The Nazis - A Warning from History
Written by Laurence Rees with a forward by Professor Ian Kershaw
"That which has happened is a warning. To forget it is guilt. It must be continually remembered. It was possible for this to happen, and it remains possible for it to happen again at any minute. Only in knowledge can it be prevented." Karl Jaspers
The strength of Laurence Rees's accessible history lies in the testimonies of more than fifty eyewitnesses, many of whom were committed Nazis and are only now free to tell their story as a result of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of Communism. Their experiences confirm that there was massive collaboration with the Nazi regime, both at home and on the war fronts, and that the terrible atrocities in the east were the work not just of elite killing squads but also of ordinary German soldiers and of local civilian populations.
How was Nazism possible? The Nazis - A Warning from History exposes the popular myths surrounding the rise and fall of the Third Reich. This book takes a fresh look at how the Nazis came to power, how they ruled and Hitler's role within the party. It describes the horrors perpetrated on the Eastern Front, including the occupation and division of Poland, the growth of anti-Semitism to its culmination in the gas chambers of Treblinka and Auschwitz, and the final months of the war when the Nazis came to reap the consequences of the suffering they had sown.
The Nazis - A Warning from History challenges the popularly accepted perception of Nazi power which focuses on Hitler as the source of all the regime's evil. Above all, it considers how a cultured nation such as Germany could be responsible for such acts of inhumanity.
Laurence Rees's history of the Nazis sheds new light on the causes of the worst conflict the world has ever known. The thought-provoking conclusions may not be what we would like to believe.
"Nazism, a creed born in Germany, brought into the world new knowledge of how low human beings can sink. Hitler did not do this on his own. Could something similar happen again somewhere in the world?" Laurence Rees, January 1997
Episode
1: Helped into Power
The programme considers how it was possible for a man such as Adolf Hitler to come to power in a supposedly cultured country such as post First World War Germany. It gives a number of long term and short term factors to explain the Nazi phenomenon
Episode 2: Chaos and Consent
The theme of the programme focuses on the paradoxical nature of Germany under Nazi rule - a society obsessed by order and yet characterised by administrative inefficiency. It opens with daunting images of Nazi crowds and the comment that the Nazis were obsessed with images of order which they attempted to illustrate and promote in their careful propaganda and yet, the programme claims, it was 'an illusion of order'
Episode 3: The Wrong War
The programme starts, with Hitler in his retreat in southern Bavaria, watching feature films about the British Empire - supposedly, these offered proof of the superiority of the Aryan Race! In 1941 he said 'Let's learn from the English - what India was to the English, let Russian territories be to us'. The programme then asks the question - How did Hitler end up fighting the wrong war? - a war against both the English and the Russians.
Episode 4: The Wild East
This programme focuses on the experience of Poland during the Second World War, a country that suffered more than any other under Nazi occupation and where one in five people died. In particular, the Poles suffered the most brutal acts of ethnic cleansing
Episode 5: The Road to Treblinka
The programme starts with a view of a railway line, followed by the view of a field. Between July 1942 - August 1943 this area became a 'killing factory'. This is TREBLINKA, one of six extermination camps set up in Poland by the Germans to tackle the Jewish Question'
Episode 6: Fighting to the End
The programme starts with the observation that because Italy was 'the birthplace of fascism', an alliance between Rome and Berlin in the 1930's therefore seemed natural and not unexpected. The two countries fought together in the first years of the Second World War, but on 19 July 1943, the 'unthinkable happened' Rome was bombed.
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