The Final Solution And The German Foreign Office A Study Of Referat D Iii Of Abteilung Deutschland 1940 43

Abteilung Deutschland came about as a department of the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs in May 1940, following a reorganization of the Referat Deutschland. The latter was established in 1933, and its first task was justifying German anti-Jewish policies to the outside world. Later its functions expanded, and in 1938-39 Referat Deutschland was instrumental in the policy of "forced emigration" of Jews, launched by the SS. The Referat D III was a desk in the Abteilung Deutschland dealing with Jewish matters. Dwells on the personalities of the chief of the department, Martin Luther; the Referat D III's chief, Franz Rademacher; and its leading "Jewish experts", e.g. Karl Otto Klingenfuss, Herbert Müller, and Fritz-Gebhardt Hahn. In 1940-41 the Referat D III prepared Nazi projects for resettlement of European Jews (e.g. the Madagascar project) and helped the Nazi satellite states (and exerted pressure on them) to introduce anti-Jewish legislation and implement their own anti-Jewish policies. Luther coordinated the Abteilung Deutschland's policies with every turn of the Final Solution. With the start of the deportations and mass murders of Jews, the Abteilung Deutschland became involved in deportations of Jews from satellite and neutral countries. However, the department remained a junior partner of the SS, since the latter did not always consult with the Foreign Office in carrying out its anti-Jewish actions. In March 1943 Abteilung Deutschland was dissolved, following a personal conflict between Luther and Ribbentrop, and its functions passed to the Inland II A department.

The Jewish policy of the Third Reich did not stem solely from Hitler's pronounced anti-Semitism; it also grew out of subdivisions and feuds within the Nazi regime and the failure of earlier attempts to find solutions to ""the Jewish problem"". Christopher Browning exploits heretofore little-used material from the German Foreign Office archives, as well as transcripts from war criminal trials, to reveal the complex forces and motives associated with this contentious issue.

A wide-ranging collection of essays in honour of Britain's leading historian of the international relations of the great powers in the twentieth century. The essays examine aspects of North Atlantic, European and Middle Eastern diplomacy.

In the courtroom and the classroom, in popular media, public policy, and scholarly pursuits, the Holocaust-its origins, its nature, and its implications-remains very much a matter of interest, debate, and controversy. Arriving at a time when a new generation must come to terms with the legacy of the Holocaust or forever lose the benefit of its historical, social, and moral lessons, this volume offers a richly varied, deeply informed perspective on the practice, interpretation, and direction of Holocaust research now and in the future. In their essays the authors-an international group including eminent senior scholars as well those who represent the future of the field-set the agenda for Holocaust studies in the coming years, even as they give readers the means for understanding today's news and views of the Holocaust, whether in court cases involving victims and perpetrators; international, national, and corporate developments; or fictional, documentary, and historical accounts. Several of the essays-such as one on nonarmed "amidah" or resistance and others on the role of gender in the behavior of perpetrators and victims-provide innovative and potentially significant interpretive frameworks for the field of Holocaust studies. Others; for instance, the rounding up of Jews in Italy, Nazi food policy in Eastern Europe, and Nazi anti-Jewish scholarship, emphasize the importance of new sources for reconstructing the historical record. Still others, including essays on the 1964 Frankfurt trial of Auschwitz guards and on the response of the Catholic Church to the question of German guilt, bring a new depth and sophistication to highly charged, sharply politicized topics. Together these essays will inform the future of the Holocaust in scholarly research and in popular understanding.

The Holocaust is frequently depicted in isolation by its historians. Some of them believe that to place it in any kind of comparative context risks diminishing its uniqueness and even detracts from the enormity of the Nazi crime. In reality, such a restricted understanding of "uniqueness" has pulled the Holocaust apart from history and set up barriers to a better understanding of the racial onslaught unleashed within the Third Reich and its conquered territories. Working against the grain of much earlier writing, this innovative new history combines a detailed re-appraisal of the development of the genocide of the Jews, a full consideration of Nazi policies against other population groups, and a comparative analysis of other modern genocides. The Holocaust is portrayed as the culmination of a much wider history of European genocide and ethnic cleansing, from the late nineteenth century onwards. Ultimately, Bloxham shows that an explanation for the Holocaust rooted exclusively in Nazism and anti-Semitism is inadequate when set against one that is both prepared to give due weight to the immediate circumstances of the Second World War in eastern Europe and to situate the Jewish genocide within the broader patterns of human behavior in the late-modern world.

In the Allies' post-war analyses of the Nazis' defeat, the "weakness and incompetence" of the German intelligence services figured prominently. And how could it have been otherwise, when they worked at the whim of a regime in the grip of "ignorant maniacs"? But what if, Robert Hutchinson asks, the worldviews of the intelligence services and the "ignorant maniacs" aligned more closely than these analyses—and subsequent studies—assumed? What if the reports of the German foreign intelligence services, rather than being dismissed by ideologues who "knew better," instead served to reinforce the National Socialist worldview? Returning to these reports, examining the information on enemy nations that was gathered, processed, and presented to leaders in the Nazi state, Hutchinson's study reveals the consequences of the politicization of German intelligence during the war—as well as the persistence of ingrained prejudices among the intelligence services' Cold War successors. Closer scrutiny of underutilized and unpublished reports shows how during the World War II the German intelligence services supported widely-held assumptions among the Nazi elite that Britain was politically and morally bankrupt, that the Soviet Union was tottering militarily and racially inferior, and that the United States' vast economic potential was undermined by political, cultural, and racial degeneration. Furthermore, Hutchinson argues, these distortions continued as German intelligence veterans parlayed their supposed expertise on the Soviet Union into positions of prominence in Western intelligence in the early years of the Cold War. With its unique insights into the impact of ideology on wartime and post-war intelligence, his book raises important questions not only about how intelligence reports can influence policy decisions, but also about the subjective nature of intelligence gathering itself.