Europe, Fascism & the Holocaust - HIST 337w Resource Guide

German fascism is better known to the world as Nazism and is closely associated with the name of Adolf Hitler (1889–1945). Like its counterparts in Italy and elsewhere in Europe, Nazism was a product of the severe social dislocations experienced after World War I and found a ready audience in the urban and rural middle classes. In Germany, these highly nationalistic classes were shocked and frightened by the overthrow of the German monarchy in 1918 and the inexplicable German defeat in World War I.

A German political movement that advocated racial nationalism (including anti-Semitism), dictatorial government, and expansion into eastern Europe by means of war, Nazism, a contraction of the term “National Socialism,” was a German political movement that emerged in the aftermath of World War I with Adolf Hitler as its leader. From the very start, it espoused ideas that rejected Western values of humanitarianism, rationalism, liberalism, democracy, and socialism in favor of extreme nationalism, racism, and a political system of single-party dictatorship. Nazi policies and practices violated human and civil rights, first in Germany and later in conquered Europe, and resorted to violent power politics in international affairs.

Winston Churchill described the mass murder of European Jewry by Nazi Germany and its allies as “a crime without a name.” The perpetrators, the National Socialist (Nazi) regime in Germany called it Die Endlösung der Judenfrage (the Final Solution of the Jewish Question). The number of Jewish victims is generally regarded to be between 5.8 and 6 million. Later, this extermination policy became known as the Holocaust, or “Shoah” in Hebrew. In a more generic and legalistic formula, the Holocaust was an example of genocide, a word invented by Raphael Lemkin in 1943. The word holocaust is derived from the Greek holokaustos, meaning a “burnt offering,” as used in a religious sacrifice.

Psychology of Adolf Hitler
DVD 943.085 H638i 2005

Streaming video

Streaming Video

German History in Documents and Images (GHDI) is a comprehensive collection of primary source materials documenting Germany's political, social, and cultural history from 1500 to the present.

Propaganda was central to Nazi Germany. This page is a collection of English translations of National Socialist propaganda for the period 1933-1945, part of a larger site on German propaganda. The goal is to help people understand the great totalitarian systems of the twentieth century by giving them access to primary material.

The Internet History Sourcebooks Project is a collection of public domain and copy-permitted historical texts presented cleanly (without advertising or excessive layout) for educational use.