a generation earlier
when political history dominated German historical scholarship. This new
perspective of the Nazi regime ‘from below’ has done much to create a newer
understanding of the Hitler State. The so-called ‘Alltagsgeschichte’ has also served
the useful function of allowing younger people to understand how ordinary people
like themselves behaved during the Third Reich. It is something they can identify
with because of the personal nature of the history. This has been acknowledged by
some of the more moderate critics of the Project. However more strident critics of
‘Alltagsgeschichte’ such as E. Hennig have said that this type of history has tended to
lead to the accumulation of sterile facts describing what life was like without setting
them in an analytical or theoretical framework.
The study of anti-Semitism continues to play a prominent role in the history of the
Third Reich. It is still not easy to explain why possibly the most cultured nation in
Europe carried out the brutal and systematic annihilation of 6,000,000 Jews. It is also
not easy for the historian to use the tools of scholarship to come to an understanding
of the Holocaust and the genocidal persecution of a people. The perspective provided
by non-Jewish scholars is inevitably different from that provided by Jewish historians.
History: Germany: Versailles to the Outbreak of World War II - 1918-1939 (AH) 48